Cooking is therapy
How a designer finds solace in the culinary arts to exercise his creative senses
“Cooking is one of the oldest arts and one that has rendered us the most important service in civic life…”
— Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
The origins of cooking began with primitive humans roughly two million years ago. There are various theories as to how early humans used fire to cook meat. According to anthropologist Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, primitive humans simply tossed a raw hunk of meat into the flames and watched it sizzle. Another theory claims humans may first have savoured roasted meat by chance when the flesh of a beast killed in a forest fire was found to be more appetizing and easier to chew and digest than the conventional raw meat.
Just like oxygen, food forms a part of our lives that is essential for survival. Besides all the great inventions that mankind has to be grateful for, the art of making food… good food is something worth cherishing! Food is much more than just fuel for our biological machines. Over the years, the quest to find the perfect taste to hit the right notes on our taste buds has led to so much evolution in our food — what we eat and how we eat it. As civilisations developed in different parts of the world, the food they made slowly become a part of their cultural identity. Over time, as cultures mixed, when someone tasted something good, they sure did want a piece of it. One of the prominent examples of such culinary exchanges would be the spice trade between historical civilizations in Asia, Northeast Africa and Europe.
Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are…
Food is one of those things that touches nearly all of our senses — sight, smell, taste, touch (unless you are not eating with your hands) and hearing (as in the delicious sound of a sizzler). So it is not at all surprising that the food we eat can affect how we feel, or our emotions can dictate what we crave to eat. A variety of spices used in food, for example, have been around in conjunction with human use for millennia for their common qualities and many of them were also used to create a variety of products designed to enhance or suppress certain sensations.
You may not remember why you craved that fudge caramel crunch last Saturday, but you sure did feel good after cleaning out a tub of it!
We eat to live; We live to eat…
How often did you decide to order an item at a restaurant based on its picture on the menu? Or decided to have whatever the couple next table were having, simply because you couldn’t resist the aroma?
The truth is that how we experience food depends highly on how it touches our senses, starting with the sense of sight. While you may not judge a book by its cover, you still will be tempted to judge a dish by how it looks. Besides being able to cook delicious food, the effort that goes into communicating that taste on the plate is perhaps no less than creating a mesmerising painting or getting the ergonomics of a chair right or crafting a delightful UI experience.
Just like different elements come together to make an artistic composition, the same is true for cooking. Starting with the basic raw materials, preparing them, and then combining them into a delicacy requires one to be aware of how the different colours, flavours and textures will interact with each other and come together at the right balance to form something that is appealing to the senses.
A lot of information about the food is often contained in how the vegetables are cut or how the gravy looks in colour and texture. How your pancakes look and taste may have a lot to do with whether you used a non-stick pan or a cast-iron skillet pan.
The humble potato, perhaps one of the most versatile of vegetables, can really add an edge to your dish. But a lot depends on how you choose to cut it — cubes, wedges, chips, julienne, shredded and so on… or not cut it at all!
The experience of cooking is quite therapeutic for me. It gives me an opportunity to experiment with the senses and “create” something beautiful that is not on a computer screen. Perhaps it was my love for food or my underlying urge to know “how stuff works” that led me to spend a lot of time in the kitchen as a kid, watching my mom work her magic. Eventually, I started to try making stuff, starting with Chow mein, which used to be my favourite after-school snack. Who doesn't love carbs?
The psychological impact of cooking a meal — whether it’s for yourself, or for others — is multifaceted, and it can provide different people with different experiences, from the comforting sense of being in control, to the freedom of expressing creativity in the kitchen. According to a 2016 study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, people who spend time on creative goals live happier lives than those who don’t and cooking something new or out of your comfort zone totally counts as an act of creativity.
When you intentionally cook a meal, you’re working on something that’s in your control, and that can realistically be accomplished.
The sense of accomplishment achieved from cooking a meal is well-noted by psychologists, who argue that “cooking and baking are therapeutic because they fit a type of therapy known as behavioural activation” — practising a goal-oriented behaviour and avoiding procrastination at all costs.
Well, you can’t wait several hours or days to finish the meal you’ve started. You pretty much have to begin, and complete, the project that is cooking your meal, and even if you wind up hating whatever it is you made, you still accomplished the goal of whipping up some food, all on your own!
All this time spent in the kitchen helped sharpen my culinary skills and has taught me a lot of valuable life lessons in the process. They say Indian recipes don't come with hard and fast rules. A lot happens during the process and is based on intuition — how deep you fry the onions, how much turmeric you put, what concoction of spices you use and so on. These little decisions leave a lot of room for experimentation and failure and learning. And that is why the same ‘daal’ (lentil soup) tastes different when different people cook it. It might sound a bit far fetched, but this does really teach you to take risks — I mean, I am not sure if you can do a ⌘Z once you have burnt your toast or overcooked your rice!
Who doesn’t love to eat? But the joy of making your own food and then enjoying it with your friends does boost those “happiness hormones”
Because the endocrine system is linked with the gastrointestinal system, food is indeed connected to our moods. If art is a form of self-expression of an artist, the way food looks and tastes bear a reflection of moods of the cook as well. There are days, when I tend to burn my food or add an extra pinch of salt, only to realise that life 😒 does really suck. And then there are times, especially when chasing stressful deadlines, when cooking some good food is all I need to de-stress and get back to work with a happy tummy!
I cook when I am happy, I cook when I am sad,
I cook when I am stressed…
and bad food does make me really mad.
Besides moods, foods tend to have a strong relationship with memories. We all have our personal comfort foods that help us remind of our home and childhood, specific people or life events. Just like a good connotative design element, a dish like that can really add a lot of meaning to a moment in life. It is in situations like these, that I feel blessed to be able to prepare myself such meals and indulge in the happy memories they bring!
What do you want for your next meal?
This is perhaps one of the most difficult questions I am faced with every day. And answering this question satisfactorily enables me to approach decision-making in a systematic way. Just like how you create a design is often guided by (besides what the client 🙄 wants) the constraints of time and resources, I often have to channel my culinary desires based on when was the last time I had a low-carb meal or what needs to be cleaned out of the fridge soon. However, it’s just the beginning of the gamble.
In order to come up with a meal that appeals to all the senses, I have to be able to visualise it first in my head — does it have a dark or light colour? Do I want to be able to see the fried onions or just feels its presence? What would I garnish it with? What am I gonna serve it with? What subtle notes do I want my mouth to cherish?
I don’t see how that’s much different from what I do at work — take the wants and needs, visualise it and craft it into something delightful that satiates the readers’ hunger (for information)!
However, there are times, when there is not enough clarity on the visualisation of your cravings. But you gotta start off anyway from something and build up as you go along — when you can’t decide for sure, start with the basics and add in the secret ingredient of randomness!
There was this one time during my college days, when my flatmate and I coudn’t decide what I should cook for dinner. I told him, “let me fry some veggies, maybe will heat up some chapatis or make some rice with it…” I had potatoes, tomatoes, spinach, capsicum and some other stuff lying in the fridge. With a picture of stir-fried veggies in my head, I started off by dicing up everything and throwing it in a flat pan with some butter, garlic and onions. Once they were nearly done and had made a nice bed on the pan, it hit me with an idea. I whipped about six eggs in a bowl, added some salt and pepper and poured it into the pan. Added some cheese on top and some sliced tomatoes and cooked the whole thing at the lowest heat possible on an induction cooktop.
My friend came back again to check on what we were finally going to have for dinner. I said, “I think we can almost call it egg pizza!”
P.S. Later I came to know it’s called a frittata.
Now that a lot of actual cooking has been done, what remains is the part where we present it to the audience.
Remember why you ordered that dish from the menu?
Hoping that you went with the second image from both the examples, we can understand the importance of presentation of your creation — whether it’s showcasing your designs in a realistic mockup or plating your food in a way that makes it look tastier than ever. A delightful presentation of dishes does help people fall in love with your food at first sight.
But how does one make food look good?
The answer lies in what the industry calls as food styling. It involves everything that needs to be done to the food to enhance the visual appeal once the basic dish is prepared — garnishing, plating and making it picture-perfect. No wonder a lot of food stylists are actually food photographers whose main goal is to make the food look attractive and appetizing. This is necessary because people eat with their eyes first, so if the food looks good, they’re more likely to enjoy it.
Within the constraints of my kitchen setup, I try my best to do this part with the available resources, at least the basic plating. This is the most fun part, perhaps, because I get to weigh in some design decisions — do the colours look good on the plate? Does the garnishing look organic and appetizing? Should I tilt the fries slightly more to avoid those shadows?
If you have read this far, I am sure you either have opened up the food-delivery app on your phone or are headed towards your kitchen.
Well, all the best 😊 I leave you with a plate of noodles anyway!
“Cooking is designing for your stomach and designing for your senses…”
Follow the author on Instagram for more delicacies.
