Green Frames: A Semantic Study in the Lexicon of Babyleaf Salad

How do we communicate a sensory experience of food? For example, we most probably would describe the sensory experience of a food product as “It was good, I liked it”, but would probably not be able to describe the sensory characteristics of the various products with some precision. It seems that sensory aspects vary in how difficult they are to express verbally (Engen 1991); we do not use the same degree of precision of taste, smell and texture as we do to vision (Meilgaard et al. 2006). It has been argued that perceptual descriptions of colours and odours are based on different organizational principles (Richardson and Zucco 1989). Colours seem to involve a lexical system that is organized in memory, while odour perception is characterized by flexibility and adaptability but with a nonverbal coding system (Engen 1987). About 400,000 odorous substances exist, and it is not clear how many of these are similar or how many classes there might be (Engen 1982). Thus, to characterize the perceived odour and flavour (in which odour is involved) is a complex task (Amerine et al. 1965). The human being is equipped with mechanisms that could guarantee that we, to some extent, perceive the same thing with our “higher” senses, vision and audition. But the “lower” senses in the oro-nasal cavity do not function with the same accuracy when it comes to how we perceive things – they rely more on learning, memories and experiences (Koster 2003). Other circumstances such as gender and age could of course also affect the ability to detect and identify different sensory properties (Richardson and Zucco 1989). Without a description of the sensory qualities, the individual profiles of the item in question could not be captured.From a linguistic point of view, sensory studies seem to include many aspects highly relevant to different linguistic areas. Since sensory descriptions of food mainly operate with words, such as crisp, tender and nutty, including their conceptual content, lexical and cognitive semantics seem to be a fruitful approach to studying and developing sensory descriptions. But in spite of the central role of the lexicon in describing sensory qualities of food, surprisingly little attention has been paid to linguistic aspects of sensory language, which may be due to the fact that sensory studies and linguistics belong to different academic disciplines. Briefly, in sensory studies, some guidelines are usually used for words and definitions, e.g. the ISO standard and ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) Noble et al. (1987) created a system for aromatic flavour for wine arranged in a partly taxonomic and semantic domain-based wheel, i.e. rather general semantic domains such as “fruity” and “nutty”. The specific-general dimension in the wheel is obvious; the general “fruity” leads to the more specific “berry” and “strawberry” in the outer tier of the wheel. More recently Pickering and Demiglio (2008) used the same model for a white wine’s mouthfeel. There are a large number of studies where sensory vocabularies are discussed and developed; some recent examples are Duffrin and Pomper (2006), Carunchia Whetstine et al. (2007), Hongsoongnern and Chambers (2008) and Civille et al. (2010) regarding pawpaw fruit puree, Cheddar cheese, tomatoes and almonds respectively. However inspiring and important in sensory studies and marketing, these works are not always very systematic from a linguistic point of view. Several of the studies mentioned above use a wheel model to categorize the sensory descriptors, but as may be seen in for example Duffrin and Pomper (2006), the wheel form can make the semantic subcategorization tricky; in this “pawpaw fruit puree sensory wheel”, the words are not categorized at all except their grouping into different sensory dimensions such as texture, flavour etc. Besides, the wheel form seems to be best suited for one sensory dimension at a time, as may be seen in for example the wine aroma wheel of Noble et al. (1987). In this wheel, though, the word groups are sometimes a bit fuzzy semantically; for example, olives, asparagus and green beans are grouped together as a subcategory of “canned/cooked”, and the taxonomies are often asymmetrical in that the same word is sometimes used on several levels (for example “nutty” and “floral”, which both occupy two levels in the wheel), while the corresponding levels in other sectors show specification (“fruity” and on the next level “tropical fruit”). It may be assumed that a cross-disciplinary meeting between sensory studies and linguistics could provide interesting views leading to expanded awareness of the importance of semantics in the future development of different sensory vocabularies, as shown in a study by Swahn et al. (2010).