I design, therefore I cook.

One of the things I really love about cooking is the design of culinary tools. In my honest opinion, the Kitchen Aid stand mixer deserves a place at MoMA. It’s a design classic, an icon of American design and mechanical engineering. Consequently, I find excuses to spend money at Williams-Sonoma or Sur La Table any chance I get.

Speaking of Williams-Sonoma, there’s one just a few miles from our house. I stopped there today because I’ve been eyeing this lemon juicer in their catalog. It’s designed by Chef’n, a product design company based in Seattle whose philosophy toward kitchen gadgets is a lot like OXO’s; i.e., ergonomically and user friendly. How apropos, given that Seattle is a design-centered city obsessed with food. Seattle, as the French would say, est une vrai gourmande!

Anyway, I have this brussels sprouts recipe that I make on a regular basis, maybe a few times a month. It calls for half a squeezed lemon. For the longest time, I’ve been using the top half of a metal citrus squeezer that I bought at IKEA long ago. It’s the kind where you twist the lemon around the metal cone. But I’ve long since lost the bottom part of this juicer, so squeezing lemons can be a pain. I use a small plate to catch the juice, but the metal cone part slips around and … yeah, it’s lame.

But buying this juicer and using it tonight made me so appreciative of good design and especially, the engineering that great design can’t exist without. And I thought about how good design and great cooking are similar in oh…let me count the ways:

Rhythm + balance.

In food, rhythm and balance exist not only in the preparation of food, but in the delicate and nuanced balance of flavors and chemical reactions that can mean the difference between a great meal and a failed attempt.

Texture.

Wow. Texture, of course! Think of all the wonderful, amazing textures that different foods embody, and consider a meal without it. As in a designed object, texture in food adds richness and complexity. And pleasure. Masticulation is an interaction between humans and food that provides an intense satisifaction. Imagine if, for the rest of your life, you were resigned to eating every meal pureed or liquefied. Go on, picture it. Sad, no?

Color.

Color is such an amazing thing in food. It’s basically food’s way of talking to us. An indicator of the nutritional value of food. As in design, color gives meaning. Lots of meaning. It also provides an emotional aspect to food that would be otherwise missing if everything we ate were black and white or shades of gray. I can handle Mies and Le Corbusier in small doses when it comes to architecture and urban planning, but when I’m eating, I want Jane Jacobs, all the way!

Unity + variety.

Consider tomatoes, for example. Or cheese or wine or breads or chocolate. These are all unified in their base chemical/genetic structure, but infinitely varied in the expression of these chemicals and/or genes.

Scale + contrast.

Scale in food could range from size: watermelons compared to cherries, for example. Or taste, perhaps. The mildness of milk compared to the spiciness of a jalapeño pepper. With contrast leveraged in preparing and serving food. Pairing crunchy with soft. Sweet with salt. Fresh with aged. Contrast in cooking and design, like texture, enriches the user experience.

Iteration.

This has to be where design and cooking are the most alike. In cooking like design, fail and fail fast, right? I’ve made many a recipe more than once and iterated as I went along. I also do lots and lots of user testing. Seriously, isn’t licking the batter the quintessential usability study?

Which brings me to the last design element I’ll use in this analogy: interaction. Cooking and good food are things that bring people together. Like good product design, they inspire relationships; people interacting and emoting and conversing and laughing and arguing and crying and smiling and nourishing and … living. That’s probably the best part about it.

On that note, good night. I’m off to have some of that salted caramel ice cream I made last week before I go to bed….