She's Playful About Food and About the People Eating It — No, Actually, She's Serious | 100 People With Ideas

"A designer only raises questions and provokes thought; a designer doesn't hand down a verdict," she says. "The thing a designer should avoid most, I think, is political correctness."

"Oh no, they cut out the chicken!"

When Marije Vogelzang travels to give talks about her exhibitions, she usually introduces herself to foreign audiences who don't know her work with one particular photo.

Against a pale gray background, Vogelzang faces the camera, calm, with a fat white hen perched on her head — though the organizers often crop out the bird, which is a size larger than her head.

"But that's the whole point of the photo." To Vogelzang, the picture is a kind of statement: you can look at what's on your plate from another angle.

In the late 1990s, still a student at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Vogelzang began making food the central element of her work. In 2016 she was named to GOOD magazine's annual "GOOD 100" and to Fast Company's list of the most influential creative people in the world.

Part of the credit goes to a change in the times. Unlike when Vogelzang started out, food design has become a big trend in recent years, and artists working with food as their material keep appearing. At the same time, the climate crisis has made food a hot subject of argument, and she is widely seen as the leader of this new field.

"It's not about food. It's about the way people eat."

Vogelzang keeps stressing that she is an "eating designer," not a food designer — meaning she doesn't care about making food taste good. She wants to change the experience of eating and push people to think harder about the system that produces what they eat. "What interests me are the verbs attached to food: harvesting, cooking, eating, even excreting."

Vogelzang was born in Enschede, in the east of the Netherlands, and grew up there. "Meat, potatoes and some beans — always those three," she says of her childhood food memories. This is the typical Dutch family meal, served on one big plate, famous for being bland, practical and dull.

She had almost no contact with food from outside, but instinct told her "there had to be more than this." Her first culture shock at the table came at university, when she went with friends to a sushi restaurant in Paris; the ingredients and the way of eating were nothing like anything she knew, and they opened her eyes.

At the time almost nobody was doing food design, and there were few peers anywhere in the world, so she had to work out the possibilities on her own. "Everyone thought it was interesting, but not design — just something housewives fiddled with in the kitchen."

Her first work was built around a funeral. In the project, called White Funeral, she made everything white, in place of the Dutch funeral conventions of coffee, sponge cake and everyone dressed in black.

She remembers something from childhood. When relatives came to visit, she would go into the kitchen, put different ingredients together into little finger foods, and then watch which ones different people chose. The way people talk to each other through food, without meaning to and straight from the heart, fascinated her.

With White Funeral she wanted food, design and choice to build an atmosphere that fit the occasion, breaking the heavy, solemn mood such events usually carry, so that people could remember the dead and share what they felt while passing food to one another. The odd project drew a lot of attention in the Netherlands.

"How great is it that my design becomes part of you. People have designed so many things already — chairs, every kind of chair — and most of them end up in the bin." While her classmates worked in wood, plastic or steel, Vogelzang turned to the kitchen and picked up ordinary ingredients. She liked the thought that people would eat her designs, and that the designs would end up going down the drain.

Many of Vogelzang's early projects turned on the theme of the banquet.

At a Christmas dinner she designed, people sat along both sides of a long table; the tablecloth hanging down from the tabletop had been hoisted up to the ceiling, and diners had to push their heads and hands through holes cut in the cloth to work their knives and forks.

She admits this was the only food-related work she could find at first — the idea of food design had only just appeared, and most people had no idea what it meant. But in the course of dealing with large numbers of visitors, she got to run all sorts of experiments on intimacy between people.

How do people behave in a strange eating environment? How does food bring people closer?

When this long-table dinner was staged in Japan, every guest arrived formally dressed, very polite and very reserved, and Vogelzang, watching from the side, felt a little nervous. But the moment people poked their heads out through the white cloth, the room loosened up. They began sharing the food in front of them without being told to, pulled out of their everyday stiffness into somewhere more natural and more equal.

"Eating is a collective act."

That is what Vogelzang believes. In her world eating can take many forms: you might drink soup next to a giant flatbread warmed under a lamp, or crack open a clay shell, like a beggar's chicken, to reach the roasted vegetables inside. What never changes is that the way we eat should return us to our primal nature.

This is also what led her to one of the most important projects of her career: Eat Love Budapest.

Eat Love Budapest is a multisensory performance and experience that brings two strangers together in the intimate act of sharing and feeding. The project insists on the individuality and the romance inside each person, which can cross class and difference and connect strangers who never learn each other's names. In Hungarian culture, Roma people — also called Gypsies — are to this day a heavily discriminated-against group, cut off from the local population at work and in daily life, and not accepted by it.

For this, Vogelzang designed a three-day performance, inviting 10 Roma women to share their stories anonymously, one on one, with strangers behind a curtain. Each woman fed her guest, by hand, food that carried personal meaning, while telling memories tied to that food and singing songs. The guest sat in a small booth closed off by curtains, unable to see the face of the person feeding them, with photographs and text hanging in front — visual memories belonging to the stories.

The installation was staged on a boat on the bank of the Danube, which made the whole space feel cut off and singular. Feeding, meanwhile, is an unusually intimate act: "Every one of us was fed as a child. It's a ritual full of feeling, but it becomes rare in adult life."

When these Roma women were invited into the project, Vogelzang recalls, nearly all of them doubted it: "People aren't going to like this."

By the second and third day, though, Vogelzang found their whole bearing had changed. "Before, they always kept their heads down, looking unsure of themselves. Now they could laugh and talk easily, stand up straight, and they wanted to keep the project going." It was almost a reversal of power. Roma people have usually been on the receiving end, whether of pity or of malice. Here they were the ones giving: food, stories and love.

It was an intimate and emotional experience. Over three days the project received several hundred visitors, and many, after leaving the boat, said they wanted to meet the person behind the curtain. Vogelzang refused. "People always want to make an exception of one individual. What I want is to change how people see Roma people as a whole, not just to make them fond of the one person in front of them."

Vogelzang's website looks like the menu of some new restaurant — bright, jumping colors with hand-drawn cartoons mixed in — but designs made out of food are not always pleasant. She likes using design to needle people's feelings.

In one project she pushed a gun made of sugar into her own mouth. The image also became the cover of Eat Love, her 2009 book. "Why does it have to be a gun?" someone asked on her Facebook page; the picture looks aggressive, and it clearly made some people uneasy.

"It's a lollipop too — to show what sugar does to the human body," she answered underneath.

Just as uncomfortable was Eat Shit, an exhibition of student work she led at Milan Design Week in 2015.

Earlier that year the Design Academy Eindhoven set up its Food Non Food department, and Vogelzang went back to her old school to run the first food design department in the Netherlands. Eat Shit was the department's first big show after it was formed.

It was, exactly as the name says, an exhibition with excrement as its subject. Students worked in groups to display it in various ways, or to challenge what the public thinks about it: rebuilding and improving waste recovery systems, baking bread shaped like intestines, making toilets that turn waste into fertilizer, drying and preserving excrement.

"The whole exhibition took visitors through a process charged with emotion, from disgust at excrement to intimacy with it," said Thomas Widdershoven, the Eindhoven academy's creative director. But the show also drew plenty of argument — physical reactions don't lie. "Visitor reactions swung back and forth between revulsion and disbelief," the design magazine Core 77 wrote.

Building a show around excrement, especially on a stage as established and international as Milan Design Week, made Vogelzang uneasy at first, but she thought it mattered to make people see where they sit in the cycle.

"You live, you eat, you excrete — it's a precious resource, and it stands at both the start and the end of the food chain."

Vogelzang doesn't seem to mind angering her audience.

In February 2016 she started a project called Egg-Change. During it she kept more than 20 chicks in the attic of her studio and watched them hatch and grow. These birds carry a set of traits: short, sparse feathers that come out easily; breast muscle fuller and thicker than that of birds in the wild; a mild temper, no taste for fighting. Chickens with these traits would struggle to survive outside, but they are "almost the perfect model of meat."

Throughout the project she posted news of her "attic chicken farm" on social media. Once the birds were grown, she killed two of them with her own hands and put them in the oven.

"When I put the photo of the roast chicken online, everyone praised how beautifully browned and tempting it looked." But when she then posted a photo of herself holding a chicken she had just killed, the comments called it cruel. "How hypocritical people are about food. We wolf down the finished dish and deny the process it had to go through."

It is worth noting that from some of the designs alone it is easy to come away thinking Vogelzang is arguing for vegetarianism, or for eating less. But she doesn't believe she is telling people how to behave — to go vegetarian, or to eat less, as has become fashionable in Europe in recent years.

"A designer only raises questions and provokes thought; a designer doesn't hand down a verdict," she says. "The thing a designer should avoid most, I think, is political correctness."

Yet whenever Vogelzang tries to take up a social question, her projects get dragged into the argument around it.

Eat Love Budapest had consequences nobody expected. In Hungary, where the city is, left-wing and right-wing outlets that normally agree on nothing both covered it, and it set off a fresh political debate about Roma integration — "only from a more humane angle." Egg-Change, which touched on factory farming, caught the attention of the Dutch agriculture minister and was even taken to parliament for discussion.

Asked how she feels about her designs being politicized, Vogelzang doesn't seem worried. She thinks it is a good thing. "It means more people are affected, and join the conversation."

The world does talk about food at a remarkable rate.

Obesity, cancer and cardiovascular disease are getting more attention than ever, and some countries have passed laws capping the salt and sugar in food or taxing it more heavily. Against a background of global warming, plastic waste, overconsumption and shrinking supplies of clean water, the food production chain cannot shrug off the large part it plays.

A report on the future of food and farming published by the British government in 2011 predicted that over the following 20 years world population would reach 8.3 billion, demand for food would rise about 40%, demand for fresh water 30%, and demand for energy 50%.

Meanwhile the production system we have leaves 1 billion people on Earth hungry — short of enough macronutrients such as carbohydrate, fat and protein — while another billion, through "overconsumption," have produced new public health epidemics such as type 2 diabetes and widespread cardiovascular disease.

In European supermarkets, food labels have grown more and more complicated. You can learn not only the ingredients and the calories but whether the vegetables are organic, whether the poultry was farmed or wild, whether the item came out of a factory or was made by hand, whether it contains gluten, whether it contains allergens — you can even tell how healthy a food is from the color of the label…

In Dezeen magazine's roundup of the design trends of 2017, you can see attention rising on all three fronts: political questions, environmental fixes and food consumption.

Vogelzang's own country, the Netherlands, leads the world in food design. National Geographic once ran a piece on how this small European country, through innovation in farming and technology, helps feed the world and has become the second-largest exporter of agricultural products after the United States, while managing at the same time to cut carbon emissions and the use of fertilizer and pesticide.

Some put this down to a Dutch sense of crisis. With nearly half its land below sea level, the Netherlands has in a sense always been in a long war of bargaining with nature, and where ecology and population are concerned the Dutch look further ahead.

"I think the fragmentation of food is pathological. If we go on consuming the way we do, we won't have the food we have now, so we need creative ideas to change this food system," Vogelzang says. What human behavior has done to living things themselves astonishes her. The world is changing, she has come to see, and the way we have looked at food for thousands of years deserves to be questioned too.

"When it comes to food, we live in a divided world. Designers need to work with scientists, farmers and politicians, and together bring a positive, bold disruption to our culture."

The disruption is aimed at the food we know best in daily life. By making it strange, she takes us back to a primal sensitivity and closeness.

Cover image: Kawin Harasai on Unsplash