Pint of View (Lecture 30): A Matter of Taste

While you munch on your dinner, think about which food item you truly like. Ever wondered why you like that so much?

Do we actually know how taste works? When was the last time you tried to explain why you like something?

Not just “it’s good,” but why it’s good. Why this coffee works for you but another doesn’t. Why a certain smell makes you feel at home. Why some flavours feel comforting and others feel like too much effort.

Most of us realise, mid-sentence, that we don’t quite have the language for it.

That’s because taste isn’t just happening in the mouth. It’s shaped by memory, by smell, by repetition, by culture, by the small habits we pick up without noticing. Flavour is something we learn, even when we think we haven’t.

What if we tell you that the next lecture will give you the framework to decode, understand and express taste and flavour like how you always wanted to. No more “yummy”, no more “delicious” as you find ways to convey flavour in this lecture-cum-food-writing-workshop.

This Sunday at Pint of View, we’re spending an evening with someone who thinks about these things for a living.

Your Speaker for the Evening

Shivani Unakar is a food researcher and creative practitioner based in Bangalore. Her work uses food as a way of thinking about people, place, and the systems that connect them.

Over the past decade, she has worked across kitchens, farms, breweries, small businesses, FMCG brands, and food media platforms. Her practice is grounded in fieldwork, observation, and sensory exploration, and is driven by curiosity about how food carries memory and meaning.

She brings this sensibility to A Matter of Taste, inviting us to pay attention to something we experience every day but rarely stop to examine.

About the Lecture

Flavour isn't just in food, it's also in us.

In the lecture A Matter of Taste, Shivani Unakar will unpack how we taste, describe, and design flavour.

First, a look at the hidden art and science of tasting, from the way our brains perceive and interpret flavour through smell and memory, to how professionals in coffee, beer, wine and more train their senses to make the invisible visible.

The lecture looks at flavour not as a fixed property of food, but as something shaped by perception, training, culture, and design. It moves from the inner workings of taste to the worlds that influence it, and asks how our understanding of flavour is changing.

Event Details

📍 1st Floor, Atta Galatta, Indiranagar

📅 Sunday, 18th Jan, 4–6 pm

Sober drinks for the evening will be provided by Local Ferment Co..