Your New Dinner Party
Bloomberg Businessweek|September 23, 2019
Is VR dining art? Or is it just delicious nonsense?
Richard Morgan
Your New Dinner Party

Harry Parr has one of the most dynamic palates on the planet. Half of the London-based food consultants Bompas & Parr, he’s served plasma-cooked bacon, created clouds of vaporized gin and tonic, and dropped banana-flavored confetti in sync to New Year’s Eve fireworks. So it was notable that before he spoke at FoodHack, a conference in Gwangju, South Korea, in June, he made sure to swing by a tiny three-seat stall for a five-course meal called Aerobanquets RMX.

“Meal” is perhaps too strong a word. It was five bites: starting with a mushroom tart with gochugaru (red chile powder) and finishing with a falooda-like dessert of cold corn starch noodles, basil seeds, strawberry ice cream, and rose syrup.

Not that Parr knew.

He was blinded by an Oculus virtual-reality headset that kept him in a 3D, interactive world inspired by 1932’s The Futurist Cookbook. Parr saw only virtual sculptures where the food should have been: The tart became a gray asteroidal blob rimmed by an orbiting disc of red crystal debris, for example. After each bite, his virtual world transformed, imbuing a layer of narrative to the meal while playing with the senses. A 2018 Journal of Food Science study found that VR environments affect taste. A VR barn makes cheese taste more pungent, for example, and a VR park bench makes it taste more herbal.

When I tried the experience myself, it reminded me a lot of eating communion wafers as a kid— the hypersensitivity to its placement on the tongue, its texture, the feel of it going down. Frequently, instincts overrode. I clung to a table’s edge or straightened my posture to avoid drowning in a quick -rising milky ocean. Reaching out for an object—a floating accordion, for example— felt utterly natural. I disregarded reality, keenly aware and unaware, the mystery of the food and the surreality of the visuals amplifying each other.

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