The chef and the flavorist: reflections on the value of sensory expertise

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Sensory expertise
• acuity
• experimental cuisine
• flavor industry
• flavor
• food and the senses

Acknowledgments

I thank my fieldwork interlocutors for helping me think about the matters here explored and for allowing me to enter their workplaces. In the initial review process for this article, Benjamin R. Cohen, Santiago Rey, and Alexios Tsigkas provided helpful feedback and direction. I am indebted to all anonymous reviewers for pushing the article forward and helping me clarify its focus and contribution to the field of food studies. In particular, I owe my focus on acuity as an analytic to Reviewer #2. I thank Emily Sekine for her skillful proofreading of this article. And finally, extended gratitude goes to the editors of this issue, Jake Lahne and Christy Spackman, for their help in sharpening the argument, their editorial assistance, and bringing the collaborators of this issue together.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Flavorists and flavor chemists are terms that are found interchangeably. However, a distinction between them can be made with respect to their approach to flavor and role within particular companies. Historian Berenstein (2017) makes such a distinction arguing that flavorists’ knowledge is directed toward sensory creation, different from flavor chemists whose analytical knowledge on flavor composition seeks objective confirmation (asking what is in the original flavor).

2. There are some exceptions to this condemning approach as found in the media. For richer journalistic writing on the flavor industry see Handel (2005), Katchadourian (2009), Berenstein (2015).

3. This definition is akin to the work of psychology on perception. Acuity represents sharpness of perception, especially in the case of vision and hearing, which are the senses that are more easily measured and have been more widely studied. The idea of power of discrimination is crucial for these measurements in studies that seek to understand, for instance, the effect of age, expertise, or disease on sensory acuity. More acuity means responding to the smallest value of a stimulus or discriminating between the smallest differences between stimuli.

Additional information

Funding

Fieldwork for this article was possible thanks to a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, No.1323548.

Notes on contributors

Ana María Ulloa

Ana María Ulloa obtained her doctorate in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research. She currently teaches at Universidad de la Sabana in Bogotá, Colombia. She is working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, After Flavor, exploring how flavor has acquired salience as an object of knowledge for science, industry, and gastronomy. She conducted multi-sited fieldwork in the United States and Spain in locales as diverse as scientific research institutions, flavor companies, and high-end restaurants.