Dialogic Eating: Designing Food Experience as a Protocol for Sensory Articulation and Urban Sensibility

This paper introduces Dialogic Eating (Taiwagata Inshoku), a practice-based methodology developed at FabCafe Osaka that uses food and drink experience as a protocol for opening, sharing, and translating pre-verbal sensory knowledge. Departing from Visual Thinking Strategies and dialogic art appreciation, Dialogic Eating addresses a structural access problem: while art-based dialogue methods are cognitively effective, they often presuppose aesthetic literacy and create participation barriers. Eating and drinking, by contrast, are universal embodied experiences requiring no prior cultural knowledge. Drawing on four practice programs implemented with approximately 256 participants — the Anparfait tasting experience, the Hon wo Nomu (Drinking Books) series, the Kemono Ato Michi (Beast Trail) program, and professional Dialogic Eating salon sessions — this paper proposes a three-function model of Dialogic Eating: sensory translation, relational generation, and connection to urban experience design. The paper further identifies two practitioner-derived findings: a four-stage engagement sequence that emerges when participants encounter an unnamed stimulus, and a sensibility-switching effect in which the perceptual register induced by Dialogic Eating may persist beyond the session. The paper situates these findings within the framework of Sensibility Urbanism, arguing that Dialogic Eating constitutes a methodology for accessing and articulating embodied knowledge of urban value that conventional metrics cannot capture.