Space, Taste and Affect: Atmospheres That Shape the Way We Eat

This book is an exploration of how time, space and social atmospheres contribute to the experience of taste. It demonstrates complex combinations of material, sensual and symbolic atmospheres and social encounters that shape this experience.

Space, Taste and Affect brings together case studies from the fields of sociology, geography, history, psycho-social studies and anthropology to examine debates around how urban designers, architects and market producers manipulate the experience of taste through creating certain atmospheres. The book also explores how the experience of taste varies throughout life, or even during fleeting social encounters, challenging the sense of taste as static. This book moves beyond common narratives that taste is ‘acquired’ or developed, to emphasize the role of psycho-social histories of nostalgia, memories of childhood, migration, trauma and displacement in the experience of we eat and drink. It focuses on entrenched social dimensions of class, value and distinction instead of psychological and neuroscientific conceptualizations of taste and sensuous practices of consumption to be intrinsically linked to the experience of taste in complex ways.

This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, human geography, tourism and leisure studies, anthropology, psychology, arts and literature, architecture and urban design.

Emily Falconer is a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Westminster. Her research focuses on the politics of affect, emotion and embodied encounters in everyday life. Emily has featured on BBC Radio 4: Thinking Allowed(October 2013) to discuss the transformations of food tourism.