ABSTRACT
In the following discussion, three aspects of our relationship to consumption are going to be analysed. They can be compressed into three concepts: need, taste and pleasure. Different ways of talking about consumption are centred around these concepts. They are unavoidably present in the different attempts to analyse and explain the development of the modern food culture and its various features. As will be shown in more detail later on, there are major conceptual problems involved with each of these approaches which are particularly evident in the ways we understand food and eating. There is a strong parallel between the development of the discourses of need and taste, on the one hand, and gastronomy and nutrition science, on the other.
