“What is this?”: Multisensorial explorations of food with and without sight

Abstract

The relationship between sensorial experiences and language during food consumption has been investigated in a diversity of settings and activities, showing a variety of sensorial practices and possible ways of discursively expressing them. In this paper, we focus specifically on activities where individuals encounter unfamiliar food, suspending expected synaesthetic associations between sensory features. Using audio and video recordings of dinner interactions in restaurants offering high-end creative cuisine and dining experiences in complete darkness, we show how the participants move from eating to tasting and engage in a multisensorial exploration of the food, where sight is either absent or insufficient to solve the puzzle of what it is they are eating. We find that this exploration commonly begins with a recurring interactional practice: the question “what is this?”, initiating a sequence that reveals a public collective engagement with the food among participants. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, we investigate the sequential environments in which “what is this?” prototypically occurs, the various actions it implements, its turn design (displaying a more or less unknowing stance), as well as how it is subsequently responded to within the participants’ project of identifying the food. We examine how the “what is this?” inquiry mobilizes various linguistic resources, in a way that is deeply embedded in multisensorial examinations of the food that are (made) available to co-participants, publicly seeable in high-end gastronomic restaurants, and publicly hearable in dark restaurants. Our findings contribute to naturalistic interactional research on commensality and multisensoriality, with particular relevance for scholarship addressing the primacy and limitations of sight.