Dan Jurafsky: THE LANGUAGE OF FOOD: A LINGUIST READS THE MENU.
W.W. Norton and Company, 2014.
Identifying oneself as a linguist or applied linguist can be, as I am sure many readers of this journal know, something of a conversation stopper. The relevance of detailed language analysis to real-world affairs does not seem immediately evident to many people. And clumsy attempts to clarify, at least in my case, seem often to make matters worse rather than better.
It depends of course on one's particular branch of linguistics. I envy forensic linguists who can tell dramatic tales of criminal acquittal or conviction on the strength of linguistic evidence. But for many in other branches of linguistics one would think there is no such hope. Computational and corpus linguists, etymologists, historical linguists, comparative linguists, phoneticians surely stand no chance. How could one ever make such areas seem not only relevant for a non-academic audience, but popular?
Yet this is exactly what Dan Jurafsky has achieved. He has used his research in computational and corpus linguistics, and his erudition in all of the areas listed above, to throw authoritative light on a topic which, unlike linguistics, is definitely one of enduring perennial public interest: food. He has done this, moreover, with charm, eloquence, humour and wit, to produce a book which will capture the attention of a non-specialist audience, making them not only interested in food (which they are already) but also in linguistics. This is no mean achievement.
Jurafsky personalises his analyses by situating them in the culinary context of San
Francisco where he lives, relating them to local events and places, his favourite delis, bakeries and restaurants, and introducing us along the way to his friends and family and their food preferences and histories: his Cantonese wife Janet influenced by her
Chinese grandfather from Guanxi, his memories of his own two New York Jewish grandmothers and their home cooking. All this localisation and personalisation might easily be written off as trivial and unworthy of serious academic attention, but this would be a mistake. There is a serious point behind the popular tone.
Take for example chapter 3 'From Sikbāj to Fish and Chips'. Here Jurafsky begins with an anecdotal tour of seafood restaurants on the San Francisco waterfront and their apparent diversity of unconnected international dishes ranging from the homely local, through European and Asian, to South American, such as the traditional
Peruvian ceviche . He then takes us back to mid-sixth-century Persia, and the court of the Shahanshah (King of Kings) Khosrau, whose favourite dish was sikbāj , a slowcooked stew of beef and lamb and chicken (!), vinegar, honey, saffron and lovage, and traces its spread throughout the Arab world in the following centuries, where it appears in "the oldest surviving cookbook in Arabic, Kitāb al-Tabīkh ( The Book of
Cookery ) compiled by Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq, c. 950-1000 CE". He tells of its adoption by sailors, who substituted fish for meat but kept the vinegar, and its further spread westward within Europe, where through gradual mutations, both linguistic and culinary, it was the ancestor of an extraordinary variety of international dishes, each firmly believed by its native consumers to be a distinctive component of their own cuisine: Catalan escabetx , Spanish escabeche , Neapolitan scapece , Genoese scabeccio, French aspic , English fish and chips (originally considered a Jewish dish).
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Moving eastward, it was the origin of Japanese tempura , a word probably deriving from "Portuguese tempero (seasoning) and the related verb temperar (to flavor)".
Meanwhile, moving on to the New World with the conquistadors it transmuted into ceviche , "the tangy fish or seafood marinated in lime that is the official national dish of Peru". So all versions meet again—and this is the serious point behind the light anecdotal framework—as an apparently diverse offering of cuisines on the San
Francisco waterfront. Food, like language, is simultaneously testament to human diversity and to human commonality.
The book is full of such historical excursions, drawing apparently effortlessly on a wealth of etymological, historical and comparative linguistic scholarship, to show how names and dishes change together, reflecting movements of people, the rise and fall of empires, and the spread of trade. Other chapters concern the origins of ketchup in Chinese fish sauce (chapter 4), the common origins of macaroons and macaroni
(chapter 10), the connection between homonymous toast , meaning a slice of heatbrowned bread, and toast , meaning a call to drink together (chapter 5), the common chemical processes and origins of the manufacture of fireworks, sherbet, and ice cream (chapter 11).
For trips into contemporary food practices and attitudes, Jurafsky draws on corpus linguistic analyses conducted with his colleagues in computational linguistics. Some are large scale, such as the analysis of 7500 menus (chapter 2) to see how food descriptions vary between inexpensive and expensive restaurants. (The former are more likely to address their customers as "you" and protest their food is "real" and
"delicious"; the latter are 15 times more likely to state the origins of their supplies, and link them to "farms, ranches, pastures, woodlands, gardens, farmers' markets, heritage".) Others studies are small scale, such one conducted with a student of 12 brands of potato chips ("crisps" in British English) linking ingredients to prices
(chapter 8). In one of the large-scale studies, Jurafsky and colleagues analysed over a million online restaurant reviews from YELP, and five million beer reviews on beeradvocate.com
and similar sites, to find out about the language in which people express approval or disapproval of what they ingest—what it tells us about them, and by extrapolation about humanity in general. Generally, he found that while terms of approval are comparatively few and bland ( amazing , perfect , wonderful , fantastic , awesome , incredible , great ), words expressing disapproval are vastly more varied and specific. Descriptions of bad beer include, for example, corny , skunky , metallic , colorless , stale , chemical , piss , yellow , disgusting , skanky , thin , flat , fizzy , and overcarbonated . Always ready to bridge creatively from one area of research to another, Jurafsky notes how languages in general tend to have more words for describing negative opinions than positive ones—a phenomenon termed negative differentiation—and links this to the evolutionary need for discrimination of dangerous tastes. From there he gives examples of the myriad terms for smell in
Cantonese, including heung , often unsatisfactorily translated into English as fragrant , a word from which, incidentally, we get "the name Heung Gong (Hong Kong; 'smellsgood harbour')". Returning to restaurant reviews he notes the predominance in negative reports of past tense communication verbs ( said and told ) and event words
( then , after ), as well as words referring to actors and events in a restaurant trip
( manager , customer , minutes , money , waitress , bill , attitude , apology , mistake , tip ) rather than the food itself. The negative experience in other words is expressed as a cautionary narrative rather than a description. On the positive side however he notes
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that if reviewers say they like the dessert, they also like the restaurant. The really positive reviews, moreover, don't just use the bland approval words above. They go for sexual and drug-addiction metaphors too. The apple tarty ice cream pastry thing was just orgasmic or These cup cakes are like crack.
Now of course it would be easy for a 'serious researcher' to throw up their hands in horror and dismiss this popularising book (with its cover showing the words of the title written in biscuits) as beyond the pale of serious writing about language. But this would be wrong, especially for applied linguists. Each chapter is based on very extensive research and scholarship—the last quarter of the book is notes and references—and although easy to read, it is also densely packed with information and ideas, so that in addition to telling its readers a great deal about food, its history and role in cultural identity, it also persuasively tells them a great deal about the power of linguistics. For us applied linguists it could also say something about our own discipline. It is an interdisciplinary tour de force , but one conducted from a solid disciplinary base in computational linguistics, the area of Jurafsky's particular expertise. It is also a good example of rigorous linguistic research being convincingly used to connect with popular interests. As such, it is an instance of a goal so often asserted but so seldom achieved in applied linguistics: relevance to "real-world problems in which language is a central issue" (Brumfit 1995).
So I recommend it wholeheartedly to the readership of this journal. There are many good reasons to read it, not least that it is enjoyable. In addition to being entertained, however, you will be informed not only about food and its history, but about the relevance of linguistics to the real world. It can serve as a model for how to popularise applied linguistics, and put all that effete knowledge into engaging with the real world outside.
Reference
Brumfit, C. J. 1995. 'Teacher professionalism and research' in G. Cook and B.
Seidlhofer (eds): Principle and practice in applied linguistics: studies in honour of
H.G. Widdowson . Oxford University Press: 27–41.
Reviewed by Guy Cook
King's College London, UK
E-mail: guy.cook@kcl.ac.uk
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