Tasting vs. Eating: The Methodic and Situated Differentiation of Embodied Multisensorial Activities in Social Interaction

Abstract

Ordinary language describes food practices with verbs such as to eat, guzzle, munch, and taste, which show that participants differentiate between various ways of absorbing food and drinks in a morally accountable manner. This chapter discusses and systematically documents how participants in social interaction orient to the difference between eating and tasting, casting light on mundane practices, their embodied dimension, and their intelligibility and normativity. By so doing, the chapter addresses several challenges of multimodal analysis: the identification of embodied complex multimodal Gestalts, their situated details, their systematicity across contexts, and their temporal organization and embeddedness in the current activity, in terms of multiactivity or not. Moreover, practices like eating and tasting concern forms of corporeality still poorly addressed in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, which relate not only to multimodality but also to multisensoriality. The chapter offers a systematic study of these practices across contexts, in different linguistic and cultural settings (a working day in a professional kitchen in Spain, commercial encounters at a market in Alsace/France, and dinners in a gastronomic restaurant in Lyon/France).