Sensory studies arises at the conjuncture (and within) the fields of anthropology • sociology • history • archeology • geography • communications • religion • philosophy • literature • art history • museology • film • mixed media • performance • phenomenology • disability • aesthetics • architecture • urbanism • design

Sensory Studies can also be divided along sensory lines into, for example, visual culture, auditory culture (or sound studies), smell culture, taste culture and the culture of touch, not to mention the sixth sense (however it might be defined)

Endorsement – Food, Senses and the City

Food, Senses and the City

edited by Ferne Edwards, Roose Gerritson, and Grit Wesser

Food, Senses and the City, edited by Ferne Edwards, Roos Gerritsen and Grit Wesser, is a book to be savoured first of all for its fare: from Thuringian festive cake to amba (the pungent Iraqui condiment) and from Colada de Uchu Jaku (a creamy flour-based soup of the Andes) to honey produced by urban bees (that is, bees who have been transposed by their keepers from the meadows of the countryside to Melbourne and other Australian metropolises).

This book is also to be savoured for its ethnography – gustatory ethnography, with an accent on the multisensory, for taste is never simply an affair of the tastebuds, but also the aroma, the look, the acoustics, temperature, and mouth-feel of victuals. Catherine Earl’s chapter on Vietnamese cuisine is positively mouth-watering: the gustatory sensations roll off her tongue by means of her pen, mixed in with all the other sensations of the ambiances in which food is consumed.

One of the main themes of the book is transferences between, for example, the rural and the urban, which is explored not only with reference to the bees but also food activism (putting producers and consumers in direct contact), urban gardening (a fast-growing trend), and foodie tourism (including slumming it, as in the case of middle class foodies who titillate their palate by trolling the eateries of disadvantaged neighbourhoods in search of crudities – the opposite of the delicate crudité). Of particular note is the way the contributors eschew phenomenology and focus on the politics of gustation, highlighting all the ways in which the sensory qualities of foodstuffs divide people (mainly due to smell but also texture) as much as unite them. While Food, Senses and the City is quite advanced in this respect, some of the contributors should nevertheless have been more conscientious about the ethics of cross-species consumption.

This book is above all a testimony to the productivity and richness of David Sutton’s concept of gustemology, the enculturation of taste that gives rise to worlds of flavour, a concept that puts paid to the increasingly outmoded notion of cultures as being distinguishable by reference to their “worldview,” even with the rise of dining remotely via Instagram.

– David Howes, author of The Sensory Studies Manifesto (forthcoming from The University of Toronto Press)