Sniffing was another visual tool at the disposal of marketers. But merely evoking the senses fails to achieve the complexity that distributed visuality entails.
Distributed visuality, a vision of interdependence among human and nonhuman actors, also draws on visual studies' association of vision with knowledge (John Berger's articulations, for example, in Ways of Seeing). That ways of seeing correspond to ways of knowing suggests what is at stake when looking at food, what scopic regime tends to dominate. If not a disembodied vision, like Cartesian perspectivalism, then at least a de-historicized vision arguably dominates our way of seeing food. While I doubt the Pizza Hut commercial could be considered embodied--it abstracts eating practices into a weird cartoon-ish world--it definitely doesn't offer room for personal narrative, let alone collective memory. Other than some personal work experience in this food industry, where can I recite a history that connects me to the ingredients, or to the place where the tomatoes were grown. More than being a locavore, I'd like to know my food at more than a sensual level.
Meredith Abarca writes about a type of sensory epistemology, sazón, which she locates among working-class Mexican and Mexican American women. Rather than quantify ingredients, measuring out a cup of flour for example, these women measured ingredients according to the taste of a dish. They seasoned, added sazón, according to their own subjective taste. This subjective, perspectival dimension, what Abarca calls al gusto, invites personal experience, memories, and stories into the picture of cooking. Not only are all the senses engaged, but they are subjectively enacted through cooking. Cooking, then, becomes a form of seeing and knowing the world, a distributed visuality that accounts for senses and stories.
The point of (r)evolutionizing how we see food through sazón and other distributed visualities may actually be a rather straightforward task. I certainly don't mind eating Pizza Hut. But shouldn't the ahistorical fast foods, and maybe even the faux-historical mass marketed exotic foods (certain culinary tourist foods), be the exception? Our jouissance can come from rarely eating out, rather than rarely eating a home cooked meal.
