Sensory labor: considering the work of taste in the food system

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Sensory studies
• sensory evaluation
• food science
• food consumption
• labor
• value chains
• coproduction

Blind tasting

Beginning in 1975 consumers in shopping malls and on college campuses across the United States encountered the opportunity to sit down at a table, take a sip of two different colas in “blind” conditions, and indicate which they preferred before being told which each was. Based on this Pepsi-funded performance of tasting, taglines for Pepsi such as “Let your taste buds decide” graced TV advertisements well into the 1980s, accompanied by the message that the majority preferred Pepsi. Through using one of the basic research approaches of food science—the blind taste test—the first “Pepsi Challenge” popularized the idea that the unreflexive and biased “lower senses” can be engaged in the knowledge-production process (Korsmeyer 1999; Perullo 2016). This public performance of tasting demonstrated the larger food industry’s belief that taste experiences were not irretrievably subjective, but rather could be standardized and extracted from the bodies experiencing them.

Tasting in blind conditions is not a long-standing practice. Rather, the blind tasting, also known as the “paired-preference test” and its many scientific siblings such as the triangle or duo-trio tests are recent entrants into the knowledge-production infrastructure that undergirds the industrial food system (Lawless and Heymann 2010). These practices depend on a specific understanding of how gustatory sensation works. Gustatory sensation—our tastes of and for food—have historically (Korsmeyer 1999) been considered to be biological (Rozin, Haidt, and Fincher 2009) or social reflexes (Bourdieu 1987), not practiced, aesthetic judgments (Perullo 2016). Diverse social and critical scholars have made convincing arguments against these passive conceptions of sensation and for tasting as an active, elaborated, and learned practice that has aesthetic and epistemic outcomes (Teil 2012; Howes 2015; Hennion 2007; Lahne 2018; Sutton 2014; Trubek 2008). Rather than continuing to explore the active nature of tasting directly, in this special issue we aim to begin a conversation about the productive aspect of tasting. The Pepsi Challenge recruited the tastes of thousands of Americans to produce a valuable fact about collective preferences. So, if perceiving the tastes of foodstuffs both requires work and produces value, then—it seems to us—we can and should be talking about the nature of this work, what we think of as sensory labor, its place in the food system, and the effects of explicitly and implicitly enrolling eating bodies in the co-creation of a food system that may ultimately affect their bodily health (Yates-Doerr 2015; Hatch 2016).

Making sensing into labor

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. In examining the circumstances of the industrial production of taste, we started to see how the sensors in these systems—sniffers sitting at GCO (gas chromatography–olfactometry) ports, sensory panelists being trained in conference rooms, and even the temporary participants in the Pepsi Challenge—were using their senses directly to produce values for others. They were engaged in sensory labor.

Framing the work of sensing as a form of labor brings sensory studies of food in line with calls for renewed attention to labor in the food system. As Sarah Besky and Sandy Brown point out in their review “Looking for Work: Placing Labor in Food Studies,” increased attention to how different modes of food production coproduce labor practices is a necessary addition to critical investigations of socially valued and maligned modes of food production (2015). Besky and Brown criticize food scholarship for too often focusing on aesthetic standards—both of consumers and producers—in distinguishing modes of food production, without attending to how labor practices may or may not differ in those same modes or even relate to those aesthetic distinctions. We would like to subtly redirect this critique by noting that taste and smell are often mobilized in debates concerning the relative merits of modes of food production. This links the experience of consumption with modes of production while failing to attend to the fact that the very experiences under discussion enroll tasting and smelling bodies into economic systems of production. Recognizing sensory perception as a form of labor mobilized throughout the food system can dissolve the apparent dichotomy between a focus on food as an object of consumption (a thing to be evaluated on its aesthetic principles) and of production (a thing to be 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.

The coproduction of sensory labor is a key insight in Alexios Tsigkas’s ethnographic account of tasting in the production of commodity Ceylon tea, on one hand, and the production of artisan “single-estate” tea on the other in Sri Lanka. In demonstrating the different roles, practices, and outcomes produced by sensing in these different systems, Tsigkas shows how attending to sensory labor practices allows one to disentangle socialized “good taste” from learned and practiced aesthetic judgment. While never turning to a reductive view of tasting as a natural process, Tsigkas insists that we take seriously the work of judgment, not merely as an activity that reifies social categories but as a labor process: “taste as the exercise of aesthetic judgment unbound by distinction” (p. 156). In examining the role that tasting plays in the value-chain leading to the production of “mass-market teabags” (p. 154), Tsigkas shows that the labor of tasting is a form of “quality control, valuation, [and] even market speculation” (ibid); that is, even in the production of fungible commodities, the labor of tasting needs to be understood as something more than passive consumption of sensory cues, or reflexive reproduction of class values. Tsigkas notes that the artisan Veralu estate he observes “does not quite achieve [sensory] consensus, but, rather … demands it of a certain consumer public” (p. 164). The work performed by the commodity tea tasters in his study, on the other hand, is more explicitly consensual and, because of that, less visible (for an examination of how classed conceptions of expertise are often inadequate, in the context of Ceylon, see Jegathesan 2015); the work of tasting that goes on in the tea value chain is the reason that consumers can consume Ceylon tea that “tastes the way it does, the way it should, due to the judgment of someone situated at a remove” (p. 164, emphasis in original). Tsigkas demonstrates the importance of attending to the tasting activity all the way down: rather than being only significant for artisan, craft, or other “high-class” products (in the sense of Bourdieu 1987), the sensory labor done to form intersubjective experience (Shapin 2012; Teil and Hennion 2004) is present in all forms of food production, despite the tendency of some food studies scholars—and many food connoisseurs—to preferentially recognize sensory labor only when it appears in socially favored forms (cf. Besky and Brown 2015).

Tsigkas’s examination of sensory labor is in direct conversation with two of the other contributors to this issue: Christy Shields-Argelès and Ana Ulloa. Shields-Argelès explores how sensing is mobilized by a jury terroir in the sensory labor practices of Comté producers in the Jura region. A jury terroir is a group of what would elsewhere be called “sensory panelists” (Lawless and Heymann 2010), but which has evolved in the production of Comté into a particular hybrid of expert and scientized tasting practices for valorizing the cheese’s sensory properties. By examining how the practice of mise en commun (that is “placing in common” by actively discussing taste experiences to form intersubjectivity) in this sensory panel acts as a ritual, Shields-Argelès demonstrates that the work of defining a constellation of flavors is less about maintaining standardized quality (as found in industrialized production), but rather is a practice of using sensory labor to justify an entire system of dairying formed around concepts such as limited, small-batch production and non-centralized herd ownership.¹ In doing so, the jury terroir coproduces and sensorially justifies the system of values that inheres in the overall Comté production-chain. Shields-Argelès’ consultants make this connection explicit: they speak of how in the Comté production-chain “members must remain collectively organized and solidaire… ‘la solidarité, ça s’organise’ (solidarity needs to be organized)” (p. 183). In this, Shields-Argelès’ study is a particularly striking example of how labor—and labor politics—are found not only in the production of food, but in the production of taste in Comté.

Ana Ulloa’s paper examines how sensory labor is mobilized in two familiar tropes—that of the demonized, faceless industrial flavorist and that of the celebrity chef—in order to trouble how media portrayals read the aesthetic qualities of flavor as metonyms for an entire discipline’s epistemic practices. Using the concept of acuity, which she defines as “keenness of thought and feeling” developed through collaborative practice (p. 190), Ulloa explores what constitutes sensory expertise in flavor-making. Drawing on fieldwork in a flavor house and chef’s atelier, Ulloa demonstrates that acuity resides not in single bodies, but is instead distributed between people and instruments, always being formed in environments of training and practice. In framing sensory labor as a practice of acuity, Ulloa argues that expertise should be seen as distributed not only between smelling and tasting bodies, but also between the various techniques and technologies used to produce knowledge that circulates outside of the knower’s body. The temporally distributed nature of acuity employs cumulative knowledge stemming from the buildup of flavor memory through compounding (in the case of flavorists) or culinary practice (in the case of the chef)—or, as Ella Butler has documented elsewhere, deliberate (or inadvertent) exposure to off-flavors (in the case of food scientists, 2018). Acuity is therefore a bodily practice (see also Butler, this issue) employed in similar ways in systems of food production that are often treated as opposite poles within food studies. Can we then see acuity as a public, bodily skill, mediating not only the sensory experiences of producers—who possess it—but also the experiences of consumers in the perceptible accretion of acuity on their plates and in their packaged foods?

Despite the way that these ethnographic accounts highlight unexpected patterns of similarity and difference in sensory labor across production systems, it is notable that industrial food production—characterized by extensive mechanization, the de-skilling of labor, and the production of undifferentiated commodity foods—officially treats individuals’ sensory apparatuses and impressions as alienable commodities. This is in analogy to the foods being tasted: the value of sensory information concerning these types of foods depends on how well that information can be treated as a commodity (Lahne 2016, 2018; Lahne and Spackman 2018). Meanwhile, in systems of craft- or artisan-food production the role of sensory labor is quite different—for example, consider the role sensory judgment functions in the creation of value for wine (Phillips 2016; Shapin 2016), where anonymous expertise is essentially worthless—we do not value consensus judgments of wine quality. Instead, the identity and (taste) expertises of the winemaker, wine judge, importer, and sommelier are part of how the wine market as an economic system and we as individual wine consumers assign values to wine (Hennion 2007; Teil 2012; Shapin 2016). Here, we see how sensory work in the food system follows the skilled risk/de-skilled guarantee dichotomy elaborated by industrial-design theorist David Pye (1968). This dichotomy is reproduced in the Ceylon tea system described by Tsigkas: the sensory work of the tasters in the commodity market to assign value and develop consistent blends is invisible, exchangeable, and portable, whereas the expertise of the taster at the Veralu estate is a key part of the value and experience of that tea. Why do these forms of sensory labor exist in such opposition even as processes of developing acuity are shared, and hybrids like the Comté sensory panel emerge? To answer this question, we think it critical to consider the history of sensory science, the obscure food-science discipline that aspires to measure the objective sensory qualities of consumer products.

A core intuition that has inspired this special issue is that sensory labor in food—the production of value in the food system through the work of the senses—changed fundamentally in the twentieth century, in analogy to broader labor changes related to (post)industrial capitalism. Until recently, the world of sensory science (writ large) has been largely overlooked by historians of science and business.² Industrial secrecy and record-keeping as well as a spate of food-industry exposés has further obfuscated this history, resulting in a field resistant to attempts to document and account. This lacuna is unfortunate because, as articles by Hildegarde Heymann and Ella Butler demonstrate, the development of codified modes of sensing is what brings into being an epistemology of sensory labor where industrial and scientific apparatuses of knowledge-making dissociate the work of sensing from the working body (see also Dickau 2017).

Therefore, Hildegarde Heymann’s personal and intellectual history of sensory evaluation as a discipline offers a much-needed accounting of the development of a particularly influential form of “scientific” sensory labor. Heymann, a distinguished professor of sensory science at University of California-Davis, presents an on-the-ground report of the development of sensory science from a handful of methods and theories to a full-fledged discipline. Her account shows that, despite its oversize influence on the food system we all inhabit, sensory science as a discipline is intellectually young. For Heymann, the history of sensory science is a history of personalities. Unlike recent work by historians of science who see the viticulturist Maynard Amerine as the shaping force of sensory science (Shapin 2016; Phillips 2016), Heymann argues that Rose Marie Pangborn—the influential UC-Davis professor responsible for the first formalized course in sensory science—was the key player in the almost accidental creation of the practices and conditions that brought sensory labor in the food industry into being. Pangborn’s commitment to the scientific ideals of experimentation, purity, and rigor, coupled with her policy of freely distributing her course materials, resulted in widespread adoption by an entire discipline of her particular standards of research and statistical techniques. By formalizing and popularizing the principles of sensory science, Pangborn established what are now the guiding principles for the production of sensory data in line with the scientific ideal of portability and objectivity (Latour 1990, 2004). In the process, Pangborn both addressed and perpetuated the fledgling field’s ongoing concerns about epistemological legitimacy, as sensory scientists began to contend with what it means to produce objective knowledge of subjective, individual experiences—a struggle that continues to this day.

The scientific principles formalized by Pangborn have de facto become the rules governing sensory labor in the food industry and have bled out into larger society through popularizing mechanisms such as the Pepsi Challenge. Lending credence to Heymann’s assertion of Pangborn’s core role in the large-scale creation and adaptation of codified modes of sensory labor is the avidity with which sensory scientists criticize other forms of sensory labor—the expertise embodied in product judges, for example (e.g., Drake 2007)—as unreliable. We find Heymann’s lived-experience consideration of Pangborn’s outsized influence on the field especially compelling and timely. Heymann’s account directs attention away from the myopic focus on the development of wine evaluation. The wine world is a reservoir of class capital and, in treating it as paradigmatic of sensory science, scholars risk recreating many of the myths about sensing and sensory labor discussed in this issue—especially the myth of who is and is not allowed to do this labor (as wine-tasting is an activity all-too-often solely credited to male visionaries). By focusing on the institution-building work that went into the field of sensory science, Heymann’s article notably highlights the under-recognized contributions of women and people of color to the field. For example, Rose Marie Pangborn was born Rosa Maria Valdez, and the influential sensory scientists Jean Caul and Alina Szczesniak are rarely recognized to be women. While Heymann’s article does not fully explore these possibilities, it provides fertile ground for bringing discussions of the gendered nature of sensory labor previously excluded by the very rigor espoused by sensory scientists.

Ella Butler tackles the actual work of scientizing tasting in her ethnographic account of the mouth as a site of labor: what she refers to as “a regulated and productive instrument in sensory tests” (p. 224). Through examining how sensory science seeks to train the mouths of multiple individuals to work in a standardized way to produce knowledge about texture, Butler shows that as the mouth produces information through its work of chewing and detecting it becomes a site of value generation. Singular, individual mouths, gathered together in a “sensory panel,” are made to stand in for what a larger population of mouths might desire. Like Shields-Argelès, Butler focuses on the work of sensory panels that operate to produce portable judgments of taste that act outside the specific circumstances of one tasting, throughout the value chain. Unlike Shields-Argelès, however, Butler focuses not on practices of intersubjectivity but rather on how micro-practices of tasting dictated by sensory science impose new forms of bodily discipline and governance that are themselves characteristic of labor. Butler demonstrates that the production of scientific knowledge with the mouth—in defiance of commonly held Western epistemological ideals of subjectivity—depends on a metaphorical breaking up of the body, on separating the tasting mouth from the subjective individual through a near-Taylorist standardization of mouth movements (in contrast, see Teil 2012). In this way, multiple individual mouths can be treated as replications of a single procedure, and variation can be dealt with and eliminated. Thus, Butler’s study of this particular set of practices shows how systems of discipline transform private bodily practices into sensory labor: “using the mouth in sensory testing is work [emphasis in the original] … participants are often told they can take ‘breaks’ from tasting” (p. 227) as if stepping away from a piece of machinery. Butler shows us how a particular form of sensory labor developed to serve a particular form of food production is mobilized in anticipatory fashion, seeking to shape the daily mouth practices of a wide range of eaters.

The last essay in our issue demonstrates that despite the fundamental shift in the relationship between sensing bodies and industrial production brought on by the codification of sensory science in the mid-twentieth century, bodily practices of sensory work thrive outside of industrial capitalism. Hayden Kantor’s essay, based on ethnographic work with smallholders and farmers in rural Bihar, a state in the north of India, suggests that through the lens of sensory labor we can understand a broader range of how humans make a life through sensory attunement. Through a focus on how sensory labor is mobilized in rural and marginal economies, Kantor brings attention to how systems of attunement to body and environment develop far from the laboratory, factory, or modern grocery store. “Sensory evaluation and the development of complex systems of distinction regarding taste are not solely the province of professional or scientific communities” (p. 238), Kantor argues. In line with Besky and Brown’s (2015) larger focus on the locales of food labor, Kantor’s research highlights how scholarly prejudices favoring class and expertise often lead to overlooking situated sensory expertise and its labor function in “unskilled” food production like the subsistence farming of rural Biharis. Focusing in on everyday practices of sensory labor, Kantor notes that “the labor of producing depends on the labor of sensing … and sensing is in fact infrastructural to multiple activities that sustain rural Bihar” (p. 249).³ Through his own bodily experiences in participant-observation and detailed ethnographic interviews with Bihari consultants, Kantor demonstrates that sensing is never a passive reception, but instead a form of habitus critical to reproducing the household and economy.

From sensing to society

Taken together, these articles open new doors for considering how practices of bodily attunement are enrolled in reproducing and coproducing a range of economic systems. Indeed, we see these processes of learning to become aware as a critical part of what makes “sensory labor” labor (cf. Stewart 2011). In this, our conception of and argument for attending to sensory labor is in conversation with environmental studies scholarship examining the role and politics of somatic sensing in navigating contaminated spaces (Shapiro 2015; Murphy 2006; Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo 2018; Kenner 2018; Jackson 2011; Spackman and Burlingame 2018). Thinking of sensing as a form of labor immediately calls to mind a Marxist reading where capital divorces individuals from their senses. While some articles in this issue, especially Butler’s, point in this direction, others such as Kantor’s remind us that sensory labor operates across a range of scales. The twentieth-century context of these articles, however, requires a more nuanced reading than offered by Marx’s straightforward argument that capitalism divorces individuals from their senses. Drawing on John Kenneth Galbraith, David Howes points out that contemporary “capitalism does not work by the extraction of the labor power and value of the worker alone, it also works by generating consumer desires of all sorts in all people” (2003). Engaging the senses, from the visual spectacle of the department store to the tactile sensation of cloth handled on a rack to the odor of a baked good, became a core part of twentieth-century efforts to entice consumers to commit their money and time to an object or experience. As these articles begin to show, how the work of sensing is mobilized by a range of actors depends upon the temporal, economic, technological and cultural milieu in which sensing occurs.

Thinking with food, including food that is not artisan or craft, invites attention to the conscious enrollment of mouths, noses, eyes, fingers, and tongues in processes of value production (capitalistic or otherwise). It offers a distinctive bridge for linking together and critically examining which bodies are laboring to register and fix sensations, and how that work is or is not being acknowledged, rewarded, or co-opted. We see something especially interesting and unexplored in the way that these practices of using mouths and noses to gather and capture sensory data coproduce economies and societies. By taking seriously the idea that the tastes of and for food have value—a truism in food studies—the essays gathered in this issue draw attention to the hitherto invisible labor of tea tasters, Pepsi consumers, university volunteers, and others in working to make those tastes real. In doing so, these essays open the door for not only 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.

Acknowledgments

The conversations developed in this issue grew out of a symposium, “Stop Making Sense,” jointly sponsored by Drexel University and the Science History Institute in March 2017. Special thanks to Nicholas Shapiro and Jody Roberts for making that symposium possible, to all of the participants in the symposium, and to the dedicated work of the reviewers of this issue. It would not have been feasible to complete this special issue without the patience and dedication of the contributing authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christy Spackman

Christy Spackman is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed between the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. Her work focuses on how exploring and intervening in science and technology shape sensory experience.

Jacob Lahne

Jacob Lahne is an Assistant Professor of Food Science & Technology at Virginia Tech. His work focuses on the sensory evaluation of food and the critical development of new approaches in sensory science.

Notes

1. In contrast, see Goldstein (2011).

2. For recent historical works studying the emergence of the so-called “aesthetic-industrial complex,” see Shapin (2012), Berenstein (2018), Phillips (2016), Spackman (2018), and Hisano (2016), and for a brief accounting of how things tasted and smelled in earlier times, see Shapin (2011) and Albala (2002).

3. For a different take on how attunement and sensing function to sustain (or undermine) food production, see Hayden (2019, 100–23).