“Meals are extremely significant moments in forming a family’s values.”
J.J.B: Consumers seek new experiences and shake off their old habits, wanting to treat themselves and be surprised. That is why everybody is always trying to renew their recipes and copy each other.
CADI: You have just talked about the future from a culinary point of view, but could you also tell us about your vision of the future as far as eating together and dining are concerned?
J.J.B: Eating and dining habits are intricately linked with social and cultural practices. To put this in perspective with design, I think we must give greater importance to pleasure and hedonistic practices and find ways to make interior spaces prone to arouse the senses. Our needs in lighting, space design and modular furniture are gradually refining as we start demanding more and more pleasant environments. Tables have become wider, sofas are more easily unfolded or transformable and so on. Objects and furniture are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Culinary habits are also following the very same trend, with kitchen objects becoming more and more sophisticated. In this way, we are improving our culinary sensitivity while making life easier for ourselves. This means we are going to consume more and more semi-ready meals heated in state-of-the-art ovens, which are better adapted to this type of product, ensuring optimum cooking conditions. Like bathrooms, kitchens are going to become one of the most meaningful and sensorial rooms in our homes. And how can we expect kitchens to improve on all levels without the food prepared in them also evolving? If we do not progress towards more advanced culinary knowledge we will probably evolve towards more culinary sensitivity. People will not cook but this won’t keep them from enjoying increasingly rich meal-times. This will be achieved as much through design and ambience as through food products themselves.
Moreover, meal delivery seems like a potentially fruitful niche for whoever manages to propose an innovative concept which is of a higher quality than pizza delivery. The phenomenon of in-home chefs is set to develop. When they invite guests over, people will increasingly call upon in-home chefs. This, still elitist, solution will probably become more widespread in the near future. I am convinced that the democratization of traveling and the development of multimedia technologies will lead to an accrued culinary sensitivity in the kitchen and an enhanced sensitivity to food in the dining room. Culinary websites are currently booming. On that note, I took part in the creation of a French periodical exclusively dedicated to culinary websites called “Nouveaux actes sémiotiques.”
As communications experts, we must strive to guide consumers, to avoid focusing on their docility and mediocrity, or on their greater or reduced buying power; instead we must place our bets on their intelligence, their sensitivity and their willingness to make eating into a daily cultural performance. Indeed, cooking a dish for the first time, setting the table for the first time, tossing a pancake for the first time, inviting one’s friends over for dinner – and all the pressure that comes with it – are true cultural performances. These gestures convey symbolism, humanity and (go on, let’s say it) love. All these gestures, such as those passed on from parents to their children, are extremely significant. Not only do these signs strengthen social ties, they are also laden with love.
CADI: How could design keep up with all the sociological evolutions currently occurring in the culinary and dining arts?
J.J.B: Training courses in aesthetic disciplines should encompass the aesthetics of space, relationships and communications (that is the form given to communication as a whole). This will not happen without adopting a cross-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approach. This is a point of view which design players seem to concur with – the fact that you are interviewing me today is living proof of this trend. Design players should now begin to strike up dialogues with sociologists, anthropologists and semiologists.
Page 7 of 9 | Previous page | Next page
