The interdisciplinary field of sensory studies has bloomed in the last three decades and, more recently, has converged with food studies. Given that one’s encounters with food are both ephemeral and individual, food as a subject of sensory studies scholarship provides a way to think about the shifting encounters between subjective individual experience, and the social and cultural construction of reality. The charge of sensory studies of food and taste is to trace out this cycle that creates and is created by physical, individual, and communal experiences; and that does so in ways that are both immediate and historic.
An assessment of the scholarship on food and the senses might well begin by looking back to the fictional experiences of a miserable miser who neither ate much, nor was sensitive to the pleasures of food, nor valued the community of the table at all. When Charles Dickens’ now-famous Scrooge first encountered the wildly bombastic Spirit of Christmas Present in his chill, dark, sparse apartments in the middle of a frigid night in 1843, it was a moment of gastronomic overload for his curmudgeonly senses. For one used to subsisting on thin gruels rather than real meals, the shock was profound:
Heaped up upon the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy estate upon this couch, there sat a jolly giant, glorious to see; who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty’s horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge, as he came peeping round the door.
(Dickens, 1989: 109–10)
Overwhelmed by this ghostly presence, the anti-social Scrooge peers from a distance. Given the multi-sensory offerings at hand, he holds himself apart and cannot at first make sense of the manner in which the spirit reveals himself, nor of the images the spectre goes on to conjure for him on the state of society. The experience is a whirlwind of contrasts as the Spirit shows him examples of abundance and pleasure in society, mixed with those of poverty and suffering. Finally, as the visit draws to a close, we have the introduction of a “Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish” boy and girl. They are “Ignorance” and “Want,” and they grovel pathetically though threateningly at the skirts of the ghost of Christmas of 1843. “Beware them both and all their degree,” warns the Spirit, for upon their forms “I see that written which is Doom” (ibid.: 141–42).
As Dickens (the social critic) knew nearly two centuries ago, and as scholars within sensory studies continue to examine it today, food is the nexus of the “sensing” self and the “sensible” society, the meeting point of the individual and the communal. Through the experience of tasting, smelling, touching, seeing, and even hearing food, the individual encounters culture, and becomes a part of society. Thus, the problem with Scrooge and the skeletally starved and anthropomorphized social problems, “Ignorance” and “Want,” is that, with respect to food, they do not sense anything at all. These characters either do not or cannot partake of gustatory pleasures, and this is the basis of their characterization as various incarnations of social dysfunction. Conversely, Scrooge at the moment of his social and spiritual rehabilitation becomes a more sensing and sensitive individual. He celebrates his moment of rebirth at the end of the tale by reclaiming his physical appetite: First, he sends a goose to the family of his much-abused assistant, Bob Cratchit, and then he rushes off to reknit the social fabric of his world even further by joining his own previously alienated family for a feast.
What Dickens’s famous redemption story demonstrates for scholars, is that paying attention to food from the perspective of the senses allows us to place individual experience within cultural and social context, and to examine how social and cultural context shapes individual sensory experience. Sensory studies of food are positioned to do both because food is such a relentlessly material subject, even as tasting it is also a richly abstract field for the cultural imagination. As Mikhail Bakhtin has characterized the role of “table talks,” and feasting in the work of sixteenth-century satirist Rabelais, the act of eating food, as well as the representation of such, expresses a complex and multi-layered “conception of truth”: “The merry, triumphant encounter with the world in the act of eating and drinking, in which man partakes of the world instead of being devoured by it,” constitutes a “victory over the world.” For Bakhtin, “the act of eating [i]s concrete, tangible, bodily.” Simultaneously, feasting “gave the very taste of the defeated world, which had fed and would feed mankind” (Bakhtin, 1989: 285). Given that our encounters with food are both ephemeral and individual, food as a subject of sensory studies scholarship provides, as Bakhtin’s comments reveal, a way to think about the shifting encounters between subjective individual experience, and the social and cultural construction of reality.
Within sensory studies scholarship, Karl Marx’s daunting assertion in 1844 that “The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present” is rightly and frequently pressed into service (Marx, 2011). It is repeated not nearly so much nor with such evident fondness as a certain memory about a certain madeleine, but its recurrence is still notable, and not only for the way in which it succinctly outlines the enormity of the task set for the serious sensory studies scholar. What Marx was insisting upon was an awareness that it is our ability to engage our sensory perceptions, to be cognizant of them, that makes us fully human, and embedded in this declaration was a warning against alienation from sensory experience (Howes, 2005). We might consider then, the way in which Marx’s comment (as well as Scrooge’s rehabilitation) usefully characterizes a broadly developed sensory studies approach to the subject of food as cyclical: Over time and repeatedly, people and societies produce food, which is then consumed by individuals who, through the act of eating it, express their participation in culture, and thus reaffirm their place in society. Through our encounters with food, in other words, we sustain the body and express the individual self, even as we also create culture and submit to society. The charge of sensory studies of food and taste is to trace out this cycle that creates and is created by physical, individual, and communal experiences; and that does so in ways that are both immediate and historic.
Ironically enough, the first scholars to take up the “labor” of examining the senses as a subject of academic research were anthropologists and sociologists who left the sense of taste far in the background of their scholarship. The work of nineteenth-century anthropologists was an ethnographic calculation and categorization of the sensory experiences of “primitives,” and part of the way they accomplished this task was through the maintenance of a long-established “hierarchy of the senses” (Classen, 1997; Howes, 2003; Jütte, 2005; Ferguson, 2011). For these scholars, vision, followed by hearing, was regarded as the most “elevated” of all forms of perception.
For early researchers, hearing and seeing were the senses most closely associated with the thinking, rational brain as it observed phenomena. These senses extended out farthest from the body, visual and aural experiences could be most easily shared with others, and they were assumed to allow their possessors to encounter the world more objectively than other senses could. As historian Mark Smith has described it, they were imbued with the ability to promote “perspective, distance, balance, coolness, detachment, and a growing sense of self” (Smith, 2008: 10). Taste, meanwhile, historically often ranked between the senses of smell and touch, was both dependent upon these other “lower order” senses, and far less objective: Not only did it require touching the sense object (food), it changed it through mastication, which led to swallowing, and then digesting (Ferguson, 2011). Tasting food then, was understood to be a deeply subjective, and even brute sense because it altered the object it encountered: Taste, base sense that it was, simply could not leave an object alone.
By the time sociologist George Simmel published his seminal “Sociology of the Senses” in 1907, the scholarly predilection for the visual and the aural was firmly in place. So much so that taste, as one of “the lower senses [which are] of secondary importance,” according to Simmel, received no direct mention at all in this work, which is among the very earliest to outline the possibilities for sensory research (Simmel, 1998: 117). As the study of the senses moved forward through the middle decades of the twentieth century, largely in anthropology and sociology, taste remained for most scholars a footnote or an overlooked realm of experience. The reasons for this are two-fold. The first of these was the continued privileging of seeing and hearing over smelling, tasting, and touching, and this was abetted starting in the early decades of the twentieth century by the invention of technologies of reproduction that recorded only sights and sounds (Howes, 2003).
In fact, this preference for the visual and the aural remained intact for decades, and in many respects it is still in place. Emphasis on visual and aural forms of experience was a principal characteristic of some of the early theoretical work that influenced what would formally become recognized as sensory studies, that of Marshall McLuhan and his student, Walter Ong. What McLuhan attempted, in works like The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1965) was nothing less than “to explain all of human history, as well as social organization between the West and the ‘tribal’ societies of Africa and the Orient, in terms of transformations in the ‘ratio of senses’ brought on by changes in the technology of communications” (Howes, 1991). McLuhan’s scholarship extended the framework of sensory studies by examining as varying and variable the “ratios” of sensory organization through which different cultures perceived the world. However, as far-reaching as his research remains, its emphasis on technologies like writing and movable type as extensions of the senses also meant that near-exclusive attention to the visual and the aural remained intact.
While McLuhan’s work offered concepts for sensory research that were also more nuanced than a “great divide” between the visual and aural on the one hand, and scent, taste, and touch on the other, his scholarship also functioned to keep this binary in place, and compelling to a range of sensory scholars for years. Furthermore, the dominance of the ocular was supported through the 1970s in the work of other theorists whose scholarship shaped thought across multiple fields. Alongside McLuhan’s work we might also think, for instance, of the long shadow cast by Michel Foucault in his studies of surveillance and observation, particularly in works like The Birth of the Clinic (1966), The Order of Things (1970), and Discipline and Punish (1975).
In terms of the trajectory of sensory studies through the mid-point of the twentieth century, then, it was shaped first by a tight focus on which senses were most worthy of research, and next by a wrangling over theoretical approaches that would determine how sensory experience would be studied. And herein we arrive at a second reason for a relative “tastelessness” to the field up through the later decades of the twentieth century. As anthropologist David Howes summarizes, theoretical approaches that emphasized the study of “culture as text” remained at the forefront of scholarship, and necessarily imparted “both a visual and a verbal bias to any analysis” (Howes, 2003: 19). What this meant for scholarly investigations into sensory experiences, was that they ran the risk of fitting their subjects into textual analysis, or “reading” them, as any written or envisioned object might be read. The result of this is a theoretical framing that replicates visual and aural experiences while continuing to veer away from other forms of sensory experience. Considered as text, certainly culture could be engaged from multiple theoretical positions: One could “dialogue” with it, one could “interpret” it, or, one could “negotiate” with it. Even so, what all of these verbs demonstrate profoundly, is the continued entrenchment of the visual/aural bias.
By the 1980s this dynamic was set to shift, and the question of how to take the senses “on their own terms,” how to treat them more fully sensually, has since come to the forefront of a wide-ranging sensory scholarship. One result of this is that research on the senses across disciplinary fields has become far more aware of taste and food; in other words, it has become more fully “tasteful” as scholars have begun to engage the sensual subject of food.
In considering how this came about, it is worth noting that, while a visual/aural privileging of analysis may have been dominant through the 1970s, these had never been the only theoretical frameworks for examining the senses. Sensory studies may be a newly identified field; nonetheless, its slender roots go deep. For instance, David Howes points to a thread of anthropological research which he refers to as the work of the early “sensualists,” that goes back to the work of scholars like Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux in the 1930s (Howes, 2003). Scholars such as these, known (though not always necessarily celebrated by dominant trends in their field) as participant observers, took sensory experience on its own, varied, and individual terms. This was a crucial aspect of their research: “For sensualists (as they could be called) were committed to using all their senses,” and at the same time, “they also set great store in achieving empathy, or sensing along with their informants” (Howes, 2003: 13). Further, scholarly interest in the senses beyond anthropology also has significant depth. There is no better example of this than sociologist Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process (1939). Although it did not receive the scholarly attention it deserved until nearly three decades after it was first published, Elias’s work was groundbreaking in its examination of “habitus,” meaning the psychological frameworks or habits formed out of exposure to social structures. Interestingly, for the scholar wishing to study the link between food and the senses, Elias’s work paid close attention to the formation of table manners in European history. More broadly, we might also think back, for instance, to early work on sensory subjects within the French Annales school of historians, and particularly the work of Lucien Febvre in The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century (1942).
For so many scholars in the humanities and social sciences then, we might conceive of the 1980s and 1990s as a watershed moment in which major older theoretical positions were dismantled, and areas of research that emphasized the particular, the individual, the contingent, and even the intimate gained attention. The flowering of post-modern theory in so many academic circles meant the abandonment of a coolly detached pursuit of objective knowledge. If objective knowledge was dead, then the subjective experiences of groups and individuals was worth exploring. For anthropologists, this meant the formulation of an “anthropology of the senses,” led by scholars such as Howes, Constance Classen, Paul Stoller, David Sutton, and Nadia Seremetakis. And as this area of research evolved, it merged with a sensory turn in other disciplines. This included, very significantly, history, and also sociology, literary studies, and philosophy. For scholars who wanted to study culture and power “from the bottom up,” and analyze the intimate aspects of “everyday life,” making room for a serious contemplation of the senses was the sensible thing to do. At the same time, for food studies as a whole, it could take advantage of this theoretically creative moment, and emerge as a self-conscious, formally acknowledged field of research.
Thus, the opportunity for realizing a synchronized study of food and the senses was realized. Within major works to treat sensory research on food, we can identify at least two major and consistent trends: Those that treat the taste of food as commodity, and those that treat the taste of food as aesthetic.
Among the first profound studies to examine specifically the role of food and the senses are those that understand taste as a driving force in transforming food into commodities, which then had the power to shape national economies, develop global markets, shift (often through force or coercion) labor pools from one place to another, and alter the ways in which whole classes of people self-identified (Smith, 2008: 151). Among the earliest of such works are Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, (1980, trans. English 1992), Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1986), and Warren Belasco’s Appetite for Change: How the Counter Culture Took on the Food Industry, 1966–1988 (1986). More recently, important works such as Andrew Dalby’s Dangerous Tastes: The History of Spices (2000) and Marcy Norton’s, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (2010) have continued in this vein.
And just as food and the sense of taste matters on the broadest levels of human experience, scholarship has also demonstrated their place as actors on more intimate scales of interaction. Here, the growing body of scholarship on the sense of taste and the construction of social “Taste,” continues to demonstrate the marked interdisciplinarity of sensory studies in general. Sociologist Stephen Mennell’s All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present may have opened the floodgates on the aesthetic study of food (1985). However, this area of research has been carried on in the work of such diverse researchers as philosopher, Carolyn Korsmeyer in Making Sense of Taste (1999), historian Rebecca Spang with The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (2001), anthropologist David Sutton in Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (2001), historian Woodruff Smith in Consumption and the Making of Respectability: 1600–1800 (2002), sociologist Priscilla Parkhust Ferguson in Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (2004), and literary studies scholar, Denise Gigante with Taste: a Literary History (2005).
Happily, the above-mentioned texts hardly constitute an exhaustive list of important works on food and the senses. Instead, we might think of them as an entering wedge of research on issues of sensory perception as they concern our bodies and minds and the consumption of food. This interrelationship has recently been defined by political and cultural theorist Davide Panagia, who notes that the mouth is a “complex organ,” and one that society often (and problematically) considers through a “normative partition: the mouth can not eat and speak at the same time.” It is either “the conduit for the mind’s ideas,” or it “must be the avenue for the consumption of food, the origins of sustenance, and a gustatory medium of bodily restorations” (Panagia, 2009: 123). While this divide might have served the purposes of different arenas of scholarship, it does not do full justice to our experience of and thoughtful engagement with food. When sensory studies scholarship pays close attention to food, and when food studies scholarship returns to the senses, we come closer to bridging this gap, and considering human experience from a more fully complex position.
Much like food interacts with all of the senses, so too does sensory studies, when focused on food, often interweave methods of scholarship from traditional disciplines to form rich interdisciplinary research. At the core, however, the base method of food and sensory studies is to keep the senses at the forefront of the investigation. Likewise, across disciplines, the central questions remain the same: How can we attempt to understand the place and meaning of the senses for an individual and for a culture, for it encompasses both physical action and experience that falls within and reflects cognitive knowledge? Sensations accompany an idea, become a form of communication, have meaning, and are embedded as part of a system of awareness (Panagia, 2009; Bourdieu, 1984; Ferguson, 2011). What then, is the location of food and taste within this constellation of making meaning through the senses? How does one’s taste of food and one’s taste for food shape – and reflect – people’s world?
These broad considerations must be pondered on multiple levels: For an individual, as part of a distinct culture, and in a particular context. For example, how might one’s unique relationship with food influence the sensorium? On a biological and physiological level, a shared experience is never quite the same and can differ from person to person – and thus the complete understanding, memory, and future expectation of a food or meal might also change. A “non-taster,” whose perception of taste is limited, and a “super-taster,” who perceives taste much more intensely, might have a different knowledge of the meal. Along these lines, a personal or cultural memory, closely linked to aroma neurologically, will affect the action, meaning, and attitude of eating or eating particular foods (Sutton, 2001; Wolfe, 2005). Even place matters, as eating a familiar food in an exotic setting (or vice versa), will change the sensorial experience (Long, 2003; Trubek, 2008).
Within a culture, having particular roles in society (for example: Hunters, farmers, chefs, mothers, doctors) whose specified tasks intersect with foodstuffs might alter one’s sensorium. On a broader scale the difference between an agricultural, rural society and an urban, industrial society, divorced from much of the food chain, will have a different relationship to food and eating resulting in divergent realities. Regarding class distinctions, food is a necessity when populations are faced with scarcity; when overflowing from a cornucopia, it is a luxury (Bourdieu, 1984). With technology and broad-based consumerism, the growth of mass media and post-modern marketing, with the rampant exposure to “food porn,” and “virtual food,” the context of expectation, satisfaction, and thus eating experience has complicated (Haden, 2005; Korsmeyer, 1999). From these considerations, as well as countless others, a scholar can seek greater understanding and patterns of constructed knowledge including how and why knowledge of food, and the sensory awareness of it, shifts and evolves.
Ethnographic research, the descriptive branch of anthropology, gives perhaps the most complete entry into sensory studies of food. For although the researcher brings her/his own biases to the table, there is still the possibility to have access to multi-sensorial experiences surrounding food when at a site. To do so successfully, however, one should have a thorough context of the meaning of food in a particular culture by understanding how each food and all of the senses are embodied as well as how moralities are attached to them (Stoller, 1989; Mennell, 1996; Rasmussen, 1999; Spang, 2000; Pink, 2009). Prior to research, a self-reflexive analysis of one’s own sensorial sensitivity will encourage awareness of prejudice of sensorial subjectivity, or biases, and will enable a scholar to experience a heightened understanding of the senses when conducting participant-observation fieldwork, in terms of both hierarchy and intensity (Pink, 2009).
Historians have borrowed heavily from the methodology of anthropologists when considering how to try to understand the senses in culture. This approach has led to the call for historians to follow anthropologists literally “into the field” (in terms of both the area of sensory studies, as well as becoming participant-observers). This, obviously, is problematic when studying the past, but some scholars suggest that a historian might overcome this time-travel hurdle by visiting museums and living history heritage centers that “bring the past alive” (Hoffer, 2003). The vast array of eras and places that can be visited at open air museums range significantly, but similarly suggest that visitors will “experience the authentic sights, sounds, smells and tastes from the past” (www.bclm.co.uk, Black Country Living Museum).
More radically, might scholars frame their lives to replicate those that they are studying, as many ethnographers do? During Lent, 2007 historian Ken Albala fasted while researching the Reformation in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. On his blog, he wrote of an internalized sense of control over what food he consumed, followed by the “swoon” of joy from his first bite of meat after abstinence. This realization led him to wonder if he better understood the Reformation intellectually because of this viseral experience (Albala, 2007). Albala, like a number of other scholars, has recreated historic meals, in an attempt to better understand food of the past and all of the tangible and intangible qualities of it (Albala, 2006; Bottero, 2006; Braund and Wilkins, 2000). As a method, however, trying to (re)experience or (re)live the past is controversial in that one’s own experiences have changed the context from the past (Smith, 2007). The ephemeral nature of food (and one might argue of the context of the senses) prohibits reliability of authenticity or of a shared experience and understanding, yet it remains the burden of the scholar to try to understand.
Luckily, for those scholars who cannot experience a particular culture first hand, understanding might still be gleaned remotely (Métraux and Mead, 2001). Howes and Classen suggest that for sensory studies, a scholar look at a range of sources, including existing ethnographies, text-based literature, and visually based sources (art and film). From these, there is a four-step process: Extract all references to the sensorium; analyze data for each sense individually; consider the consociation among each modality, or sense, and how they help construct the meaning of experience; conclude with an organization of the senses for a culture (Howes, 1991). It becomes, then, an epistemological exercise by which to understand how culture internalizes the senses (Stoller, 1997).
Within the aforementioned process, or any analysis, the key becomes paying particular attention to references regarding the senses in the sources. Within a text-based narrative, closely considering the characteristic nature of gustatory passages serves to further the understanding of a person or culture and/through their food. The “thick description” that surrounds food and the senses becomes the informative medium and message for scholars to embrace (Camporesi, 1989, 1994). The narrative, then, frequently based on repetition and memory, becomes the collective norm, percolating as metaphor and metonymy throughout a culture (Sutton, 2001). The same idea holds true when examining non-text-based sources, including oral histories, artwork, archaeological sites and evidence, photography, films, and material culture, which can not only reveal visual aspects of food and aesthetics, but a better understanding of all senses (Schama, 1987; Métraux, 1951; Pennell, 1998). But, as is the case whenever doing research, it is the task of the scholar to closely consider who has produced the source as well as their motivation for doing so.
Even with a range of cultural “goods” pointing us toward understanding sensibility, however, Braudel reminds us that when researching a “totality” a scholar should limit the locus by geography and time, paying particular attention to a culture’s (or an individual’s for that matter) frontiers, borrowings, and refusals (Braudel, 1980). These boundary lines offer awareness of a deeper understanding of an individual or a culture precisely because the actions involving food, the body, and knowledge are bound together. Food and the senses intimately embody aesthetic taste and regurgitate philosophies and desires, and one makes distinctions because eating and experiencing the sensorial is part of being alive (a necessity) but is also part of an intellectual pursuit (a luxury) (Bourdieu, 1984; Rozin and Siegal, 2003; Fleissner, 2008). Thus action, or the process of sensing, reveals ontology, knowledge, and greater understanding of the intellectual, reuniting the body and the mind. Pierre Bourdieu perhaps explains this cycle best: “[T]he philosophical sense of distinction is another form of the visceral disgust at vulgarity which defines pure taste as an internalized social relationship, a social relationship made flesh” (Bourdieu, 1984: 499–500). While Bourdieu is referring specifically to class relations, it serves to remind us that visceral disgust is both biologically and culturally formed and frequently surfaces when the “us” is faced with the “them” and food choice (Rozin et al., 2000).
Ultimately, food choice and the senses intersects the material and intellect, becomes the point of the cognitive and the aesthetic, inextricably tied to the sensorium. For medieval Norman-Anglo, for example, taste was thought to be transmitted through the tongue’s pores, where it would be considered by the “judgement of the soul” (Woolgar, 2007), while it is the sensorial modes of the Japanese tea ceremony that provides “symbolic efficacy and power” in an attempt to reach transcendence (Kondo, 1985). As such, looking at food studies and sensorial studies can help to understand other cultural questions including, but not limited to, religion, philosophy, and ethics. Perhaps this will lead us to the most complete understanding of the individual and the cultural, the tangible and the intellectual, in an attempt to reach a “conception of truth.”
The relatively nascent fields of food studies and sensory studies are ripe with possible areas to consider and investigate. Certainly, recent studies strive to give greater consideration of cultural relativity toward the senses, but Western scholarship historically has investigated the five senses with which we are familiar. This widely accepted truism, however, is more recently being contested as neither a static nor a universal understanding. Additional senses that have been argued that need attention include speech, hunger, thirst, pain, kinesthetic, and even, as scholars of medieval history have revealed, holiness, or, as Brillat-Savarin himself suggested, desire (Howes, 2007; Bynum 1987; Woolgar, 2007). The role of emotions needs also to be considered when researching the senses as influencing and reflecting personal experience. Certainly, scholars who look at food choice, nutrition, marketing, and consumer behavior find it integral, but rarely is it explored in tandem with food studies and the senses (Pink, 2009).
Scholars also need to ruminate on what one tastes when tasting. For much of Western history, the culture identified four “tastes”: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. Included with these, Aristotle incorporated the tastes of pungent and astringent, while current ideology (especially if one listens to marketing) embraces umami, long identified in Japanese culture, and even calcium. Cross culturally, the number of tastes that are categorized also varies. In Indonesia, the Weyéwa categorize sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent, and bland, while the Sereer Ndut of Senegal only recognize three (Kuipers, 1991).
Physiologically, taste is rarely experienced in isolation, but rather as an intimate joining with flavor. Food molecules, dissolved in saliva, are noted by taste receptors (found in the taste buds) and travel to the brain. Simultaneously, additional molecules are released both through our nose (orthonasal) and at the back of our mouths through the nasal cavity (retronasal). These aroma molecules stimulate the olfactory system and alert us to flavor (for example the difference between strawberry and cherry). The third sense that happens in the mouth is the somatosensory, which includes pain (for example, capsaicin) and pleasure, but also mouthfeel, which can often change with textures of food, but also components such as fat. When studying the senses, rarely do scholars consider all of these aspects, culturally, when in fact there is a diplomacy of the mouth. This becomes an extremely difficult task to consider as the general population are rarely cognizant of the nuances of these components. Thus, it remains an exciting frontier for scholars of the humanities and social sciences, to work across the hallway with hard scientists, to strengthen the understanding between biologically driven food sensation and experiences and those constructed via culture (Korsmeyer, 1999; Rozin, 1999; Peynaud, 2005; Wolfe, 2005).
Finally, to take up the mantle suggested by David Howes, it remains somewhat ironic that sensorial studies (along with food) is often presented through one sense, the visual. In this way, scholars perpetuate the continuation of the dominance of the visual and of written communication devoid of the other senses. How, instead, might we change this? Certainly, within the halls of academia, more scholars incorporate experiential teaching and learning in the classroom, but as a group this also needs to be considered on a larger scale of dissemination. We don’t have the answer to this, but we sense future scholars might (Howes, 2007).
For one wishing to embark on the sensory study of food, the range of options is expanding as the field matures. The sensory analysis of food is one that can be undertaken throughout the humanities and social sciences, particularly in anthropology, sociology, and history departments. However, a more compelling approach to the scholar interested in the sensorial approach to food might consider interdisciplinary programs in food studies, cultural studies, and American studies.
While not specifically focused on food and the senses, there are a number of research institutes, doing compelling work on sensorial studies that include “The Sense Lab” at Concordia University, New York Institute of Philosophy, and Sensory Stories at the University of York. A comprehensive list of programs is listed at the website www.senorialstudies.org, which also has additional resources including a research directory, events, syllabi and curricula, and information on the excellent journal, The Senses and Society, which was founded in 2006.
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——(2007) Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Jütte Robert (2005) A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
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