If ever there was a professional association I might aspire to join, this is it: The Society of Quantitative Gastronomy! The Society’s objective:

The objective is to facilitate interactions between academic researchers and professionals of Gastronomy from several perspectives: economics, econometrics, sociology, psychology, management, marketing, chemistry, sensometrics, and to develop academic research in these different fields of analysis.

Some typically nerdy papers presented at their first annual conference:

• “Is Breakfast Really Free? Evidence from French and Italian Hotels”
• “Food Fetish: Gastronomy as Spectacle of Subversive Desire in Spanish Fiction and Film”
• “Wine, Balloons, and Mud: Gastronomic Tourism and a Divided Landscape in California”
• “The Gastronomical Fair of Dijon as Consuming Spectacle”
• “Food decision, information and personality”
• “Gastronomic follies: The spatiality of excessive hors d’oeuvres from the Desert de Retz to Le Patissier Pittoresque”
• “Econometrics of taste: some recipes with ranks”