On Friday, November 12, 1937, listeners tuning in to "Housekeepers' Chat" — a weekday radio segment produced by the US Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Home Economics —were given a glimpse of the agency’s methods for providing reliable information about food to the public. Usually, these fifteen-minute weekday segments offered recipes from "Aunt Sammy," household tips, and nutrition and family health advice for the effective, scientific housewife.1 On this day, listeners were assured that
even at the Bureau's food laboratories, there were still some tasks that had not been mechanized: "even modern science with all it's [sic] labor-saving machinery hasn't devised a robot that tastes and smells." When it came to evaluating the flavor of food, the
1. Morleen Getz Rouse, "Daytime Radio Programming for the Homemaker: 1926-1956," Journal of Popular Culture 12.2 (1978): 315-327. For broader context on the technical and scientific aspects of home economics, see Amy Sue Bix, “Equipped for Life: Gendered Technical training and Consumerism in Home Economics, 1920-1980,” Technology and Culture 43.4 (October 2002): 728-54, and Carolyn Goldstein, Creating Consumers: Home Economists in Twentieth-Century America, (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2012).
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host announced, "no one but a human being can judge the flavor of the food human beings eat.”2
But who were the human beings whose judgments gained the Bureau’s official scientific imprimatur? These "taste judges" were USDA staff members who were "regularly employed in other work," but who had demonstrated sound and consistent judgment, as well as the ability "to analyze their own reactions to what they taste... [and] express these reactions on the score sheet they are using." The host explained that the Bureau of Home Economics routinely assembled panels of these specially chosen tasters to scientifically evaluate how changes in production methods affected the quality of different foods, including meat, bread, cakes, canned goods, and dairy products. Tasters, however, were never allowed to know the details of the experiments they contributed their sensory capabilities to: "if they did, it might possibly influence their judgment," undermining the evidentiary validity of their conclusions. "In all of these experiments," the chat’s host concluded, "the opinions of taste-testers are really important. Because flavor and aroma are two of the biggest items in food quality, and so far there is no other way to judge them."
This chapter considers the consequences of this proposition: "no one but a human being can judge the flavor of the food human beings eat." With the increasing
industrialization of food production in the 1930s, flavor became an object of scientific
2. "How Does It Taste?" USDA Housekeeper's Chat, Bureau of Home Economics. Broadcast date: Friday, November 12, 1937, 1. Emphasis in original.
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and technical concern for food manufacturers and the federal government. Researchers from multiple disciplines – including chemistry, agriculture, physiology, psychology, home economics, and food technology – working in different institutional settings, harboring a variety of motives, found it necessary to develop standard tools capable of measuring the “organoleptic” qualities of foods: quantifying the various sensory dimensions of flavor experience, including taste, aroma, texture, and appearance.
The "taste panel" — a small group of individuals (trained, tested, but, crucially not “experts”) producing sensory judgements in specialized settings under controlled conditions — first appeared in research and industrial laboratories in the 1930s. By 1950, the taste panel had become the primary research tool within both government and
industry to measure, compare, and evaluate the sensory qualities of foods, including flavor, texture, and visual appeal. Rather than a transitory record of subjective individual preferences, taste panels were expected to produce reliable, stable, and reproducible information about food’s sensory qualities — the type of data that could be evaluated alongside, and correlated with, other, new instrumental measurements and determinations of the chemical and physical properties of foods.
By examining the practices of organoleptic research in their specificities — the formally articulated methods, associated technologies, social structures, and desired outcomes — this chapter tracks a major change in the scientific study of flavor during the 1930s and 1940s. As food-science research increasingly revealed the physicochemical components responsible for the qualities of foods, the sensory aspects of flavor also became the subjects of systematic study and investigation. The interwar and wartime
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years marked the convergence of these two modes of research into flavor, which was increasingly studied in the context of food manufacturing and the sensory changes that occurred during production. The development of the taste panel as a laboratory
instrument shows us not only how flavor was made into a scientific object during this period, but also marks the formation of a model of the subjective, tasting self that could be incorporated into rationalized, industrialized processes of product development and design.3
The first part of this chapter traces the early days of laboratory taste panels, beginning in the 1930s until the Second World War. I show how this instrument developed at the convergence of multiple research programs and needs, shaped by, but distinct from, both traditional practices of "expert tasters" employed in assessing or grading specific commodities, and from new polling and statistical sampling methods from market research.
The second part of this chapter looks at how sensory evaluation, and laboratory taste panels, rose to prominence in the context of army research at the Quartermaster Food and Container Institute. The seminal status of the Quartermaster Institute has been reinforced by historical accounts from some of the scientists who participated in
developing this field — including several who worked at the institute's laboratories in Chicago, and later, Natick, Massachusetts. These accounts often tend to dismiss work
3. Steven Shapin, "Sciences of Subjectivity," Social Studies of Science 42, no 2 (2012): 170-184.
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done in the 1930s as the pre-history of the discipline.4 Beginning this story in the 1930s
— when methodologies, research protocols, institutional settings, and disciplinary identities were still in flux — reveals a great deal about the diverse interests that were involved in the project of shaping the taste panel into a scientific instrument. The
Quartermaster's Food Acceptance Research Laboratory was dominated by psychologists, and their preeminence there has in some sense foregrounded the contributions from psychometrics and psychophysics, while minimizing the contributions from other fields.5
Taking a closer look at the work that preceded the Food Acceptance Research Laboratory exposes the key contributions of chemists, home economists, and food technologists, not to mention the technicians, administrative staff, factory workers, and others who
volunteered to serve on panels. Their material technologies, skills, professions, and social arrangements laid the groundwork for the later claiming of sensory science by
psychologists.
The chapter concludes by following the path from military food research back into civilian food production. I look at the relatively rapid acceptance of sensory evaluation methods in industry and non-industry laboratories, and consider the
consequences both for the ways that industrialized foods are made to taste, and the ways that consumer desires are probed, presumed, configured, and satisfied.
4 Herbert L. Meiselman and Howard G. Schutz, “History of Food Acceptance Research in
the US Army,” Appetite 40 (2003): 199-216; Howard G. Schutz, "Evolution of the Sensory Science Discipline," Food Technology 52, no 8 (August 1998): 42-6; David R. Peryam "Sensory Evaluation -- The Early Days," Food Technology 46, no 1 (January 1990): 86-89. A practitioner's account with a more generous view of work in the 1930s is Rose Marie Pangborn, "Sensory Evaluation of Foods: A Look Backward and Forward,"
Food Technology (September 1964): 63-7.