Jacob Lahne

A little information excites us. Consumer sensory experience of Vermont artisan cheese as active practice.

This research is concerned with explaining consumer preference for Vermont artisan cheese and the relationship between that preference and sensory experience. Artisan cheesemaking is increasingly an important part of Vermonts dairy sector, and this tracks a growing trend of artisan agricultural practice in the United States. In popular discourse and academic research into products like artisan cheese, consumers explain their preferences in terms of intrinsic sensory and extrinsic - supposedly nonsensory - food qualities. In laboratory sensory studies, however, the relationship between preference, intrinsic, and extrinsic qualities changes or disappears. In contrast, this study explains this relationship by adopting a social theory of sensory perception as a practice in everyday life. This theory is applied to a series of focus group interviews with Vermont artisan cheese consumers about their everyday perceptions. Based on the data, a conceptual framework for the sensory perception of Vermont artisan cheese is suggested: consumers combine information about producer practice, social context, and the materiality of the product through an active, learned practice of sensory perception. Particular qualities that drive consumer sensory experience and preference are identified from the interview data. Many of these qualities are difficult to categorize as entirely intrinsic or extrinsic, highlighting the need for developing new approaches of sensory evaluation in order to fully capture everyday consumer sensory perception. Thus, this research demonstrates that social theory provides new and valuable insights into consumer sensory preference for Vermont artisan cheese.

The Lexicocalorimeter: Gauging public health through caloric input and output on social media

We propose and develop a Lexicocalorimeter: an online, interactive instrument for measuring the “caloric content” of social media and other large-scale texts. We do so by constructing extensive yet improvable tables of food and activity related phrases, and respectively assigning them with sourced estimates of caloric intake and expenditure. We show that for Twitter, our naive measures of “caloric input”, “caloric output”, and the ratio of these measures are all strong correlates with health and well-being measures for the contiguous United States. Our caloric balance measure in many cases outperforms both its constituent quantities; is tunable to specific health and well-being measures such as diabetes rates; has the capability of providing a real-time signal reflecting a population’s health; and has the potential to be used alongside traditional survey data in the development of public policy and collective self-awareness. Because our Lexicocalorimeter is a linear superposition of principled phrase scores, we also show we can move beyond correlations to explore what people talk about in collective detail, and assist in the understanding and explanation of how population-scale conditions vary, a capacity unavailable to black-box type methods.

A comprehensive approach to understanding cooking behavior: Implications for research and practice

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of – and need for – an expanded understanding of cooking (skills and knowledge) to inform research on the connection between cooking and health. Design/methodology/approach This paper describes a concept of “food agency” and contrasts it with how cooking is commonly conceived in food and nutrition literature. A food agency-based pedagogy and proposals for using it are also introduced. Findings Cooking is a complex process that may be crucial for making a difference in the contemporary problems of diet-related chronic diseases. There are two interlinked problems with present research on cooking. First, cooking has yet to be adequately conceptualized for the design and evaluation of effective public health and nutrition interventions. The context within which food-related decisions and actions occur has been neglected. Instead, the major focus has been on discrete mechanical tasks. In particular, recipes are relied upon despite no clear evidence that recipes move people from knowledge to action. Second, given the incomplete theorization and definition of this vital everyday practice, intervention designs tend to rely on assumptions over theory. This creates certain forms of tautological reasoning when claims are made about how behavior changes. A comprehensive theory of food agency provides a nuanced understanding of daily food practices and clarifies how to teach cooking skills that are generalizable throughout varied life contexts. Originality/value This commentary is of value to academics studying cooking-related behavior and public health practitioners implementing and evaluating cooking interventions.

Introduction to Accounting for Taste

A widely held and currently popular conception paints the food industry as a well-oiled machine catering to, and even creating, the food desires of hapless and helpless consumers (Pollan 2008; Moss 2013). 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. Historians of industrial food (Horowitz 2006; Petrick 2009; Bentley 2014) demonstrate the role these practices have had in twentieth century life, as well as the frequent disjunction between public discourses of taste and industry norms. 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. The papers in this issue, therefore, bring a sharp focus on the epistemic history and practices of what here we will loosely call “sensory sciences” to ask: How have the processes and methodologies of the sensory sciences developed and

Standard sensations: the production of objective experience from industrial technique

Abstract Sensory evaluation is the food-science discipline that “comprises a set of techniques for accurate measurement of human responses to foods”. In lay terms, sensory evaluation seeks to objectively describe the nominally subjective sensory properties of food without using physical measurements. However, the techniques used by sensory scientists in pursuit of accurate measurements of subjectivity are largely contingent on the assumptions and goals of the food industry. Food-industry needs implicitly define which foods have “true” tastes, and what those tastes are. This paper examines one way in which the US food industry defines and delimits food sensations through a focus on Descriptive Analysis (DA), which sensory-analysis experts Lawless and Heymann call “the most sophisticated tools in the [sensory scientist’s] arsenal” – and in particular the form of DA called “Spectrum”. I argue that Spectrum panel-members are trained into a particular subjectivity stemming from (literal) food-industry standards: whenever possible, these standards are branded, industrially produced foods, which are assumed to have objectifiable, invariant sensory properties. I document these practices and their implications, demonstrating that the reification of subjective experience in the lab has ramifications not only for personal experience, but social and economic structures.