Curricular Tastescapes

• In Event: Tasting Curriculum

Abstract

When is the last time you paused while munching on an apple and wondered at the complexity of the sensory experience
—Prescott, 2013, p. 19

Despite the unctuous affordances of long fermented humanities, the saccharine rewards and savory punishments administered by behaviorism, progressives’ chewy pragmatisms, critical theory’s liberally prescribed social tonics, and the reconceptualist’s crunchy, complicated conversations, students, teachers, and educational scholars remain hungry beings. The tastescapes in this paper ask, what might feed us? Or please us? Or both?
It’s a crepuscular pleasure. Her pungent trumpets’ nearly narcotic smell-song drenches summer’s lusty dusk. Wild and untrimmed, diaphanous funnels flutter and flush against sunset. Fused petal lips part. The top lobe is wide. The lower lip folds modestly underneath. Her narrow corollas spiral back to uncover ivory filamented stamens boasting sunshine anthers. It takes just a decisive pinch at the very tip of the swollen calyx where tube meets slender stem, and then a light, steady pull. Her stile slides out the back end punctuated by a tiny sticky stigma bearing a honeyed happy ending that congeals sweetly on my tongue.
Consider yourself beckoned to the thicket of my tastescape. Probyn (2003) asks, is “eating the new sensuality?” This paper says yes and invites you to trace my topographies of taste with your own tongue. Kabat-Zinn, (2014) instructs that in order to do that “we have to take it into our mouths ourselves and taste it in order to know it. Here, the tasting is the knowing” (p. 103). As Serres (1985/2008) reminds, such knowledge is necessarily fragmentary and as temporary as the “twilight-colored smell of honeysuckle” (Faulkner, 1929/1984. p. 95). Serres (2008) writes: “smells and tastes are transitory, evanescent, ephemeral. Differential. The map is refined like delicate silk or a spider’s web. With neither stock nor total, a fragment of time” (p. 156). My narrative here, what I borrow from Wessell (2010) to call a tastescape, doesn’t aim to condense curiosity, desire, and knowing into a rectilinear road map of place or offer a capsule of clocked and measured memory. Rather, this tastescape is cross-modal, living curriculum that meanders across fecundities of flavor that are both emergent and preservative (Richardson, 2021). In this paper chapter, tastes coalesce and dissipate, drop by droplet, like nectar glistening on the author’s lips.
Berry (1992) describes and prescribes eating as an extensive pleasure bound up with accurate consciousness of who and what the eaten (tasted?) and the eater (taster?) are to each other, where they come from and a critical understanding of the conditions which produce both (p. 151).
According to Berry (1992):
Eating with the fullest pleasure—pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance—is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend (p. 152).
Perhaps embodying curriculum-as-tasting or tasting curriculum might offer a life-sustaining taste of such pleasure.

Author

• Laura M. Jewett, University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley