[June 25, 2014]

NCKU, Dutch Designers Hold Dialogue on Food Design

National Cheng Kung University's Institute of Creative Industries Design (ICID, NCKU) hosted two presentations on food design on June 19 with nearly 50 people interested in food design, including students, faculty and designers from the Netherlands attending.

One of the presentations was given by Annelies Hermsen, a Dutch designer whose expertise is on food design. "Food design is to make emotion out of food," Hermsen said when she talked about her work.

"Food design for me is the combination of being creative in the food industry so it's not being a chef making dishes beautiful but to see food as creating emotions," according to Hermsen. She also presented her project on special hospital food for oncology patients with appetite problems.

The guests were invited to taste the experiment of mushroom grown on tea, shrimp and sugarcane and then fill in a questionnaire about the sampling.

"The idea is to replace meat with mushroom mycelium," Mei-Feng Lin said when presenting the food project she worked on with the 'Meat the Mushroom' company. For a period of four weeks she collaborated in a student project with the Dutch company. She accompanied Lucia Zaquini, a biologist at "Meat the Mushroom," in experiments and industry visits.

Mushrooms are delicious, sustainable and cheap; they save cows and prevent polluting cow dung, but they may not look or taste appealing to some of consumers, said Lin.

"We'd like to design mushrooms into a product people will love to buy and eat," Lin added.

The survey of the mushroom sample will be sent to "Meat the Mushroom" and they will see which flavors are most favored and then large-scale production will be carried out to achieve the goal of meat replacement, according to Bart van Bueren, director at the Dutch Design Post and visiting expert at the College of Planning and Design, NCKU. "This presentation is a trial for our new design course in collaboration with six different companies where students will actively collaborate with visiting Dutch designers."

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