Anoop Sharma’s Experimental Art Reimagines Everyday Food Through Design

Engineer and designer Anoop Sharma started cooking his own meals more than a decade ago. Working from home all these years meant “a break from work and eating healthy, homecooked food where I am fully aware of all that goes into it,” he shares. Over time, that interest expanded into complex and experimental dishes, eventually intersecting with the design practice he runs under Company of Design. A unique one-man operation, Company of Design has worked across a wide spectrum: from brand identities to communication, obstacle races to board games, safety solutions for women to peace programs, food design to spatial design, films to illustrations, and more. Out of those two parallel obsessions came Foodesign, an experimental, self-initiated project that catalogues food from a designer’s perspective, converging media such as styling, photography, graphic design, mechanical drawings, blueprints, animation, and typography.

The process moves through sourcing ingredients, cooking, plating, photography, and then identifying the design within the dish. Having worked in design and advertising for a long time, the first step was the obvious one: to art-direct every meal with the right tableware and lighting and then shoot it,” he says. Anoop noticed the shapes and colours and how they combined to create perfect compositions, which led to the realisation that we create beautiful products and structures in our kitchens every day. And that achieving the perfect output requires the same precision, detail, and control, both visually and tastefully. “ I started seeing the hidden XYZ axis, cross-sections and exploded views,” he notes.

Anoop saw the stickiness of a sabudana pearl, how the beetroot bled its colour onto other ingredients, and how a poke released the air stuffed inside a bhatura. At times, these observations turned microscopic and often cerebral, focusing on the interaction between rice and kidney bean grains when mixed together to eat and the experience that interaction created. Some depictions captured the feeling after a dish was consumed, like the lightness of a watermelon salad. The chemistry between ingredients also began revealing typography — fusilli drilled through broccoli and mushroom formed an ‘F’, while a buckwheat crepe folded into the shape of a ‘D’. As the project evolved, Anoop began learning the botanical names of ingredients and applying them to the designs in Devanagari script. 

Human behaviour lies at the centre of the project. “Food > Human,” says Anoop. “We make food, but the food really makes us.” In his project, this reverence and wonder translates as food becoming a colossal architecture, that he can step inside as a miniature. With Foodesign, Anoop intends to build a deeper mindful connection with the food we consume every day. He reckons it might affect the food habits of younger generations in the future as well. “On a personal level,” he notes, “it constantly challenges me, allows me to learn new things about food, and guides me toward healthy eating; something I wish to continue for as long as possible.”

Follow Foodesign here and check out Anoop's work on his website.

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