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Gastronomy and Beyond (G+B) aims to unite individuals who contribute to innovation in the realms of culture, products, territories, sustainability, and community.
Our mission is to expand horizons, foster creativity, and explore a myriad of concepts.
Professor Charles Spence is an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford and Head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory. His research focuses on understanding how people perceive the world around them—particularly how our brains integrate information from different senses including smell, taste, sight, hearing and touch to create the rich multisensory experiences that characterize daily life.
As a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, Professor Spence's work explores how a better understanding of the human mind can inform the design of multisensory foods, products, interfaces and environments. He serves as a consultant for multinational companies on multisensory design and has become a multi-award winning expert in the field of multisensory perception and neuroscience-inspired design. His research has attracted international recognition, with appearances in major media outlets and talks at prestigious venues discussing the psychology of food, taste, and sensory experience.
Drawing on his work in space research and his experience as commander of the NASA-funded HI-SEAS Mars simulation, Angelo Vermeulen explores how extreme environments change how we think about food. Bioregenerative life support systems such as the European Space Agency’s MELiSSA program circulate matter through microorganisms, plants, technological infrastructure and the inhabitants themselves. Waste becomes a resource, making humans active components of a deliberately constructed ecology. Yet food cannot be reduced to metabolism alone. During HI-SEAS, cooking became a space for creativity, cultural exchange and social cohesion. Bringing these perspectives together, the talk examines food as both biological necessity and social infrastructure, and asks what designing food systems beyond Earth can teach us about circularity, resilience and the future of food on our own planet.