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Gionatan Lassandro is the president of Fooda and the co-founder of Foodam – Food, Design & Art Museum. He has organised a contest inviting designers from around the world to reflect on the theme, Food for future. 15 projects were eventually selected and then exhibited during Milan Design Week. We interviewed him to find out more about his initiative.
What is Fooda and how did it come about?
«Fooda is an association that works to promote the culture, planning and innovation of food and dietary acts. Both myself and the other co-founder, Elena Barbara Augusta Vannini, both followed the same study course at the Industrial Design Department at Milan’s Politecnico. Without a doubt, my Pugliese origins have played a fundamental role in my interest in everything related to the world of food.»
What do you mean by feeding acts?
«It’s an expression that embraces a very wide context: it’s everything that has to do with food – from production to dining. It also includes the technological aspects like production systems, planning - like shape and sensory analysis – as well as the symbolic and anthropological contents of food.»
And Foodam?
«Foodam stands for Food, design, art & museum. Its objective is to connect food to design and art and create a museum-space to exhibit studies and projects tied to Food Desing. The contest we launched and its exhibition both go in this direction.»
What kind of response have you had?
«We’ve been sent projects from all over the world, especially all around Europe. But we also received entries from Japan and the States. With Foodam, we wanted to create an event, give our input. Now our aim is to organise a more complete exhibition in 2012.»
The term Food Design is used to indicate many different things: the presentation of dishes, the setting of a table, product packaging of food and even kitchen utensils. What do you mean by Food Design?
«The paradigm of Food Design is relatively recent and there’s not one single definition. That said, when we talk about design, we talk about planning and projecting: Food Design includes everything that has to do with food: it’s tied both to industrial production and classical planning (packaging, shape, colour), and there’s also a visual and cultural component. For example, a chef with a restaurant may decide to create a kind of Food Design mood. The important thing is not to confuse it with gastronomy and the art of garnishing dishes!»
