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.
*This podcast episode is part of the project The Sonic Turn, co-financed by AFCN. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or the way its results may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding beneficiary.
