Play with your food: A creative workshop with food/play/food

Join Steph from food/play/food for this workshop which will explore play as a tool to explore the complexity of food. FInd new ways to play with your work and words! 

About this event

In this workshop we’ll think, discuss and write about playing with food, as well as explore ways to make a recipe for a fruit fool more foolish…

Steph fromfood/play/food is a designer and greengrocer whose work uses food as a starting point to explore the complexity of food. She’s printed with squid and dared a bunch of academics to throw their food at a wall with the encouragement of Autodineur, a random automated poetry bot.

The event will include the opportunity to make a rhubarb or other fruit fool dessert. Ingredients will be shared with participants 3 days prior to the event for those who would like to join in. Please let us know of any special dietary requirements upon booking your place.

The workshop is suitable for participants aged 16 and above. No writing or creative experience is necessary for this event.

Due to the intimate nature of this event, places for this workshop are limited.

Join us in this playful workshop as we explore this traditonal fermented oat drink and create recipes that play with the flavours of Autumn.

Booking will be available shortly.

Love food and creativity, but want to explore just more than cooking or eating? In this special seasonal class we‘ll explore the connection between Food Design, culture and Christmas!

During this class, you will learn how to creatively use food as a medium to create some original hand-crafted Christmas gifts. Anything but a cooking class, we’ll explore playful Christmas traditions in different cultures, find out how best to eat our Christmas trees, and create some unique gifts for you to take home.

Materials will be provided, please let us know of any special dietary requirements upon booking your place.

Love food and creativity, but want to explore just more than cooking or eating?

My Introduction to Food Design course looks at food in its broadest sense, encompassing culture, science and design. 

During these classes, you will learn how to creatively use food as a medium to create artworks which communicate a variety of topics. 

All materials will be provided, please let us know of any special dietary requirements upon booking your place. For sessions two and four we recommend you bring a smartphone or camera to either create photos or short videos of your creations.

All sessions have a 10-15 minute introductory session

SYLLABUS

Week One: Let’s Play. We’ll create wearables made from veg as we explore how we can use food differently to challenge our preconceptions about food.

Week Two: Playing with colour, we’ll dive into blue food to create collaged artworks and investigate why blue food is seen as weird as well as discussing anthocyanins in food.

Week Three: We’ll do some fermentation and explore transformation, salt as resistance and interspecies relationships.  

Week Four: We’ll explore the senses and create experimental artworks based on the relationship between taste and our other senses. 

Week Five: Discover gyotaku printmaking and the complexity of the paper, the medium and the connections between these.  

Week Six: Students own project on the themes of speculative futures and food systems. A prompt will be given at the beginning of the course. 

Curious?

The 6 week course will take place in Burntisland, Fife in January 2027 as well as online. Please get in touch for more information.

Booking will be available shortly..!

Join us in this playful workshop as we design and assemble a light lunch dish that aims to communicate the taste of Burntisland.

Participants will forage, design and create a vessel/plate made from natural materials to complement their light lunch dish, which will be assembled from a collection of local foods.

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Tasting Place

The French term ‘terroir’ can be described as a ‘taste of place’ (Parker 2015), with place referring to the ecology of an area, be it environmental and cultural that help constitute a place of “shared custom and affective belonging” (Trubek 2008, p1, in Paxon 2010).

Food designers, chefs and restaurateurs have long incorporated bespoke product designs into their multisensory experiences to convey a sense of place; to trigger nostalgia; or to enhance or change taste perception using crossmodal correspondences. In this workshop we will explore how best to enhance our selected ingredients using natural materials in our designs.

Booking will be available shortly.

Some Inspiration: images of tableware using natural materials to emulate place:

1. Seadish made by Amber Josephine van Dillen from seaweed

2. Mycelium and cornstarch/PLA bowl by Growing Lab

3. Tempeh Bowl by Karenina van den Crommenacker & Nicolas Rotta for Mediamatic

4. Shellworks ceramics made from lobster shell known as chitin or chitosan

5. Douglas McMaster’s zero waste restaurant, ‘Silo’ repurposes materials used within the kitchens and distribution chain to create tableware products that are then used within the restaurant. This could be seen as a contemporary example of reverse-engineering an urban terroir (Paxson 2010).  

6. Roza Janusch’s kombucha scoby vessels

7. Cindy Valdez’s research of local clays in Moray, Peru for Mater

8. Sarah Jerath pinch pots ceramics with clay made with local grits incorporated; a reminder of the earth of journey of the past artisan.