Squid ink batter and octopus might not sound yummy to you. But you have to admit: The Singaporean dishes are fun to look at. The chefs didn’t just make a feast for your body. They made a feast for your eyes too.

Modern chefs know food is more than nutrition. Many of them think of their plates as blank canvases. They pick white plates so the colors in their food will “pop.” Does the dish have something liquid in it, like a sauce? Chefs often put that at the bottom of the dish so it doesn’t slosh around while a waiter carries the dish to a table. Does the dish have something sticky like mashed potatoes? That goes on the bottom too. Its gluiness will help keep bigger pieces of food stuck right in the spot the chef wants.

As the chef arranges food, he or she will likely follow an age-old guideline used in art: the rule of thirds. Like the subject in a good photograph, the food will not appear smack in the middle of the plate. It will be arranged off to the side. Chefs have many other tricks too. They usually cut their food into small pieces so their high-paying customers will not have to do it themselves. When they add items to a plate, they add an odd number. An even number of objects on a plate looks strange to the eye.

People have not always had such fancy ideas about how food should be plated. In the Middle Ages, people just ladled stew into a stale bread bowl and called it dinner. But a few hundred years later, a French chef named Marie-Antoine Careme starting showing that the beauty of food mattered. He built confections that looked like buildings—sometimes several feet high! Mr. Careme invented sauces still used in fine cooking today. He served food in small portions like chefs do now. The rest is history!