Food-Inspired Design

One of my favorite things to do when I travel is to wander through foreign grocery stores, seeing how people in other parts of the world (or the country, even) label, display and buy their food. That’s why I love the new book crEATe: Eating, Design, and Future Food. The writers, who are British trend analysts, scoured the earth to find the latest developments in everything from restaurant design to food packaging to fad diets. What makes me want to spend some quality time with the book, though, are the images—of cooking schools, kiosks and food innovators across the globe. Two ideas I fell for were the Illy Push Button House, which looks like a shipping container but turns into a gleaming white five-room house (complete with kitchen) at the push of a button, and a Japanese designer’s chocolate pencils, in a range of cocoa blends, that you sharpen over your dessert to get chocolate shavings.