Bad to chew: a commentary on the taste of texture

ABSTRACT

In the 1960s, corporate funded sensory science radically advanced knowledge about the food texture preferences of American consumers. Most research was geared to knowing what was best to chew, but one influential sensory laboratory at General Foods Corporation made provisional statements about what they believed was generally regarded as “bad to chew.” These haptic discards have since been refashioned by mostly white, mostly male American foodie culture into points of aesthetic discrimination and subsequently as drivers of culinary tourism. At the same time, discriminating eaters that maintained and cultivated these sensory attributes in regional delicacies have grappled with the broader “bad to chew” in complex and difficult ways. This essay poses one way of considering how sensory science serving mass culture and idiosyncratic local tastes have interacted.

KEYWORDS:

• Taste
• foodies
• sensory
• texture
• disgust

Acknowledgments

Research for this paper was funded by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada. The author would like to acknowledge the tremendous persistence of the issue editors to see this paper to completion, as well as the expert advice of the anonymous reviewers. This paper also benefited tremendously from comments during the Edible Feminisms workshop in February 2018, hosted by the Centre for the Study of Women, UCLA.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this paper was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Joel Dickau

Joel Dickau is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Toronto. His dissertation focuses on the emergence of texture as a problem, fix and interface for the American industrial food system in the twentieth century.