Four Field Colloquium Series: " In Tastes Lost and Found: Remembering the Real Flavor of Fat Pork" by Brad Weiss

How do we describe the materiality of taste? Taste, in both its prescriptive and descriptive versions, is often assessed as a primarily discursive form.  But at a perceptual level, taste has its own specific qualities that are not just narratable, or referential but felt.

How do we describe the materiality of taste? Taste, in both its prescriptive and descriptive versions, is often assessed as a primarily discursive form.  But at a perceptual level, taste has its own specific qualities that are not just narratable, or referential but felt. And it is these felt qualities within lived experience that continue to merit our ever closer consideration. This paper focuses, in particular, on the taste of pork fat – and fatty pork - and my primary concern is the taste of pork fat’s phenomenological qualities, as well as its political economic ones.  These qualities can be discerned recent efforts to transform the way that pork is produced, and to promote alternative models of meat production