Omer Polak
Culinary Slow Food Project
Bezalel academy of art and design
Culinary Slow Food Project
The project presented as a short video that shows the dishes, the tools and reflect the whole experience.
Advisors:
Prof. Ami Drach, Of blessed memory.
Liora rosen
Photographer Moti Fishbain
Patisserie David Laor
Great cook Yaffa Polak
Culinary Slow Food Project
The project includes a local dishes' design and unique cutlery that empowering the eating experience. It entitles to raise the way our minds changed throughout the years, from an agricultural society, gathering and hunting behavior to an industrial one. our society has created a huge gap between the appearance of the final dish and its constituent materials. The project presented as a short video that shows the dishes, the tools and reflect the whole experience.
2. The Brief: Summarize the problem you set out to solve. What was the context for the project, and what was the challenge posed to you?After years of fast food admiration which reflect the western culture and excessive consumer culture, we see increasing movement that calls for healthy diet and consumer awareness. Reality shows and protest movements around food such as vegetarianism and naturalism have become part of daily life trends. The current project wishes to bring up the gap we have created between the source of the food and the way in which it is served.For example, cock's comb, chicken's head and feet were once part of our daily menu elements and now disappeared completely and considered as a waste requiring food's sterilization, psychologically too. Thus, the fish schnitzel served in a heart or a star shaped and loses its nature. The served dishes in this project were made of simple and cheap raw materials usually excluded from the consumer's sight and some of them are thrown to trash. By using Molecular cooking the design got alienated shape and also affected the way we ate (i.e. laboratory instruments were used). Through the contrast of flavors, textures, and the familiar-different tension, the project raises questions about the future culture of food, about our place as designers and consumers in this leading consumer system which is a mirror to others fields in our society.
3. The Intent: What point of view did you bring to the project, and were there additional criteria that you added to the brief?The project brings a critical view whose main purpose is asking questions about the future of food and our place in that system. The project creates a new perspective by combining two different culinary approaches: "Slow food" that requires to return to the source of the food to the time we were hunters gatherer societies. By that, slow food movement preserving and promoting local and traditional food and emphasizing the cultural value and the method of preparation. In addition, that movement has set itself to educate the consumers about the risks that the fast food culture includes. The second approach, molecular cooking, offering a scientific solutions for industrial mass cooking while exploring new ways of cooking and making special dishes. Molecular cooking is consider to be very elitist and alienated and the combination of the two is shown in the project by seeking local dishes that remind us of the tradition and the culture in which we grew up in, but receives configuration and distant futuristic interpretation. The unique experience of eating that kind of meal also reflects a point of view about the instruments we eat with and the way we eat; from cutlery that remind us laboratory equipment, something in between ancient hunting tool to surgery tool, to eating with our hands as ancient Neanderthal way.
4. The Process: Describe the rigor that informed your project. (Research, ethnography, subject matter experts, materials exploration, technology, iteration, testing, etc., as applicable.) What stakeholder interests did you consider? (Audience, business, organization, labor, manufacturing, distribution, etc., as applicable)The project starts with several different directions of research about local food culture. The formal aspect of the research started from the empty negatives existing spaces in food. Internal cavity of a chicken which usually filled with extras for a meal was cast, so does internal cavity of fish and other territories were cast and given a new forms and new point of view referring to the source but not to the familiarity as we know it because it does not really exist. Thus, Fish mousse form is the internal shape of the body cavity. The lack and the emptiness are the cornerstone of consumer culture. The principle driving the affluent society is paradoxically the sense of lack. It is always the same hunger that the entire system trying to satisfy and yet to create at the same time. Dishes were created while maintaining the original and familiar taste despite the extraordinary visibility. For this purpose I worked in collaboration with a chef and a pastry chef who helped me maintain the tastes. Material attempts were made on the food as work techniques I've known from the industrial design field as well as the implementation techniques. Casting, injections, vacuum forming product has been applied on raw edible material. The dishes were designed after research and observations of people's eating habits. Thus, the calf bone became the serving dish coated with a layer of chocolate and "Malaby" (a local desert).
5. The Value: How does your project earn its keep in the world? What is its value? What is its impact? (Social, educational, economic, paradigm-shifting, sustainable, environmental, cultural, gladdening, etc.)The project has a cultural value indicates many areas in our lives. The dishes that were served in the dinner critically reflect the distance in our society. In addition, there is also an educational impact: The project was filmed and can be spread to general public so it can raise the thinking about duties as consumers' food and ask questions about the edible raw materials that entering to our bodies. Moreover, the project brings up the sustainability aspect by taking products that use to be ignored.
6. Did the context of your project change throughout its development? If so, how did your understanding of the project change?The project deals with the multicultural problem attributed mainly to Western culture. However, the served dishes are local Israeli food that seems quite different from the familiar Mediterranean culture. In this project the first course is chicken bones as if there were a normative snacks that characterize our region. 'Jerusalem Mix' salad containing internal parts, 'Gephilte Fish' dish which arrived to Israel from Europe by the Ashkenazi community was redesign into fish mousse and by that combining old and new culture. The 'Malaby' dessert which is so typical to Middle Eastern region served instead as a veal bone coated with white chocolate and it became a tool rather than trash. In addition, the desert dish raises ethical questions about kosher and humanity since Malaby made of milk and according to Jewish religious there is a prohibition against eating meat and milk together, the Jewish law (as in the Book of Exodus) forbids "boiling a (kid) goat in its mother's milk" and it has healthy aspects too.
span class="question">7. Does your project have nutritional elements? If so, are these elements available and affordable on a global or local level?The served Dishes in the project based on local daily and cheap ingredients, that you can find any Supermarket and some of them even in trash. The project examines the use of raw materials through time and through socioeconomic changes. By that, the internal organs, bones, and fish scraps presents in this project through filters of molecular cooking that makes their display more prestigious and more intriguing.
A captivating voyage between past and future food, abstraction and matter, mental and emotional impulses.