A blank canvas for a thousand mash potato beards

Although (Don’t) Play With Your Food is certainly one of my favourite projects from the archive, over the years it’s attained the heavy air of a project that could have been so much more.

On leaving college the idea was the closest thing I had to a readily marketable and manufacturable product. But in the weeks and months that followed, I came to realise the painful truth that although the project seemed to have a bright future, the intricacies of EU law would ultimately scupper the project’s production.

Another face awaiting some home-cooked adornment

Originally devised during my final year at college my aim was to create a set of plates that would introduce some creativity into a wholly domestic situation. Seeing how children love to play with their food I decided to create a pair of plates for adults and children alike to spark their imagination at the dinner table.

In the workshop I embossed simplified facial features onto plates, with the hope that a template would encourage food to be applied as decoration. Ultimately, my aim was to turn the act of eating into something engaging, maybe even encourage some clean plates!

So what happened? Well, on leaving college I sat on the idea for a couple of years until I joined Airside where I realised that the plates would be a great product for the Airside Shop. In a happy turn of events Airside already had begun to work with SUCK UK to manufacture and curate Airside’s It’s Pop, It’s Art mug collection and it seemed like a natural step to take the idea to SUCK UK to explore its manufacture. Thankfully SUCK UK thought it was a sound idea and agreed to work on a prototype.

An important point to add here is that Fred and Friends, a very popular American company that produce home-ware in a similar vein to SUCK UK, also thought it was a good idea. Prior to signing my contract with SUCK UK, Fred contacted me on a number of occasions to ask if I’d like to supply them the idea for production. However, being in the UK I wanted to work with a ‘local’ company, so I opted for SUCK UK.

And they were brilliant, SUCK UK clearly care a lot about what they do, and as a British company I’m proud to say that they more than hold their own in the competitive market place for things-you-never-knew-you-needed. Incidentally, Jude Biddulph, the director of SUCK UK who I was working with gives an excellent interview in China, Britain and the Nunzilla Conundrum a Radio 4 documentary by Anna Chen on the art of making things-you-never-knew-you-needed.

SUCK UK's inital prototype (Image: SUCK UK)

Within a few weeks, we had a prototype, but tellingly there was something up. The plate had become a bowl and consequently it was impossible to stack or arrange food in a meaningful way. Obviously I questioned this and Jude explained that EU law deemed my original design unsafe.

Producing a helpful chart of plates to illustrate his point, Jude explained that because both of my plates featured smiley faces, they would automatically be classed as plates for children. Nothing wrong with that, but the problem was that since the designs were so affable, the plates would be automatically classed as suitable for very young children. Theoretically this could mean newborns and upwards – and this new class introduced a lot of new rules.

Jude went on to explain that the bowl design was a way of getting around this classification, since very young children were not expected to eat from bowls, so a bowl with a smiley face would negate the automatically assumed audience.

Would this put a child off?

When I suggested we slap a warning or an age limit on the packaging instead Jude further informed me that regardless of information placed on the packaging, the plates’ smiley face would always lead to a child’s plate classification. I even suggested the above logo, a mature design that I thought would put off young very children and their parents, but this just wouldn’t wash.

The jury's still out to whether this project actually made kids eat their greens

Now, the key issue with crockery aimed at a very young age bracket is that it naturally determines the materials you can use. This wasn’t a problem for me as I wanted to use melamine, a safe plastic that had the look and feel of china. However, our main headache were the plates’ embossed surfaces. The nub of the matter was that since these plates were to be aimed at such young children, the EU’s laws on baby utensils came into play – and these are naturally very very harsh. Infact, the plates fell afoul of the first golden rule of baby plate health and safety – that all surfaces used by babies for eating needed to easily cleared by the largest, thickest dessert spoon, otherwise the surface could be legitimacy classed as a dirt trap.

But SUCK UK didn’t give up, they had their legal team to pour over the laws surrounding baby plate production, and even explored new designs. But, because I wanted a design that would be almost identical to my original prototype, the project inevitably ground to a halt.

Here's one I made eariler

With our options exhausted, we parted company, disappointed but happy we gave the project a thoroughly good go.

Fred and Friends 'Food Face' plate (Image: Fred and Friends)

However, many months later there proved to be an unexpected epilogue to the tale. I was holidaying in the Lake District, when on a rainy excursion to the lovely town of Ambleside, I saw an oddly familiar plate in the shop window. Peering closer through the driving rain I saw it was a called a Food Face plate designed by, yup, Fred and Friends.

Fred and Friends had found a way around the embossing problem by simply printing a face onto the plate – no raised features! It’s a good solution to the problem, and I admit that I was so blinkered to the idea of having raised features like my prototype that I never even considered this approach as a compromise.

A little voice at the back of my head does wonder if they were ‘inspired’ by my idea, they certainly knew about it, but my attitude is that you can’t copyright an idea and it’s not like nobody has ever made a face from food on their plate. So I’m in no way bitter when it comes to business like this, I was not willing to compromise my beautiful object and this was the outcome. Like they say “it’s not personal, it’s business”.