What We Talk about when We Talk about Food Experiences

Verbally expressing taste experiences is challenging for non-experts, whose subjective and semantically inconsistent descriptions often use basic terms (e.g. sweet, nice), unlike trained experts such as chefs. Understanding non-expert taste expressions is crucial for enhancing communication between humans as well as humans and computers for enhanced human-food interaction experiences. This research investigates how non-experts express taste experiences using common foods as taste stimuli. Study participants were asked to verbalise their subjective experiences of five selected foods (i.e., dark chocolate, crisps, mango juice, lemonade, cheese), each representing one of the five basic tastes (i.e., bitter, salty, sweet, sour, umami). These qualitative data was enriched with self-report questionnaires on the liking, familiarity, and perceived intensity of the taste stimuli. We discuss participants verbalisations with regards to five key dimensions: affective, temporal, embodied, associative, and evaluative, illustrating how expressions unfold in time (diachronic structure) and their specific configurations at different moments (synchronic structure). This exploratory is only forming the beginning to understand the complex, multi-faceted nature of how we talk about food experiences.