Reviewed by:

• Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat by Ai Hisano
• Barkha Kagliwal (bio)

Bright oranges at the supermarket, yellow butter available throughout the year, and pink cakes at birthday parties: in Visualizing Taste, Ai Hisano examines how the appearance of everyday foods has changed from 1870 to 1970 in the United States.

Hisano argues that the industrialized mass production and sale of food depends on controlling consumers' senses. Food is reduced to its "eye appeal"—in particular, to its color—at the expense of smell, taste, texture, shape, and size (p. 21). Various scientific and technological interventions aided this transformation, including standardizing color through spectrophotometers, quantifying beer through tintometers, and testing through the colorimeter. This "chromatic revolution" ensured the predictability of colors for consumers, higher sales for producers, and safety from adulteration for regulators (p. 20). While visual culture studies focus on print media such as advertising to housewives through colorful leaflets, magazines, and brochures, Hisano demonstrates how color control also altered food as well as consumers' gender and class identities. [End Page 1224]

Natural dyes were common before synthetic alternatives offered an extensive spectrum of artificial colors. This fundamentally changed not only the color of processed foods like Jell-O and meats but also of fresh foods like fruits and vegetables—all at the behest of corporate interests. The author reveals the irony that growers, producers, and retailers redefined these "artificial" colors as "fresh" and "natural." Hisano supports these claims with evidence from trade journals, media articles, marketing brochures, and home economist statements, among other sources.

The book contributes a visual perspective to literature on agriculture, food processing, and retail in the history of technology. Several studies have provided an approach to understanding the entire chain of mass producing food: Deborah Fitzgerald has analyzed the changes that led to factory farms; Shane Hamilton studied how food processing changed labor relations in meat packing; and Franck Cochoy examined the shift from local groceries to the self-service layouts of retail stores. Hisano's contribution to this literature is to show that many aspects of these processes have been subject to producers' reduction of food to its visual dimension. This change pervaded every aspect of the industrialized food system: controlling consumer perceptions through marketing; changing the very object of purchase, for instance, by eliminating green oranges; adding artificial dyes not only to processed foods but also to canned, and eventually, even to fresh produce; making the branding on packaging bright, which did not conform to the natural color of foods; and finally, controlling the retail environment through lighting, layout, refrigeration, and clear packaging. Competition between producers and the relationship between the state and corporate interests remade the very boundaries of processed and fresh produce, natural and artificial food color, and harmful versus harmless dyes.

The book highlights conflicting stakeholder perspectives: those of growers, dye producers, food processors, retailers, scientists, USDA and FDA regulators, consumer organizations, housewives, and home economists. The book achieves a comprehensive analysis in several case studies, showing, for example, how the yellow color of bananas was normalized over their purple color and butter was colored yellow while margarine declared to be white.

Another strength of Hisano's approach is comparing the (often conflicting) decisions regarding public health and safety concerns of European and American regulators. By pointing to differing or similar approaches, the book's material is situated in a larger realm of patenting regimes, international trade, and even geopolitical battles over food safety. The book raises important questions about the power of consumer organizations in pushing back against harmful food dyes: for instance, the regulatory controversy about red dyes used to color meat following the counter-culture movements in the 1960s. While there is much evidence of consumer push-back to the addition of artificial color to foods, Hisano could have done more to include consumer perspectives on food quality encompassing taste, smell, shape, size, and nutritive value in addition to color. [End Page 1225]

Visualizing Taste is especially of interest to scholars of the history of technology and...

审核人：

• 视觉化的品味： Ai Hisano谈生意如何改变您所吃东西的外观
• 巴尔卡·卡格里瓦尔（生物）

超市里的鲜橙色，全年可用的黄黄油和生日派对上的粉红色蛋糕：Ai Hisano在“可视化口味”中研究了从1870年到1970年美国日常食品的外观如何变化。

Hisano认为，食品的工业化大规模生产和销售取决于控制消费者的感官。食物会因气味，味道，质地，形状和大小而降低到其“吸引人的视觉”，尤其是其颜色（第21页）。各种科学和技术干预措施帮助实现了这一转变，包括通过分光光度计对颜色进行标准化，通过色度计对啤酒进行定量以及通过色度计进行测试。这场“色彩革命”确保了消费者的色彩可预测性，生产者的更高销售额以及调节剂掺假的安全性（第20页）。视觉文化研究侧重于印刷媒体，例如通过彩色传单，杂志和小册子向家庭主妇做广告，Hisano展示了色彩控制如何改变食物以及消费者的饮食习惯。[结束页1224]

在合成替代品提供广泛的人工色之前，天然染料是常见的。这不仅从根本上改变了Jell-O和肉等加工食品的颜色，而且还改变了诸如水果和蔬菜等新鲜食品的颜色，所有这些都是出于企业利益的考虑。作者揭示了讽刺的是，种植者，生产者和零售商将这些“人造”颜色重新定义为“新鲜”和“自然”颜色。Hisano提供了来自贸易期刊，媒体文章，营销手册和家庭经济学家声明等证据的支持。

该书为技术史上有关农业，食品加工和零售的文献提供了视觉视角。几项研究提供了一种了解整个大规模生产食物链的方法：Deborah Fitzgerald分析了导致工厂化农场的变化；Shane Hamilton研究了食品加工如何改变肉类包装中的劳资关系；弗兰克·科乔伊（Franck Cochoy）考察了从当地杂货向零售商店的自助式布局的转变。Hisano对这些文献的贡献是表明，这些过程的许多方面都受到生产者将食物缩减到其视觉尺寸的限制。这种变化遍及工业化食品系统的各个方面：通过营销控制消费者的看法；例如，改变购买的目的，通过消除绿色的橘子；不仅将人造染料添加到加工食品中，而且还添加到罐头中，甚至最终添加到新鲜农产品中；使包装上的品牌明亮，不符合食品的自然颜色；最后，通过照明，布局，冷藏和透明包装来控制零售环境。生产者之间的竞争以及国家利益与公司利益之间的关系重新划分了加工和新鲜产品，天然和人工食用色素以及有害与无害染​​料的界限。冷藏，包装清晰。生产者之间的竞争以及国家利益与公司利益之间的关系重新划分了加工和新鲜产品，天然和人工食用色素以及有害与无害染​​料的界限。冷藏，包装清晰。生产者之间的竞争以及国家利益与公司利益之间的关系重新划分了加工和新鲜产品，天然和人工食用色素以及有害与无害染​​料的界限。

该书强调了利益相关者之间相互矛盾的观点：种植者，染料生产商，食品加工者，零售商，科学家，USDA和FDA监管者，消费者组织，家庭主妇和家庭经济学家的观点。该书在几个案例研究中进行了全面的分析，例如，显示了如何将香蕉的黄色相对于其紫色进行归一化，而黄油则变为黄色，而人造黄油则宣布为白色。

Hisano方法的另一个优势是比较欧美监管机构在公共健康和安全方面的决定（通常是相互矛盾的）。通过指出不同或相似的方法，该书的材料位于专利制度，国际贸易乃至食品安全的地缘政治之争的更大领域。该书提出了有关消费者组织抵制有害食用染料的力量的重要问题：例如，在1960年代反文化运动之后，有关用于为肉类上色的红色染料的法规争议。尽管有很多证据表明消费者会推迟向食品添加人造色素，但Hisano可以做得更多，以包括消费者对食品质量的观点，包括口味，气味，形状，大小，[结束页1225]

可视化口味特别受技术和科学史学者的关注。