Food & Creativity
Food is an essential part of life, not only because it keeps us alive and gives us energy, but also because it is full of enjoyment. Webster’s dictionary defines food as “material consisting essentially of protein, carbohydrate, and fat used in the body of an organism to sustain growth, repair, and vital processes and to furnish energy”( Webster dictionary). There are seven classes of nutrients: carbohydrates, fats, fiber, minerals, protein, vitamins, and water. Fats are one source of energy and important in relation to fat vitamins. There are five food groups also including vegetables, poultry/meats, fruits, fish, and eggs.
Food can be creative and unique in many ways and there are so many techniques to try and seasonings to add to acquire different tastes and flavors. There are different methods that can be used when cooking resulting in different textures. Cooking is creative work. Creativity is the base of all things invented. Many creative minds have changed the world for the better. Creativity is the act of turning something good into something better. Amazing flavors, special presentation, personal preferences, allow food to be a creative and innovative medium.
Creativity is labeled by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to conjure solutions. Food helps get our creative juices flowing, eating food allows to be alert and get everything going not just physically but mentally as well. Creativity helps people in many ways, it makes people money, expands industries and many other things. Creativity is not about coming up with something, it is about taking ideas from different sources and putting them into a better or at least different form. This process is hard, it involves studying what others have already done and adapting it to people’s own purposes. A place where an abundance amount of creativity can be found is in the kitchen.
There are countless condiments available worldwide that can make any basic plate into a masterpiece. After adding seasonings, a person’s palate can acquire common tastes such as bitterness, saltiness, sweetness, or spiciness. Each one of these flavors adds character to any plate. For example, jalapenos add heat to a dish. The creativity in this is selecting the jalapenos rather than other “heat” ingredients like red peppers, black ground pepper, or sriracha sauce. Each seasoning added to taste is based on preference. When preparing a dish, learning temperature and time is important. Undercooking food can affect one’s health tremendously. Temperature plays a large roll in this stage. For example, it’s a common mistake when frying chicken to turn the stove on high to cook it faster. Although in some cases this is true, other times the outside cooks, leaving the inside raw. Chicken, unlike other meats such as fish and steak, must be fully cooked to avoid foodborne illnesses. Cooking time can also affect how tender the food can be. If the preparation is rushed the meal will taste charred and rushed, but if people give the food a decent amount of time to cook you’ll have a well-prepared meal. For instance, if people were to cook a ten-pound roast for an hour, the result would be tough and rubbery. If people allowed it to slowly cook overnight or throughout the day, you’ll have a tender, juicy roast that falls off the bone when people cut into it. It’s all about technique.
People can create different dishes into beautiful shapes for presentational purposes. Being able to fully experience the tastes of different cultures, however, is what makes it original. The presentation of a dish is what makes the food on the dish look good. If a chef in a fancy restaurant was to serve the president he would not give the president a plate that looks like a baby regurgitated on it. The chef would give him a plate that would look appealing and nice to the president. A dish presentation is one of the most important things. A chef could never become a chef if they had poor presentation skills people do not only eat with their mouths they also eat with their eyes. If the presentation looked horrible then people would make the assumption that the food probably tastes horrible too, and half of the time they are right. There is creativity in food presentation and an attractive plate makes the food taste better. How people plate the food and the different shapes or colors presented also gives a descriptive insight of creativeness in the dish. The plating of the food can bring a creativity aspect as far as if people were to look at a plate that is nice and neat people may think the food quality is great whereas if the plate was sloppy people may think it wouldn’t be appealing. Shapes and colors are also creative in food. While cooking people are able to create whatever they desire. When baking a cake people are able to theme the cake literally anything. Another great factors is food coloring.
Colors bring a sense to the plate the color of the food affects people’s perception of the food. For example, if a person saw a whole bunch of green on their plate they would automatically make the assumption that it is a vegetable and may not want to eat it, but if it was a big juicy piece of a brown steak. every person would want to eat it. The color of food also brings excitement to one’s’ eyes. On the food pyramid, it states that the average person should eat different colors of food. having different colors of food on a plate brings excitement to the plate because the plate would be tedious, and lack interest in the eyes of the person that is going to eat the food (Batt, Alan).
A personal touch is what makes food is unique and different. There is art in being yourself. If humans were all the same, the world would be a simple and basic place and there would be no excitement or new discoveries. The world would be the same in every direction. Being yourself in the kitchen is exhilarating, never knowing what people may come up with next. If the world was the same people would be eating the same boring thing every day of their life. Every person creates their food in different ways whether it is good or bad. For example a person in jail, they have days if they are very good the will be given snacks that their other fellow cellmates will not receive and they will use those snacks in different ways. People in jail will find any way to turn a snack into a meal.
Another example is cultural food. There are so many different cultures in the world and most people use their culture in their foods (DeMers 1). Jamaicans don’t use the typical everyday fruits people use in America. In the book The Food Of Jamaica, it talks about the different kinds of everyday fruits they use such as Guava, Cho-Cho, and Papaya. Guavas are small fruits with pink seed-filled flesh and they grow all over jamaica and are used for things such as cocktails, sauces, and fruit cups. Cho-Cho is a pear-shaped squash and they are eaten as a vegetable. Zucchini can be substituted for this particular vegetable. Every culture has a different way of contributing their own unique and different fruits and vegetables to a dish. If a person from America was to go to China, the food would be different because of the different cultures.
In conclusion, food is creative in an abundance of ways. It is an essential part of every person’s life, every biotic creature on this earth needs food to survive. Food is what most creative people use to describe themselves. Every culture has a different way of making so many dishes. People consume with their eyes first, so if the food on the plate does not look satisfying then no one is going to want to eat it. The different colors of food on the plate makes the food more appealing. Flavor, presentation, and personal influence make food is a creative and innovative medium are all part of making a dish presentable and appealing to the eye.
Works Cited
Batt, Alan, et al. The Colors of Dessert: 6 Colors, Recipes from 87 Chefs. Batman Studios, 2008
Boyle, Tish, and Timothy Moriarty. Grand Finales: A Modernist View of Plated Desserts. Wiley, 1998
DeMers, John, and Norma Benghiat. The Food of Jamaica: Authentic Recipes from the Jewel of the Caribbean. 1st ed., Periplus Editions, 1998.
Kempston, James. The Creative Cook: The Secrets of the Kitchen Revealed. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993.
.Page, Karen, and Andrew Dornenburg. The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America’s Most Imaginative Chefs. 1st ed., Little, Brown, 2008.
Page, Karen, and Andrew Dornenburg. Kitchen Creativity: Unlocking Culinary Genius–With Wisdom, Inspiration, and Ideas from the World’s Most Creative Chefs. First ed., Little, Brown and Company, 2017.
Questlove, and Kyoko Hamada. Somethingtofoodabout: Exploring Creativity with Innovative Chefs. Edited by Ben Greenman, First ed., Clarkson Potter/, 2016.
Styler, Christopher. Working the Plate: The Art of Food Presentation. John Wiley & Sons, 2006. Shopsin,
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