How Sight—Not Taste, Smell, or Touch—Became the Sense of the Supermarket
When it comes to buying food, sight has usurped all other senses. What are the consequences of relegating smell, taste, and touch to the sidelines?
Ai Hisano is a senior lecturer at the Graduate School of Economics at Kyoto University, Japan, and a former Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow in Business History at Harvard Business School. She is the author of Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat, which won the 2020 Hagley Prize in Business History and the 2020 Shimizu Hiroshi Book Award (Japanese Association for American Studies).
When it comes to buying food, sight has usurped all other senses. What are the consequences of relegating smell, taste, and touch to the sidelines?