Noisy bread, anyone?

2004-10-12 13:05

Paris - As nutritionists and health gurus worldwide ponder how to reverse growing global obesity, a rarefied handful of food designers believe "green" chocolate and bread that makes noises might be just the thing.

"The food industry needs new shapes, new textures, new styles," said Edouard Malbois, who heads the world's self-proclaimed first designer food consultancy firm, Enivrance.

"Our job is Imaginary Foods, a new discipline linking the real world and the world of fantasy."

After putting heads and tastebuds together, the food studio and four high-powered European chefs - a Briton, a Spaniard and two Frenchmen - have come up with designer green chocolate, stylised eggs, chickenleg-like vegetable "drumsticks", and bread able to literally produce three different sound-bites.

"People today want to live in harmony with nature, with the plant world," Malbois explained. "So we drew inspiration from the earth, the sea and the sky to develop concept foods that are industrially viable."

Enivrance, which is developing designer foods for the likes of McDonald's, Lavazza and Barilla, and has worked with top stores such as Harrods of London and Galeries Lafayette in Paris, plans to unveil its latest creations at the two-yearly SIAL world food and drinks fair opening in the French capital this month.

Real thing revisited

The egg, brainchild of Francois-Xavier Bogard, a chef who is also culinary architect to Hermes fashion house, is the real thing revisited, made of a food-shell with soft matter inside.

"Eggs are magic, they're reassuring, they always contain goodness, and you can carry them around anywhere," Malbois said.

The "Earth Egg" prototype the designers will exhibit at SIAL has a crusty cereal-like shell with a green creamy substance posing as the white and soya-sprouts and other veg featuring as the yolk.

"Green Chocolate", the work of Barcelona master chocolate-maker Oriol Balaguer, is a chocolate block sprouting blueberries, sprigs of fennel, ginger and vanilla.

"This bar of chocolate isn't as rich and is better balanced than the usual, which means you don't feel as guilty about eating it, and it's not as bad for you, given our sedentary lifestyles," he added.

But kudos for the most futuristic designer food of all has to go to Britain's Heston Blumenthal.

Known as "Sea Bread", and described as "a dialogue between flour and seaweed", the dune-coloured wave-shaped slice of bread is also a work-in-progress sound system supposed to produce successively, when bitten, the screech of a seagull, the crackling sound of sand and the swish of waves breaking onto the shore.

"This is not art for art's sake, and it's not just packaging, we really are creating new foods," Malbois said.

- AFP