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ABSTRACT
Recent ethnographies from the anthropology of food and the senses have shown how moments in which people taste foods are shaped by scientific knowledge, methods, and rationales. Building on approaches developed in science and technology studies, this article offers an ethnography of the field to which this shaping power has been assigned: the scientific study of taste. Detailed tracing and analysis of two laboratory experiments on taste performed in laboratories in Western Europe brings out how both turn moments in which people taste into a bodily response. At the same time, since their technical set-ups address different societal problems and varying interest groups, they stage diverging versions: a perception versus a reaction to an exposure. The article, thus, sheds light on how cultural and social norms, ideals, and practices shape the knowledge production about taste and its resulting effects.
Acknowledgements
For inspiring comments, productive discussions, and challenging questions, I would like to thank Annemarie Mol, John Law, Jeannette Pols, The Team consisting of Sebastian Abrahamsson, Filippo Bertoni, Emily Yates-Doerr, Else Vogel, Tjitske Holtrop, Cristobal Bonelli, and in particular, Carolina Dominguez and Jenna (and Boris) Grant. The research has been funded by the European Research Council through the grant AdG09 Nr 249397 The Eating Body in Western Practice and Theory, and for final revision by the grant Nr 639275 The Vitality of Disease—Quality of Life in the Making. The author has no conflicts of interest.
Notes
1. The anthropology of food and the senses has become a huge and burgeoning field. For a systematic review, see Sutton, “Food and the Senses”. Engaging in fieldwork in, traditionally, far-away places and observing how moments in which people taste foods and drinks arrive is only one approach to studying taste. Moments in which people sensually engage with food and drinks have also been studied and theorized as instantiations of people's “taste,” in the sense of preference pattern, and analyzed in regard to how they differ according to class, age, and gender lines, most famously by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction. For a more detailed discussion of the arguments proposed in Distinction, see Mann. They have been conceptualized also as articulations of the relations between foodstuffs, preferences, and food infrastructures (Keneally). And finally there is literature, partially overlapping with these other approaches, on people's sensual engagements with food and drinks in those settings that advertise themselves as “tastings,” for instance of wine (Sternsdorff Cisterna), coffee (Goldstein), and olive oil (Meneley).
2. That moments in which people taste foods are shaped by scientific research and technological innovations is a well recognized phenomenon and topic in food history and history of science. See for instance the edited volume Food (Flandrin and Montanari) and Shapin (“Changing Tastes”).
3. http://www.masterstudies.com/Masters-Degree/Biotechnology/Sensory-Science/, last accessed 12 May 2017.
4. That “taste in humans” is thinkable as an object of scientific inquire is the effect of epistemic shifts that have happened during the Enlightment period (Leschziner). In this period the body became an entity with a universal physiology, which was depicted two-dimensionally from anatomical dissections of three-dimensional corpses. Before, each body had been constituted as a unique entity by its particular combination of humours—blood, phlegm, choler, and melancholy—which formed its physical state.
5. The names of the scientists and research facilities have been anonymized. Rather than attributing bias to individual researchers, the intention of this article is to shed light on the logic of scientific research practices.
6. The relation between the word taste and moments in which people taste foods and drinks is not straightforward. What sensory (and social) scientists define as taste may differ from the ways in which lay people understand and use the word. While the systematic sampling of wine and cheese is explicitly framed as tasting, a sensual engagement and appreciation of food and drink may also occur in other ways. Additionally, taste (and tasting) are English words and other languages suggest other practical relevances tied up with taste and tasting. They also allow for alternative ways of theorizing physicalities of bodies (see Mann and Mol). Rather than providing a definition of taste, I have left visible the gaps between taste as an emic term used by sensory scientists and an etic term used in the analysis.
7. The training provided to these panelists largely resembles that provided to wine lovers (Sternsdorff Cisterna) and olive oil producers (Meneley). Participants acquire the skill or further develop it to notice more and more subtle differences between and within one property of a substance. What is particular about the trainings in lab F is that descriptors are generated by panelists (rather than being given to them) and the object is a model system (not a food product available on the market or one soon to be launched).
8. Insights generated by sociologists and anthropologists through personal acquaintances and reading across disciplinary boundaries seem to become drawn into sensory science research as well as molecular cuisine experiments (Roosth). The effects of this dynamic deserve further investigation.
9. In lab N, satiation is used to describe processes that bring a so-called eating episode to an end. Satiety refers to what happens after a meal has been eaten, involving the suppression of hunger and inhibition of further eating for a particular length of time.
10. Quantifying in the form of measuring creates a particular moral economy, according to Theodor Porter. It changes the relation between disciplines and renders statistics crucial, which could be observed also in lab F and N, and deserves further investigation.
11. Standardization, a process of “constructing uniformities” (Timmermans and Epstein 71), occurs in laboratories as well as outside of them. For a detailed analysis of standardization in a food production process, see Paxson.
12. The use of models and populations can itself become highly contested as Gail Davies’ ethnography of laboratory mice in genetic research and Steven Epstein's study of in- and exclusion processes of populations in the development of HIV drugs exemplify.
13. It is in emic, in the sensory scientist's terms, that the taste booth becomes a means to create universality. Like other scientific ideals (for “objectivity” see Daston and Galison), this universality is highly specific. For an extended discussion of how the geographical location matters to tasting, see Mann.
14. As Fabien Muniesa and Anne-Sophie Trébuchet-Breitwiller have pointed out in their ethnography of consumer tests in the perfume industry, becoming a research subject requires a lot of discipline and a particular set of (in)attention skills.
15. This is not only the case nowadays, it seems it has also happened in knowledge production processes in the past, when the major concern was to govern “the Other” in various forms. For example, as part of the endeavor to govern Nature, in 1787, on the first successful expedition to the highest mountain top in Europe, the Mont Blanc, the leader of the expedition, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, regularly measured his companions’ ability to taste (de Saussure); and as part of the British Empire's endeavor to govern Other people, in 1898, on the first expedition to the islands Torres Straits, the Cambridge anthropologist Charles S. Myers similarly measured the islander's ability to taste (Myers).
16. This contrasts to other practices that allow for a coexistence of different ways of tasting in one place at one moment in time. For an analysis of the co-existence of different modes of ordering sensorial engagements with foodstuff in a restaurant, see Mann 2018.