8 - The Anatomy of Tasting

Summary

Tasting is an embodied practice – beginning with putting the sample in the mouth, achieved through specific ways of chewing it, and completed by swallowing it – which cannot be reduced to a private, neurophysiological process, but which is rather an interactional intersubjective achievement. The chapter describes the systematic ways in which the participants create a specifically relevant interactional space for the customer to begin to taste, and to focus on their tasting, while the seller suspends talking and favors an exclusive attention to tasting, albeit continuing to monitor the taster, before both participants resume mutual gaze and reengage in talking. Tasting can be performed in a diversity of ways, alone versus together, in silence versus in a guided, instructed way – but even when the taster is given the opportunity to taste individually and in silence, tasting remains an interactional achievement. Tasting is also a practice distinct from eating: the former privileges the exclusive, silent focus on the sensorial qualities of the sample, while the latter happens in the midst of the conversational engagement, enabling multiactivity and multiple engagements.