Serving the Right Plate: Spatial Biases in Food Plating Aesthetics

With the growing popularity of social media, the aesthetics of food plating is getting more and more exposure. Optimizing the aesthetics of plating and understanding where certain elements of the dish should be placed on a plate or within a bento box or bowl will aid researchers in learning what side of dishware plating creates the most appetizing appearance to the average diner. The goal is to understand the ideal layout of a dish in order to improve a chef’s plating techniques along with optimal advertising photography for a world focused on visual stimuli. Previous literature led us to predict that there would be a leftward bias of plating the largest, most caloric heavy component of the meal on the dish. Similar to Western text (both reading and writing) moving from left-to-right, we suspect diners prefer food being placed in a similar directionality. Art is commonly studied in conjunction with laterality experiments, where participants frequently demonstrate a leftward bias. Japanese bentos are normally rectangular in shape, akin to a portrait or painting. When scanning a photograph, people generally scan from left-to-right similar to when reading text. Research in laterality suggests that native reading direction can highly influence a person’s opinion on aesthetics. This thesis outlines studies of food plating aesthetics whereby Canadian participants were presented photographs of professionally plated dishes and their mirror image together to elicit and record preferences. Image pairs were presented on top of each other in random orders, and decisions between leftward and rightward biased choices were collected and analysed. The majority of participants had a native reading direction of left-to-right. Interpretations of the results suggested what the ideal way to plate food is. For food presented on plates, no significant placement bias was present overall. However, for bento boxes and poke bowls, participants preferred dishes where the majority of the food was plated on the left side of the dishware, resulting in a statistically significant leftward bias. Additionally, a particular favourable trend was consistently seen, where participants almost always preferred a placement of long foods to start at the bottom left corner and ascend towards the top right in a diagonal pattern. Research in laterality and aesthetics suggests that people have a particular penchant towards either specifically the left or right side for many different habits (such as preparing the right hand for a handshake) or appearances (such as preferring artwork that is illuminated from the left). By applying these studied concepts to the art of plating, techniques can be taught to create ideal presentations. Learning how we can optimize plating aesthetics can benefit people in a variety of vocations. Mainly chefs, cooks, photographers, social media users, advertisers, and marketers could use this conclusion of a leftward bias preference to their advantage.

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