Mechanical tasting: sensory science and the flavorization of food production

Introduction toAccounting for Taste

“…In this imaginary, industry draws together food engineering and advertising to capture the public's senses with salty, sweet, and fatty foods (Moss 2013). A fundamental element of this engineering for taste is what Steven Shapin has termed the "aesthetic-industrial complex" (2012,179): the combination of public and private consumer-science research developed largely in the post-World War II era (Phillips 2016;Shapin 2016;Pettersson 2017). Focused on understanding and optimizing end-use sensory experiences of consumption, these sciences took on the task of transforming subjective sensory experiences (for indeed, what could be more subjective than taste) into objective knowledge that could then circulate in a standardized form, free from the fetters of individual eating bodies Despite scholarly and public agreement that the twentieth-century industrialization of food has profoundly reshaped food systems across the globe, the knowledge-making practices of the aesthetic-industrial complex have largely remained out of sight.…”

“…However, the practices of sensory science and evaluation, flavor chemistry, and other aesthetic-industrial knowledge-making systems remain relatively unexamined by the larger scholarly community that has focused on the food industry and taste (Bentley 2014;Wilson 2015). Indeed, few scholars have examined how, exactly, the food industry is nominally so successful at shaping the consuming public's sensory experience and creating the irresistible tastes posited by many to be at the heart of the industry's dominance (but see Muniesa and Trébuchet-Breitwiller 2010;Howes 2015;Pettersson 2017). Too often treated as ahistorical and acontextual, these practices are regularly portrayed by its practitioners as a disinterested science, capable of objectively measuring and quantifying the sensory aspects of food.…”