Salleh Mohd Radzi, et al. (2015) refers food presentation as
presenting and decorating the food attractively as a tangible cues for the customers’ perception of quality. Aforesaid, presentations are essential to indicate the first expectations of the food to the customer. In the food perspective, the presentation is the adaptation of sauces and garnishes to menu items; soup, entrées, main courses and desserts. A new study led by Professor Charles Spence, the Oxford University gastrophysicist making waves in the food industry, has proven beyond doubt that making something look good makes it effectively taste better too. What’s interesting, is that where previous studies have focused on sophisticated dishes – sautéed chicken breast with a fines herbs sauce, brown rice pilaf and sautéed green beans with toasted almonds – and Michelin-style plating – arranging a 17-component salad to look like a Kandinsky abstraction – here the plates in question featured a simple garden salad (leaves and cucumber with other unspecified ingredients), and steak and chips. Spence’s team found that even with such basic dishes, thoughtful presentation meant diners found the food more flavourful: cutting the fillet horizontally, thereby showing the inner colour of the meat, or serving the cucumber thinly sliced on top of the other salad ingredients, made both dishes considerably more appetising – and appear to be more expensive. In the case of the salad, diners were willing to spend three times more for that decorative assemblage, £3.85, as opposed to £1.35 for the unprepared version. While it seems patently obvious that if you’re going to buy a salad, you’d rather it actually be prepared, it is noteworthy that that preparation is valued twice as high as the raw ingredients. When it comes to food, it seems we are willing to pay quite a bit for attentive labour. As Amy Fleming writes, about the Kandinsky salad, other people’s effort tastes good. On the other hand, too much fuss is off-putting: as Jay Rayner noted last month, fine dining is on the wane. When eating out, for the most part, we want good food, but little faff. But what of the food we prepare ourselves? Does the same degree of effort go into what we put on our own plates? Fleming, at the end of her piece, resolves to make sure it does, especially when hurriedly dishing up dinner for her kids: “Food plonked on to the plate willy-nilly makes them deeply suspicious,” she writes, “whereas a pleasing pattern or an artful arrangement gets things off on a fine footing.” Asking friends shows it can go the other way though. One, Jessica Stanley, a writer and mother of two, is suspicious of anything too slick or too fussy in a restaurant: “No smears of puree or carefully angled rectangles of fish. I’m alert to too many ingredients on one plate, an extra sauce or jelly or dust or edible flower that says the chef isn’t confident in his dish.” So, she says, she’d never do that in her own food. “If I know that the ingredients are good I don’t mind how a dish is served at home: if the lamb’s organic and time has been taken, splat a big serving of shepherd’s pie on the centre of my plate.” The one concession she’ll make to food styling, she says, is to wipe the edge of the plate clean of smears and splashes.
When it comes to her toddler, how food is presented is guided by this
one question: “How can I get her to eat a balanced diet without any trauma?” Stanley’s strategy is simple: a variety of colours and textures, a choice of spoon and bowl so the child has some say in the matter, and new things served next to old favas. Or indeed not served up at all. “The easiest way to get her to eat something is not to serve it at all,” she says, “just snack on it myself so she steals it from me.” And lastly, “if we’re eating as a family I flatter her by serving her exactly the same meal on the same plates that the adults use. I can immediately see her sit up straighter and eat in a more grown up way.” This is a fairly accurate description of how I approach feeding a toddler too. A selection of lots of little bits, the more variegated, the better. And I definitely enjoy making it all look pleasing. It’s the tiny things on top of other things that work particularly well: capers or other pickles, chopped herbs or nuts, black sesame seeds on white rice, a crumbling of feta on red, red tomatoes. But, actually, variety, contrast and attention to detail are guiding principles in all the food I make and serve. It’s instinctive: I want the food I give to someone – to anyone – to look beautiful. (Dale Berning Sawa, July 15, 2015). Foreign Literature Traditionally, the visual composition of food on a plate, or plating, has often taken place in an intuitive manner. In restaurants, plating is refinedthrough an iterative process until the composition ‘just feels right’, often driven by the experienced whim of the chefs working at the ‘pass’.Increasingly, though, science is starting to deliver insights that could explain, or disconfirm, the chefs’intuitions and ‘rules-of- thumb’. Recently,researchers interested in the aesthetics of food have started to assess people's overall preferences when it comes to the visual composition of foodon the plate, and the impact that this may have on the consumption experience. The research shows that principles borrowed from the visual artscan, to a certain extent, be applied to plating. In experimental aesthetics, one assertion that is often made is that people prefer balanced overunbalanced visual compositions. Here, we report on a series of citizen science experiments conducted at the Science Museum, in London, thatdemonstrate a clear preference for balanced over unbalanced presentations of exactly the same ingredients over all compositions. This preferencefor balanced plating is considered in light of the recent trend by many modernist chefs toward asymmetric plating (i.e., when all of the edibleelements are crowded onto just one side of the dish).&2016 AZTI-Tecnalia. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)