Sound and Food: Adriana Sohodoleanu

In this episode we approach food not through taste or image, but through sound — through crackling oil, chopping rhythms, silences at the table, and the social acoustics of eating.

Our guest is Adriana Sohodoleanu, a Bucharest-based gastronomy theoretician, researcher, and writer. Adriana’s work brings together food studies, cultural history, and critical theory, approaching gastronomy not as lifestyle or spectacle, but as a complex cultural system. Her research interrogates how culinary practices encode social values — from class and gender to authenticity, tradition, and modernization.

Food is never only a matter of flavor. Every culinary experience is singular, yet taste itself is culturally shaped. Still, beyond cultural codes and biological mechanisms, there exists a particular force of pleasure — a force that exceeds classification. In European traditions, pleasure has often been subordinated to ethics and knowledge, treated as an obstacle to rational understanding. But if we move toward a co-evolutionary perspective, mind and body can no longer be separated. Pleasure becomes a way of accessing taste, transforming passivity into active sensitivity, into perception. Hunger itself emerges not only as a physical need, but as a profound desire where the material and the metaphysical intersect. Food, in this sense, becomes both sustenance and meaning — an essential engine of human experience.