Making Taste Public Industrialized Orders Of Sensing And The Democratic Potential Of Experimental Eating

Abstract: Existing discussions of food democracy focus on people's freedom to choose healthy, sustainable, or otherwise 'good' foods. Such foods are supposed to be unrestrained by oligopolistic structures of food supply, economic inequality, misinformation, or the misleading lobbying campaigns of the food industry. Our article aims to broaden the discussion about food democracy: focusing on people's freedom to choose the food they want, but also on people's freedom to engage with what they eat and how they want to eat it. This thematizes collective orders of sensing and, more specifically, taste. Based on pragmatist and praxeological studies we pose that tasting food is a matter of historically grown collective practices. In a second step, we assert that the reflexive shaping of such practices is currently dominated by the food industry and related forms of sensory science. Democratizing taste is a matter of people's capacity to self-govern how they experience and enjoy food. To this end, we