| In the last decades, flavor, an aesthetic experience that is intimately tied to pleasure, affect, memory, and culture, has been consolidated as an autonomous scientific object, a technological product, and a medium for artistic expression. Such efforts have come partly from the revalorization of the science of taste and smell and the mounting interest of both chefs and scientists in the chemistry of cooking and the experience of eating. While it is common to find arguments that define sensorial experiences as unavoidably private and subjective, or as exclusively pertaining to the cultural realm, the purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how the aesthetic and subjective experience of flavor is shared in the course of its investigation and manufacture. Fieldwork for this project was carried out in the United States and Spain during 14 months at three different sites, each of which foregrounds a particular knowledge practice---science, industry, and gastronomy. By focusing on different methods, skills, and practices for understanding and creating flavor, this ethnography argues that flavor, as a phenomenon to study, only comes into being at the intersection of practices and institutions that allow for its partial apprehension. What we can know about flavor is constantly being reconfigured by way of interaction and communication among these different practices. In going after flavor, what these practices do to each other is more important than what they know individually. In their practical interaction, and in strengthening their ties, they keep rediscovering what flavor is and what it can do. Finally, it is shown that these practices (science, industry, gastronomy) are all at odds with entrenched dualisms like those of mind and matter, culture and nature, subject and object, and techne and episteme---but they nonetheless need each other as long as they remain autonomous fields and their boundaries hold. |
