Abstract :
[en] During long-term fieldworks, I accompanied several types of sensory expert panels, particularly on food products, which had the mission to discriminate different sorts of products and define their respective sensory profile. Their quest to an object practically exploitable in an industrial and commercial context is the center of my PhD thesis. The specificity of expert panels is to search to avoid all kind of idiosyncratic experiences to create a common perception by testing “objectively”.
I was interested to observe the period of training to understand how those people had acquired their expertise, and how their attention toward their own sensations were entangled to scientific infrastructures. I assisted to the emergence of a particular world, in which the classical categories for science practices and taste perception were completely blurred. To establish a common truth, through sturdy and stable categories, appears to be compatible with personal moods and dispositions, singular and hedonic judgments, sociocultural grounded sensorium, contingent elements, and indeterminate parameters. Resorting to standard tests, educated and coached judges, statistical treatments, specific vocabulary, comparisons to physic-chemical analysis and various other apparatuses, these labs tempt to define and assess some food products.
Sensory analyses present interesting opportunities to challenge the activity of testing. This very particular professional activity has to show us numerous lighting perspectives on daily practices in this modern world: about industry, sciences and economy.
First, because this proper word of “test” is often ambiguous and equivocal. It could be used to refer to a large space of activity. The goal of those examinations could be multiple: to outline consumers‟ feelings and choices, to check the quality of production, to search new applications, or to improve a current array. In other occasions, “test” is also used to for searching good descriptions, to elaborate an efficient classification for a specific domain of activity, or even to document an unknown object. At the same time, various other expressions are employed as synonym, to name the same single session. By confronting test to other close concepts, as judgment, assessment, analysis, experience or exam, to cite a few of them, I would outline some specificity, but also multiplicity of testing.
Second, members of sensory panels (and moreover their supervisors) have to interact with entities difficult to seize and to handle with accuracy (e.g. perception, language, memory...). They cope with sophisticated methodologies and specific infrastructures, often obstacles rather solutions, in mode to test correctly their products. Because that complexity, the protocol of the test is regularly built with the members of the panel, who are at the same time the objects of the test and the “tool” of measure to approach the perception of the objects. Collaboration and coordination to organize tests is another relevant question.
Finally, test is also an opportunity to open out the legitimacy of professionals: marketers, scientists, managers, producers and many other do not hesitate to rely on sensory analysis to prove their efficiency and to enforce their actions. Test is thus also an apparatus of justification.
