viz.

Image Credit: Evan Sung for the New York Times

A recent article in the Dining and Wine section of the New York Times led me to rethink the importance of visual culture in the current round of debates about food in America. In a shift from the usual conversation about how food is deceitfully misrepresented in branding or advertising, the article at hand got me thinking about the role played by the visual presentations of actual meals. Thinking about plating allows us to revisit the relationship between food and visual culture and reimagine sight as a creative component of foodways—instead of a predatory marketing ploy—with the potential to positively impact the ways we eat. 

The role of visual culture and rhetoric in marketing, branding and otherwise selling food has received a fair share of attention lately.  The opening sequence of Food Inc. (read Tim’s review here), for instance, tells us how the agrarian ideal depicted on our grocery store products masks the lurid industrialization of agribusiness. The seemingly omnipresent Michael Pollan (whose In Defense of Food is currently playing a central role in the rhetoric curriculum at UT Austin) often portrays sight as a villain, warning us never to eat anything we’ve SEEN advertised. Visual critiques of the fast food industry have even shown up in different ways on this blog (see here  and here ) .  For the moment, I want to ignore all of that and think about tweezers.

 Oliver Strand’s Times article on the culinary uses of surgical tweezers is unlikely to draw the attention of any but a niche audience of foodies and kitchen enthusiasts, but the descriptions of plating offered by the chefs he interviewed should catch the eye of anyone familiar with theories about photography, poetry or any number of aesthetic and cultural productions:

 “It’s harder to make it look like you didn’t try,” said the chef David Chang, whose kitchen crew at Momofuku Ko tweezes extensively. “It’s more difficult to make it seem it’s plated as it falls. That’s what we call it, ‘as it falls.’ It’s not rustic. It’s naturalistic. It sounds stupid, but you’re using tweezers to make it seem natural.”

There are a number of points here, but the first thing to notice is the difference between natural and naturalistic. “Rustic,” for those who don’t keep up on gastronomical lingo, is another term for “country” or “home-style” presentations of food. Rustic dishes can be accomplished with much less precision than what is typical of haute cuisine. Chef Chang wants to draw a distinction between “rustic” plating—food that actually falls where it will—and a “naturalistic” presentation that is painstakingly made to appear plated “as it falls.” Strand sees this as part of a larger trend:

 Increasingly, this kind of naturalism is the look of fine dining. Symmetry and geometry are giving way to artful jumbles and cascading forms. Microgreens, for instance, seem to have drifted in on a gentle breeze. It all might look tossed together, but it’s about as accidental as a $200 bed-head haircut.

The plating should LOOK accidental, but the presentation isn’t any more natural than the dialogue in a Wordsworth lyric or the musculature in a Gericault.

So, as with the grocery store in the into to Food Inc. or the photoshopped breakfast sandwich in Tim’s post above, we find that plating presents food as something it is not. Even the industrial concerns of uniformity and homogenization seem to be at work behind the scenes: Strand reports that “Chefs say tweezers let them assemble meticulous compositions quickly, and with such consistency they look the same every time.” And we can't forget that chefs share with agribusiness and fast food the same goal of selling you food (though, of course, they have very different business models).

Despite these similarities, plating—the visual presentation of individual meals—provides us with a potential counterbalance to the visual exploitation of consumers by glossy prints of food and farms that have little to do with the product they purchase.  The goal of marketing images is moving the consumer to the point of sale, and they often accomplish this goal by obscuring either the product or its origins. The grocery story is full of bucolic images of ideal farms meant to keep us from thinking about the factory our milk came from or the exploited migrant worker picking our winter tomatoes.  The fast food menu board is not there as a point of reference—“your bacon cheeseburger will look like this”—but as an incitement to forget what the order looked like last time and order it again. In this system, food is a commodity, and companies want consumers thinking about the consumption, not the production, of that commodity.

Plating, on the other hand—even semi-deceptive naturalistic tweezing—draws attention to the food itself and invites us to contemplate the ingredients and the craft that went into its production. Chefs spend time plating in fine dining kitchens because they want their customers to appreciate the skill that went into planning, prepping, cooking and serving the meal, especially since those efforts can’t generally be seen from the dining room. A well arranged plate invites contemplation. While it might not force us to ask if our tuna was sustainably fished or whether our busboy is paid a living wage, it does move food out of the realm of interchangeable commodities, and, in doing so, it asks for more from us than thoughtless consumption.

Plating might be most important at home. Most of us don’t eat the majority of our meals at Corton or Momofuku Ko, so tweezer-positioned microgreens are unlikely to have much impact on our consciousness or our behavior. On the other hand, those of us who cook at home (and cooking more at home is one of the best things you can do for your health, your budget and your carbon footprint) might benefit from being more intentional with our plating. An attractive plate invites us, even as home diners, to pause momentarily and consider the food we are eating. By drawing attention to the craft of cooking, it can earn home cooks some well-earned respect (even from ourselves) and help open a space for us to be conscious diners instead of mindless consumers.