Ordering tasting in a restaurant: experiencing, socializing, and processing food

Abstract

Sometimes there are moments in which German speakers will state that something schmeckt gut [tastes good]. Focusing on a family celebration in a restaurant in Austria, the paper considers how in three schmeckt gut moments, participants variously order “tasting” as a process of experiencing, socializing, and processing. It is argued that while it is possible to analyse how a person simultaneously experiences sensual qualities inherent in a particular dish, socializes with others, and processes food, these aspects are not equally relevant for the people involved in the “tasting”. Different modes of ordering “tasting” can exist next to each other such that a “tasting together in difference” takes place. Following from this, this article calls for further investigation into the practical achievement of “tasting together in difference” and the enabling role of care in this process. By shedding light on how tasting is done in practices of dining out in Western Europe, it contributes to a growing set of ethnomethodologically oriented studies on how tasting and taste are done in practice.

Keywords:

• Tasting
• taste
• eating out
• experience
• practice

Acknowledgements

For inspiring meals, helpful comments and challenging questions, I would like to thank Annemarie Mol, John Law, Jeannette Pols, and The Eating Bodies Team: Sebastian Abrahamsson, Filippo Bertoni, Emily Yates-Doerr, Else Vogel, Tjitske Holtrop, and Carolina Dominguez. And for “experiencing” all this together with me, I would like to thank especially Cristobal Bonelli.

Notes

1. The family event in the restaurant Nibelungenhof is a highly specific case in terms of class, geographical location and cuisine. The family members could be described as being part of the eastern Austrian middle class. The restaurant was once a well-running inn. Nowadays it survives by providing cheap menus to builders during the week, a lovely garden to tourists cycling through the region in summer, and a menu including traditional dishes such as Wienerschnitzel as well as more exquisite ones for the locals who dine there on weekends. (See Mann [2015] for a critical discussion of contextualizing events in which people taste food in terms of class and geography). Except for the chef Rainer, the participants of the family event have been anonymized. I would like to thank them, Rainer and all the other chefs whom I was allowed to interview and observe for providing me with food to eat as well as food to think with.

2. "Ordering" has been developed by John Law (1994) as a way of ethnographically studying what Michel Foucault called “discourses” and defined as “forms of strategic arranging that are intentional but do not necessarily have a subject” (Foucault 1981, 95).

3. The relation between moments in which people sensually engage with food, and the English words "tasting" and "taste" is not straight forward. First, there are situations and sites such as convents in which tasting happens in silence. Secondly, when people do chat while sensually engaging with foodstuff, the expressions that are mobilized in non-English languages do not always fit the ones English native speakers use. Thirdly, lay people might not use the words "tasting" and "taste" in the same way as social scientists do. Finally, among social scientists there is no agreement on how to study, conceptualized and theorize "tasting" and "taste". Social and cultural anthropologists who traditionally have observed in far away places how people sensually relate to food theorized this as a sense of the human. In contrast, sociologists have studied the consumption of particular food items by people belonging to a group within society and conceptualized this as a mechanism of distinction organizing the social.

4. Chefs who work in world famous restaurants such as the Noma in Copenhagen and El Bulli in Catalunya, so Mitchell (2012), have added to their focus on sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami, also an attention to the kind of memories and emotions evoked by a dish. For a detailed analysis of US chefs’ repertoires for talking about the aesthetics of a dish, see Fine (1995).

5. Desjarlais (1994) describes how through his fieldwork in a shelter for homeless mentally ill people in Boston, he came to recognise that "experience" is an analytical, philosophical, Western and highly specific notion. His informants described their way of living as a “struggling along” the included a necessity of holding oneself together and making do with the day-to-day contingencies in the here and now. Desjarlais theorizes this as a second and alternative way of being in the world next to "experiencing" it. For a discussion of the specificities, the philosophical concerns, and the impossibility of translation of the English term "experience", see Cassin (2014, 329–331).

6. For an analysis of the process of digesting that raises questions about agency, see Abrahamsson (2014); and the practical achievement of eating a meal with one’s fingers, which shifts the bodily boundaries of where tasting begins and ends, see Mann et al. (2011).

7. “Tasting together in difference" is inspired, on the one hand, by Helen Verran’s explorations of possible answers to the question: “how to live” in difference (1999); and, on the other, by Annemarie Mol’s investigation into the co-existence of difference in medical practice (2002). It resonates Jean Duruz and Gaik Cheng Khoo’s notion of "eating together-in-difference" (2014). "Eating together-in-difference" draws attention to the ways in which, in spaces of interethnic exchange, "food becomes an ensemble of interactions with difference, [produces] cultures of “mixedness”, [and] complex forms of multiculturalism" (4). While "tasting together in difference" focuses equally on differences that come together in eating events in a public space, it highlights the different practical relevances that prevail in particular moments, and how they come together and co-exist next to each other within the space and time of eating.