Reframing gastronomy: Gastronomics as an area of science?

Gastronomy is increasingly studied across a wide range of specialised disciplines, yet this analytical success also raises a conceptual problem: what makes otherwise distinguishable phenomena specifically gastronomic? This article addresses that question by shifting attention from disciplinary components to the relations through which they become mutually consequential. Taste, pleasure and commensality are examined as revealing boundary phenomena rather than as necessary conditions of gastronomic experience. Their significance lies in the way they connect sensory, affective, social, cultural, normative and practical domains. We argue that gastronomic qualities may arise or change through interactions among such phenomena, and propose the concept of the gastronomic configuration to describe the wider relational organisation in which this occurs. On this basis, Gastronomics is introduced not as a new discipline or bounded scientific field, but as a coordinating label for inquiry directed towards gastronomic configurations. The perspective is compatible with relational and complexity-oriented approaches while specifying a distinct analytical focus: how differentiated processes become gastronomically consequential through their relations. We further introduce relational reconstruction as a complement to disciplinary decomposition, and analytical visibility to describe how configurations become sufficiently distinct and describable to support systematic comparison and explanation. The article thus proposes Gastronomics as a way of retaining the explanatory achievements of scientific specialisation while bringing the relational organisation of gastronomic phenomena back into scientific view.