The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (2 page)

Why do we fancy something sweet at the end of a meal—so much so that we have influenced Chinese restaurants in the United States
to offer one when their own culture didn’t even have a word for “dessert,” let alone a fortune cookie? We’ll see the history of dessert (rooted in Andalusia, Baghdad, and Persia), and we’ll introduce the grammar of cuisine, the idea that eating sweets at the end of a meal (rather than, say, the beginning) is rooted in the implicit structures that define each modern cuisine in the same way grammar rules help define a language.

The language of food helps us understand the interconnectedness of civilizations and the vast globalization that happened, not recently, as we might think, but centuries or millennia ago, all brought together by the most basic human pursuit: finding something good to eat. You might call this aspect of the book “EATymology.” But the language of food isn’t just an etymological clue to the past. The words we use to talk about food are also a code that we can decipher to better understand the present.

In our lab at Stanford, we use linguistic tools to study online or digital texts of all kinds, with the goal of better understanding the human condition. We’ve studied recordings of
speed dates
to uncover the subconscious linguistic signs of a date going well or badly, showing that the advice from dating manuals is completely backward. We’ve tested pages on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to uncover the subtle linguistic cues to
an author’s covert biases
. We’ve used linguistic theories of politeness to automatically measure
how polite different people are on the web
, and show that, sadly, the more power and status people achieve, the less polite they become.

Throughout this book I’ll apply these computational linguistic tools to the study of food, drawing on rich datasets now available due to the rise of the Internet and examining millions of online restaurant reviews, thousands of online menus, the linguistics of food advertising and food brands.

I’ll use these tools and others from the intersection of linguistics
and economics to uncover subtle linguistic cues hidden in the language of today’s food advertisers, showing surprising ways that you are being targeted every time you read a menu or even look at the text on the back of a package of potato chips. You will even see how linguistic cues can predict the price of individual dishes on a menu, based not only on the words that appear but also on those purposely omitted.

The language of food also tells us about human psychology, who we are, from the nature of our perception and emotions to the social psychology of our attitudes toward others. By using software to investigate millions of online reviews of restaurants or beers, we discover evidence for the Pollyanna effect: a claim from psychology that human nature strongly tends toward the positive and optimistic. Hence our comparisons of good food to, say, sexual pleasure. We’ll also look at how people talk about restaurants they really hate, the scathing 1-star reviews, discovering what people are most traumatized by, and we’ll see that it’s all about our connection to others.

Finally, we’ll talk about health. Why were
flour
and
flower
once the same word and what does that suggest about our unhealthy obsession with refined food? What does the fact that
salad
,
salami
,
salsa
,
sauce
, and
soused
all originally meant the same thing tell us about the difficulty of reducing the sodium in our diets?

Like the incriminating evidence in Poe’s
Purloined Letter
, the answers to each of these questions is hidden in plain sight in the words we use to talk about food.

The structure of the book follows the meal, starting with menus and then the fish course, replete with sailors and pirates, followed by a break for the punch course and toast that traditionally preceded the roast in formal dinners, then the roast itself, a brief interlude to talk about snacks and craving before finishing with dessert. (But the chapters can also be read independently in any order. My mom, whose love
of consensus is legendary in our family, only read every other chapter of
War and Peace
, so we like to say she just read Tolstoy’s
Peace
.)

All innovation happens at interstices. Great food is no exception, created at the intersection of cultures as each one modifies and enhances what is borrowed from its neighbors. The language of food is a window onto these “between” places, the ancient clash of civilizations, the modern clash of culture, the covert clues to human cognition, society, and evolution. Every time you roast a turkey for Thanksgiving, toast the bride and groom at a wedding, or decide what potato chips or ice cream to buy, you are having a conversation in the language of food.

San Francisco, California
April 2014

One

How to Read a Menu

SAN FRANCISCO’S MOST
EXPENSIVE
restaurant won’t give you a menu. Well, that’s not strictly true. The attentive staff will happily offer you a beautifully printed list of dishes (“trout roe, sea urchin, cardoon, brassicas . . .”)—by email, after you get home, as a souvenir. Saison, this marvelous Michelin-starred restaurant, isn’t alone. Expensive restaurants everywhere increasingly offer “blind” tasting menus in which you don’t know what you’re going to eat in each course until the plate is set down on your table. When it comes to high-status restaurants, it seems that the more you pay, the less choice you have.

Status used to be expressed a different way. If you ate out in the 1970s I’m sure you dined at one of those establishments that writer Calvin Trillin called
La Maison de la Casa House, Continental Cuisine
. Trillin, an early supporter of local and ethnic eating, mocked pretentious restaurants whose menus were as macaronic a mishmash of French and English as their names (
macaronic
: from a sixteenth-century verse style mixing Latin with Italian dialect originally named, as we’ll see, after macaroni). Trillin complained of being led to a “purple palace that serves ‘Continental cuisine’ and has as its chief creative employee a menu-writer rather than a chef.”

Menu writing manuals of the day advised restaurants to
“continentalize your menu,”
and indeed they did, as we see from these examples, with French words mixed in randomly with English or Italian words;
sometimes even just the French article “Le” with an otherwise English sentence:

Flaming Coffee Diablo, Prepared en Vue of Guest

Ravioli parmigiana, en casserole

Le Crabmeat Cocktail

Menus full of macaronic French weren’t just a fad. Through the wonder of the Internet, we can go back in time more than a century in the New York Public Library’s
online menu collection
(donated by Miss Frank E. Buttolph [1850–1924], a
“tiny, unostentatious, literary-looking lady”
with an obsession for menus). The 10,000 menus start with the
Astor House’s breakfast menu
for the Ladies Ordinary meeting of August 25, 1843 (clam soup, boiled cod, mutton cutlets “sauté, with champignons,” calf’s head, chicken pies, mashed potatoes, beets, squash, roast beef, lamb, snipe, squab, goose, and in case anyone was still hungry, blackberry pie, cream pie, peach ices, and macarons for dessert; we’ll come back to those macarons. Menus from the early 1900s are full of interwoven bits of French, especially those from expensive and upper-middle-priced restaurants, which use it
five times more than cheap restaurants
:

Flounder sur le plat

Eggs au beurre noir

Fried chicken a la Maryland half

Green turtle a l’anglaise

Sirloin steak aux champignons

We’re not in the 1970s any more (let alone the 1870s), and now this kind of fake French just seems amusing to us. But status and social class never really go away; modern expensive restaurants still have ways of
signaling that they are high-status, fancy places, or aspire to be. In fact, every time you read a description of a dish on a menu you are looking at all sorts of latent linguistic clues, clues about how we think about wealth and social class, how our society views our food, even clues about all sorts of things that restaurant marketers might not want us to know.

What are the modern indicators of an expensive, high-class restaurant? Perhaps you’ll recognize the marketing techniques in the descriptions of these three dishes from pricey places:

HERB ROASTED ELYSIAN FIELDS FARMS LAMB

Eggplant Porridge, Cherry Peppers,
Greenmarket Cucumbers and Pine Nut Jus

GRASS FED ANGUS BEEF CARPACCIO

Pan Roasted King Trumpet Mushrooms

Dirty Girl Farm Romano Bean Tempura

Persillade, Extra Virgin Olive Oil

BISON BURGER

8 oz. blue star farms, grass fed & pasture raised,
melted gorgonzola, grilled vegetables

You probably noticed the extraordinary attention the menu writers paid to the origins of the food, mentioning the names of farms (“Elysian Fields,” “Dirty Girl,” “blue star”), giving us images of the ranch (“grass fed,” “pasture raised”), and alluding to the farmer’s market (“Greenmarket Cucumbers”).

And menu writers aren’t the only ones to get carried away. In the first episode of the show
Portlandia
Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, obsessive locavores, question the provenance of the chicken at
a restaurant. The waitress tries to reassure them that the chicken is “a heritage breed, woodland raised chicken that has been fed a diet of sheep’s milk, soy, and hazelnuts.” Armisen and Brownstein, still unsatisfied (“The hazelnuts, these are local?”) head out to visit the farm where the chicken was raised just to make sure.

I suppose linguists can be annoying dinner companions as well. All that reading of words on menus does tend to slow down dinner ordering. And yet studying menus one by one, while good for inspiration, is generally not sufficient for uncovering the subtle differences. For that you need larger amounts of data.

Luckily, these days restaurants digitize their menus and put them online, making it possible to look at a huge number of menus, and hence test hypotheses about restaurant language and price while controlling for the geographic location, the type of cuisine, and so on.

To find out how widespread this locavore trend really is, and to see what other subtle cues restaurant menus are hiding, I conducted a study with Victor Chahuneau, Noah Smith, and Bryan Routledge from Carnegie Mellon University.
We used a very large dataset
consisting of 6500 modern menus (describing a total of 650,000 dishes) culled from the web, covering restaurants in seven cities (New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles). This allowed us to control for the city, the neighborhood, the type of cuisine, and many other factors that economists control for when studying restaurant price (such as being on a main street versus a side street, a factor I learned from economist Tyler Cowen’s
An Economist Gets Lunch
).

We then wrote software to count the number of references to farms, ranches, pastures, woodlands, gardens, farmer’s markets, heritage pork, or heirloom tomatoes that occur on the menus of restaurants of different price classes—from cheap one-dollar-sign restaurants [$] to expensive four-dollar-sign restaurants [$$$$]. Across this very
large dataset, very expensive ($$$$) restaurants mention the origins of the food
more than 15 times as often as inexpensive restaurants!
This obsession with provenance is a strong indicator that you are in an expensive, fancy restaurant. (Or that you are purchasing an expensive package of junk food, marketed with the exact same strategies, as we’ll see.)

We discovered many other linguistic properties with economic implications in our study. For example, the tendency of expensive restaurants to choose what you’re going to eat extends far beyond posh Michelin-star places like Saison. Even on a la carte menus, a more expensive restaurant is more likely to offer a prix fixe selection, or to describe an individual dish as being composed of a “chef’s choice” or the “chef’s selection,” as we see in the following examples:

Sashimi Omakase:
ten kinds of chef’s choice

Antipasto Della Casa:
The chef’s daily selection

In cheaper restaurants, by contrast, the diner has a lot of choice, as
linguist Robin Lakoff pointed out
. First of all, inexpensive restaurants just have far more dishes. On average twice as many. Think about the menu at the last Chinese restaurant you went to, or the last diner, compared to the last fancy restaurant. Cheap restaurants are likely to give a choice of sizes (small, medium, or large), or a choice of proteins (chicken, shrimp, or tofu). Another linguistic cue on menus of cheap restaurants is that the word
you
appears much more often, in phrases like “your choice” or “your way.” Here are some examples: