“Taste for Life” (“Smag for Livet” in Danish) is a unique interdisciplinary research and communication center with focus on taste, food and the senses. The center involves researchers from the humanities (pedagogical and didactical scientists), natural sciences (sensory scientists and gastrophysicists), and social sciences (anthropologists) as well as educators (preschool, elementary, secondary and vocational schools, colleges and universities) and chefs.

Through interdisciplinary research collaboration and communication we attempt to span the perceived chasm separating food-sensory science and the humanities and social sciences. We do so by engaging scholars from different disciplines in a close, collaborative effort hereby generating new knowledge on taste.

The center thus includes researchers from several universities and colleges, chefs from innovation kitchens, and teachers from elementary schools, high schools and vocational educations. By integrating research, taste, learning, didactics and communication, our projects focus on three main areas: sensory sciences and didactics; gastrophysics and the integration of scientific disciplines; and innovation and honing of culinary skills.

While we teach pupils, students and the broader public in educational institutions and festivals about and through taste, we also study their use of taste, taste preferences, and learning processes by gathering empirical data for anthropological, sensory and pedagogical research.

At the conference, we wish to present selected data and theory of taste across fields of science and arts as well as examples of our work as case-studies of interdisciplinary research and teaching. The presentations for the session “Sensory Pedagogies” will be as follows, each presentation being very short (5-7 minutes) followed by questions and dialogue with the participants led by Amy Trubek as discussant.