Changing Tastes: How Foods Tasted in the Early Modern Period and How They Taste Now

Steven Shapin (School of Advanced Study, University of London)

Abstract:

In dietetic and natural philosophical frameworks of the period from Antiquity to the seventeenth century, the subjective experiences of taste, and indeed the experiences of digestion, testified to the make-up of the world's edible portions.  That is, such subjective experiences might be both philosophically and practically reliable.  How did that framework help early modern eaters make sense of their bodies and that portion of the world that constituted their aliment?  How did that sense-making capacity change over time, as new medical and scientific frameworks emerged from the eighteenth century and, finally, became scientifically dominant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?  What happened to the subjective experiences of taste when they no longer indexed how the world really is?  How has the vocabulary used to describe taste changed?  And how do we now know about the edible world?

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