This introductory chapter examines taste as a symbolic, cultural, affective, and as economic currency always in circulation, and that, once mobilized, allows eaters to identify and differentiate themselves along race, class, gender, and ethnic lines. The concept of sensory economies is a plural one and allows exploring sensory experiences of food as the result of social, cultural, and financial exchanges always remade. The chapter looks at the cultural, social, and sensory history of New Deal food writing: the multisensory culinary material produced by employees of the Federal Writers's Project (FWP). Throughout, workers produced comforting snapshot pictures aimed at providing cultural confidence to a country in the midst of one of the worst economic depression of its history and giving legitimacy to the new political, social, and economic order of the liberal New Deal state.
