It was billed as a blind taste test.
Students in the Brock Hall classroom sampled liquid refreshments provided in little, white, disposable cups, tasting each of the eight samples one by one.
They sniffed. They tasted. They sniffed some more. They laughed and talked among themselves, logging notes—sometimes making “ick” faces—after sampling each cup.
If you think this sounds like a Napa Valley wine tasting experience, you’re incorrect.
It was an olive oil tasting.
Yes, that’s a thing.
“Food, Society, Identity,” an anthropology class taught by University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Assistant Professor Emma McDonell, featured a blind taste test of different olive oil varieties.
Thanks to funding provided by a Walker Center Classroom Mini Grant, McDonell has been able to integrate high-impact practices that combine the sensorial and material aspects of cooking and eating.
“I applied for a Walker Center Mini Grant because, to do the kinds of hands-on activities that I wanted to do in this class, I needed funds for that,” said McDonell, a cultural, economic and environmental anthropologist and a humanistic social scientist.
“The goal was to have the opportunity to teach sensory learning through cooking, tasting and eating. Food, in particular, lends itself to this kind of sensory learning.”
For the course, McDonell has seven different in-class activities planned this semester involving tasting, cooking or eating. She said the goal is to teach students course material while also helping them understand links between abstract ideas and complex theories with personal experiences.
For an early February class, she invited Charlie Kimball, owner of Zi Olive On the North Shore, to her classroom with eight different types of olive oil—including one that was rancid—to help students understand the nature of tastes.
Kimball, a UTC chemistry major who graduated in 1972, provided shared vocabulary for discussing what one smells, then tastes.
“The taste characteristics of olive oil is about the chemistry of the olive,” Kimball told McDonell’s students. “Half of your taste, whether you’re tasting wines or tasting olive oils, is what you smell before you taste it.”
During the tasting, McDonell walked around the classroom distributing the small cups.
“Smell before and as you taste,” she reminded the students.
“The olive oil tasting allowed them to see how taste is learned as they watched this expert instruct them in the different flavors that are found in each olive oil that they’re tasting,” McDonell said.
“I think it also helped get across one of the points of the week, which was about the way that certain tastes come to be seen as good and some as undesirable.”
McDonell said one of the things that’s interesting to her about using food as a tool for learning is that people understand, at some level, the relationship between food, eating experiences and memory.
“All of us have some food that, even just the smell of it, brings us back to a particular moment in our lives, whether it’s from our childhood or being at grandma’s house or something like that,” she said.
“Experimental psychologists have confirmed that food has a particularly powerful ability to create memories because it engages all of our senses. So to me, there is something interesting about using food in the classroom because of how food creates memories with such power.”
