Healthy food can bowl you over

Forget plating and portioning, bowl food is the new way to eat. The trend started with smoothie or breakfast bowls, artfully decorated mandalas using carefully crafted layers of yogurt, raw honey, nut butters, berries, fruit and seeds. And the health benefits might just be worth the time it takes to create the carefully arranged bowls.

And just like the ramen trend did, Bowl Food has branched out from breakfast to lunch and dinner as a holistic health option. "[Bowl combinations] are popular because they're nutritious and can incorporate protein, whole grains, vegetables, and delicious sauces into one dish," said Camille Becerra, a New York chef who popularised the trend. "I think that's where we're leaning in terms of eating habits now."

Her "dragon bowls" were a take on a classic macrobiotic meal: grains, vegetables and pickled ingredients, plus delicious sauces.

There are dedicated bowl-centric restaurants, like a Los Angeles eatery called Edibol and, locally, Asian-inspired venues like Johannesburg's Warm&Glad or Emma Chen's Pron.

Joburg blogger Puveshree Moodie said she discovered the trend when investigating healthy eating options. "I tried and failed so many times to eat healthier, until I discovered the concept of these gorgeous food bowls. It helped me through my pregnancy, dealing with gestational diabetes, and through my breastfeeding journey, because I craved unhealthy foods.

"This way of presenting and eating healthy food is sustainable for me on an eating plan because it is easy and quick to put a dish together. The healthy toppings and combinations are endless. Not forgetting, there is a bowl for all seasons."

Moodie said she used simple options with healthy staples from the cupboard and fridge "that won't hurt the budget or have you doing tons of washing up. For me, that takes care of the majority of the reasons why we tend to not eat healthier."

And it turns out our brains are influenced not only by the difference in shape between a plate and a bowl, but even by different types of bowls.

A study co-authored by Professor Charles Spence, a sensory psychologist at the University of Oxford, showed that the colour, size, and shape of plateware can affect a person's perception of food.

One study showed that yogurt sampled from a heavy bowl was rated as being 13% more intense, 25% denser and 25% more expensive than the same yogurt served in a light bowl.

Spence said: "Hard though it is to believe, five, yes five, books will be published on the subject of bowl food in 2016. This is definitely one of the new food trends taking everyone by surprise. But why should serving food in a bowl matter?

"One commentator said: 'The main appeal is that it makes everything taste better.' Gwyneth Paltrow also claims that 'everything tastes better in a bowl'."

Spence said this could make healthy foods like spirulina appear more palatable to those who previously shunned them. "As a gastrophysicist, analysing this strange new trend, bowl food clearly ticks a number of the right boxes from a multisensory perspective."

One advantage of serving hot food in a bowl was that it "allows, maybe even encourages, the diner to take a hearty sniff of the steaming contents. Anything that can enhance the olfactory hit associated with a dish is likely to improve flavour perception and possibly also increase feelings of satiety." And of course the trend is a social media winner. "It is supposedly more photogenic too," Spence said.