Top-secret eating

Although a narrow field internationally, experiential food design has reached South Africa. By Nadine Botha

Short of air or water, designers don't get a more fundamental medium than food. "Designers cannot get closer to people than to make (something) that becomes part of the body," agrees Dutch food designer Marije Vogelzang.

Spanish food designer Marti Guixé  concurs: "I like the fact that (food) is a product that disappears - by ingestion - and is transformed into energy."

Guixé  and Vogelzang have both spoken at Design Indaba before. Their relatively novel discipline should not be mistaken either for cooking or for gastronomy; nor is it interior or table design.

Instead, Guixé  and Vogelzang are more concerned with the experience than the constituents of the food.

The "experience of food" may sound abstract, but we all design experiences around food. Consider, for instance, that food from the Oriental Bazaar in Cape Town does not taste the same when eaten at home, but a pizza delivered in a box to your doorstep tastes better than when eaten in a restaurant. Or that chocolate cake seems less indulgent in the office than in the downstairs coffee shop, while lasagne is better in a lunch box than fresh out of the oven.

Unless, of course, it was eaten by candlelight, because everything is better eaten by candlelight, and the flavours of a beach-side braai can never be topped in the backyard.

Culture, nature, society, the senses, technology, psychology and material are the ingredients with which we temper food, according to Vogelzang, who will be visiting South Africa in November to launch her guest-edited edition of Design Indaba magazine. All-white funeral meals, Christmas feasts that demand sharing, children's hospital menus based on colour and blind-folded date-tasting are just some of the ways that she seeks to capture fleeting experiences.

Rather than the old-fashioned understanding of experience being what one learns from mistakes, contemporary experiences are more often activities that are exclusive, once-off, special and capable of distinguishing you from others. You can see how this can describe both your private family reunion as well as an invite-only party with a secret celebrity guest. In the realm of food design, these experiences have proliferated in the form of supper clubs, pop-up restaurants and dining performances such as South Africa's own Madame Zingara's.

Over the past three months South Africans, Capetonians in particular, have enjoyed a secret pop-up restaurant called Chop. Conceptualised by The President design studio, Chop happened on Thursdays at a secret venue and took bookings via Facebook.

Up to 12 guests sat at the same table and were fed chips, popcorn, biltong, pickles, veal-brain ravioli, steak, smoked potatoes, witblitz, glow-in-the-dark gin-and-tonic jelly and quince. Wine was served from ceramic pots shaped like pigs and guests shared an ostrich egg by passing it around. The meal ended in the dark with fluorescent pens.

The President's own designer, Peet Pienaar, and business director, Hannerie Visser, were responsible for all the cooking.

Chop was conceptualised as a lead-up to the unusual Toffie Food festival and conference from September 3 to 4 in the Cape Town City Hall. While there are lectures, workshops and tastings on the bill, the programme highlights are a Nelson Mandela-inspired tasting menu, a traditional Argentinian braai, a city-wide dinner party spread across people's private homes, a pinata exhibition and a food market.

International speakers include Julie Powell, the US food blogger whose story inspired the movie Julie and Julia; Eloise Alemany, an Argentinian cookbook specialist and former managing editor of I-D magazine in the UK; and Tung-Yuan Lin, a Taiwanese coffee alchemist. From South Africa, chef and food blogger Kobus van der Merwe, Gourmand World Cookbook award-winner Renata Coetzee and food anthropologist Anna Trapido will headline.

Also in anticipation of Toffie Food, The President's newly launched Menu magazine features Cape Town's 167 best dishes. Again, do not mistake this for a fancy restaurant guide. The dishes range from koeksisters, samoosas, boerewors rolls and slap chips to ice cream, French toast and curry.

The magazine promotes the fact that some of the best sources of food are street corners, not malls, and the only food expert to take note of is you, yourself.

As Pienaar points out in the editor's letter: "Food is what most people can be creative about. Everyone has to do it. Food tells us who we are and where we came from."

Meanwhile, the work of designers such as Vogelzang, Guixé  and Pienaar is to invent elaborate experiences to capture the spontaneous joy of real life.

• Nadine Botha is editor of Design Indaba magazine. Website: www.designindaba.com Twitter: @designindaba