What influences how people taste the food they eat? This paper investigates how
sensual engagements with food, particularly tasting it, become contextualized in
everyday life practices and social science theories. Based on ethnographic fieldwork
in a Swiss hospital, the Kantonsspital Graubünden, the paper analyzes what
doctors, patients and nurses bring up as shaping sensual engagements with food.
It also investigates how sensual engagements with food become contextualized in
three social scientific studies on “taste,” “eating” and “tasting.” The paper argues
that the three different contexts developed in these studies, namely “society,” “food
culture” and “in practice,” do not help to make sense of what was observed and
was brought up by the people working and living in the hospital as shaping sensual
engagements with food: what happens before, after and around eating. The paper
therefore adds “mundane goings-on” as a fourth context and concludes that contexualizing tasting allows the addressing of social issues. It recommends further
investigation of the relation between contexts.