Taste™

ABSTRACT

Developments in intellectual property law (and its interpretation) have opened the door for new claims to “ownership” in the domain of food. From the copyrighting of recipes to the trademarking of the “cylindrical configuration” of the Cinnabon cinnamon bun, food and its sensory properties appears to be increasingly governed, channeled, and transformed by commercial demands and concerns over competition. The unique role of color in this phenomenon has yet to be explored, and this article traces how food, color, and the law intersect—as well as the significance of the overlap. Specifically, the article examines the varied and complex ways in which color tints our edibles, probing attempts at color control and the sometimes contested nature of the process. This exploration of food and color will reveal the central and often fraught role of the law in bolstering—and also shaping—the semiotic, symbolic, and cultural meaning of food and hue.     

Delicious molecules: big food science,the chemosenses,and umami

Abstract

Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, molecular techniques of mapping chemosensation (the chemical senses of taste and smell) have been woven into a universalizing, evolutionary explanation for human eating behavior. In a prominent example, umami (translated from Japanese as “savory deliciousness”) has come to be understood as the “fifth basic taste sensation,” elicited by the common flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG) along with other amino acids and ribonucleotides. Meanwhile, socialized associations of food desirability, undesirability, pleasure, and disgust have likewise come to be interrogated on the molecular level – in the oral cavity, in the brain, and throughout the gastrointestinal tract. In this paper, I abridge this molecularization of sensuous eating with the provocation that the sensory is affective is molecular is political. This phrase signals the stakes with which taste and smell are ontologized as fundamentally embedded in memory (and thus in affect and in culture); as conducted in train with corporate food and beverage research and development; and effected at molecular sites of transduction (chemical reception). It is to say that, in recent decades, the sensory and affective domains have been made molecular. And in the context of food science, that molecular knowledge is interested. This paper conducts a brief, critical accounting of how chemosensation is made knowable and actionable, and for what purposes. It suggests that the most authoritative knowledge of how taste and smell mediate human health (the sensory) is shaped by the corporate imperative to determine what chemical compounds humans register as pleasurable (the affective), and thus what food products humans can be relied upon to buy (the political). As a result, a lack of scientific consensus on wider questions of metabolism – of glutamate, for instance – is built into chemosensory science, which has privileged the work of product design.     

Sensing Cittàslow: Slow Living and the Constitution of the Sensory City

ABSTRACT

In 2004 Aylsham, Norfolk, became Britain's second Cittàslow Town (Slow City). Embedded within the slow living ideology of Cittàslow is the assumption that the “better” life it advocates involves heightened sensory experience and concomitant pleasure. In contrast to contemporary fast life, it wishes that “suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment [may] preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency” (The Slow Food Companion 2005: 6). In the first part of the paper I analyze how the sensory elements of slow living are represented in the Cittàslow and related Slow Food movement's literature. Then, based on my ethnographic fieldwork centered on Aylsham's Cittàslow events and projects, I examine how the routine and creative sensory practices of the individuals who produce and participate in Cittàslow policies and activities are constitutive of a “sensory city.”     

Mouthing Disgust and Pleasure in Eating Disorders

ABSTRACT

This article explores the complex sensorial encounters that people with eating disorders have in response to their mouths, food, eating, and embodiment. We argue that relationships to food, perceived primarily in clinical and psychological terms of control and discipline, ignore sensorial and generative dimensions of embodiment and the associated affective agency of hungers, pleasures, and disgust. Through analysis of the filmed performance of Untitled (The Party), we examine how the mouth for people with eating disorders embodies a metaphorical space of disgust, but also pleasure. As a soft, moist bodily opening, the mouth presents a symbolic space that can be filled with sensorial engagements of touch, disgust, pleasure, and taste. It is through the materiality of cream as used in the performance, and Irigaray's morphological mediation of bodily dimensions and language via the mucous touch, that we present new sensorial engagements with eating disorders.     

Introducing Sensory Studies

ABSTRACT

Color serves a variety of purposes in society from identifying groups to conveying symbolic meanings to providing aesthetic pleasure. More subtle effects of color can be found in the environments that human communities construct around themselves. At Doon School, an elite boys' boarding school in northern India, color is intimately associated with the students' activities, social relationships and sensory experiences. It defines their status and shapes their everyday lives. The uses of color at the school are consistent with a wider social aesthetic emphasizing restraint, logical thought and the training and presentation of the body. Many of these values can be seen to have their origins in the school's colonial history and postcolonial aspirations.     

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.     

Regimes of Vision and Products of Color

ABSTRACT

This article argues in favor of opening up media studies and visual studies to a new line of sensory inquiry—namely, embracing color as a powerful and pertinent mode of communication. It probes the contemporary state of color products and/or products of color through three interconnected categories (that is, color as expression of identity or quality; color as mark of individuality and color as cosmetic) to reveal not only the complex interplay between “signature” and “shock” hues, but also the implications for color codification—and for color communication as a whole.     

Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies

ABSTRACT

Sound studies and Deaf studies may seem at first impression to operate in worlds apart. We argue in this article, however, that similar renderings of hearing, deafness, and seeing as ideal types—and as often essentialized sensory modes—make it possible to read differences between Sound studies and Deaf studies as sites of possible articulation. We direct attention to four zones of productive overlap, attending to how sound is inferred in deaf and Deaf practice, how reimagining sound in the register of low-frequency vibration can upend deafhearing dichotomies, how “deaf futurists” champion cyborg sound, and how signing and other non-spoken communicative practices might undo phonocentric models of speech. Sound studies and Deaf studies emerge as fields with much to offer one another epistemologically, theoretically, and practically.     

Designing flavors for mass consumption

Abstract

In the increasingly competitive market for processed foods after the Second World War, flavor assumed new importance in product design and development as companies struggled to gain advantage and entice repeat buyers. This paper examines the flavor profile, a novel sensory evaluation method developed by chemists at Arthur D. Little, Inc. (ADL), the storied Cambridge, MA consulting firm. Introduced in 1949, the flavor profile claimed to offer a reliable way of measuring and describing the subjective sensory qualities of products. Drawing extensively on archival material, I document the circumstances surrounding the development of the flavor profile at ADL, examine its uses, and consider the conditions that led to its widespread adoption by the food industry. By considering the flavor profile as both a scientific instrument for flavor measurement, and a practical tool for flavor design and development, I hope to illuminate a dark corner in the history of food industrialization: the values, ideologies, and contingencies that shaped how foods were made to taste in the postwar period.     

Sensuous Pageantry

ABSTRACT

This article proposes an exploration of taste through the lens of certain events organized by the Slow Food movement. It aims, first, to situate Slow Food discourses in the practices carried out in particular sites, and second, to account for sensuous relations established between people and food in events such as fairs, festivals, and markets. In redirecting attention to the specificity of sensory practices of the organization, the article contributes to a little-explored field in Slow Food studies. It shows how micro-practices enrich and continuously shape the Slow Food principle of sensory education. Research from fairs, festivals, and markets in England and Italy provides insight into the interactions and strategies of producers, organizers, and visitors, and evaluates modalities of taste-making and taste formation. The article introduces the concept of sensuous pageantry in order to explore multiple ways of engaging with various sensory orders pertaining to the what, who, and how of tasting. It is argued that sensuous pageantry, an often overwhelming and dominant sense of taste and sensing at fairs, brings multiple sensory orders together and creates tensions which alternately undermine or reinforce those sensory orders. As such, fairs offer distinctive conceptual insights for a sociology of taste and the senses, which aims to assess emerging sensory constitutions as potential catalysts and drivers of change.     

Unruly Voices in the Museum

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the use of audio recordings and oral memory for the critical engagement with colonial pasts in ethnographic museums by focusing on the traveling exhibition What We See, curated by Anette Hoffmann (2009). Specifically, it draws on Jeffrey Feldman's notion of colonial “contact points,” i.e. material traces of colonial encounter, to highlight the exhibition's ability to convey and critique the sensory experience of colonial contact. In What We See, this colonial contact consisted in an anthropometric project conducted in South-West Africa, today's Namibia, in 1931, resulting in an archive of anthropometric measurements and photographs, life-casts, and phonographic recordings. The exhibition proposed an innovative way of reworking this archive by staging an intricate interplay between sound and sight, thereby disrupting conventional ocularcentric forms of display. However, this multisensory approach provoked highly divergent reactions at its various exhibition venues. This article argues that the divergent reactions in Cape Town, South Africa, and Vienna, Austria, were due to different levels of what Ann Stoler describes as “colonial aphasia”—that is the context-dependent difficulty of addressing disquieting colonial pasts and its sensory dimensions.     

Surprising the Senses

ABSTRACT

We perceive the world around us and the objects in it with all our senses. Designers can therefore influence the way we experience everyday products by paying attention to the multiple sensory aspects of products.

When sensory information from two or more senses conflicts, people can be surprised. Currently, more and more product designers are experimenting with designing products that provide incongruent sensory information. Creating such products enables these designers to evoke interest for their products and let people experience something new.

In several studies, we have investigated people's reactions to and opinions about products with sensory incongruities. The results of our studies suggest that evoking surprise by incorporating sensory incongruities in products can be seen as a means to create more pleasurable product experiences.     

Touching Consumers,engaging the Senses in Consumption

ABSTRACT

For years, the Campbell's Soup Company advertised their brand of soup through a message of “Mmm, Mmm, Good.” This slogan reached mass audiences primarily through visual and auditory media messages of television and print. Campbell's recently switched to a new form of advertising to consumers through an IAd application. The format works through Apple iPhones by first showing an interactive ad teaser, “You're getting warmer,” then when clicked through asks consumers to download cooking applications individually to their iPhones. This shift represents a change in appealing to consumers' senses and social sensibilities. The former media approach appealed to a rational social sensibility and mass audiences of eating soup at home as an enjoyment shared with others. The latter iAd slogan and iPhones media approach appeals to a more tactile sense and individualistic sensibility. This article explores the particular confluence of social, sensory, and media factors that intersect with a marketed food brand, and discusses its implications for the way manufacturers mix and blend new sensory messages and mobile media channels to appeal to a new sensibility in people's changing eating habits.     

The mutual determination of wants and benefits

The degree to which I want something often affects the amount of pleasure or other benefit it will bring me if I get it. This, in turn, should affect the degree to which I want it. In theJournal of Philosophy,89 (1992) 10–29, Anna Kusser and Wolfgang Spohn argue that decision theory cannot cope with this mutual determination of wants and benefits. This paper argues, to the contrary, that decision theory can cope with it easily.     

Fantasy Lands and Kinesthetic Thrills

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that Coney Island's enclosed amusement parks aided in the transformation of spectacle as total-body experience. By studying the ways that Coney Island's unique beachside resort produced entertainment that appealed to all of the senses, we seek to “make sense” of the amusement area in its historical and geographic specificity. Even in its early years of development the beachside resort was touted (and critiqued) in the popular press as a carnivalesque atmosphere that escalated the senses. With the opening of Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland Coney Island's enclosed amusement parks provided dream worlds of technological and architectural wonder that invited kinesthetic. Coney Island reconfigured the dizzying effects of urbanism, modernity and the capitalist machine as entertainment, inviting pleasure seekers to experience the shock of modernity as fun. Mechanical amusements celebrated and fostered thrill seekers as sensuous beings who experienced leisure not just through their eyes but with and through their entire bodies. Though the impossibilities of recreating the sensorial experiences of pleasure seekers at Coney Island remains a methodological limitation, this article contributes to literature that understands the senses as lived, embodied phenomena that are products of culture.     

A Transversal Lineage

ABSTRACT

This article proposes the term “perceptual abstraction” to describe the methods of artists who take bodily contingency as their medium. It focuses on the low-frequency drone work of an anonymous figure called Eleh. Like others in the Minimalist tradition, Eleh follows a processual ethic that begins from a minimum of structural elements and asks how they might reshape one another over time. What sets Eleh apart, however, is its singular focus on frequencies within, and sometimes beyond, the lowest reaches of human hearing. These tones play strangely on the sensorium because they can evade cochlear audition even while haunting other registers. This is bass as an agent of bodily mystification, and in Eleh's hands it becomes a sonic strategy for modulating felt space and fleshy thought. If Eleh diverges from most Minimalists in these ways, then liner notes and cover art point to another, more like-minded body of work. Might Op(tical) Art—with its interest in “charging fields” and rhythmically unraveling retinal perception—share at least as much with Eleh, at the level of affective strategy? If so, could we posit an alternate, transversal lineage of artistic practices defined not by form or tradition, but by a desire to confound perception, by whatever aesthetic and sensory routes?     

From Emplaced Knowing to Interdisciplinary Knowledge

ABSTRACT

In this article, we discuss how experiential and unspoken ways of knowing produced through a video-based approach to sensory ethnography can be made meaningful and relevant to the applied practice of design and engineering scholars. We advance discussions of sensory ethnography by interrogating and making explicit the analytical processes that turn the sensory knowing of the ethnographic encounter into convincing accounts of everyday realities whilst engaging new sensitivities and ways of seeing that in themselves contribute to cross-disciplinary knowledge. We argue that through a more self-conscious appreciation of how and where experiential categories become applied knowledge the value of a sensory ethnography approach in design-centered energy research can be realized.     

A Terrible Beauty

ABSTRACT

Despite their well-known etymological disparity the aesthetic remains synonymous with the beautiful. The basis of this relationship is the notion that the sensory, represented by the aesthetic, needs to be seen in terms of beauty before it can be elevated to the plane of ideas and social ethics. In truth the association undermines the potential for aesthetics to demonstrate the sensory nature of consciousness and justice. Outlining an earlier conception of aesthetics as sensual consciousness and contrasting this with the impoverishment of the beautiful as either a sensory or ethico-political concept, this article argues the case for aesthetics to be given both a distinct and superior status to the beautiful.     

Sensory Orientations and Sensory Designs in the American Deafworld

ABSTRACT

In order to understand the meaning of deafness, one needs to understand the role of senses in culture. The DeafWorld is a sensory world. People who are d/Deaf create their own sensory profile. There are three principal sensory orientations among d/Deaf people in the American DeafWorld: visual, auditory, and tactile. These orientations have led to the invention of visual, tactile, and auditory sensible objects and architectures to fit the d/Deaf world and d/Deaf subjects' needs. These objects are also partly generated through interaction with the audist sensory orientation of the hearing world and thus constitute a kind of bridge between the two worlds while at the same time contributing to their distinctive contours.