My mom told me not to play with my food. So I drew a face on my hamburger.

Two dots of ketchup and a curve, on a toasted bun, at a kitchen table. That was the whole thing. It made her laugh, which was the point, and it turned out I liked making the food look like something more than I liked eating it.

Years later I'm still doing it, except now the hamburger is a griffin and it takes eight hours.

The rules

Everything on the plate is edible. No googly eyes, no toothpicks holding things upright, no plastic anything. If it's in the picture, you could eat it. That constraint is the whole craft — anyone can glue eyes on a bun, but making an eye out of an olive and a slice of cucumber is a different job.

Every recipe photo is a real plate. Built in a real kitchen, shot as it came out. Designs still in development are labelled as concepts until they've been built and re-photographed — a picture attached to a recipe is a promise, and it should be a real one.

Drawings are labelled as drawings. The illustrated versions — the colouring pages, the things printed on t-shirts — are clearly art, and they never pretend to be dinner.

Where it's made

In Thailand, which turns out to be the best possible place to learn this. Thai fruit and vegetable carving is centuries old and absurdly good — the kind of knife work that turns a carrot into a chrysanthemum in about ninety seconds. Some of that is starting to show up in the showpieces.