Your New Dinner Party

Is VR dining art? Or is it just delicious nonsense?

- Richard Morgan

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.