Standard sensations: the production of objective experience from industrial technique

Sensory evaluation is the food-science discipline that “comprises a set of techniques for accurate measurement of human responses to foods”. In lay terms, sensory evaluation seeks to objectively describe the nominally subjective sensory properties of food without using physical measurements. However, the techniques used by sensory scientists in pursuit of accurate measurements of subjectivity are largely contingent on the assumptions and goals of the food industry. Food-industry needs implicitly define which foods have “true” tastes, and what those tastes are. This paper examines one way in which the US food industry defines and delimits food sensations through a focus on Descriptive Analysis (DA), which sensory-analysis experts Lawless and Heymann call “the most sophisticated tools in the [sensory scientist’s] arsenal” – and in particular the form of DA called “Spectrum”. I argue that Spectrum panel-members are trained into a particular subjectivity stemming from (literal) food-industry standards: whenever possible, these standards are branded, industrially produced foods, which are assumed to have objectifiable, invariant sensory properties. I document these practices and their implications, demonstrating that the reification of subjective experience in the lab has ramifications not only for personal experience, but social and economic structures.