The taste bud and the form. Ethnography of sensory labs

Sensory analyses present an opportunity to challenge classical dualism, especially when it is about taste. During long-term fieldworks, I accompanied several types of sensory expert panels, which had the mission to discriminate different sorts of products and define their respective sensory profile. I was interested to observe the period of training to understand how those people had acquired their expertise, and how their attention toward their own sensations were entangled to scientific infrastructures. Using sensory ethnographic methods, I assisted to the emergence of a particular world, in which the classical categories for science practices and taste perception were completely blurred. To establish a common truth, through sturdy and stable categories, appears to be compatible with personal moods and dispositions, singular and hedonic judgments, sociocultural grounded sensorium, contingent elements, and indeterminate parameters. Resorting to standard tests, educated and coached judges, statistical treatments, specific vocabulary, comparisons to physic-chemical analysis and various other apparatuses, these labs tempt to define and assess some food products. The goal of those examinations could be multiple: to outline consumers¿ feelings and choices, to check the quality of production, to search new applications, or to improve a current array. What interested me is the quest to an object practically exploitable in an industrial and commercial context, avoiding all kind of idiosyncratic experiences. In this presentation, I would tempt an analysis of those particular tests, focusing on the double bind of testing products and testing consumers, and searching to assess the causes of organoleptic variability.