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Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat
Ai Hisano exposes how corporations, the American government, and consumers shaped the colors of what we eat and even the colors of what we consider “natural,” “fresh,” and “wholesome.”
The yellow of margarine, the red of meat, the bright orange of “natural” oranges―we live in the modern world of the senses created by business. Ai Hisano reveals how the food industry capitalized on color, and how the creation of a new visual vocabulary has shaped what we think of the food we eat. Constructing standards for the colors of food and the meanings we associate with them―wholesome, fresh, uniform―has been a business practice since the late nineteenth century, though one invisible to consumers. Under the growing influences of corporate profit and consumer expectations, firms have sought to control our sensory experiences ever since.
Visualizing Taste explores how our perceptions of what food should look like have changed over the course of more than a century. By examining the development of color-controlling technology, government regulation, and consumer expectations, Hisano demonstrates that scientists, farmers, food processors, dye manufacturers, government officials, and intermediate suppliers have created a version of “natural” that is, in fact, highly engineered. Retailers and marketers have used scientific data about color to stimulate and influence consumers’―and especially female consumers’―sensory desires, triggering our appetites and cravings. Grasping this pivotal transformation in how we see, and how we consume, is critical to understanding the business of food.
The yellow of margarine, the red of meat, the bright orange of “natural” oranges―we live in the modern world of the senses created by business. Ai Hisano reveals how the food industry capitalized on color, and how the creation of a new visual vocabulary has shaped what we think of the food we eat. Constructing standards for the colors of food and the meanings we associate with them―wholesome, fresh, uniform―has been a business practice since the late nineteenth century, though one invisible to consumers. Under the growing influences of corporate profit and consumer expectations, firms have sought to control our sensory experiences ever since.
Visualizing Taste explores how our perceptions of what food should look like have changed over the course of more than a century. By examining the development of color-controlling technology, government regulation, and consumer expectations, Hisano demonstrates that scientists, farmers, food processors, dye manufacturers, government officials, and intermediate suppliers have created a version of “natural” that is, in fact, highly engineered. Retailers and marketers have used scientific data about color to stimulate and influence consumers’―and especially female consumers’―sensory desires, triggering our appetites and cravings. Grasping this pivotal transformation in how we see, and how we consume, is critical to understanding the business of food.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published November 19, 2019
About the author
Ai Hisano
2 books1 followerAi Hisano is Senior Lecturer at the Graduate School of Economics at Kyoto University, Japan. Winner of the Wilbur Owen Sypherd Prize, Hisano has been Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow in Business History at Harvard Business School. She has published on the food-coloring business, the development of transparent packaging, and gender politics and food marketing.
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December 3, 2024
I read this book bit by bit as a part of a project I was working on and found at every chapter that it was fascinating, well researched and did a good job of providing multiple perspectives which made it seem less biased. All in all the topic of this book I find to be super interesting and full of good anecdotes and facts that colour the way you see the way we perceive food.
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