Editor’s note: Hy Mariampolski is managing director of QualiData Research Inc., Brooklyn, N.Y. Michael P. Cook is head of consumer understanding at Givaudan Flavors Corp., Cincinnati.

At the intersection of cuisine, culture and cognition, eating food is a universal experience in which people gain the satiation that sustains human life while achieving gustatory pleasures that affirm both the ego and memberships in social groups.

An analysis of the ways in which chicken is cooked and eaten in China illustrates and typifies this intersection. As we learned while conducting a global food ethnography, consuming chicken in China involves an array of sensory experiences - visual, olfactory, gustatory and tactile - so profoundly different from Western experience that an understanding of chicken flavor cannot be understood without referencing Chinese culture as its source.

Focusing on practices characteristic of another culture brings both our own culturally-bound rules and norms as well as theirs into sharp relief. It highlights Franz Boas’ fundamental principles of cultural relativism: that the biological, linguistic and cultural traits of human groups are consequences of historical developments involving both cultural and non-cultural forces. Cultural diversity is an essential human attribute, and individual behaviors within specific cultural environments follow their own forms on their own terms. Cultural cues intersect with sensory experience at all stages of the life course to produce the pleasures associated with eating one’s native cuisine. Consequently, what we desire to see, smell and taste becomes rooted in our daily experiences. We become complicit in our own connivance when we gain pleasure through an acquired or created fragrance or flavor. When a young lady uses a heady scent to appear more sexy, desirable or mysterious than she really is, we are wise to such devices and love every minute of i...