Leisure Food: Derive Social and Cultural Entertainment through Physical Interaction with Food

Food is not simply a source of nutrition, but also a symbolic medium for social bonds and entertainment. Beyond this, food is common artefact across cultures, embedded with internal cultural value and identity. This paper presents the notion of “Leisure Food”, which explores the roles of mundane food in deriving social and cultural entertainment from people’s interaction with physical food. We focus on the application of culturally based food experiences as a gateway for enriched and profound entertainment, through maximizing the physical, social and cultural affordances of food using technologies. From this notion, we developed two prototypes based on the positive interactions that people have as they eat and prepare food in their everyday lives and also extend them to remote situations. The preliminary user study demonstrates that these two prototypes can enhance the level of social engagement and culture recollection experience through the new designed forms of physical food-mediated interaction, which verified the proposed features regarding “Leisure Food”.