Flavor Fluency
Learning to Read and Write Information in Every Bite
Beth Ames Altringer Eagle
Penguin Group · 2027
By age 30, you've had 90,000 flavor experiences and developed almost no vocabulary for any of them.
France has éveil du goût — formal taste education in elementary schools. Japan teaches umami as naturally as primary colors. Parts of India have children recognizing regional spice profiles before they can write their names clearly. Produce, umami sources, and spices all contain environmental, historical, and cultural data that experts know how to read. Americans teach nothing — about the thing we do three or more times a day.
This isn't biological limitation. It's a choice we made and never questioned.
Flavor Fluency introduces the Sensation Alphabet — a 24-code notation system for flavor perception (11 textures, 6 tastes, 7 aromas) and the grammar that lets anyone learn to read and write what they eat. The book follows the journey of a design professor who spent years studying chefs, farmers, plant breeders, spice blenders, and competitive tasters to build a system that makes flavor perception teachable and transferable.
Part memoir, part science, part training manual. By the end, readers can “read” a breakfast taco the way they'd read a sentence: fracture at impact, coating level 2, acid cutting through accumulated richness.
This isn't just a book about food. It's about perception itself — and the claim that creative capacity is universal, but creative vocabulary is not.
About the Author
Beth Ames Altringer Eagle is a design engineer, flavor researcher, and sensory artist. She is a professor at Dartmouth College, where she directs the Design Initiative at Dartmouth (DIAD), and a faculty associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center. Her installations have appeared at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis, and the MIT Museum. She has built design engineering programs at Harvard, Brown, RISD, and Dartmouth. She holds a PhD from Cambridge.
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