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From The Hindu: "(...) most people don't even notice why the food they eat arrives looking, feeling or sounding the way it does." Architects Sonja Stummerer and Martin Hablesreiter are on a mission to make people really look at what is on their plates. The young authors of the German book, Food Design, won a `Special Award of the Jury' at the Gourmand Awards last year. This year, they will be shooting a documentary on food design, as they travel across Europe. - Their docu is a must see.

In its Simplicity Labs, Philips ('Sense and simplicity') collects successes and horror stories of people with their kitchen and during cooking.

Flavor tripping in which some fruits alters the body's snse of taste seems a pure example of experience design, according to Design for Service.

Three quotes from the synthesis:

(1) Cooking is a language through which all the following properties may be expressed: harmony, creativity, happiness, beauty, poetry, complexity, magic, humour, provocation and culture.

(2) The information given off by a dish is enjoyed through the senses; it is also enjoyed and interpreted by reflection.

(3) Knowledge and/or collaboration with experts from different fields (gastronomic culture, history, industrial design, etc.,) is essential for progress in cooking. In particular collaboration with the food industry and the scientific world has brought about fundamental advances. Sharing this knowledge among cooking professionals has contributed to this evolution.

Gordon Ramsey: A guerilla UX consultant?

From CHI '08: "Food is a central part of our lives. Fundamentally, we need food to survive. Socially, food is something that brings people together-individuals interact through and around it. Culturally, food practices reflect our ethnicities and nationalities. Given the importance of food in our daily lives, it is important to understand what role technology currently plays and the roles it can be imagined to play in the future. In this paper we describe the existing and potential design space for HCI in the area of human-food interaction. We present ideas for future work on designing technologies in the area of human-food interaction that celebrate the positive interactions that people have with food as they eat and prepare foods in their everyday lives." - Download available.

At the 2008 conference on 'Design & Emotion' (Oct. 6-8 2008, Hongkong), one of the conference themes relates to similarities and differences between product experience design and design of food and fragrances. The theme caption reads "What emotional responses do we experience in response to foods and fragrances? Are these particular and distinct emotions, or are these the same emotions we also experience in response to product appearance? How can we describe and design for food and fragrance emotions? This theme invites papers that discuss the experiential impact of food and fragrance design."

A research assignment: "TV-programs about cooking are popular but could be more popular if the TV-audience could interact with the cooks about the recipe, suggest alternative ingredients, ask to show or tell more details, give background information or whatever. The main obstacle for Interactive TV seems to be that there is no adequate business model and that there is some historical separation between TV displays having only marginal processor power and PC technology. But technology doesn't prevent Interactive TV." - Might deliver some interesting results.

A collection of simple network graphs illustrating how the flavor components of 250 different food products relate to each other, as a tool to inspire the creation of original recipes. By comparing the flavor of each food product, such as strawberry, with the rest of the food and their flavors, new combinations such as 'strawberry with peas' can be made. The more flavors food products have in common, the shorter the distance between the food products.

Or ... how to 'improve the workforce' by changing food habits.

Designing for a global audience means making sure it fitts in all cultures. Almost impossible considering all differences among people. What and how people eat differs all over the place. From chopsticks to forks and knives and how it relates to culture and design. (source: uigarden)

Virpi Roto (Sr. Research Scientist Mobile HCI at Nokia) stated in this paper  that "(...) we can talk about user experience whenever there is interaction with a product. A cake does provide user experience, because I can interact with it: I touch the cake and feel how soft it is, and bitting that cake gives delicious taste as 'feedback'. That's how I interact with the cake." - So, food and UX do have things in common.

Mike Kuniavsky (of Adaptive Path fame) published a post on wine from an informational perspective.