The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (20 page)

succulent pork belly paired with
seductively
seared foie gras

The association is quite strong: the more mentions of sex in a restaurant review, the higher the price of the restaurant.

People use a very different metaphor when they like the food at cheap restaurants. In reviewing inexpensive restaurants, they use the language of addiction or drugs instead of sex to talk about their fries or garlic noodles:

garlic noodles . . . are now my
drug of choice

these cupcakes are like
crack

be warned the wings are
addicting

. . . every time
I need a fix
. That fried chicken is so damn good!

I swear the fries have
crack
or some sort of
addicting drugs
in them

The examples above show what we “crave” or are “addicted to”: chicken wings and fried chicken, cupcakes, garlic noodles, French fries, and burgers. It’s the snack foods and bar foods, guilty pleasures because of their fat, sugar, and deep-fried goodness that invite the comparison to
drugs. Researchers still aren’t sure of the biochemical
link between junk-food cravings and drug addiction
, but in any case the cravings for fat and also sugar are quite strong. A study that varied the fat and sugar in chocolate milkshakes suggests that sugar may light up the reward center of the brain even more effectively than fat. Writer
Adam Gopnik
describes nights during his experiment in giving up dessert when he would wake up and—like a golem controlled by external command—sleepily wander toward the freezer and the ice cream.

In any case, the linguistic ubiquity of this metaphor of drugs demonstrates how deep this addictive understanding of junk food and desserts is embedded in our culture. By placing the blame on the food, we’re distancing ourselves from our own “sin” of eating fried or sugary snacks: “It’s not my fault: the cupcake made me do it.” Our research also found that women are more likely than men to use drug metaphors in reviews, suggesting that they are especially pressured to conform to healthy or low-calorie eating.

What are people eating when they talk about sex in reviews? We can study this by looking at food words that
occur more frequently
near sexual words. Two kinds of foods are associated with sex. One is sushi, because of the modern trend of giving sexy names to sushi like these:

sex on the beach roll

foreplay roll

sweet temptation roll

orgasmic spicy tuna roll

sexy mama roll

sexy lady roll

hot sexy shrimp roll

sexy lizzy roll

The other food most frequently associated with sex is dessert:

molten chocolate cake . . . honestly an
orgasm
on a plate

I still
lust
for the silky panna cotta and
tantalizing
sorbet

marshmallows . . . so . . . sticky and sweet, they’re nearly
pornographic

warm chestnut mochi chocolate cake . . .
seductively
gooey on the inside

The examples above also exhibit another class of words associated with both dessert and sex: texture words like
sticky
,
silky
,
gooey
. Here are the sensory words most commonly used to describe desserts in the million reviews:

rich moist warm sweet dense hot creamy flaky light fluffy sticky dry gooey smooth crisp oozing satin soft velvety thick melty silky oozing thin crunchy spongy

All of these are from the sensory domain of “feel,” of textures and temperatures. When we talk about desserts, we talk about their feel in the mouth, not their appearance, smell, taste, or sound. Americans usually describe desserts as soft or dripping wet, a tendency that linguist Susan Strauss, in her comparison of TV advertising in the US, Japan, and Korea, found to be a general property of food advertising in American English. US commercials emphasize tender, gooey, rich, creamy food, and associate softness and dripping sweetness with sensual hedonism and pleasure.

This association between soft, sticky things and pleasure isn’t a necessary connection. For example,
Strauss found that Korean food commercials
emphasize hard, texturally stimulating food, using words like
wulthung pwulthung hata
(solid and bumpy),
ccalis hata
(stinging, stimulating),
thok ssota
(stinging), and
elelhata
(spicy to the extent that one’s nerves are numbed).

The link between dessert and sex
is visible in many aspects of our culture, from the sensual advertising of chocolate to women (like Ghirardelli’s slogan, “Moments of Timeless Pleasure”) to modern music, where my students Debra Pacio and Linda Yu found that recent songs like Kelis’s “Milkshake” or Li’l Wayne’s “Lollipop” use dessert and especially candy as a metaphor for sex. There is a gender effect with dessert too. Our study shows that women are more likely than men to mention desserts in their reviews.

Dessert is also so prized that people find it very difficult to say anything bad about it. Notice the overwhelmingly positive sentiment of the 20 most frequent sentiment words associated with dessert:

delicious amazing yummy decadent divine yum good OK wow fabulous scrumptious delectable wonderful delish refreshing awesome perfect incredible fantastic heavenly

In fact, the more Yelp reviewers mention dessert, the more they like the restaurant. Reviewers who don’t mention a dessert give the restaurants an average review score of 3.6 (out of 5). But reviewers who mention a dessert in their review give a higher average review score, 3.9 out of 5. And when people do talk about dessert, the more times they mention dessert in the review, the higher the rating they give to the restaurant.

This positivity exhibited by reviews, filled with metaphors of sex and dessert, turns out to be astonishingly strong. Despite the negativity bias that makes us especially sensitive to negative situations, people are actually much more positive than they are negative.

One sign of our positive nature is word frequency. Positive words, though weak in variety, occur much more often in reviews than negative words. Restaurant reviewers use words like
great
,
delicious
, and
amazing
3 to 10 times more often than words like
bland
,
bad
, or
terrible
.

Review scores themselves are also skewed toward the positive. Reviewing scores on most sites go from 1 to 5, so the median score should be 3. Instead the median score, whether for restaurants or beers, is about 4 out of 5. My colleague down the hall
Chris Potts has shown that this skew
is true wherever people review things on the web—books, movies, cameras, you name it.

This tendency toward the positive is not a recent trend caused by the Internet, but has been shaping our language for millennia. Linguists
are deeply interested in linguistic phenomena that hold across all languages, key to our goal of discovering true human universals. A bias toward positivity in vocabulary is one of the strongest universals we have found. This idea that people are positive is called
the
Pollyanna effect
, after the heroine of Eleanor Porter’s 1909 book for children, Pollyanna, an orphan who always looked on the bright side. In common usage “Pollyanna-ish” describes a naïve or foolish optimism, but the Pollyanna effect is a more neutral observation of humans’ remarkable tendency toward optimism.

The Pollyanna effect is not just specific to reviews. If you ask Google how frequent a word is (or check the frequency in a carefully constructed academic database of texts),
positive words are (on average) more frequent than negative words
. English
good
is more frequent than
bad
,
happy
than
sad
; Chinese
kaixin
(happy) is more frequent than
nanguo
(sad); Spanish
feliz
is more frequent than
triste
.

More subtly, positive words have a special linguistic status called
unmarked
.
Markedness
has to do with oppositions: in pairs of words like happy/unhappy, good/bad, capable/incapable, or honest/dishonest, the first of each pair is unmarked or neutral and the second is marked. There are many linguistic cues to which member of a pair is unmarked. The unmarked form is shorter (marked
unhappy
and
dishonest
have an extra
un
- and
dis-
than unmarked
happy
and
honest
). Unmarked words tend to come first in “X and Y” phrases like “good and evil” or “right and wrong.” Unmarked words are neutral in questions. Asking “Is your accountant honest?” is the neutral way to find out about the honesty of your accountant. If I instead ask, “Is your accountant dishonest?” that suggests that I already have some reason to believe you have a cheating accountant. Sure enough, across languages, the
unmarked form is much more likely to be positive
(
happy, honest
) rather than negative (
unhappy
,
dishonest
); it’s very rare across languages for a negative word like
sad
to be the basic form and
unsad
to be the way to
say “happy.” Thus we have English words
unhappy
,
incapable
,
uncomfortable
, but not
unsad
,
un-itchy
,
unklutzy.

The Pollyanna effect has been confirmed in dozens of languages and cultures, and comes up in all sorts of nonlinguistic ways as well. When psychologists ask people to think of items or remember them from a list, they name more positive things than negative things.
When people forward news stories
, they are more likely to forward the positive stories than the negative ones.

In other words, although humans have a lot of ways of talking about negative events, and are especially traumatized when other people are rude or mean to them, although people differ in all sorts of ways, perceive different tastes and smells, and range hugely in their personalities, these differences only serve to highlight a fundamental similarity as humans: we are a positive, optimistic race. We tend to notice and talk about the good things in life. Like dessert. And sex.

And all of this, joy and trauma, is visible in those reviews on the web, offering a little insight into the human psyche along with advice on where to go for dinner.

Just don’t forget to order dessert.

Eight

Potato Chips and the Nature of the Self

SAN FRANCISCANS ARE
a festive people, although we can be a little confused about exactly what we’re celebrating. There’s the Chinese New Year Parade, which is not held on Chinese New Year, and Carnival, a fabulous parade we have in May instead of in February. Then there’s Burning Man, which used to be on Baker Beach but we don’t even hold in the state anymore, and the Bay to Breakers race, which for most participants is more of a (barely) mobile drunken costume party than a race.