Hautes Etudes du Goût/Advanced Studies in Gastronomy : Pierre Combris

Among the extraordinary praofessors of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Gastronomy (Hautes Etudes du Goût, de la Gastronomie et des Arts de la Table, Pierre Combris is very important.

Pierre Combris is an economist, emeritus research director at INRA.

Since 1996, he his the head of the Laboratory on Consumption Research. He studies food economy and food habits, as well as the mechanisms of choice by consumers.
He personnally studies the evolution of food concumption in France, from the 50's to today.
Also he is interested in the processes of choice in function of the characteristics of food and of the available information.

He his a member of the board of the Institut Français pour la Nutrition, expert for the Fonds Français pour l'Alimentation et la Santé.

Dear Friends

I did not tell you much, recently, about the professors of the Hautes Etudes du Gout, sorry.

This week : Gérard Liger-Belair
















Gérard Liger-Belair is Professor of the  University  Reims Champagne-Ardenne (URCA)

He created there the team Effervescence, Champagne and Applications (GSMA – UMR CNRS 7331), which studies the processes linked with the dynamic of bubbles in liquids with dissolved gases (from the bubbles of champagne to the foams of the industry).

For the last decades, he developed an expertise on foams and bubbles, objects which attracted physicists, chemists and mathematicians.
The processes associated with bubble formation in champagne were poorly known until recently. However, in a glass of champagne, all the steps from birth to death of bubbles can be studied. Generally bubble are created on immersed particles, on the glass, and it evolves until detaching, reaching the surface.
These tiny spheres of carbonic dioxyde generate a wealth of phenomena of unpredicted complexity, and which are responsible for the whole sensation of the drinker. For about 15 years, Gérard Liger-Belair and his colleagues are developing analytical tools for studying bubbles.

Géard Liger-Belair published about 100 scientific articles, and about 10 books, among which  :


- Effervescence ! la science du champagne, Odile Jacob, 2009
- Voyage au cœur d’une bulle de champagne, Odile Jacob, 2011
- Champagne, la vie secrète des bulles,Cherche-Midi,2014

He got scientific prizes for his research and publications. 

Another teacher of the Hautes Etudes du Goût : Sidonie Naulin

Every week, I am happy to tell you about the teachers of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Gastronomy, Hautes Etudes du Goût.

This week  : Sidonie Naulin

Sidonie Naulin is assistant professor of sociologie at Sciences Po Grenoble and in the Pacte Laboratory. She is studiying economic sociology, media sociology and food sociology.

A former students of the Ecole Normale Supérieur, with an agregation in social sciences, she did her PhD at the University Paris Sorbonne on food critic, trying to understand how is produced the information about food.
This PhD was published as a book in June 2017 (Presses universitaires de Rennes). From discussions, interviews, observations and a quantitative survey of text statistics, this book deals with the environment of culinary and gastronomic journalism. This history of this activity is done, and its current market is analyzed. Some chapters deal with particular biographies, daily work and celebrity analysis of some food critics, envisioning also  the new competitors who are food bloggers.

Today, she is interested by the biographies of chefs. She is participating to the ANR Capla project, in which she is doing a survey of chefs cooking in homes using internet sites for making contacts with customers.
She is going to study the biographies of cooks from data given by the LinkedIn social network.

Remarkable teachers for the Hautes Etudes du Goût : Pascal Schlich

Pascal Schlich teaches at the Hautes Etudes du Goût :

Pascal Schlich is a director of research with the INRA and the scientific leader of the ChemoSens platform at the Centre des Sciences du Goût et de l'Alimentation in Dijon. He holds a Ph.D. in statistics from the University Paris XI and the accreditation for tutoring Ph.Ds from the Burgundy University. His research deals with sensometrics (statistics for sensory sciences) and the study of consumer preferences. Pascal Schlich has signed or co-signed a hundred of scientific articles or book chapters and is the co-inventor of the TimeSens® software. He teaches sensometrics at AgroSup Dijon, ENSAI Rennes and Montpellier University and is an international consultant for several industries.

Sensory profiling is a technique of sensory analysis recording attributes intensities, but providing no indication on the sequence along which these attributes are perceived. Pascal Schlich and his team developed the Temporal Dominance of Sensations (TDS) method about 12 years ago to fill in this gap. In TDS the subject is asked to indicate at any time the “dominant” attribute, the one trigging his/her attention, not necessarily the most intense one.

TDS has become a reference method in sensory analysis. Contrarily to sensory profiling, it can be used with no training, thus by consumer panels. It makes it possible to pair TDS to dynamic recording of liking, satiation and emotions along the consumption of the full portion of a food or beverage in order to identify the temporal drivers of these three features.

Professors of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Gastronomy

 Do you know the Institute for Advanced Studies in Gastronomy ? This is a unique university programme about food, with no equivalent in the world !

The professors are chosen among the best in France in the field of food research. And this explains why, after more than ten years  of activity, our Institute is so successful, with participants from all over the world.

Now, I decided to present some professors (one per week). Today :




Sylvie Lortal is senior scientist at Inra. For 25 years, she has been having fundamental and applied research on the mechanisms of cheese ripening, on the in situ activity of micro-organisms and their  enzymes, and on the  biodiversity of technological properties of lactic and propionic bacteria. For her work, she was awarded  the Award de l’American Dairy Science Association in 2011.
For 8 years, she was the director of the  UMR Science et Technologie du Lait et de l’œuf of Inra in  Rennes, france (https://www6.rennes.inra.fr/stlo)  and co-editor of the Oxford Companion to cheese (2016-Oxford univ. press), a unique encyclopedia about cheese. With a passion for fermented food, their particular place in human food, and for  the biodiversity of microbial ecosystems, she created in  2006 a Centre de Ressources Biologiques « Bactéries d’intérêt alimentaire » (CIRM-BIA), collection of micro-organisms certified  ISO 9001 (4000 product) – member of the national network  Biobanque, CRB, of which she is now a scientific adviser.
Again in the field of microbial databank, she was the coordinator for Inra of the European Project of  Infrastructure EMbaRC (FP7 – 2009-2012).
Today, she has a mission for the Department Microbiologie et Chaine alimentaire of Inra. She is intended to create a European network managing a collective reflection on the place and the nutritional benefits of fermented food in the European diet. Also she is doing research on biofilms lying on the traditional tools used for cheese making