International Journal of Food Design - 1-2: Creative Tastebuds 2020, Dec 2020

Vegetable-based food and drink products are becoming more popular in the United States with increased awareness of health benefits as well as their positive environmental impact. Yet, there is a lack of attention in marketing these healthy vegetable food products to children, particularly in comparison to less-nutritious food products that are effectively utilizing child-oriented design in the marketplace. This article includes four exploratory studies. The first three studies are part of a co-design process involving children and chefs to create playful vegetable products that appeal to children. These studies result in a variety of playful vegetables concepts which are then evaluated in different methods by children. The preliminary results of these studies indicate that children do not prefer playful versions of vegetables significantly more than familiar versions. The final study presented in this article specifically examines the role of familiarity and colour on a child’s preference towards select vegetable products. Contrary to expectations, a trend uncovered in all four studies demonstrate children’s inclination towards the more familiar versions of a vegetable, illustrating a need for more appropriate design interventions to effectively bring about positive changes in children’s food choices.

In this article, the position that there is a good case for sustainable food tourism despite the negative impact on the climate caused by tourism and travelling practices is argued. This requires, however, that we develop well-designed sustainable food experiences. We need to redesign and rethink the very idea of the food experience with particular focus on participation, the role of the consumer, the accessibility of the food design, and the potential of local contexts, to give some universal examples. This does not mean that sustainable food tourism is or can become carbon neutral. It means that the job of the food designer is to offer climate-friendly solutions and, maybe more importantly, that sustainable food experience designers should focus on how to inspire more sustainable food consumption and anti-consumerist lifestyles beyond the context of the experience. These arguments are presented via a case study of a sustainable food experience from the Faroe Islands.

Our current consumption patterns cause high levels of CO2 emissions. Encouraging sustainable lifestyle changes is one tool among many to reduce emissions. Looking towards the public health literature, we identify three strategies for dealing with excess consumption: redeem, replace and reduce. We highlight the benefits and challenges that individuals face when employing these strategies. Finally, we present a promising approach to moving beyond individual-level strategies and their challenges.

How can we create large-scale changes in our society that lead to more sustainable food consumption? One certain contributor to change is to ensure that the products and meals available in supermarkets, cafeterias, schools, hospitals and restaurants are sustainable while at the same time evoke pleasure, as pleasure is decisive for food choice. There is a need for culinary practitioners to prepare delicious meals based on sustainable ingredients, which require less resources to produce (such as vegetables, algae, legumes, grains, seeds and nuts), and also to use new ingredients (such as production side-streams or insects). However, these ingredients are not necessarily delicious due to, e.g., their bitterness. They may also evoke disgust or be socially unacceptable to eat. Thus, future culinary practitioners need knowledge of how to make these products acceptable and delicious in meals. Sensory science provides a valuable toolbox for evaluating foods, and thus contributes to finding ways to both change sensory properties of foods and improve their deliciousness. Therefore, knowledge about this can contribute to important know-how in culinary arts educations. However, in the current culinary arts educations in Denmark, not much training and education in how to taste and how to carry out sensory evaluation of food is implemented. Taste for Life and the University of Copenhagen have worked with input from vocational teachers on developing teaching materials about sensory science for culinary arts educations. In this opinion article we present the ideas behind the programme and discuss the potential of the material. We hope and expect that it will contribute with knowledge about how to increase deliciousness through a course dedicated to sensory science as part of a culinary arts education.

The article examines the primacy of vision and the work of the sensorium: the permanently under-construction seat of the senses, that absorbs and interprets information endlessly to make associations that influence food and eating. It discusses how the internet’s social media photo sharing platform Instagram plays a pivotal role in food choices as part of our taste apparatus. The article’s focus, situated in middle to high-income countries, concludes that Instagram – as a particularly visual example of social media’s attention economy is potentially part of the transformation to more sustainable and ecological eating.

According to the WHO, childhood obesity is one of the most serious public health challenges of the twenty-first century. In this context, finding ways to make the healthier food choices the preferred ones can be a valuable contribution to solving this multifaceted problem. Sensory and consumer science offers a wide range of tools that can support the development of healthy and well-accepted food alternatives. In traditional sensory and consumer science, children would be involved in the product development process either as testers or informants. However, in our opinion, it would be valuable to extend their role to co-creators or co-designers, an approach already more established in the field of innovation and design, where children actively participate in the idea generation and development of healthy food that they will like and choose. Our own experience has shown that involving children in the idea-generation step for healthy food can be highly motivating and stimulating for them. In this opinion article, we discuss why it is important to include children actively as a relevant consumer segment in product development and suggest a process and methods that could be valuable for brainstorming about food ideas with children.

Taste is a key analytical concept when we want to understand how people handle their food choices. But taste is an interdisciplinary concept that means different things, for example, to a chef, a farmer, a scientist and a sociologist. Using an empirical example, this opinion article argues that the gastronomical field embraces many meanings of taste and that this diversity needs to be nurtured rather than downplayed. It is suggested that research on social figurations can shed light on the endeavour to develop both new taste preferences and sustainable food practices.

Plant-based foods are part of a needed change in the food system. This opinion article addresses sustainability, health and consumer issues to inform plant-based food innovation and research. Consumers are key players in the food system. In 2020, consumers require that cues of sustainability be clearly addressed in food innovation. Consumers are more and more conscious of the detrimental effects of animal farming on the environment as well as the ethical issues resulting from poor animal welfare. Consumers want their products to be sustainable, healthy and conscious of animal welfare. Plant-based foods deliver on all fronts. Nevertheless, consumers have to deal with facilitators and barriers towards dietary change such as cooking skills, taste preference and family support.

How do you teach sustainability in food education? By preaching and giving lectures? Or by supporting the reflexive capacities of students? It is the opinion of this article that teaching taste and food design with regard to sustainability must be ethically reflexive. We should not moralize. Focusing on sustainability as a reflexive concept, students should not only learn to eat what is deemed to be the right things to eat; they must also learn to relate to food and meals in a critical and informed way. The article points out what ‘damage’ moralization can do if food and sustainability are designed or communicated without ethical reflections.

Food well-being has been addressed in consumer research over the past decade as a means to provide a more holistic perspective on consumers’ relationship to food. However, the interest has mainly been directed at individual choice and experience, meaning that the ethical foundations of well-being have received less attention. This foundation is important in the context of food as it provides an opportunity for outlining a new agenda for food well-being. Using food design as an overall framework, this article introduces Epicurean ethics as an underlying conceptual design that positions pleasure at the core of food well-being. Not in the sense of trivial hedonism, but as judicious consideration of what is pleasurable when individual and collective interest is weighed and short- and long-term consequences taken into account.