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Tasting off-flavors: Food science, sensory knowledge and the consumer sensorium
Abstract
In food science and technology, understanding off-flavors has a significance with both technical and commercial implications. In the food industry in the United States, it is a widely held truism that consumers will not buy a product if they do not like the way it tastes or if it contains unpleasant flavors. But how can science determine when food is off putting, and how do scientists learn to address bad tastes in their experimental and technical practice? Based on ethnographic work with food scientists in the United States, this paper is a reflexive account of learning to taste off-flavors, a form of sensory learning that utilizes the scientist’s own body as a kind of instrument. The paper argues that a particular understanding of the consumer sensorium emerges through food scientists’ approach to off-flavors. This is an image of the consumer as a chemically receptive sensory system that is highly sensitive to compounds at trace levels. By utilizing the sensitivity of their own senses, food scientists exploit the relationship between distaste, memory and sensory perception as a form of training to produce future aesthetic memories of off-flavors that can be deployed in a technical context.
... As Cristina Grasseni [33] suggests, participant observation can also involve a process of sensory apprenticeship. Some of these activities concerning food include sitting through training sessions [34][35][36], partaking in vocational classes [37], hanging out in bars and people's homes [31,38], waiting tables in a restaurant [39], or lessons about the "taste" of Japanese cuisine [40]. Through these practices, ethnographers not only learn about other people's sensory experiences, but also about their identities, values, and beliefs and how something like food is valued. 1 There are other related tools. ...
In recent decades, ethnographic methods have gained increased attraction in different fields outside of anthropology. Contemporary approaches to ethnographic research have pushed traditional methods to address new research subjects and purposes in a collaboratory and participatory manner. One such new area is consumer and market research. In this chapter, the reader will be introduced to contemporary ethnographic methods with a special attention to sensory ethnography and multisited ethnography—strands particularly fitting for consumer research. In addition, in order to make the case for the need of ethnography within the food industry, an example of doing multisited and sensory ethnographic research on flavor will be presented. From this example, important insights for consumer research will be drawn as well as practical advice for those new to ethnography and interested in this descriptive and interpretative approach for data collection and analysis.Key wordsQualitative researchEthnographySensory ethnographyMultisited ethnographyConsumer researchParticipatory methods
... There are various studies of the perfume industry (Muniesa and Trébuchet-Breitwiller 2010;Teil and Hennion 2004) that discuss the making of "the nose" as measuring instrument. These scholars have deliberately focused on body parts (though Butler [2018] is more expansive in other work) and how bodily instruments are crafted in testing and marketing practices. In this article, I take this line of inquiry in a different direction and look at the role of institutional educational environments, that is, universities, in the making of the sensing, measuring body. ...
Medicine is often criticized in science and technology studies (STS) for its dominating measuring practices. To date, the focus has been on two areas of “metric work”: health-care workers and metric infrastructures. In this article, I step back into the training of clinicians, which is important for understanding more about how practices of measurement are developed. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in a Dutch medical school to look at how a ubiquitous and mundane tool––measuring tapes––is embodied by medical students as they learn to coordinate their sensory knowledge. In doing so, they create their own bodies as the standard or measure of things. Unpacking educational practices concerning this object, I suggest that tracing the making of measuring bodies offers new insights into medical metric work. This also speaks to the growing interest in STS in sensory science, where the body is fashioned as a measuring instrument. Specifically, two interrelated contributions build on and deepen STS scholarship: first, the article shows that learning is an embodied process of inner-scaffold making; second, it suggests that the numerical objectification of sensory knowing is not a calibration to “objectivity machines” but rather to oscillations between bodies and objects that involve sensory-numerical work.
... In taking perceptual practice as a key analytical framework for investigating engineering work, we draw on traditions in both science and technology studies (Alac, 2008;Baim, 2018;Daston and Galison, 2007;Latour, 1986;Lynch, 1985) and interaction analysis (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1996;Lindwall and Lymer, 2017;Stevens and Hall, 1998) that have argued for an approach to perception as a situated social practice rather than an individual biological fact. Defects are not natural, pre-given aspects of an environment or product; rather, defects emerge in relation to modes of what Stevens and Hall (1998) call 'disciplined perception', a term that draws attention both to the particular forms of perception that support claims to knowledge and expertise (Carr, 2010;Goodwin, 1994) as well as to the fact that these forms of perception are learned practices (Baim, 2018;Butler, 2018;Goodwin, 1997;Jasanoff, 1998;Vertesi, 2012). It was because engineers had learned particular ways of looking at and assessing steel products and production methods that certain perceptible phenomena became recognizable as defects. ...
This paper explores how professional engineers recognize and make sense of product defects in their everyday work. Such activities form a crucial, if often overlooked, part of professional engineering practice. By detecting, recognizing and repairing defects, engineers contribute to the creation of value and the optimization of production processes. Focusing on early-career engineers in an advanced steel mill in the United States, we demonstrate how learning specific ways of seeing and attending to defects take shape around the increasing automation of certain aspects of engineering work. Practices of sensing defects are embodied, necessitating disciplined eyes, ears, and hands, but they are also distributed across human and non-human actors. We argue that such an approach to technical work provides texture to the stark opposition between human and machine work that has emerged in debates around automation. Our approach to sensing defects suggests that such an opposition, with its focus on job loss or retention, misses the more nuanced ways in which humans and machines are conjoined in perceptual tasks. The effects of automation should be understood through such shifting configurations and the ways that they variously incorporate the perceptual practices of humans and machines.
... Since the mid-twentieth century, researchers working at the 'grey area' between industry and academia (Gerontas, 2014) have actively used sensory science to shape what I think of as the ingestible environment. Deliberate, repeated exposure to tastants or odorants, trains bodies to become measuring instruments (Muniesa and Trébuchet-Breitwiller, 2010), increasingly able to mobilize what Ulloa (2019) terms sensory acuity (see also Butler, 2018;Spackman, 2018) in the pursuit of measuring sensory experience. That knowledge in turn circulates to facilitate the enchantment of consumer mouths, the creation of uniform sensation (Lahne, 2018), or as an argument for the physical emplacement of sensation critical to maintaining name-denomination systems (Shields-Argèles, 2019;Trubek, 2008). ...
This article examines the politics of smell at the edge of perception. In January 2014, the municipal water supply of Charleston, West Virginia was contaminated by an under-characterized chemical, crude MCHM. Even when instrumental measurements no longer detected the chemical, people continued to smell its licorice-like odor. In a space where nothing was certain, smell became the only indicator of potential harm. Officials responded by commissioning state-funded sensory testing of crude MCHM to determine its sensory threshold. Via the critical passage point of sensory science, some instances of embodied attunement were allowed to enter into the evidentiary regimes of perception, while other, similarly trained moments of attunement were excluded from the process. This, I show, produced knowledge about the spilled chemical that maintained the systems that contributed to the spill in the first place. Drawing on new materialist thought, I riff on biology and ‘transduce’ the ephemeral phenomena of smelling crude MCHM into a new medium: Rather than thinking of smell as a volatile molecular material (an odorant), I show that consideration of smell as a manipulable object that one can imagine as having tangible substance and shape offers a way to experiment with disciplinary forms. I suggest an alternate future, where sensory science acts to record sensory labor that produces facts about collective experience that cannot (easily) travel through current systems, a process that is one possible way of beginning to unravel entrenched systems of toxic harm.
... There are however interesting exceptions. After Goodwin's (1994) pioneering work on the specific practices attached to professional perception, a few ethnographic studies have analyzed sensory panels (Muniesa and Trébuchet-Breitwiller 2010;Butler 2018;Mann 2018) and sensory trainings (Teil 1998;Rice 2010;Maslen 2015). Since these panels and trainings aim at fostering a specific perception, these works report on the particular configuration of the sensory analysis labs and their tasting sessions with their more or less strange sensory protocols. ...
How can one learn to perceive? The study of an expert training shows how olfactory learning combines two operations and modalities of experience: firstly, it rests upon doubt and the questioning of perception to turn its undisputable evidence into a changing plurality. Secondly, perception is reconstructed and stabilized according to a set of chosen constraints, thanks to a perpetual control and reworking of the inadequate perceptions.
This analysis brings us to reconsider the interpretation of the notion of “attention”. Trainees focusing on their perception do not make it more salient, precise and detailed, as per the representational interpretation of perception. They question it. In so doing, they foster a surge of “shades” and make it plural and variable. Attention denotes here a process of perceptual destabilization, through doubt.
Additionally, in the cases studied, the reflexivity that enables learning shows deconstructive aspects: through doubt, the surrounding world turns from self-evident to changing and plural. This does not fit the usual constructive character of reflexivity, as in “mind-” or “self-building” processes, for instance. At the core of the learning process, the shifting modalities of perception seem to open the door to a larger variety of understandings of reflexivity and their correlative selves.
... Recently, we oversaw a special issue of the journal Senses & Society that examined how the twentieth century upended what it means to taste (Lahne and Spackman 2018). In articles on the practices of those within the food industry who create flavor-sensory scientists (Lahne 2018;Butler 2018), flavor chemists (Spackman 2018;Tracy 2018), and flavorists (Ulloa 2018)-we worked to trouble the scientization of taste, arguing that the food industry "erases the active labor of the sensing body [emphasis in the original]" (Lahne and Spackman 2018, 3) in attempting to develop objective measures of flavor. We see something interesting going on in these practices of using mouths and noses to gather and capture data that are then metaphorically and literally separated from the humans possessing those organs and corresponding sensations. ...
The taste of foodstuffs has shaped entire economic systems. Yet many scholars have understood how one tastes as only a matter of aesthetics. New forms of doing work through the senses, associated with twentieth-century industrialized food production, have made it clear that the sensations produced by mouths and noses do more than mark class—they carry economic value. It seems that it is time we attend more closely to this sensory labor and its place in the food system. Recognizing perception as a form of labor mobilized throughout the food system offers to dissolve the apparent dichotomy between a focus on food as an object of consumption, evaluated on its aesthetic principles, and of production, evaluated on its ethical implications. Sustained examination of sensing as found in the essays in this issue demonstrates that the types and modes of sensory labor mobilized in the provisioning, making, and eating of food are not neutral—rather they coproduce modes of food production. In doing so, these essays not only open the door for valuing otherwise unacknowledged work, but also point towards opportunities for critical intervention in how we talk about and practice taste and, in the process, make society.
... First, I suggest that the acquisition of knowledge through the senses of smell and taste should not be taken as a sensual skillful formation that only takes place through artisan activities such as cooking, brewing, and baking. Sensory expertise, as the discipline of sensory science and its role in the food industry make clear, is not foreign to processes of standardization, quantification, and quality control, but, on the contrary, constitutes an essential mode of knowing for their practice (Butler 2018). Acuity is a concept that couples skill and knowledge, mind and body. ...
Flavor expertise can be found across different disciplines and practices, spanning from science to industry to gastronomy. Through an ethnographic exploration of sensory expertise, this article brings detail to the question of what makes up flavor expertise and how it is valued, juxtaposing the work of the high-end chef with that of the flavorist—a producer of flavorings for mass-produced foods and beverages. These two worlds of flavor are generally differently valued (i.e., chefs are seen as creative geniuses, while flavorists are considered fraudulent tricksters). However, as the article will contend, these worlds are actually closer than is recognized and share common ground in the development of sensory acuity. As an analytic framework, the concept of acuity understood as keenness of understanding and feeling is used and how acuity-in-action operates in both fields is illustrated. Overall, the article makes a case for studying expertise ethnographically, by suggesting that the traditional approach to sensible skills, with its subjectivist bias and emphasis on physiological traits, is insufficient insofar as it neglects the communal space where flavor becomes an object of concern and appropriation. This space is intersubjectively shared and constituted through experimentation, communication, and collective action.
... On the contrary, woody, chokeberry ID, astringency, bitterness and sourness were not appreciated flavors by consumers. As expected, the off-flavor was not among the liked attributes (Butler, 2018). ...
Consumers’ preference is essential to improve processed food products quality, but small companies sometimes lacks knowledge or tools to develop consumer studies. The aim of the present study was to investigate consumers’ insight to recommend the best drying methodology for pomegranate arils. With the aim of providing information that industry can correlate to the drivers of liking, descriptive sensory characteristics, and volatile compounds of the samples were determined and related with consumers’ responses. A total of 19 volatiles of dehydrated pomegranate arils were determined using solid‐phase microextraction and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. Partial least square regression (PLS) results indicated that consumers overall liking was positively correlated with “pom ID”, “sweet”, and “fruity” attributes, and also volatile compounds of the esters family. Overall liking was negatively correlated with the “off‐flavor” and “burnt” attributes, related to the furan compounds family. Penalty analysis indicated that the sample corresponding with the current commercial product needed improvement on the “pom ID”, “fruity”, and “sweetness” parameters. All the samples processed using the proposed new drying techniques were more liked than the commercial sample, highlighting a sample dried using pre‐osmotic dehydration in Wonderful concentrate pomegranate juice.
Practical Application
Consumers’ preference is essential to improve processed food products quality, but small companies sometimes lack knowledge or tools to conduct consumer studies. The present study provides useful information to understand consumers’ preferences of a healthy product such as pomegranate dehydrated arils. Also, the link of physico‐chemical and sensory tools is clearly described, providing information about possible sensory quality indicators.
A partir de três contextos de análise distintos, o artigo busca discutir os processos de qualificação do café especial realizando um mapeamento da forma pela qual a qualidade deste café é convencionada, ao longo do seu ciclo de comercialização. A partir de um trabalho etnográfico de cerca de três anos em algumas cafeterias cariocas, fundamento a qualidade do café especial como uma convenção vinculada ao ato de degustar o café, que assume um caráter instrumental, no caso da avaliação realizada na compra dos cafés; técnico procedimental, no caso do cotidiano operacional dos baristas para com o café; e o ritual valorativo, pensando-se o consumo ordinário do produto em cafeterias.
This article stems from an ongoing collaborative ethnographic project with a Delhi-based women workers’ union known as Shehri Mahila Kamgar Union. Since 2015 I have been studying how domestic workers view the relationship between the senses and work. The main objective is to understand how the “senses” in general and smell in particular have been invisibilised in discussions on “intimate labor.” While analyses of the sensory labor and synesthetic reason involved in craftwork and food preparation celebrate sensoriality, the location of smells in intimate labor, especially domestic work, has been occulted. I propose the term “intimate sense-labor” to foreground the study of the acts of erasure of smells that are central to the sensory practice of domestic workers. Intimate sense-labor consists of strictly disciplining the senses and controlling sensory emanations while reproducing the intimate smells of a household through acts of cleaning, washing, and cooking. Building upon everyday work narratives of domestic workers, I expose the workings of “intimate sense-labor” through an examination of the smells of happiness, fear, and disgust.
Odors define many things: plants, foods, people. Although the rise of instrumental flavor and odor analysis techniques from the 1950s to 1980s, largely driven by the food and perfumery industries, allowed scientists unprecedented access to knowledge about the structures and origins of odorific molecules, these techniques and their influence on the social imagination remain relatively unexamined. Working at the intersection of Gender, Food, and Science and Technology Studies, this paper examines how the technique of gas chromatography-olfactometry (GC-O), key to how perfumers and flavorists managed sensory experience, was mobilized to scientifically categorize the bodily odors of immigrants and women as other. Through analysis of the instrumental and sensory techniques used to quantify as well as qualify bodily odor, I examine how researchers mimicked patterns for ordering the world of taste and smell in their efforts to characterize and master women’s bodily odors. The indexing of bodily odors through GC-O highlighted the porous nature of the body and its smells, even as researchers, physicians, and producers of feminine “hygiene” products promoted commercial anti-fungal medications, douches, and suppositories for their promise to reign in the excess smells of the body and its microbial and mycobial companions.
‘Being annoyed’ is emblematic of modern environments where individuals are exposed to all kinds of unpleasant sensations: olfactory, acoustic, visual, tactile or kinaesthetic. This phenomenon references the very inner feelings of discomfort, repulsiveness and inappropriateness, of inhabiting places characterised by socio-environmental materialities that could be lived, consciously or not, as hostile and sensorially disturbing. By focusing on two cases of odour pollution caused by household waste processing plants, this article argues that the feeling of environmental annoyance refers to a series of sensorial, social and economic impediments. Bad smells, as ‘disturbing affordances’, are the scene of collective sensory processes that shape hospitability and value of places. The article particularly questions the role played by the qualisigns of value in these depreciation processes and highlights the need for a comprehensive anthropology of hostile environments.
Tea production comprises concerted acts of discernment—from plucking and processing tealeaves, to tasting, blending, and valuing tea—the outcome of which ranges from the ordinary to the singular. Tracing the tension between the two, this article cast a closer look at how aesthetic judgments are made and shared, and the ways in which they are incorporated into the production of mass market commodities. The aim of this paper is to highlight the nuanced practices of aesthetic judgment, which, no matter how indispensable to the production of an ostensibly ordinary good, are obscured by the widespread association of taste with distinguished consumption—the conflation, in other words, of aesthetic judgment with “good taste.” Based on ethnographic research conducted with producers and professional tea-tasters across the Ceylon Tea industry, it argues for a broader understanding of the judgment of taste as an enactment of sensory labor irreducible to commonly held categories of distinction.
In an intensifying climate of scrutiny over food safety, the food industry is turning to “food safety culture” as a one-size-fits-all solution to protect both consumers and companies. This strategy focuses on changing employee behavior from farm to fork to fit a universal model of bureaucratic control; the goal is system-wide cultural transformation in the name of combatting foodborne illness. Through grounded fieldwork centered on the case of a regional wholesale produce market in California, we examine the consequences of this bureaucratization of food safety power on the everyday routines and lived experiences of people working to grow, pack, and deliver fresh produce. We find that despite rhetoric promising a rational and universal answer to food safety, fear and frustration over pervasive uncertainty and legal threats can produce cynicism, distrust, and fragmentation among agrifood actors. Furthermore, under the cover of its public health mission to prevent foodborne illness, food safety culture exerts a new moral economy that sorts companies and employees into categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ according to an abstracted calculation of ‘riskiness’ along a scale from safe to dangerous. We raise the concern that ‘safety’ is usurping other deeply held values and excluding cultural forms and experiential knowledges associated with long-standing food-ways. The long-term danger, we conclude, is that this uniform and myopic response to real risks of foodborne illness will not lead to a holistically healthy or sustainable agrifood system, but rather perpetuate a spiraling cycle of crisis and reform that carries a very real human toll.
The current paradigm for developing products that will match the marketing messaging is flawed because the drivers of product choice and satisfaction based on texture are misunderstood. Qualitative research across 10 years has led to the thesis explored in this research that individuals have a preferred way to manipulate food in their mouths (i.e., mouth behavior) and that this behavior is a major driver of food choice, satisfaction, and the desire to repurchase. Texture, which is currently thought to be a major driver of product choice, is a secondary factor, and is important only in that it supports the primary driver—mouth behavior. A model for mouth behavior is proposed and the qualitative research supporting the identification of different mouth behaviors is presented. The development of a trademarked typing tool for characterizing mouth behavior is described along with quantitative substantiation of the tool's ability to group individuals by mouth behavior. The use of these four groups to understand textural preferences and the implications for a variety of areas including product design and weight management are explored.
Sensory evaluation is the food-science discipline that “comprises a set of techniques for accurate measurement of human responses to foods”. In lay terms, sensory evaluation seeks to objectively describe the nominally subjective sensory properties of food without using physical measurements. However, the techniques used by sensory scientists in pursuit of accurate measurements of subjectivity are largely contingent on the assumptions and goals of the food industry. Food-industry needs implicitly define which foods have “true” tastes, and what those tastes are. This paper examines one way in which the US food industry defines and delimits food sensations through a focus on Descriptive Analysis (DA), which sensory-analysis experts Lawless and Heymann call “the most sophisticated tools in the [sensory scientist’s] arsenal” – and in particular the form of DA called “Spectrum”. I argue that Spectrum panel-members are trained into a particular subjectivity stemming from (literal) food-industry standards: whenever possible, these standards are branded, industrially produced foods, which are assumed to have objectifiable, invariant sensory properties. I document these practices and their implications, demonstrating that the reification of subjective experience in the lab has ramifications not only for personal experience, but social and economic structures.
Despite their nuanced palates and cooking skills, as guests at the humanitarian table, Liberians living at the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana were expected and assumed to adapt to the “tastes of necessity.” In the refugee camp, the sensory experiences and pleasures of the taste of liberty—or “luxury”—existed, if at all, as an indicator that one was no longer in need of aid. In this article, I consider how innovations in cooking and taste shape humanitarian politics and argue that Liberian refugees subverted the biopolitics of necessity through biographies of taste. Through their sensuous encounters and critical responses to the taste of necessity, humanitarian subjects are able to produce biographies of food aid and a public accounting of the historic and contemporary conditions of humanitarianism. By prioritizing the taste of refugee food, camp residents have challenged the reason of humanitarian reason by expanding the sensibility of food aid and repositioning recipients as essential figures in humanitarian aid.
The presence of food waste, and ways to reduce it, has generated significant debate among industry stakeholders, policy makers, and consumer groups around the world. Many have argued that the variety of date labels used by food manufacturers leads to confusion about food quality and food safety among consumers. Here, we develop a between-subject, laboratory experiment with different date labels (Best by, Fresh by, Sell by, and Use by) for products (ready-to-eat cereal, salad greens, and yogurt) of different sizes and dates to evaluate how date labels influence the value of premeditated food waste of subjects, or their willingness to waste (WTW). Subjects have different WTW over products, sizes, and dates; we expect that ambiguity avoidance may prompt differences in the WTW. The WTW is greatest in the “Use by” treatment, the date label which may be the least ambiguous and suggestive of food safety. The WTW is the lowest for the “Sell by” treatment, which may be the most ambiguous date label about safety or quality for the consumer. Results from the mixed-design, repeated measures ANOVA provide evidence that subjects have different WTW by date labels over products.
http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau1.1.009
This article reports on an ethnographic experiment. Four finger eating experts and three novices sat down for a hot meal and ate with their hands. Drawing on the technique of playing with the familiar and the strange, our aim was not to explain our responses, but to articulate them. As we seek words to do so, we are compelled to stretch the verb “to taste.” Tasting, or so our ethnographic experiment suggests, need not be understood as an activity confined to the tongue. Instead, if given a chance, it may viscously spread out to the fingers and come to include appreciative reactions otherwise hard to name. Pleasure and embarrassment, food-like vitality, erotic titillation, the satisfaction or discomfort that follow a meal—we suggest that these may all be included in “tasting.” Thus teasing the language alters what speakers and eaters may sense and say. It complements the repertoires available for articulation. But is it okay? Will we be allowed to mess with textbook biology in this way and interfere, not just with anthropological theory, but with the English language itself?
Chronic domestic chemical exposures unfold over protracted timelines and with low velocity. In this article I argue that such microscopic encounters between bodies and toxicants are most readily sensed by less nameable and more diffuse sensory practices. The apprehension of conventionally insensible toxic exposures is informed by sustained attention to barely perceptible alterations of somatic function and atmosphere. Slight biochemical impressions, which at first appear simply meaningless or puzzling, accumulate in the bodies of the exposed and reorient them to the molecular constituents of the air and the domestic infrastructure from which such chemicals emanate. Through the articulation of these small corrosive happenings, residents of contaminated homes can accumulate minute changes to body and atmosphere across time and space in a process I call the "chemical sublime," which elevates minor enfeebling encounters into events that stir ethical consideration and potential intervention. The chemical sublime is a late industrial experience that inverts an Enlightenment-era, yet still dominant, conception of the sublime. Across authoritative and questioned bodies, companion species and humans, this essay asks: in what ways do diffuse sensory practices generate knowledge of, attention to, and engagements with the chemical world?
In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as theeffect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.
Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.
This article reports on “molecular gastronomy,” a food movement whose practitioners—chemists who study food and chefs who apply their results—define as the application of the scientific method and laboratory apparatuses to further cooking. Molecular gastronomy offers one example of how scientific rationales sometimes percolate outside professional scientific fields. I explore what happens when the explanatory ground occupied by “culture” is supplanted by a different mode of expertise—here, science. Following ethnographic research conducted in a molecular gastronomy laboratory, I show how French molecular gastronomists seek both to preserve and renovate classic French cuisine. Describing how they think about French cuisine in an anthropological language indebted to French structuralism—the work of Claude Lévi‐Strauss, in particular—I reflect on the afterlives of anthropological concepts in scientific domains.
To the extent the food studies literature concerns itself with cooking, the focus is exclusively on good cooking, and that which tastes good. This article focuses on the neglected area of bad cooking, and what sorts of messages a putatively bad-tasting dish is supposed, again putatively, to convey about the person who cooked it. In opening up the disgusting meal for anthropological investigation, this article also exposes an underworld of social relations where antipathy and rejection prevail, in place of community and sentiments of nostalgia.
In historical and ethnographic studies of the making of scientific knowledge, there has been a long-standing fascination with deflating certain stories about objectivity. Among the resources used to achieve that deflation have been the notions of subjectivity, which has been treated more as a trouble for objectivity than as a knowledge-making mode open to systematic study. I describe notions of subjectivity implicated in that inattention; I trace potentially constructive links between contemporary science studies and resources in 18th-century philosophical aesthetics; I draw notice to available engagements with the mode of subjectivity known as taste, and, especially, gustation and olfaction; and I suggest ways in which we might study the achievement of intersubjectivity in these domains.
Much of the burgeoning literature on food in anthropology and related fields implicitly engages with issues of memory. Although only a relatively small but growing number of food-centered studies frame themselves as directly concerned with memory, for instance, in regard to embodied forms of memory - many more engage with its varying forms and manifestations, such as in a diverse range of studies in which food becomes a significant site implicated in social change, the now-voluminous body relating food to ethnic or other forms of identity, and invented food traditions in nationalism and consumer capitalism. Such studies are of interest not only because of what they may tell us about food, but moreover because particular facets of food and food-centered memory offer more general insights into the phenomenon of memory and approaches to its study in anthropology and related fields.
In this article, I deliver a first-person anthropological report on a dive to the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's three-person submersible, Alvin. I examine multiple meanings of immersion: as a descent into liquid, an absorption in activity, and the all-encompassing entry of an anthropologist into a cultural medium. Tuning in to the rhythms of what I call the “submarine cyborg”—“doing anthropology in sound,” as advocated by Steven Feld and Donald Brenneis (2004)—I show how interior and exterior soundscapes create a sense of immersion, and I argue that a transductive ethnography can make explicit the technical structures and social practices of sounding, hearing, and listening that support this sense of sonic presence.
In this article I investigate the politics of nuclear weapons production by examining how weapons scientists have experienced the exploding bomb at the level of sense perception through three experimental regimes: underground testing (1945–62), aboveground testing (1963–92), and stockpile stewardship (1995–2010). I argue that, for weapons scientists, a diminishing sensory experience of the exploding bomb has, over time, allowed nuclear weapon research to be increasingly depoliticized and normalized within the laboratory. The result is a post–Cold War nuclear project that assesses the atomic bomb not on its military potential as a weapon of mass destruction but, rather, on the aesthetic pleasure afforded by its computer simulations and material science.
Milk has almost a neutral flavor profile that is pleasantly sweet, with no distinct aftertaste. The flavor is imparted by the natural components such as proteins, fat, salts, milk sugar (lactose), and possibly small amounts of other milk components. Whole milk has 3.5% milkfat, lowfat milk 1-2%, and skim, <0.5%. Fluid milk composition and flavor variations have been attributed to types of feed, seasonal variation, breed, milk handling, storage conditions, processing, and packaging. Therefore, the sensory evaluation of milk, in both the bulk and packaged forms, is of utmost importance to the market (fluid or beverage) milk industry. The per capita fluid milk sale in the U.S. is about 79.61 L (IDFA, 2006). Since fluid milk is consumed regularly by people of all ages and most ethnic groups, this product is constantly being assessed for quality by consumers. If the flavor of milk is not appealing or appetizing, less of it will be consumed. Furthermore, off-flavored milk may cast an unfavorable reflection on other dairy products that are sold or distributed under the same brand name and thus unfavorably affect sales of those products as well. The sensory characteristics of any dairy product are most dependent on the quality attributes of the milk ingredient(s) used to produce them. An important truism of the dairy industry is that "finished milk products can be no better than the ingredients from which they are made." The quality and freshness of the various milk and cream components is most critical to product sales. Most flavor defects of finished dairy products could be substantially minimized, or perhaps eliminated, if all dairy manufacturers would more critically assess the essential quality parameters of all ingredients, especially the milk-based ones. The differentiation of milk into different quality classes (known as grading) demands keener, more fully developed senses of smell and taste than does the sensory evaluation of other dairy products. Many of the off-flavors present in fluid milk are more delicate, less volatile, or otherwise more elusive than those typically encountered in other dairy foods. Since milk (or cream) is the basic material from which all dairy products are made, it behooves milk producers, dairy processors, distributors, and other personnel involved with dairy products to be aware of how various flavor defects of milk affect the quality of manufactured products. Processing personnel should have the ability to detect off-flavors in milk and be able to assess or project the impact of these on the flavor quality of finished dairy products.
How do cells on the tongue register the sensations of sweet, salty, sour and bitter? Scientists are finding out—and discovering how the brain interprets these signals as various tastes
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice
- Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Your Food is Fooling You: How Your Brain is Hijacked by Sugar, Fat and Salt
- David Kessler
Kessler, David. 2013. Your Food is Fooling You: How Your Brain is Hijacked by Sugar, Fat and Salt. New
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Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat
- Harvey A Levenstein
Levenstein, Harvey A. 2012. Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat. Chicago, IL:
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Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
- Michael Moss
Moss, Michael. 2013. Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. New York: Random House.
The Challenge in Flavor Research
- George F Stewart
Stewart, George F. 1963. "The Challenge in Flavor Research. " Food Technology 17 (1): 5.
Un-Knowing Exposure: Toxic Emergency Housing, Strategic Inconclusivity and Governance in the US Gulf South
- Nicholas Shapiro
Shapiro, Nicholas. 2014. "Un-Knowing Exposure: Toxic Emergency Housing, Strategic Inconclusivity
and Governance in the US Gulf South. " In Knowledge, Technology and Law, edited by Emilie Cloatre
and Martyn Pickersgill, 189-205. New York: Routledge.