Research published today in our journal Flavour shows that food arranged to resemble famous artworks tastes better than food in a traditional or neat presentation. So we thought we’d get everyone to improve their meals with an art-inspired presentation.

Tweet your examples of art-inspired food presentation using the hashtag #ArtisticTaste, and let us know whether it’s made your mealtime more fun. We’ll be sharing our favourites on Twitter from @BioMedCentral, and collecting up more on our Facebook page.

Here at BioMed Central, we never shy away from a challenge, our crack team had a go at making some themselves. Once they’d had a little think about what they wanted to recreate and chosen their ingredients,  we put down some newspaper, donned our aprons and got started. Here’s how they got on with their delicious masterpieces, and down at the end of the page, you can see the fruits of their labour in our very own Taste Gallery.

Designer Rosario Villajos went abstract with a Mark Rothko salad, using olives, tomatoes beetroot, and that ever popular artistic ingredient, cheese, to reproduce his painting No. 3/No. 13.

James Balm, our Social Media Assistant used a pitta bread base and salad a cheese frame for his take on a Picasso portrait.

PR Assistant Alanna Orpen’s surrealist Magritte painting included a curtain of red pepper, cottage cheese clouds, a man made of olives and half a red onion for his hat.

Here in the comms team, we can confirm that they tasted delicious!

The fun continued offsite too. Giusy Arciresi recreated the Keith Haring painting ‘Untitled 1984’ in her own kitchen by chopping up black olives to make the bold outline, and filling it with delicious cous cous, cheese and tomatoes. And inspired by her activities at work, Alanna had another go in her spare time, making a smoked salmon, beetroot and courgette Degas ballerina.

The paper showing this effect was written by a group of scientists and chefs at the Crossmodal research lab at Oxford University. Professor Charles Spence explained to us that this dual  perspective could have important implications for applying these findings to make meals more enjoyable. “Studying food presentation under the lens of psychology and sensory science promises to provide important insights into the art and science of plating”, he said.

In the article, the researchers say they think we find artistic representations of food more flavourful because these artistic meals stimulate the visual senses, and influence the parts of the brain that control perception of taste. They say that this shows how interlinked our senses are.

So with that in mind, feast your eyes on our beautiful Taste Gallery.