Abstract
Existing discussions of food democracy focus on people’s freedom to choose healthy, sustainable, or otherwise ‘good’ foods. Such foods are supposed to be unrestrained by oligopolistic structures of food supply, economic inequality, misinformation, or the misleading lobbying campaigns of the food industry. Our article aims to broaden the discussion about food democracy: focusing on people’s freedom to choose the food they want, but also on people’s freedom to engage with what they eat and how they want to eat it. This thematizes collective orders of sensing and, more specifically, taste. Based on pragmatist and praxeological studies we pose that tasting food is a matter of historically grown collective practices. In a second step, we assert that the reflexive shaping of such practices is currently dominated by the food industry and related forms of sensory science. Democratizing taste is a matter of people’s capacity to self-govern how they experience and enjoy food. To this end, we suggest the approach of ‘experimental eating’ as a way to question and reflexively engage with embodied forms of tasting. We report on the development of methods that, in a next step, are to be combined for a participatory exhibition inviting people to experimentally reconfigure their habitual tasting practices and experience agency in matters of shaping taste. The exhibition makes taste public by demonstrating the construction of sensory experience in eating practices. It positions taste as a collective issue which every human being can experiment with—and thus to contest the governance of taste as currently exercised by industrial corporations and scientific experts.
Highlights
Towards Making Taste PublicIn 2005 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel curated the exhibition “Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy” (Latour & Weibel, 2005)
We look for methods not to educate people about the nefariousness of the food system, but to engage people in creatively exploring new ways of tasting or what we call methods of ‘experimental eating.’
How can we engage with ways of knowing and doing taste in the context of current industrialized food systems? How can we redress the dominance of production and marketing interests in the aesthetic governance of food systems? How can we open up the shaping of collective taste practices for a broader and more inclusive engagement with the public? These are key questions for overcoming aesthetic path dependency and enabling innovation in food systems, but they can be framed politically, as key questions for democratizing the aesthetic governance of food systems
Summary
In 2005 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel curated the exhibition “Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy” (Latour & Weibel, 2005). We face here the challenge of turning taste, and the ways in which it is being shaped, into an issue of public concern This goes beyond discursive contestations with a view to the making of rules (by states) but has to work directly through the medium of sensory experience with a view to nurturing people’s capacity to practically engage with their own ways of tasting. We conclude the article with a recapitulation of the challenge of deepening food democracy by opening up the dimension of taste, of how people sense food and how they want to eat, for wider public engagement by the people themselves
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