Judging, Tasting, Knowing Good Food

Though public discourses of good food exert a powerful influence, cooks and eaters construct our own understandings in ways that may simultaneously reflect and resist these norms. Our knowledge of good food may sometimes present itself as vague (Schaefer et al., this issue), yet is often quite nuanced, based on disparate factors-economic, logistical, nutritional, temporal and political, along with individual preferences-as the articles featured in this special cluster illustrate (Thomas et al., Tsui, this issue). Cooks (and also eaters) often exhibit sophisticated epistemic functions not unlike those of judges. They navigate multiple modes of knowledge-lay and expert, embodied, situated spatially and relationally-between eaters and food environments, between eaters and cooks. Cooks' and eaters' discussion of good food reveals moral imperatives translated into foodways, a range of interpersonal and institutional interactions and the traces of social hierarchies, as we see in these articles. Thus, good food is less a series of discrete choices by individuals than a domain in which cooks, eaters and their environments constitute interdependent networks. Through the emerging picture of these processes, this special cluster advances our knowledge of the cultural politics of good food, the epistemic politics of food choices, the workplace as an underexplored site of food cultures and just and sustainable health promotion efforts through food.