Multisensory experiences with and of food: representing taste visually and verbally during food ateliers in a Reggio Emilia perspective

This paper offers an example of what a sensuous approach to food and taste education can look like by investigating the role of learners’ senses when taste experiences are translated into words and drawings. The context of the Reggio Emilia approach – and specifically the food atelier setting – creates a space to explore food and taste based on the pedagogy of listening and reflective taste pedagogy, where each participant’s individual taste experience is central. The authors describe a non-formal, online food atelier gathering data from 92 participants (78 children/adolescents and 14 adults) from 15 countries, focusing on learners’ articulated taste experiences of freely chosen foods through their descriptions and depictions of their taste experience. The findings offer insight into learners’ multimodal articulations of their experiences of tasting foods, starting from each individual’s visual/verbal interpretation, thus building bridges between (abstract) concepts and language on the one side, and sensuous bodily experiences on the other.