Making Meals Both Appealing and Healthy: A Food Presentation Simulation System

“You eat with your eyes first.” Marcus Gavius Apicius, the insightful first-century Roman gourmand, stated. Although arranging foods in attractive ways can increase one’s appetite, creating an aesthetic food presentation is challenging. For instance, users have to cut ingredients into pieces of specific shapes and sizes, while imagining the overall appearance of their desired composition. To overcome such challenges, we introduce a system that assists users to arrange ingredients to present appealing patterns in meals. The system enables them to perform a process of trial-and-error in the simulation prior to creating a real food presentation. Due to machines’ high computing power, our automatic simulation provides users with a variety of food presentation results and inspires their creativity accordingly. It also computes the nutritional composition of each simulated food presentation so that both visual quality and health are considered simultaneously. Results demonstrate that the simulated food presentations are visually appealing and could be physically created. Participants who joined the user study also favored our food presentation simulation system.