As a journalist earlier and a scholar later, I have been reflecting about how to best write about food, especially when I am not developing arguments or explaining facts. How can words convey the sensory or emotional elements that shape our eating experiences and cannot be easily described or defined in neat categories or ideas? That’s why I have been dabbling in poetry, without any pretension to be a poet or aspiration to become one. Here is what came out. Call it an experiment in communication.

As a journalist earlier and a scholar later, I have been reflecting about how to best write about food, especially when I am not developing arguments or explaining facts. How can words convey the sensory or emotional elements that shape our eating experiences and that cannot be easily described or defined in neat categories or ideas? As I have been working at the intersection of design and food, I have been increasingly focusing on objects in their unadulterated,wordless, thoughtless, emotionless “thingness.” Yet, they somehow have agency, in the sense that they have effects on our behaviors, generating feelings, actions, and reactions in us and influencing attitudes and decisions. As designers know very well, things evoke forms of embodied knowledge and performance that are not necessarily discursive but cause intellectual and impassioned ripples. They train human bodies to move and locate themselves in space in particular ways, and to execute automatic gestures that can be quite outside of voluntary control. Yet, at times it feels as though things and their interactions with us resist to be translated into words. A challenge, for a writer.

I have struggled to express how the material qualities of what we ingest – smells, textures, mouthfeel, flavors –  generate affect and color our physical and pre-verbal awareness of ingestion, if any such dimension actually exists. Systematic research is expanding in these fields, as they are quite important for economic sectors ranging from hospitality to food manufacturing. Such studies measure, dissect, quantify. However, I wanted to try another approach, leaving behind my academic methodologies and allowing feelings and sensations to take over and guide my writing. That’s why I have been dabbling in poetry, without any pretension to be a poet or aspiration to become one. Here is what came out. You can call it an experiment.