One of the 'problems' that I have found when I have been researching cook books is that many contemporary cook books emphasise looking rather than cooking: they are not about the physical process of cooking but are about aspiration, a kind of food pornography. From a marketing point of view, this is not a problem: cook books are big business, the number one bestselling book on Amazon at this moment in time [1] is a cook book (Jamie Oliver's 30 Minute Meals, the fastest selling non-fiction book ever) and there are two other cook books in the top ten. In the top 50 bestselling books of 1998-2010 [2], Delia Smith's How to Cook, Book One appears at number 39 with Jamie Oliver's 30 Minute Meals at number 51.
It seems that despite healthy sales of cook books, sales of ready meals are also booming: in 2003, the United Kingdom spent £5 million a day on ready meals, and was the largest consumer in Europe:
"The report, 'Consumer Trends in Prepared Meals', shows that the UK is already by far the biggest market in Europe for ready meals, accounting for 49 per cent of all sales. Second-placed France has a mere 20 per cent, followed by Germany with 14 per cent." [3]
"The far greater popularity of prepared meals in the UK than in any other European country is due to several factors, the report said. First, there is a cultural aspect -prepared meals are far less popular in countries with a strong gastronomic tradition such as Italy or France. Secondly, working hours are longer in the UK than they generally are in the rest of Europe, as are commuting times, creating additional levels of time pressure and a heightened need for convenience foods." [3]
I find it puzzling that so many cook books are sold yet so few people cook. I don't want to appear evangelical about cooking, I'm not Jamie Oliver persuading people to eat healthy home-made food and people do have valid reasons for not cooking. However, I feel that cooking is a pleasure and, even if you are extremely busy, taking time out to prepare something from scratch, is far more therapeutic than heating up a ready meal or ordering a takeaway - and sometimes can take less time than juggling several trays in the microwave.
If cook books have become about looking then is the design of the books responsible for prioritising looking over action? As cook books employ more and more lavish production techniques and as food photography and styling became ever more sophisticated, does the function of a cook book become backgrounded as the visual is foregrounded? Is it possible to design cook books that make the process of cooking more explicit, that reveals it as an action in time, creating a cook book that people actually use as instructions to prepare food?
In This Means This This Means That, Sean Hall asks the question: 'Can we represent time?' He talks about some of the ways in which time can be represented in graphic design: "The flow of text may be about how it is placed with other texts, how it is spaced, and what sort of graphic and auditory features it has (e.g. slow, long sentences may be evident in a play, whereas quick, short syllables may be evident in a poem." He concludes that "The question as to whether we can represent time may be misleading; that is, if we think of the question as being about how to depict the phenomenon of time. This is because there are so many ways that something that takes up time can be represented, none of which may be 'true' to the way we experience time itself." [4]
In my recent practical experiments I have taken the method of a recipe and stretched it out, stage by stage, over the pages of a book. The book has, of course, an inherent sense of time within it; when we hold a book we are aware of our position in it, how much we have read and how far we have to go. There is a linearity to the book rooted in conventional left to right reading that suggests a journey with a beginning and an end. In This Means This This Means That, Sean Hall talks about left to right reading in Western cultures, he uses an example of a washing powder advert: dirty clothes appear on the left, clean clothes appear on the right - the reader understands that, through the placing of images in this order, the washing powder will make the dirty clothes clean. Obviously, in cultures that read from right to left, this process is reversed but, whichever way we read, "information placed on one side of a composition is usually 'given' or assumed, while the information on the other side tends to be 'new' or unexpected." [4]
To accompany the broken down text of the recipe I have used images, put through various processes in Photoshop that gradually reveal themselves to be the finished dish as the reader progresses through the book. I wanted to disrupt the instant gratification of seeing a finished dish alongside a set of instructions. I feel that seeing a book full of photographs of finished dishes encourages a kind of 'window shopping', not dissimilar to browsing the shelves of a supermarket where the physical process of cooking becomes secondary to the finished dish. I hope that with my visual tests I am making an attempt to show cooking as a process by using graphic design processes.
I want to look at some cook books (and perhaps other kinds of manuals, i.e. DIY manuals) that use diagrams to present a process, revealing it as something that exists within time. At this stage, I'm not sure if this is about trying to get people to cook by demystifying the process, by making it look easy; cooking is not always easy but, I think, that by prioritising and making explicit the temporal process of cooking rather than the end result, it might actually make a cook book which is about cooking as well as looking.
[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bestsellers/books
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/01/top-100-books-of-all-time
[3] http://www.foodnavigator.com/Financial-Industry/UK-meals-ready-for-growth
[4] Hall, Sean (2007) This Means This, This Means That: A User's Guide to Semiotics, London, Laurence King