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What does sorrow taste like? Or anger? In 2012, the people at Hoxton Street Monster
Supplies of London launched The Taste of Emotion, a unique range of seasoning salts
collected from human tears. There are five varieties of salt available in the collection,
which the company explains have been harvested from humans experiencing all kinds
of emotions in various situations (laughing, sneezing, anger, sorrow, and, of course,
chopping onions). Each of the five salts have a distinctly different flavour. Sorrow
tastes of delicate lavender.
Beyond its association with food, but also incorporating that, taste is not only shaped
by people’s different experiences according to their class and social position,
geography and ethnicity, it also serves as a marker of identity and status. Pierre
Bourdieu has famously argued that taste forms part of the cultural capital that confers
respect, often linked to social class:
Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their
classifications distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between
the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their
position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed (6).
Although, following Bourdieu, taste’s use as a metaphor for aesthetic sensibility has
been a significant interest for scholars, the literal sense of taste has tended not to
capture research interest until more recently recently. The privileging of written and
visual texts in western research and scholarship has meant that our other senses are
frequently neglected more generally, and this is especially so for taste and smell.
According to Carolyn Korsmeyer, this disparaging of taste is related to three
particular assertions that are both popular and often found underpinning empirical
studies: (a) there are only four tastes—sweet, salt, sour, and bitter—so it is a sense of
limited scope (although the fifth taste, umani, is now often included); (b) taste is a
“poor sense”, because most flavour is contributed by smell; and, (c) taste and smell
are “primitive” senses, somehow unworthy of serious study (75).
In this way, as often identified as a “lower order” sense that drives appetite and
sometimes indulgence (and additionally associated with the body), the subjective and
often very personal nature of taste has also traditionally ruled it out as an object of
study. That perception has, however, clearly recently changed, and is demonstrated in
the range of studies undertaken on sensory experience and taste by historians,
philosophers, sociologists, scientists, anthropologists, geographers, and cultural
studies critics, complementing the growth in taste as a topic of enquiry in food studies
and the extension of aesthetics to objects of popular culture. As David Howes, from
the Centre for Sensory Studies explains, the sensory turn in history and anthropology
dates from the 1980s, and has expanded into other cognate areas, and beyond these
disciplinary routes, the field is also itself conceptualised along sensory lines, as in
visual culture, auditory culture (or sound studies), smell culture, taste culture, and the
culture of touch.
In proposing this issue of MC Journal, we considered taste as both a physical and
cultural experience and phenomemon, and invited contributions which approached
and interpreted the term “taste” widely, in order to explore a broad range of issues in
media and culture. Contributors responded with an exciting range of articles, which
investigate the concept of taste from innovative angles and introduce new primary
materials into the orbit of consideration regarding “taste”. We, therefore, invite you to
this taster of media and culture related scholarship on taste.
We sincerely thank our universities for supporting scholarly editorial endeavour, the
many reviewers for this issue for their useful and generous feedback, the contributors
for their insight and diligence, and Wes Hicks for his great cover image. Special
thanks to the editorial team of MC Journal for making this ongoing contribution to
research possible.