Taste knowledge: couscous and the cook's six senses

Abstract

In this article, I explore how cooking knowledge is constituted and show that a sense of taste is central to it. Drawing on the thick description of domestic couscous preparation in Marrakech, Morocco, I treat taste both as a multisensory form of knowing that includes a sixth sense, temporality, and as a broader set of values that inform everyday food preparation. The notion of taste knowledge highlights that there is much more to a cook's knowledge than the act of cooking, and that food and the broader environment play an active part in it. Importantly, taste knowledge only fully emerges as an activity in which past, present, and future experiences are evaluated against material and social changes. Finally, taste knowledge shows that phenomenologically inspired research allows an understanding of broader cultural, economic, and political processes and how these shape, and are shaped by, the work of low‐income, yet highly knowledgeable, women.

Ethical Endeavours

“…Phenomenology, which has recently gained some prominence in US anthropology, also seems to be becoming more popular among European anthropologists (e.g. Cooper 2022;Eisenlohr 2022;Graf 2022). Th e fi eld of economic anthropology, in particular, was well represented in 2022, with two concepts -moral economy (see below) and social reproduction (e.g.…”