5 - Touching: Professional and Lay Touch

Summary

Touch constitutes a closer sensorial access to cheese, enabling to check its texture and consistency and inferring its creaminess, intensity, and maturity. However, touch is often forbidden in specialized shops. This chapter explores the paradoxes of touch as a both a normatively constrained practice and a crucial access to some essential sensorial qualities of the product. On the one hand, the seller has a privileged right to touch the cheese, within a form of “professional touch” – in the form of palpating movements of the hand – that can take the form of diagnostic checks orienting to the evolving state of the cheese or of demonstrative gestures addressed to the customer. On the other hand, the customer can obtain the right to touch the products in some circumstances, either requesting permission to touch or being offered to touch by the seller. Touching the cheese contributes to the selection of specific items, orienting to the unicity of each piece of cheese as far as its consistency, maturity, and organic evolution is concerned. So touching accesses specific relevant sensorial features that are crucial for evaluating cheese and making decisions about its selection and purchase.