The Dark Side of the Spoon: The Gustatory Experience of Eating in a Blind Dining Restaurant

Kathe Gray

doi:10.21428/92775833.39065d01

Abstract

The Dark Side of the Spoon: The Gustatory Experience of Eating in a Blind Dining Restaurant

Highlights

The dark side of the spoon: The gustatory experience of eating in a blind dining restaurant abstract | In this ethnographic account, a blind dining restaurant, where visually impaired people lead sighted patrons into pitch-black dining rooms and serve as their waiters, becomes the field site for a “sensory apprenticeship,” an experiential approach to accessing sensorial, embodied, and affective ways of knowing that otherwise elude visual observation
MOUTH SENSE: A SENSE-SCAPE DEFINED Picture of eating and drinking as a daily activity, adding to the human tongue: a roughly surfaced muscle cov- taste perception several other sensory modalities ered with moist, pink tissue and stippled with small located perceptually in the mouth: chemical bumps
Is a most intimate sense, given that in knowing a Gustatory perception is limited to five recognized material through taste, we necessarily take it into categories of taste: bitterness, saltiness, sourness, our bodies.[6]

Summary

KATHE GRAY

The dark side of the spoon: The gustatory experience of eating in a blind dining restaurant abstract | In this ethnographic account, a blind dining restaurant, where visually impaired people lead sighted patrons into pitch-black dining rooms and serve as their waiters, becomes the field site for a “sensory apprenticeship,” an experiential approach to accessing sensorial, embodied, and affective ways of knowing that otherwise elude visual observation. No matter what time of year I comportment, with kinesthetic control and balance might eat them As these examples intimate, the taste experience, and morality.[11] In Western culture, where sight while an intensely personal one (for while we can has long been privileged as the rational, modern, share food, we cannot share the exact same mouth and superior sense, the sensorium is marked by sense of it), is an inherently social activity. A pronounced visual bias.[12] Having often heard that the human body compensates for the loss This process of socializing cannot be done of one sense with an enhancement of those that with human sensorial productions of noise, remain, I wondered if I might be better able to heat, taste, smell, spectacle, etc. It was feasting, toasting... etc.) In other words, we that I found myself visiting O.Noir, a blind dining sensorialize our world, especially through restaurant in Toronto, Canada

Blind dining originated in the home of Jorge

Some restaurants pitch themselves as a respite

PICTURING THE DARK Each visit to the