Gastronomy as Sensory Engineering

Is gastronomy a case of sensory engineering? Is sensory engineering relevant to gastronomy?We argue that gastronomy is a familiar and widespread example of sensory engineering. This has two consequences. First, we can use our everyday acquaintance with gastronomy to illuminate the nature of sensory engineering and to interpret emerging and exotic cases, such as augmented reality, psychedelics, and artificial sensory organs. Second, by viewing gastronomy as sensory engineering, we can clarify how gastronomy differs from cooking more generally.Gastronomy’s ubiquity makes it easy to overlook; however, therein lies its philosophical utility. We understand gastronomy better than any general theory of sensory engineering or novel example of it. Gastronomic experiences are often carefully engineered. Sometimes, culinary interventions are as simple as hiding broccoli’s bitter taste under a blanket of cheese—so the kids will finally eat their vegetables. Other instances are more involved. Gastronomes orchestrate a broad range of tools to produce specific and complex sensations by focusing on everything from subtle details of food chemistry to plating, ambient music, and background scents. Examining the relationship between cases like these and sensory engineering not only helps us understand what sensory engineering is, it also highlights what makes gastronomy unique and differentiates it from cooking.Conceptually, sensory engineering has its roots in dream engineering (Carr et al. 2020; Macpherson 2024). Here, different dream elements are introduced, suppressed, or altered by someone’s intervention. For example, dairy increases the chances of disturbing dream contents (Nielsen and Powell 2015)—the so-called “Rarebit Fiend” (Welsh or otherwise)—while certain scents bring about dream contents associated with them—minty odors giving rise to icy dreamscapes (Schredl et al. 2009, 2014; Amores and Maes 2017).Sensory engineering extends the concept of dream engineering to include modifications of perceptual sensations where, unlike when we dream, we are supposedly in touch with reality. Sensations are manipulated by controlling what reaches our sensory receptors, how our receptors respond to stimuli, or how the resulting sensory information is processed. Consequently, sensory engineering can enhance or undermine perception’s utility and trustworthiness as a source of knowledge: revealing previously hidden aspects of reality, blinding us to what would otherwise be manifest, or blending facts with phantoms.The range of sensory engineering is vast because sensory interventions may vary in numerous ways. Consider, first, the intervention’s target. Sensory engineers may influence any number of external or internal lynchpins of perceptual processes: sunglasses alter the stimulus but leave the sensory system itself undisturbed; artificial sensory organs, in contrast, alter the pathways delivering sensory signals; and psychedelics alter how the signal is internally processed. Second, consider the intervention’s method. Some interventions are technical (e.g., hearing aids), others pharmacological (e.g., LSD), still others psychological (guided relaxation techniques or MKUltra-style introductions of subliminal triggers). Third, consider the intervention’s precision. Both light-filtering goggles and hallucinogens alter color perception, but only the goggles can filter out precisely one wavelength. Fourth, consider the goal of the intervention. Some effects are fully intended, some partially, and others not at all. If you started to hallucinate after eating Albert’s mushroom casserole, your hallucinations might be unintentional (if he isn’t an experienced mushroom forager) or intentional (if he is). Even if his goal was to make you hallucinate, what you hallucinate is largely out of his hands (though he might exert partial control by providing additional input like playing music or telling a story). Other effects might be foreseeable but unintended, e.g., the nasty taste of Albert’s dish. Fifth, consider varying degrees of controllability. While hearing aids can be easily turned off or tuned to specific environments, the effects of LSD can hardly be stopped once they take hold. Sixth, consider the intervention’s duration. Trips caused by DMT last less than thirty minutes; an artificial lesion of one’s visual cortex lasts a lifetime. Finally, consider the intervention’s blatancy: if you see Pikachu in augmented reality, it is obvious that someone tempered with your experience; but in “substitutional reality,” the faked-in elements are built to look real, and real elements are doctored to look faked-in, thereby hiding the engineer’s influence (Suzuki et al. 2012).Because cases of sensory engineering appear to be so heterogenous and because some are so novel, it is hard to capture them cleanly or to have ready intuitions about them. Still, the questions raised by sensory engineering are deep and vexing: Do we perceive in these cases or not? Is there any knowledge to be had? If yes, then how secure, safe, or sound is our perceptual knowledge when perceptual processes are under some engineer’s influence? Can the manipulated aspects be vehicles for knowledge or are they its defeaters? When can we distinguish the engineered from the non-engineered aspects? What is the content of our engineered sensations? To get some grip on these questions, we propose to let gastronomy guide us; at the same time, we also think that sensory engineering is relevant to differentiating gastronomy from cooking more generally.The questions raised by existing cases of sensory engineering are urgent, in part because these cases are so novel that we often do not know how to think about them. There might be analogies in the philosophical literature, e.g.,: Are sensory engineers mirroring Descartes’s evil demon? Are the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave mirroring engineered sensations? But these philosophical analogies often come with a theoretical baggage that we might not want to impose. We propose that gastronomy can serve as a theory-lean guide to thinking about sensory engineering and that, in turn, sensory engineering can help us better understand gastronomy.For this back-and-forth between gastronomy and sensory engineering to work, there have to be parallels between familiar cases of gastronomy and exotic cases of sensory engineering. Are there such parallels? Yes.Gastronomy clearly involves complex stimuli that are carefully engineered by seasoned chefs: the food itself. However, if we consider any alteration of stimuli to be a case of sensory engineering, we end up with a deflationary understanding of sensory engineering. Consider how adding salt to a meal, painting a wall, or fixing a squeaky floorboard would then be instances of sensory engineering, which goes too far.But gastronomy involves more than the mixing of ingredients and thereby goes beyond cooking in two ways. First, it is focused on the experience of eating and not on, say, convenience or preservation. This involves a whole host of other techniques beyond the mixing of ingredients, an awareness of the holistic setting in which food is consumed, and how these influence a guest’s overall experience. Second, even where cooking is primarily concerned with gustatory experience, gastronomy employs a higher degree of accuracy and knowledge, not unlike the way that mechanical engineering, for instance, differs from weekend carpentry.Clever gastronomes may introduce elements to hide others: Champagne’s bubbles mask its high sugar content. This resembles cases of substitutional reality where, for example, broken windows are overlayed with unbroken simulations, hiding the neighborhood’s decline. Gastronomes may use multisensory integration, such that scents, sights, sounds, and smells combine to produce a gastronomic whole which can be influenced by technical means. For example, limp potato chips seem crispier when accompanied by an artificial crunching noise (Spence 2015). This is comparable to virtual reality engineering in games, where coordinated increases of brightness and loudness may produce the illusory feeling of being close to a simulated fireplace.In other cases, gastronomes may target sensory receptors themselves: the “miracle berry” synsepalum dulcificum makes sour foods taste sweet by binding a specific protein (miraculin) to our taste buds. By changing the way stimuli are processed, this resembles a pharmacological intervention at the level of perceptual transducers, similar to numbing agents in surface anesthetics.More so, gastronomes may affect the processing of the sensory signal in the central nervous system. Alcohol is commonly paired with food, but intoxication heightens our preferences for savory foods over sweet foods (Schrieks et al. 2015), making you prefer to end your meal with cheese rather than dessert. Alcohol and other psychoactive ingredients not only affect our preferences, but they also influence the sensory aspects of eating. In that regard, gastronomy resembles other cases of sensory engineering targeting internal processing like psychedelics that, e.g., produce comparable effects on preferences when it comes to music (Gloecker et al. 2024).Gastronomy is one of the most familiar and frequent cases of sensory engineering. From this perspective, we can see what makes it special as a form of cooking. In that regard, sensory engineering provides a conceptual framework to theorize about gastronomy, emphasizing the craft that goes into shaping our experiences of the ingredients we perceive.Studying gastronomy also enhances our understanding of the concept of sensory engineering and provides a valuable comparison. Our intuitions about gastronomy are often much clearer and, arguably, better-founded than those concerning either esoteric cases (like artificial sensory organs and psychedelics), or philosophical theories and thought experiments.Using intuitions about gastronomy clarifies puzzling cases of sensory engineering. Allow us to illustrate: Are elements introduced by sensory engineering a form of perception or not? When a sensory intervention affects the stimulus but not our sensory receptors or perceptual processing (as in Champagne’s bubbles concealing its sugar content), we are more willing to treat the resulting sensation as true-to-the-object. We think of Champagne as being tart and fresh despite its high sugar content, not as secretly sweet despite our tart experience of it. When interventions target our sensory receptors or processing, however, we tend to think that the object is misrepresented: the miracle berry does not “reveal” the hidden sweetness of lemons, it makes them seem illusorily sweet. Here our clear intuitions about gastronomy provide a guide to interpreting novel cases. Analogously, one should think that remote vision via cameras, for instance, is closer to veridical perception because it leaves receptors and processing intact—unlike psychedelically altered visual experiences, which do create illusions and hallucinations.Far from pumping intuitions about far-out scenarios or exploiting contentious theories, gastronomy provides a familiar ground from which to consider harder cases of sensory engineering. Similarly, these cases are relevant for theorizing about the science and art of gastronomy. Gastronomy is not philosophically interesting in spite of its prosaic nature, but precisely because of it.Brandon Ashby was funded by the DFG/AHRC-Project SENSOR (FI 2369/3-1); Sascha Benjamin Fink by the same grant and by the BMBF-Project PSYCHEDELSI (01GP2214C). We are grateful to our colleagues Derek Brown, Jack Lyons, and Fiona Macpherson for their insightful comments.