3 - Looking for a Cheese

Summary

Entering the gourmet cheese shop, the customer is confronted with dozens and sometimes hundreds of different cheeses. This chapter discusses how the search, identification, and selection of a possible buyable is accomplished, through actions that characterize the beginning of the purchase and that are consequential for the possibility (or not) to engage in a closer sensorial exploration of the materiality of the cheese. The first access to the cheese products is distant, characterized by sighting, looking and starring, within actions that either display the customer knows what they want or not. Chapter 3 shows how customers not knowing what they want look around in the shop asking for advice or/and then adopt a focused look on one product and ask questions about it. These actions constitute a praxeological, interactional and sensorial context that emergently projects the relevance of a closer examination of the materiality of cheese.