Taste as labour: Local sensory practices and the recalibration of global taste regimes across Taiwan’s specialty-coffee value chain

Abstract

This study theorises taste labour to examine how sensory practice becomes a form of labour in the specialty coffee industry. Drawing on 14 months of multi-site ethnography with baristas and farmers in the Alishan region of Taiwan, it analyses how bodies are disciplined, trained and valorised through the institutionalisation of sensory expertise. This study demonstrates how baristas and farmers calibrate perception, translate flavour into data and cultivate taste as a measurable and tradable quality. Situating taste within labour relations distinguishes taste labour as more than performing or mediating taste. This sensory regime offers possibilities for craft-based autonomy while simultaneously reproducing gendered, classed and regional inequalities across both cafe and farm settings. Therefore, this study positions taste beyond a matter of preference into an embodied mode of knowledge production central to contemporary labour regimes.