2021.Nov.16

REPORTS

Report on the Lecture by Dr. Ai Hisano “Taste and Vision in History: The Transformation of “Aesthetics” and the Rise of Consumer Society”

On Friday, May 28, 2021, B’AI Global Forum held a lecture by Dr. Ai Hisano, who joined B’AI as an associate professor and the University of Tokyo Excellent Young Researcher. Dr. Hisano specializes in the history of the senses, technology, and business, and has conducted historical research on color, taste, and vision of food, especially in the 20th-century United States. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Delaware. Her findings have been published as Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat (Harvard University Press) and recognized internationally. In this lecture, we also invited Prof. Shunji Yamanaka, who is a professor at the University of Tokyo and an expert in the field of design, as a commentator. Many audiences posted questions in a Zoom chat box, which led to a lively discussion.

 

Dr. Hisano explained that food color needs to be understood from social, cultural, and technological analytical perspectives, and that “natural (or correct) color” is epistemologically constructed. For example, the perception that bananas are yellow is a result of the standardization and mass production at the end of the 19th century. Namely, red bananas were not suitable for long-distance transportation, so yellow ones were mass-produced and advertised through color lithographs. The perception that meat is fresher when it is red is also due to the fact that customers are able to choose their own products in supermarkets. They avoid brown meat, so technologies such as General Electronic’s light bulbs were developed to make meat look fresh red. As discussed above, “natural colors” are the results of the acceptance of artificially constructed colors as natural. Dr. Hisano also explained that one of the background to the visual appeal of food is the gendered visual environment. Constructed color is not just a story of technological development. Dr. Hisano explained the situation where sensory perception (aesthetics) is emphasized in the expansion of capitalist society as “aesthetic capitalism,” and she will also clarify how the transformation of urban space affects its composition in the future.

 

After the lecture part, Dr. Yamanaka discussed the issue of the gap between functional beauty that is intrinsically natural and the artificial beauty, which may have destroyed some things, by taking the example of the automobile industry, in which he was involved as a designer. In response, Dr. Hisano pointed out that there is a movement to restore the natural taste of food while the appearance does not necessarily correspond to the actual taste and texture, and that in the case of Japan, the first half of the 20th century, when westernization was underway, there may has been a freer sense of not depending on mass production. The audience asked questions related to the contemporary situation, such as growing interest in “Instagrammable” pictures, the strong interest in sight rather than taste, and the contradiction between mass production and uniqueness.