Sensory labor: considering the work of taste in the food system

Abstract

The taste of foodstuffs has shaped entire economic systems. Yet many scholars have understood how one tastes as only a matter of aesthetics. New forms of doing work through the senses, associated with twentieth-century industrialized food production, have made it clear that the sensations produced by mouths and noses do more than mark class-they carry economic value. It seems that it is time we attend more closely to this sensory labor and its place in the food system. Recognizing perception as a form of labor mobilized throughout the food system offers to dissolve the apparent dichotomy between a focus on food as an object of consumption, evaluated on its aesthetic principles, and of production, evaluated on its ethical implications. Sustained examination of sensing as found in the essays in this issue demonstrates that the types and modes of sensory labor mobilized in the provisioning, making, and eating of food are not neutral-rather they coproduce modes of food production. In doing so, these essays not only open the door for valuing otherwise unacknowledged work, but also point towards opportunities for critical intervention in how we talk about and practice taste and, in the process, make society.

Sensing Collectives

“…In contrast, recent studies in anthropology and sociology focus on tasting as embedded in specific situations where both subjective predilections and objective food qualities are merely two elements that are not fixed but constituted in relation with other elements of a more complex configuration of the situation, including, for example, specific culturally established meanings, interactions with other people, specific trained bodily practices of eating or tools and atmospheres Mol, 2009;Paxson, 2010;Korsmeyer & Sutton, 2011;Mann, 2015;Mann, 2018;Spackman and Lahne, 2019). Rooted in pragmatism and ethnomethodology, tasting is studied here as an aesthetic practice, a "reflexive and performative capacity, opposed to any possibility of seeing it as an objectified reality which scientific knowledge could account for from the outside" (Teil & Hennion, 2004, p. 27).…”

Taste knowledge: couscous and the cook's six senses

“…Spackman and Lahne (2019) regard sensing as a form of not only affective, but also economic and political labour mobilized through the food system. Tsigkas (2019), who describes tea production in Sri Lanka, and Kantor (2019), focusing on subsistence farming in Bihar, India, show, respectively, that practices of discernment can and should be disentangled from ‘good taste’ and the implicit social hierarchy of tastes, and that cultivated perception is the preserve not only of professionals or high‐class consumers but also of people usually dismissed as unskilled labourers.…”

Gardening for Food Well-Being in the COVID-19 Era

“…Nutrition has effects on growth, cell regeneration, and immunity among others, which are critical for human health [28][29][30] and well-being [31,32]. The sensory ability to taste also has a direct effect on well-being [33][34][35]. We saw for example that people who lost their sense of taste due to COVID reported emotional and psychological difficulties as a result [36].…”