The strict geometric arrangement of food in these photographs could lead one to believe they carry encoded messages. Perhaps they are an avant-garde way to share recipes? Or the radishes, avocados, and cashews are a cryptographic tool to warn those in the know about genetically modified organisms? The sea salt even looks a bit like brackets in source code, so maybe this is some new omnivore-oriented programming language?
The mundane reality is that these culinary ciphers are advertisements for a new diet app called Food Throttle that will pair data from 330,000 restaurant menus in New York City with recommendations from doctors and dietitians to help users lose weight and improve their health. Technical details aside, the big goal is to stop people from thinking about food as a biological necessity, or series of guilty pleasures, and instead to consider calories as materials that can be used to shape their bodies like works of art.
"Food Throttle is for people who think something about themselves is unbalanced or out of whack," says product lead Ben Fisher. "We can make it right, make it balanced." To help establish the brand identity for this concept, Fisher turned to Dennis Adelmann and Carolin Wanitzek, communication designers based in Mannheim, Germany. "Food Throttle's philosophy of dieting is very organized and structured," says Adelmann. "So we decided to show the meals in a kind of constructed pattern on bright colors."
Each of these OCD photographs began with a carefully prepared sketch, but like master chefs, Adelmann and Wanitzek improvised and rearranged the ingredients to taste. The process was playful, but not without difficulties. "Working with peppercorns, beluga lentils, and quinoa was a real challenge," says Adelmann. "The smallest ingredients had to be arranged with tweezers and just a small tap on the paper would destroy the entire composition." Juicy ingredients posed another challenge and would leach into the paper backgrounds and waste hours of work if the process didn't move quickly.
Beyond the support they provide to the app, Adelmann sees the collection as a contribution to a burgeoning movement called "Design Culinaire," where food is objectified by artists. "We want to prep people to look at the food they eat in a new way," he says. "The viewer of the work is going to change their consumption process of food just by looking at the food as art, instead of as 'food' in the traditional sense."
Food Throttle is slated to launch in late Q4.