Abstract

The interdisciplinary field of sensory studies has bloomed in the last three decades and, more recently, has converged with food studies. Given that one’s encounters with food are both ephemeral and individual, food as a subject of sensory studies scholarship provides a way to think about the shifting encounters between subjective individual experience, and the social and cultural construction of reality. The charge of sensory studies of food and taste is to trace out this cycle that creates and is created by physical, individual, and communal experiences; and that does so in ways that are both immediate and historic.