A Spiral of Apples, Ants-on-a-Log
Why does presentation matter?
Issue 62: From Sara Kate
Sometimes it takes having a child around to find the joy and playfulness—the reverence and spirituality, too—in cooking and eating. When my daughter was little, I was never one of those parents to make smiley face pancakes or ants-on-a-log, but a fanned out display of apple slices was not uncommon and going hard on glitter and flowers for her birthday cake was an annual tradition. Still is.
Myself the daughter of a food stylist, the notion that the enjoyment and even the nourishment we get from food might not just come from the taste, but also the way it looks is something that’s lived within me since I was a child. I asked my now-retired mom why she thinks presentation matters and why she still makes food look pretty. Here’s what she had to say.
“As a food stylist, the single sense of sight is used to provoke the other senses … the aromas, textures, temperatures, tastes and even sounds of what you are offering.
As a mom, it is kind of the same but to invite and even entice your child to be curious about, explore and enjoy food and mealtimes … and to nurture and love them. And I still do it now because I still know you eat first with your eyes.”
[Thanks for putting it so well, mom!]
Confession: I started thinking about this topic, not because I was making a platter of food that looked really great, but rather I was cleaning out my fridge and I came across some very past-prime lettuce. It had lost its color and its structure. It looked literally dead, versus the vibrant, alive way lettuce looks when it is fresh. This is nature’s way of food styling. We are built to know what is healthy for us and what might poison us.
Our drive to decorate and beautify what we eat is perhaps just an extension of that instinct; a way our enlarged brains—evolved bipeds serving our families and friends meal after meal—decide that food should be delivered to people we love. One thing I do know is that when effort is made, the recipient feels extra loved. For little kids, it sometimes does mean making food animated: smiley face pancakes, for example. But as we age, we are able to receive beauty not because there is a face on our food, or a raisin “ant” on our celery and peanut butter “log”, but because we can tell the person who cooked for us cares by the effort they put in.
The person who cooks for us also gets a benefit. For me, when I’d slice those apples, I found myself in a meditation. Each slice, a silent chant in my head about one reason I loved being my daughter’s mother. And then the next. And the next. Pretty soon it was a mandala of sweet apple love.
What do you do to make your food beautiful? And why do you do it?