Saturday, March 15, 2014
Congressional B (Omni Shoreham)
As food consumption is increasingly linked with costly and debilitating diseases such as obesity or diabetes, scholars such as Claude Fischler, Jessica Mudry, and Amy Trubek have argued for the implementation of a discourses of taste built on French methods of tasting (dégustation) as a key step in combatting the ills of the Western diet. However, discourses of taste obfuscate the role of scientific and technological innovation in shaping consumer taste, leaving public health policy makers with an incomplete understanding of how consumers make taste judgments. Using archival materials including promotional ephemera and medical reports and contemporary media sources, this paper examines the reframing of the taste of mineral water in France from that of a medicine during the Belle Epoque to that of a food in the late twentieth century. I argue that as medical usage of mineral water gave way to alimentary usage, the core concepts of mineral water therapy were resurrected and repackaged to overcome consumer distaste for certain flavor profiles. By surmounting consumer distaste through building on a largely forgotten medical past, producers transformed consumer desire. This paper explores the intersection between the analytical, quantitative, “rational” world with the ephemeral, messy, sensorial world, and will provide European scholars with a deeper understanding of how resurrection of old concepts can complicate and transform scientific “progress,” while simultaneously offering insights to nutrition and public health policy makers.
