The Sounds Delicious Project studies sound, listening and sonic practices in Danish and French cooking (19th-21st Centuries). The project examines how thinking through sound can help craft new sensibilities to and alternative narratives of food production and environmental relations. The project began with the observation that sound is an important part of what connects people to food and what gives food vitality. On any given day, kitchens vibrate, cooks listen, cooking makes sound. Rhythms of a chopping knife intermingle with sizzling garlic, humming appliances, fragments of conversation, the page turn of a stained cookbook. Cooking is an epistemic site created through multiple knowledge practices. Yet the kitchen has a history of being silenced or considered as noisy. This project explored what turning an ear to food preparation reveals about the kinds of orientations and knowledges that make up food, and the dynamic relationships between humans, nonhumans, and materials.
The project’s main aim was to create a new interdisciplinary dialogue between Sound Studies and Food Studies, one that enriched the study of the senses in everyday cooking and food-making processes, as well as the study of the gustatory. The project’s objectives helped outline a sonic perspective to study food, what this entails, and what new research paths can be generated. The project’s scientific research objectives include:
-Objective 1 identified various sounding and listening practices in different past and present food making situations. This contributes to histories of embodied practices and techniques.
-Objective 2 investigated the framings of various sonic research practices. This includes documenting and analysing the positionalities that such practices bring to food research. This objective relates to epistemologies of observation. It contributes to multisensory anthropology methods and to media studies.
-Objective 3 sketched complex choreographies and sensory constellations between actors and environment that compose the project’s food cases. This contributes to studies of food production and environmental humanities.
These research objectives were accomplished through doing archival, multisensory anthropological, and practice-based research on different culinary topics and case studies.
My approach of “listening in” to food production practices started in the kitchen, and then moved across kitchen boundaries into other areas of food production, such as: urban honey production, milk and cheese production, and salmon fishing. Gustatory topics today are connected to environmental change, sustainability, gender discrimination, and animal, soil, and plant studies. My analyses focused on how the different modes of embodied sonic research that made up my sonic perspective of food contributed to the cultivation of sensibilities that reconnect humans with food. Hearing different agencies and sensing the complex relationships of food production are important for addressing current food problems today.
