Brown Bag Lecture: Masters of Flavor: Sensory Analysis and High-Industrial Food

Flavor is a complex biochemical property that encompasses the range of sensory impressions generated when someone bites into a piece of food. For the producers and industrial scientists this combination of tactile reactions, sound, smell, and taste has been a great challenge to master. In the mid-20th century the issues related to food flavor resulted in the formation of a new field of industrial research called sensory analysis. The field stands out in the history of science due to the subjective nature of the matter it targeted and for the range of ingenious methods developed to turn flavor into stable and generalizable data. Sensory analysts used professional tasters, test panels, machinery that emulated the human senses, and laboratory devices like mass spectrometry and gas chromatography. In his talk Pettersson will discuss how the field emerged, what systems of experimental methods were used, and how historical studies of sensory analysis might shed light on how the flavor of food changed during the high-industrial era.