Food as the vehicle of senses Sharing taste through a television program

This paper first reviews literatures regarding the intersection of food and senses, and then focuses on how taste is developed and shared through the long-lasting Japanese television program“ Cooking Today” . Following Appadurai (1996) in his discussions of“ global flows” as relational and contextual rather than scalar or spatial, it is assumed that food is not only the entity of nutrition but also a vehicle of senses associated with a particular locality. Therefore, taste should be analyzed in terms of relativity and variability in the context of worldwide interconnectedness which is recently revealing more fluid configurations of time and space. Television programs were being broadcast in Japan in the decades following World War Ⅱ in order to contribute to post-war democratization. Because they were broadcast during the day, they focused primarily on daytime audiences, namely, women. One such program was a cooking show called Kyouno Ryouri (Cooking Today), which introduced women to new tastes as well as a new identity as a new housewife. As television sets became popular even in rural areas, this identity was eventually shared among women throughout Japan. This demonstrates that the taste of food presented in this cooking show was the medium that delivered a new and variable identity. This also suggests that taste can have meaning, emotion, and value even before actual cooking practices impact the sensory properties