Requesting another to taste: Passing food and the distribution of agency in the organization of bodily trajectories

Abstract

This paper offers an analysis of the organizational features of passing food objects as a commonplace embodied social practice to accomplish requests to another to taste food during joint cooking activities. Situated within the cognate frameworks of Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology, the sequential, multimodal analysis details and explains the formal features of passing food from hand to hand and from hand to mouth as distinct practices with distinct micro-sequential organizations. The study draws on a corpus of 14 hours of video-recordings of naturally occurring joint cooking activities in which the participants speak German, Swedish, and English. Focusing on the projectable aspects of bodily trajectories, the analysis reveals how the request sequences are achieved through the participants’ early projection of how to pass the food objects and their stepwise mutual adjustments to their conjoint action trajectory. In progressively establishing who does what next and how during the food transfer, the participants orient to the relevance and distribution of interactional agency. When the normative organization of the step-by-step transfer is disregarded, an ambiguity emerges concerning what action the practice is doing, which prompts the participants to engage in significant interactional work to re-negotiate on what terms the transfer can resume. This shows how issues of interactional agency are exerted and exhibited in and through the sequential organization of social interaction. The results contribute to, and elaborate, prior findings on requests and advances our understanding for the close attention that participants to interaction pay to the detailed aspects of multimodally formatted actions and the normative expectancies that make up to their intelligibility, reflexively elaborating each other.

Introduction

This study discusses how the organizational features of two alternative embodied practices for passing food in request sequences are indicative of how participants exhibit and negotiate agency in and through interaction. By focusing on cooking activities where the participants orient to the relevance of trying food for progressing with the activity, the analysis allows us to examine the transfer of food objects as constitutive of immediate requests to ‘other’ to taste food in the form of (i) passing the food object from hand to hand before the taster (the person requested to taste) puts it into their mouth and (ii) putting the food directly to the mouth of the person tasting.

Previous research on requests for immediate actions has shown the close attention that participants pay to the timing and multimodal gestalts of the request sequences, as these are praxeologically embedded within the ongoing activity (Mondada, 2014, 2017, 2019, 2021a; Oloff, 2021; Tuncer and Haddington, 2019). Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) (Garfinkel, 1967; Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970; Sacks, 1992; Schegloff, 1992; 2007), the detailed multimodal analysis in the current paper aims to describe how the alternative practices for passing food show the participants’ orientation to situated contingencies. It also aims to specify the micro-sequential organizations that the visible features of their progressively established bodily trajectories incorporate (Deppermann and Schmidt, 2021; Mondada, 2021b), as these are consequential for the acceptability of the practices and indicative of the participants’ orientation to issues of interactional agency.

Requesting actions and proffering objects

Offers and requests have been abundantly researched among scholars interested in the moral and organizational features of social action (Davidson, 1984; Drew and Couper-Kuhlen, 2014; Kendrick and Drew, 2016) and many studies focus on how their formal features as sequence-initiating actions are consequential for their uptake (Couper-Kuhlen, 2014; Curl, 2006) and relate to issues of, for example, expertise and entitlement (Craven and Potter, 2010; Horlacher, 2022; Lindström, 2005; Mondada, 2014). This is also the case for research that focuses on bodily resources for making offers and requests (Fox and Heinemann, 2021; Kärkkäinen and Keisanen, 2012; Rossi, 2014; Zinken, 2015), including requests and offers to taste (Mondada, 2018, 2019, 2021a).

Furthermore, recent research has addressed the question of how the embodied features of offers and requests relate to and are relevant for looking at issues of agency in interaction. Tuncer and Haddington (2019) argue that participants orient to, exhibit, and adjust their relative agency through their handling of objects in sequential environments where object transfers are at play. Deppermann and Gubina (2021) on the other hand look at the German request format darf/kann ich? (may I/can I?) and how speakers initiate and sometimes complete the embodied action before the request is granted. They conclude that ‘[t]he temporal coordination between the trajectory of the embodied action and the darf/kann ich?-TCU indexes the assumed intersubjective status of permissibility, impinges on the exertion of agency and affects the ascription of deontic status to the participants in the sequence’ (Deppermann and Gubina, 2021:14). This shows the interest of pursuing research on how organizational aspects of multimodally accomplished actions are instructive for understanding the situated negotiation of interactional agency as a practical accomplishment.

Previous research on requests where objects are involved pervasively treats cases where A requests an object from B (Kendrick and Drew, 2016; Rauniomaa and Keisanen, 2012; Rossi, 2014; Zinken, 2015; Zinken and Ogiermann, 2013), where the request sometimes also involves an action (Deppermann and Gubina, 2021, Mondada, 2018, 2021a). In contrast to those studies, the present inquiry examines cases where self requests another person to taste by proffering the other person a food object. Furthermore, the request sequences are embedded within an activity where the tasting is treated as contributing to and even being consequential for the achievement of that activity.

In the literature there are a couple of instances where A requests B to do something that involves an object and does it by way of proffering that object. For example, in his examination of embodied request formats, Rossi discusses a case where a player extends a card to their teammate as a request to take the card and play it in a combination on the table (2014: 311–312) and Tuncer and Haddington present an example where a researcher proffers a colleague a tube while asking them to inspect it, arguing that the initiation of the action converges with the enactment of their agency (2019: 66–68). However, there is no systematic research on immediate requests of an action that involve the proffering of an object. This study aims to contribute to the filling of this gap and further contribute to our understanding on interactional agency as a members’ problem in micro-sequential organizations of bodily trajectories.

Projectability and visible aspects of embodied proximity and touch

Offers and requests are often characterized by their sequential organization as a canonical adjacency pair where the first part strongly projects a second part in the form of granting or accepting the request or the offer (Schegloff, 2007; Schegloff and Sacks, 1973). However, the embodied nature of situated social actions and the praxeological spatio-temporal context in which they are achieved, makes it possible for participants to initiate responsive actions even before a ‘first’ action is produced (Mondada, 2021b) and to presuppose permissibility and agency concerning the embodied accomplishment of a verbally initiated course of action (Deppermann and Gubina, 2021). This stresses projectability as a fundamental feature of action recognition and shows that visible aspects of embodied conducts are normatively ordered (Goodwin, 1994) and that they rely on situated contingencies and interactional and material relevancies (Heath and Luff, 2020; Heath et al., 2018; Mondada, 2014). This becomes particularly clear in contexts that concern bodily proximity and touch.

The importance of gaze for organizational aspects of social interaction is well established in the literature (i.e., Goodwin, 1979; Heath et al., 2018; Kendon, 1967; Rossano, 2012; Sudnow, 1972) and a growing body of research demonstrates visual practices as a publicly available social phenomenon (i.e., Kidwell and Reynolds, 2022; Nishizaka, 2000) that is constitutive of instructive activities (i.e., Evans and Lindwall, 2020; Goodwin, 1994, 2000; Hindmarsh and Heath, 2000). For example, Heath et al. (2018), show how the skillful passing of objects from the scrub nurse to the surgeon during surgery relies on anticipated action and how the visible features of hand positions work as embodied instructions for just how to pass the materials. This strand of investigations shows that participants to interaction see and treat what others see as accountable and sequentially implicative.

Visual practices are moreover indicative of and reflexively establish the normative and moral dimension of the visible features of bodily proximity and touch (Goodwin, 1994; Keevallik, 2020), and research on affective bodily proximity has demonstrated hugging and kissing as actions that are progressively accomplished by the engaged parties in a stepwise manner by virtue of mutual adjustments of projectable and publicly available bodily trajectories (Goodwin, 2020; Mondada et al., 2020).

In what follows, we will see that the intelligibility and acceptability of the locally and progressively established practices for how to pass food objects heavily relies on the participants’ monitoring of their respective bodily trajectories as ratifiable proposals that are susceptible to adjustments and associated with morally laden issues of entitlement and agency. More particularly, we will see how the passing of food is produced and treated as requesting another person to taste as part of a joint cooking activity, and thus distinct from offering another to taste (Mondada, 2018, 2021a) or when ‘self’ requests to taste something themselves (Mondada, 2019).

Data and methodology

This study is carried out within the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded project ‘From multimodality to multisensoriality’ (P.I. Lorenza Mondada), which focuses on how our sensorial aspects of naturally occurring, everyday social interactions are rendered publicly available and are used as resources for the intelligibility of social action. The data presented in this paper draws on two sub corpora within the project including video recordings of a food hackathon (5 hours) and amateurs preparing a gastronomic dinner event (9 hours).

The recordings were carried out with stationary and mobile video cameras and the audio was collected through microphones mounted on the participants to complement the sound taken up from the video cameras. All data were collected with the informed consent of the participants, whose names are replaced with pseudonyms. The recordings have been multimodally transcribed following the conventions of Jefferson (2004) and Mondada (2018).

The Food Hackathon recordings documented an international competition in innovation and food waste where the competitors were allocated challenges in food design with a focus on sustainability. The team in these recordings had two days to figure out how to transform banana peel into an edible and commercial product. It was recorded in Sweden and the participants speak English and Swedish.

The recordings of the amateur chefs document the collective preparation of an association’s pop-up restaurant dinner with the goal to raise money to the association who works on immigrant integration through creative activities. It was recorded in the German speaking part of Switzerland and the participants communicate in German. Zubir and Peter speak L2 German.

In both settings, the participants recurrently ask each other to taste the things that they experiment with, and they treat it as consequential for how they eventually decide to pursue with the cooking activity. In total, I have identified 24 instances where ‘self’ requests another person to taste and the request is granted through a transfer of the food from ‘self’ to a taster. Requests from self to taste have been excluded, as well as offers and requests to taste food that is readily available for participants to take with their own hands, as this implies a sequence organization and sets up conditional relevancies that are significantly different from the focal phenomenon in this study.

The choice to use ‘request’ as the vernacular gloss to describe the course of action that the participants engage in is grounded in the initial action’s formal properties in terms of linguistic and embodied resources as well as how it is understood and treated by the recipient in observable and publicly available ways.

Out of the 24 instances, 14 of the requests to taste are accomplished by passing the food from hand to hand, 5 from hand to mouth, 2 from hand to mouth with a utensil (a spoon), and 3 are rejected. In the analysis, I intend to show the regularity with which the participants orient to the relevance of coordinating the passing of food objects as the practical achievement of the request sequence, while accounting for the observable variation across the excerpts.

Analysis

People cooking together recurrently engage in offering and requesting to taste food when choices must be made regarding how to pursue with the preparation of the food. I first present the analysis of requests to taste where the food is passed from hand-to-hand before examining instances where the food is passed directly from hand-to-mouth in an unproblematic way. I will argue (i) that the choice between the two practices is contingent on whether the person who is requested to taste is occupied with a manual activity, (ii) that this contingency prompts extended work concerning the co-ordination of bodily trajectories, and (iii) that the micro-sequential organization of the bodily trajectories embodies the participants’ orientation to agency as a salient feature of how to accomplish the course of action.

Passing food from hand to hand

Explicitly requesting another person to taste

The most common way for participants in the recordings to accomplish immediate requests to taste food, is to pass the food from hand to hand or from utensil to hand, before the person who tastes it puts it into the mouth. In Excerpt (1), Zubir (to the left) who is preparing a variation of çiğ köfte, requests Peter (to the right) to taste one of the balls to decide whether he thinks that they should serve it fried or not fried.

Excerpt (1) CLASH_01.29.21

As Zubir approaches Peter, who is putting things in the cupboard and has his back turned toward Zubir, he lifts his arm and stretches his hand with a piece of çiğ köfte forward, while summoning Peter (lines 1–2). Peter is still turned away and does not answer the summons when Zubir suspends approaching his hand and continues with what is initiated as announcing the best way to prepare the food (fried or not fried) (line 4, Figure 1) but ends as an alternative question through the indexical increment ‘oder so’/or like that.

The intelligibility of the request to taste is embedded in the alternative question and the proffering of the food object, which projects compliance and displays that Zubir is entitled to ask Peter to taste. This is in line with previous research, showing how issues of entitlement is related to requests’ syntactic format (Curl and Drew, 2008; Heinemann, 2006; Lindström, 2005; Zinken, 2015). It is also distinct from offering another person to taste in cheese shops for example, which typically are formatted as polar interrogatives and where other formats are contingent on situations where decisions to buy are at play and the participants’ display of epistemic positions vis-à-vis the object to taste (Mondada, 2021a).

The question is furthermore finely coordinated with Zubir’s monitoring of and embodied adjustment to the timing of Peter’s visual orientation to him. As Peter’s turning around becomes projectable, Zubir turns his hand, palm open, thus visibly presenting the food and rendering the demonstrative ‘that’/so intelligible (lines 4–6, Figure 2). In this way, the request to taste is done through the demand for an opinion and the embodied proffering of the food in the open palm to take. Peter, in turn, grants the request by stretching out his hand and taking the çiğ köfte from Zubir’s hand and taste it, while Zubir elaborates the description of what he will eat (lines 8–10, Figures 3 and 4).

The request is thus granted by embodied means and the food transaction is accomplished by a sequentially organized proceeding that relies on the participants’ mutual monitoring of their respective embodied resources. The excerpt shows how the verbatim request, and the granting of it, is achieved through the early projection of the possible format for how to pass the food to taste and the participants stepwise mutual adjustments to their conjoint action trajectory, progressively establishing what to do next, and how to do it, as an intersubjective achievement. It also shows that the interactional work that is done through linguistic and embodied resources relies on the publicly visible features of bodily trajectories and leaves it to the taster and requested party to complete the transfer by taking the proffered food, incorporating an orientation to the distribution of interactional agency as a situated accomplishment.

Requesting another person to taste in embodied ways

In Excerpt 2 the request to taste is produced in an embodied way. The example is drawn from the Food Hackathon data, and we join the activity as Lina requests Elin and Deepak on the other side of the kitchen island to taste a flatbread baked from flour made of dried banana peels.

Excerpt (2) FoodHack_190316_01.04.08

In Excerpt 2, as in Excerpt 1, the achievement of the action trajectory – as it amounts to granting the request to give an opinion about the bread – depends on and is made possible by the participants’ monitoring of their respective stepwise bodily arrangements and their situated and progressively established understanding of initiated and projectable bodily trajectories.

Lina’s request for Elin and Deepak to taste is accomplished through her embodied proffering of the bread (cf. Rossi, 2014). After breaking a piece of the bread (line 1, Figure 1) she stretches her arm while she monitors Elin. Once the bread is in a position where it is reachable for Elin, she holds it still, and after some time Elin starts raising her hand, projecting to take the bread (lines 1–2, Figure 2) and thanks Lina (line 2) before taking the bread (line 2, Figure 3) and putting it in her mouth (line 3, Figure 4). Lina visibly monitors Elin’s hand’s progressively established trajectory and just before Elin takes the bread, Lina looks down again, anticipating the achievement of the object transfer (lines 1–2).

The same procedure is then repeated as Lina proffers another piece of bread to Deepak (lines 3–4, Figures 4–7). This transfer further exemplifies that the micro-sequential organization of the request relies on the embodied and publicly visible step-by-step projection of how to make the transaction. The participants’ orientation to the proffer of the bread as a request to taste is displayed in Lina’s bodily request format, which projects compliance and reflexively establish the intelligibility of requesting to taste as a relevant and projectable action within the ongoing activity (cf. Rossi, 2014). Furthermore, the participants subsequently orient to the relevance of furnishing an opinion on the food: Lina by soliciting a positive assessment (line 6) and Deepak by postponing an evaluation as he asks for a specification of the bread’s properties (line 7). This shows their distinct orientation to tasting and requesting each other to taste as part of their joint task rather than offering a sensorial experience.

In sum, we have seen how requests to taste are formatted through linguistic and embodied resources and, more specifically, through the proffering of the food object, which also embodies an initiated possible format for how to effectuate the food transaction. The presentation of the food is thus transformed into the practice for passing the food, as the requested party grants the request by virtue of taking the food from the hand and tasting it. This shows how interactional agency is embodied in the distribution of actions that are made relevant progressively, in their situated context, as the requesting party leaves it to the taster to take the food. We now turn to instances where the party who is requested to taste is occupied with another activity and initiates an alternative practice for passing the food.

Passing food from hand to mouth

Most of the food transfers in request sequences in this data are done by passing from hand to hand. However, when the requested party is occupied with a manual activity, the participants pass the food directly to the mouth of the person who agrees to taste it. In comparison to passing the food from hand to hand, passing it directly to the mouth involves further interactional work in terms of how to intelligibly propose an alternative practice and subsequently coordinate bodily trajectories.

As in the previous section, we will see that the request sequences can be initiated and accomplished by verbal and embodied resources as well as by only embodied resource, whereas the granting of the request through the initiated practice for passing the food is done through embodied resources.

Explicitly requesting another person to taste

In Excerpt 3, we join the dinner cooking activity again, about ten minutes after the sequence discussed in Excerpt 1, as Zubir approaches Peter with another piece of çiğ köfte and asks him to taste.

Excerpt (3) FEED_kannst_du_probieren_CLASH_01.38.22

As Zubir approaches Peter, he initiates the request by specifying an aspect of the cooking procedure, which prospectively works as an account for the request to taste (line 2). The request is then formatted through the modal verb construction ‘kannst du probieren’ can you try, while looking at him and holding out the çiğ köfte in his hand (lines 3–4, Figures 1 and 2). Peter, who is occupied with the dishes, turns his head during the request and right after that Zubir has stabilized his hand, Peter looks at the çiğ köfte (line 4, Figure 2) and it is publicly available for both participants that the referent is established. In difference from Excerpt 1 and 2, where the requested parties stretched out for the food with their hands, Peter keeps his bodily orientation to the sink, and instead opens his mouth and lowers his head (line 5, Figure 3). In response to this, Zubir raises his arm further toward Peter with the direction toward his mouth (line 5, Figure 4). He then stops his hand and keeps the food still (line 5), letting Peter lower his head further and eventually take a bite from the çiğ köfte (line 6, Figure 5), before they both retract and look away (line 5).

In this way, we see how the sequence organization is extended through the further steps in organizing the embodied trajectories on a micro-sequential level. Whereas the food object initially is proffered by positioning it between the participants in a publicly visible way, Peter’s visible recognition of the referent and opening of his mouth proposes, projects and initiates to pass the food directly to the mouth, which prompts Zubir to raise his arm further. Similar to Excerpts 1 and 2, the participants then orient to and reflexively establish the distribution of agency as an interactional achievement through their embodied conduct: after their progressively organized approach toward each other, Zubir halts his hand and lets Peter take the food with his mouth – as opposed to continuing the bodily trajectory and putting the food directly into it. This stepwise organization and finely attuned bodily coordination rely on the participants’ mutual monitoring of their respective embodied resources.

In Excerpt (4) we observe a similar organization of the request sequence, as Zubir asks another participant, Daniel, to also taste a piece of çiğ köfte.

Excerpt (4) CLASH_01.37.22

Similar to Excerpt 3, Daniel is occupied with a manual activity as Zubir approaches him and requests him to taste through a similar modal verb construction to what we observed in Excerpt 3 (lines 1–2, Figure 1). As Daniel raises his head and establishes visual access to the referent (line 3), he then lowers it again while keeping his gaze on the çiğ köfte (line 3, Figure 2). Zubir understands this movement as granting the request and projecting the food transfer to be effectuated directly to his mouth, as he starts approaching Daniel’s mouth with the çiğ köfte while keeping his gaze on him (4, Figure 3). Daniel ratifies this trajectory by adjusting to it as he moves his head to the right, projecting to meet up Zubir’s direction (line 4). This prompts Zubir, in turn, to lift his hand further (5, Figure 4), and as he stops, Daniel takes the çiğ köfte with his mouth (5, Figure 5), before they both retract their bodies and look away (line 5).

As in Excerpt 3, we thus see how the taster and recipient of the request initiates the alternative practice for passing the food directly to the mouth, which the requesting party tacitly accepts and engages with by progressively initiating and suspending their bodily trajectories, adjusting to the taster. The participants’ mutual monitoring and dynamic bodily adjustments allow to stepwise project and eventually accomplish the transfer directly to the mouth while letting the party granting the request complete the transfer to the mouth. In this way the organizational features of passing the food embody the distribution of interactional agency in terms of who takes the food how and when.

Requesting another person to taste in embodied ways

As it was observed in Excerpt 2, requesting another person to taste food can be done in embodied ways. This is also the case when the food is passed directly to the mouth. Excerpt (5) is the continuation of Excerpt (1), and we join the interaction again as Peter is currently tasting the çiğ köfte that Zubir gave him to taste, asking whether to fry it or not. Peter now extends that request, asking Daniel, who is standing next to him, to also taste.

Excerpt (5) CLASH_01.29.30 ((continuation of Extract 1))

Peter approaches Daniel, who stands to his right and is occupied with cutting, and reinvokes the practical issue of whether to fry the çiğ köfte or not by referring back to it as ‘a good question’ (lines 15–16, Figure 4). Daniel treats Peter moving closer as requesting him to also taste, and as he looks at the çiğ köfte (line 17, Figure 5), Peter manifestly sees this as Daniel granting the request as he splits the çiğ köfte in two.

Concurrently, Daniel straightens his body and leans to the side while keeping his arms and hands still, which Peter treats as projecting the food transfer to be done directly to his mouth, as he raises his arm a bit and orient his gaze to Daniel’s face, visibly monitoring him (lines 17–18. Figure 6). Daniel responds to this movement by leaning downwards, adjusting to Peter’s bodily trajectory, and by opening his mouth (lines 19, 20), further exhibiting readiness to take the food directly with the mouth. Daniel’s throaty sound (line 21) collects its meaning within its local environment (Keevallik and Ogden, 2020) and is hearable as enacting an animal’s grumbling before/when taking a bite of something, orienting to the practice as marked.

Like in Excerpts 3 and 4, it is at the point where Peter stabilizes the food object (line 21, Figure 7) that Daniel takes a bite (22, Figure 8), reflexively establishing the dynamic bodily configuration as mounting to the participants’ situated display of the distribution of agency among them in terms of who is expected and entitled to do what when. At the same time, it is observable how the intelligibility of Peter moving toward Daniel as a request to taste relies on the participants mutual understanding of tasting as a relevant and projectable action within the activity (Rossi, 2014). The observation that Anders extends Zubir’s previous request to Anders to taste further consolidates the claim that the participants treat tasting as essential for the ongoing activity as a collective undertaking.

In Excerpt 6, the request to taste is also done through only embodied means, with the difference that the food is proffered on a teaspoon. The data is drawn from the Food Hackathon recordings, and we join the activity as Elin approaches Lina with a spoon with chocolate spread made from banana peel and cacao that she proffers to Lina.

Excerpt (6) FoodHack_1_01.31.34

Like in Excerpts 3, 4, and 5, Elin is engaged in another activity when Lina approaches her with the spoon and the negotiation and eventual establishment of passing the spread on the spoon from hand to mouth is incrementally organized through embodied trajectories and mutual adjustments on a micro-sequential level. Elin extends the spoon in front of her already when walking toward Lina (line 1, Figure 1), but withdraws it a bit when Lina initiates turning her head and looks to the spoon (line 1, Figure 2). This allows Elin to intelligibly proffer the food while leaving Lina the time and space – in the literal sense – to grant the request.

Similar to Excerpt 5, Lina grants the request by initiating and proposing the alternative format to pass the food directly to the mouth by keeping her gaze on the spoon while opening her mouth and adjusting to the anticipable trajectory of Elin’s hand (line 1, Figure 3). This prompts Elin to again extend the spoon toward Lina’s mouth (lines 1–3, Figures 4a and b) and at the point where she holds the spoon still, Lina produces a short laughter and takes a bite from the spoon (line 5, Figures 5a and b) before they both retract.

Even though Elin withdraws the spoon and waits for Lina to grant the request before pursuing the prior trajectory of the spoon, Elin holds the spoon in a position that projects to pass the food directly to the mouth, rather than offering the handle of the spoon for Lina to bring to the mouth herself. This embodied anticipation differs from Excerpts 3, 4, and 5, and indicates that there might be an orientation to passing food with utensils as affording projections and opportunities due to the use of a tool for accomplishing the food transfer. Nevertheless, Elin positions and stabilizes the spoon in space in a way that allows Lina to eventually take the food from the spoon with her mouth. In this way, the sequential organization of the transfer’s actual accomplishment embodies the same orientation to interactional agency as observed in the other excerpts.

In this section, we have seen how participants to cooking activities engage in interactional and embodied work to project and accomplish the passing of food directly from hand to mouth in situations where the person requested to taste is occupied with a manual task. We have also seen that the requests can be done explicitly through linguistic formulations with modal verbs like ‘kannst du probieren’ can you try ‘kannst du etwas probieren’ can you try something, or through embodied gestalts. In both cases, publicly available and early embodied trajectories on behalf of the person proffering the food to taste is similar to the cases where it is passed from hand to hand; the food is approached and presented with the hand or a utensil (as in Excerpt 6), in a way that is publicly visibly and projectable for the person requested to taste. In difference from the cases where the food is passed from hand to hand, the accepting party does not mobilize their hand(s), but instead compose an embodied gestalt that is progressively exhibiting the relevance to pass the food directly to the mouth of the tasting party. This practice is established and coordinated through solely embodied resources and accomplished in a smooth way and its completion is manifested through the participants’ respective withdrawal.

In line with previous research, showing how participants orient to, calibrate and exert the expected and exhibited distribution of agency among them (Deppermann and Gubina, 2021, Tuncer and Haddington, 2019), this section has shown how this also plays out in the fine-tuned organization of the passing of food objects. To substantiate the claim that the organizational, micro-sequential features of passing the food object is normatively ordered, we now turn to a case where there is an observable departure from this organization, which the participants orient to as problematic, and which prompts a re-negotiation of the terms of the food transfer.

An emerging ambiguity: Passing food or doing ‘feeding’?

In the previous section, we saw that passing food directly to the mouth is used as a vernacular practice for accomplishing requests to another person to taste food. In this section, we will look at a case where this embodied format is resisted to, suspended, and requires specific interactional work to eventually be accomplished. We join the interaction as Elin proffers a piece of bread with banana peel spread to Lina who is on the other side of the room, occupied with washing up kitchen utensils. Elin and Lina talk Swedish to each other.

Excerpt (7a) FoodHack_2_00.15.28

Elin asks Lina to taste as she walks across the room toward her with the bread, already projecting that she will grant the request (lines 1–7). The summons prompts Lina to turn her head and look at her, while continuing doing the dishes (line 3, Figure 1). This gaze is not only available to Elin, but it is seen as conditionally relevant, as she treats the gaze as suspending the need for responding to Lina’s repair initiation ‘hm:’ (line 4). Elin’s understanding of Lina’s lengthy gaze (lines 3–5) as solving an eventual issue of understanding is ultimately confirmed by Lina’s subsequent granting of the request through a prospectively oriented instruction of just how to accomplish the food transfer. She does this in form of the imperative ‘feed me’ (line 6), which she utters in English, giving it a joking quality. Nevertheless, in difference from the previous excerpts, the participants thus explicitly address the practical features of how to accomplish the course of action, which occasions a series of actions that impedes on the action trajectory.

In response, Elin transforms Lina’s reference to ‘feeding’ from concerning the format of how to transfer the food, that is, putting it directly to the mouth, to an instruction regarding how Lina should do being fed; by taking ‘a very big bite’ (line 7). In this way, the main interactional business is shifted to feeding instead of granting a request. During this verbal upgrade, Lina opens her mouth, exhibiting readiness to take the food with her mouth, as Elin is still walking and shortly after starts extending her arm with the food (line 7, Figure 2). In addition to the verbal instruction, Elin’s embodied format of the action trajectory as she approaches Lina with the food is distinct from what we have seen in the prior excerpts. In Excerpts 1 and 2, the food object is presented in a publicly visible way and held stable until the taster reaches out with their hand. In Excerpts 3–6 the practice of passing food from hand to mouth is projected and progressively ratified through embodied trajectories, but eventually achieved through the food being held stable and the requested party taking it with their mouth. In contrast, in Excerpt 7, Elin does not stop her movement as Lina opens her mouth. Instead, while producing the verbal instruction, she pursues the trajectory toward her mouth, projecting to put the food in it. (line 7).

This organizational feature, together with Elin’s verbal upgrade of the joke, prompts Lina to close her mouth and resist to the action (format) by initiating a partial repeat of the prior turn (‘ett-’ one-) and then laughing (line 8). This shows that she hears the joke as invoking an action that has asymmetrical or even sexual connotations. Elin manifestly understands Lina as suspending the action trajectory as she retracts her hand and laughs in overlap (9). Nevertheless, after Lina’s additional laugh tokens (line 10), Elin again upgrades the joke further by a turn-initial slightly condescending ‘så’ like that, and the instruction ‘ta hela’ take the whole while laughing more (line 11). Despite the laughing and joking aspect of the exchange, Lina resists further by turning away and producing the imperative ‘tyst’ quiet in an accentuated way (lines 11–12, Figure 3). This explicit demand and definite suspension of the action trajectory prompts Elin to back down and initiate to pass the food for another first time.

Excerpt (7b) FEED_feed_me_FoodHack_2_00.15.28

As Lina has disengaged from the action trajectory, Elin renegotiates the terms for passing the food by downgrading the instruction to a request to ‘just taste a little’ with a laughing voice and while extending her arm again but stopping in mid-turn and holding it still. In this way she adopts the preparatory organizational features of the embodied practice to pass the food directly to the mouth that is observable in Excerpts 3–6 (line 13). After additional laughter (line 14) and after that Elin has stopped extending her arm, Lina turns again to her (line 13, Figure 4), leans forward while giggling (line 15, Figure 5), opens her mouth and takes a bite (line 16, Figure 6), while Elin keeps the food still. As soon as Lina has taken the food, Eline reinvokes the reason for the request, as she solicits an evaluation on behalf of Lina (line 19), thus going back to the main interactional business.

Passing food can be done through various embodied resources, and the participants’ apparent inattentiveness to the embodied practice of putting the food into the mouth as a potentially intimate bodily composition in Excerpts 3–6 is indicative of the acceptability of the practice as a practical procedure for granting requests to taste. Nevertheless, the resistance to and suspension of the action trajectory in Excerpt 7 shows the accountability of the progressively established embodied format and more particularly the strong normative aspects of bodily trajectories and the delicate connotations that are associated with them. Although Lina prospectively formulates how to carry out the action through the imperative ‘feed me’ (6), the problem with Elin’s subsequent uptake on this formulation is the emerging ambiguity concerning what course of action they engage in, that is, doing feeding rather than doing passing food to which very different membership categories are attached.

Studies on feeding within EMCA, have examined feeding as an embodied practice that is intrinsic to activities for nutritious purposes in contexts where there is an asymmetry between the person feeding and the person being fed in terms of motoric proficiency. This include infants (Wiggins and Keevallik, 2021) and residents with dementia in care homes (Hydén et al., 2022; Pierson, 1999), which entails a clear distribution of tasks among the participants. Wiggins and Keevallik (2021) specifically show the organizational aspect of feeding as a finely coordinated achievement, where the mother approaches the food, the infant opens their mouth, and the mother subsequently puts the food in the infant’s mouth. This description is convergent with Elin’s projected bodily trajectory in Excerpt 7 and substantiates the claim that Lina resists to the categorical connotations associated with this action, including issues of asymmetry and agency. In addition to the overt resistance in Excerpt 7, the laughter, and vocalizations in Excerpts 5 and 6, where the food is passed directly to the mouth without an explicit request to taste, might be explained by them being seen as more ambiguous and thus susceptible to be treated as delicate.

In sum, this section shows how both participants reorganize and orient to their respective bodily positioning and successive trajectories in a way that incorporates a distribution of agency within and throughout the sequence where the person granting the request to taste remain in measure to take the food with their mouth.

Conclusive discussion

In this study I have specified the organizational features of passing food objects as the practical accomplishment of requesting another person to taste food during joint cooking activities. The requests to taste emerge in a context where tasting is treated as intrinsic to, consequential and beneficial for the activity of cooking together, which affirms previous findings concerning the relevance of sensorial practices for the organization of social interaction (Mondada, 2018; Mondada, 2021a). In the ensemble of the cases, the participants orient to the relevance of assessing the food they taste. While this study is not focusing on these evaluations per se, this observation is relevant for the claim that the instances are treated as immediate requests to taste and not offers of food. The observation that the participants’ requests to taste reflexively establish the cooking activity as a joint endeavor also contributes to and elaborates previous claims that offers and requests by default pertain to issues of who is the beneficiary party (Clayman and Heritage, 2014) as the participants in this data rather orient to the situated relevancies of the ongoing activity in situated though ordered ways.

The result of the case-by-case analysis shows that the requests to taste can be made by linguistic and embodied means (Excerpts 1, 3, 4, and 7) or through solely embodied practices (Excerpts 2, 5, and 6) (cf. Fox and Heinemann, 2021; Mondada, 2014, 2017; Rossi, 2014; Zinken, 2015). The immediate requests to taste in this study are however categorically related to the concurrent proffering of the food to taste and the visible positioning of the food object in front of the requested party is constitutive of its intelligibility as a request. Moreover, in addition to initiating a course of action, this positioning embodies and initiates a possible format for how to pass the food (would the request be granted), as it offers the option for the requested party to take the food with their hand and put it in their mouth, as it is observable in Excerpts 1 and 2.

Furthermore, the analysis shows that in cases where the requested party is occupied with another (manual) activity, they recurrently initiate the alternative practice of passing the food directly to the mouth, as it is observable in Excerpt 3–7. The format of passing food from hand to mouth, which implies a particular form of physical proximity, is thus used as the solution to a practical problem where the party receiving the food does not have their hands readily available. The practice of putting the food directly to the mouth is initiated early on by the requested party and progressively established through the participants’ mutual orientation to stepwise, sequentially organized bodily trajectories that rely on visual practices. This embodied procedure is eventually accomplished as the requesting party holds the food object still and the party granting the request to taste takes the food in and with their mouth. In this way, both parties orient to and reflexively establish the distribution of agency as concerning who eventually completes the action trajectory by putting the food into the mouth and as relevant for the acceptability of the action.

The normative aspect of the bodily trajectories’ progressively established features as a mutual and locally established shared understanding is ultimately shown in the analysis of Excerpt 7, where Elin pursues the initiated arm trajectory toward Lina’s mouth, projecting to put the food in her mouth, which suspends the course of action. This emerging problem pertains to the altering of the embodied conduct from a practice accomplishing a granted request to taste food, to the action of doing feeding, which distinction is embedded and exhibited in the micro-sequential organization of talk and bodily trajectories (Deppermann and Schmidt, 2021; Mondada, 2021b), invoking distinctive normative expectancies. This corroborates previous findings concerning the relevance that the participants pay to the sequentially ordered micro-organization of embodied action trajectories as dynamic, publicly available, and situated accomplishments that are implicative for how they engage in and carry out joint activities (Mondada, 2022).

The close attention that the participants pay to the visible features of their respective bodily trajectories’ micro-sequential organization as consequential for the intelligibility of the action they engage in shows members’ competence in recognizing, adjusting to and resisting to ambiguities when they emerge. The resistance is furthermore readily recognized as such and engenders extended interactional work to repair the problem. This shows the interest in pursuing detailed sequential and multimodal analysis of the normative features of embodied activities, as this might be instructive for applied interests in ambiguities and troubles in interaction as straightforward and easily graspable for participants to interaction.

In sum, the results elucidate how the micro-sequential organization of embodied trajectories is intelligible as projecting distinct courses of actions with distinct properties regarding interactional agency in terms of the accountability of who does what. Previous research has discussed issues of agency in interaction as related to rights and obligations to initiate and fulfill requests in terms of social asymmetry (Floyd, 2017). In line with and building on recent work on how social actors pursue work on interactional agency through the dynamic interplay of linguistic and embodied resources (Deppermann and Gubina, 2021; Tuncer and Haddington, 2019), this study shows a more complex aspect of these questions, as participants to interaction manifestly orient to and negotiate issues of agency in and through the micro-sequential organization of bodily trajectories that are embedded in situated practices for coordinating joint activities.

Author biography

Hanna Svensson is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Applied Information Technology at the University of Gothenburg. Working within ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, her research mainly concerns issues of intersubjectivity and embodiment in the context of (institutional) social interactions, including training of firefighters, political meetings, cooking activities and game play.