Paper short abstract:

STS has largely ignored taste sensations: meanwhile, food scientists have developed methodologies to quantify taste. I discuss these methods and their implications. With some case studies of opposing usage, I claim STS should explore these intersubjective methods to study smell, taste, and touch.

Paper long abstract:

For too long, STS has ignored taste sensation as irretrievably subjective: while we are happy to embrace analyses a la Bourdieu of its social uses and consequences, the experience of tastes themselves, and the affective consequences, are considered to be beyond the purview of social theory.

Taste, however, has too many material consequences to remain unexamined; food scientists have developed industrial methodologies to quantify taste. There now exist methods for fixing taste as a matter of objective - or at least intersubjective - truth. Since these methods are employed daily by industry to shape consumers' lived-in environment, they deserve greater scrutiny; in fact, as I argue here, these methodologies may themselves be useful for STS work in the areas of taste, aroma, and touch.

Here I add to the growing body of scholarship on sensory-science methods for accessing and understanding the senses of taste - gustatory, food-flavor, and preference. I briefly describe the methods of "sensory evaluation of food" and frame them within STS scholarship, drawing heavily on Shapin, Hennion, and Latour. From my own and others' work, I describe how sensory evaluation, although developed directly from industrial practice, can be successfully employed for differing epistemological purposes. I contrast, on the one hand, industry-led sensory consulting to delimit and delegitimize non-industrial modes of food production with, on the other, the employment of sensory evaluation as "proof of value" by artisan-food producers. I conclude with some new ideas for how the intersubjectivity-generating functions of sensory evaluation can be used to by STS scholars.