Making-doing sensory perception: how to teach taste

Imagine a course of “olfaction and tasting”, in a notorious professional school for flavourist and perfumers in France. The aim of the teacher is to instil sensory referential sources in students, by the appropriation of a rigorous vocabulary and through practical tries of molecules and preparations. To name, to compare, to memorize, to describe and to value these substances are the tasks of the group during two years. As the general topic of the research was to understand professional skills about taste, one of the issues consisted in studying the development of these specific abilities. The focus was on the techniques deployed to install a sensory common frame, alternatively through a research of a bottom- up consensus and some imposed tags. The teacher, who has to transfer a substantial amount of sensory references to the class in narrow times, and to make them able to master those notions, has to face to a double constraint. She must transmit a core-sensorium, but at the same time has to support students’ own contributions, in mode to open the reference document to necessary enrichments. More than
« actors », or « informants », the teacher and the students were also masters for me, by contributing to my sensory education. But also when they have confronted me to delicates questions and issues, sometimes against my own first researches. They were what I called though co-inquirer, proposing contradictory and resistant interpretations of the world, teaching me how to realize the study of sensory.