Feel Your Food
Ceramic Exploration
“Culinary historian Betty Fussell once told me that Americans have a singular preference for blandness. In her research, she discovered that in taste tests for beef, anything gamy in flavor was described in terms of disgust. We have become so dissociated from food in its natural form, she argues, that being reminded of it is unpleasant, if not unpalatable.”
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- Dan Barber, The Third Plate
The largesse of industrial agriculture has perfected in meat what the chopped salad accomplishes at sweet green: tender bites that require as little chewing and consideration as possible. Bland cuts of meat are slapped on center stage, but “The best parts, as most chefs will attest, come from the supposedly lesser cuts. These nonprimal parts suffer from a disadvantage, however, which hobbles their stardom: they require you to chew. And in some cases, to chew and chew” (Barber).
A growing body of research explores how external factors can alter what are perceived to be intrinsic characteristics of food, such as flavor, quality, or how satisfied we feel after consuming it. Experimental psychologist, Charles Spence, and his colleagues study what impacts people’s perception of taste.
In one experiment, participants sampled Lotus Biscoff biscuits from either a smooth or a rough platter. People described the cookies eaten from the smooth, shiny plate as melting in the mouth, mild, sweet, and even bland. Biscuits eaten from the rough, grainy plate were described as crunchier, saltier, intensely flavorful, and more gingery.
Another experiment demonstrated that haptic sensations from touching smooth or rough coffee cups affected the flavor, mouthfeel, and aftertaste of coffee. The smooth cup’s coffee was described as light, juicy, round, velvety, and as having a short and sweet aftertaste. The same coffee sampled from a rough cup was considered dense and dry with a lasting, tart, bitter aftertaste.
Mimicking a food’s desired traits in its vessel can help further extract those flavors and mouthfeels from the food itself. Inspired by this haptic research and the pursuit of non-bland food, I designed and created three ceramic pieces that use texture not to mimic intrinsic qualities of the food, but to mimic intrinsic qualities of the food’s origins. If we are what we eat, it would help to know what we’re eating.
These three pottery pieces sit at the intersection of growing food, preparing food, and experiencing food. The haptic sensation of each vessel invites the user to engage with the sometimes-forgotten whole ingredients that make up certain foods. Elements of each ingredient’s growth and cultivation are mirrored in the construction of each piece to call attention to the food within and the growing processes around them. These pieces stand as an antithesis to blandness, a reminder of an ingredient’s natural form, and a plea to taste your food before you swallow it.
Wheat Plate
Materials: clay, wheat courtesy of the Yale Farm
I volunteered on the Yale Farm for a day this summer, and we harvested wheat. As I cut stems of wheat stalks, I realized I had no idea how the feathery, plump kernels would become flour. This little toast plate is my apology to the wheat stalk, a plant that covers sixty million acres of the nation, feeds millions of people around the world, and is so destroyed by processing that I can hardly reckon the crop I was harvesting with the bag of flour in my kitchen.
Spice Mug
Materials: clay, cinnamon stick, cloves, star anise
Raw spices were used to create textures that mimic the trees and plants they come from. The curled form of the mug mirrors the method by which cinnamon is harvested; the inner bark layer is scraped from cinnamon tree shoots and dried into the curled scrolls we see in grocery stores.
Espresso Cup
Materials: clay, coffee beans courtesy of East Rock Coffee
Covered in waxy green leaves that sprout opposite each other in groups of two, coffee trees fruit cherries along their branches. The coffee cherries hold two seeds side-by-side, which are roasted to become what we know as coffee beans. In a peaberry cherry, a natural mutation occurs where only one seed grows instead of two (this mutation occurs in about 5% of harvested cherries). To pay homage to the romantic pairs of leaves and pairs of seeds that characterize the coffee plant, the natural forms on the espresso cup are formed by two beans--with the occasional nod to the peaberry.