The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (21 page)

My favorite, however, is the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, which, in keeping with the fluidity of categories here, does not mainly consist of bluegrass. It’s a free autumn music festival created by late local legend (and fluid category himself) Warren Hellman, the scion of an old California Jewish immigrant family, a lifelong Republican and billionaire private equity manager who supported labor unions and played labor protest songs in a bluegrass band, and was beloved in the city for giving away a lot of his fortune making music free to everyone. Hardly Strictly gets 600,000 attendees (in a city of 800,000 people!) who come to see Emmy Lou Harris and Doc Watson and Steve Earle and Janet’s favorite, Elvis Costello. You can’t beat listening to Elvis Costello on a sunny Saturday in Golden Gate Park, but the icing on the cake, as it were, is the kettle corn that they make in huge fired vats, stirring with a big paddle. Kettle corn, or
really any kind of sugary popcorn confection, from Cracker Jack to Fiddle Faddle to a confection of my childhood called Screaming Yellow Zonkers! all have the crucial salt–sugar balance that is definitive of a perfect snack.

Everyone has a favorite junk food, whether it’s French fries (with ketchup, naturally), the chili cheese dogs that Janet favors when we’re visiting her brother Ricky in LA, those “snack bars” that my runner friends pretend aren’t junk food, or the Cheetos snacks adored by my nephews and labeled—by food scientist Steven Witherly in Michael Moss’s book
Salt Sugar Fat
—
“one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet.”

Junk food is a popular topic in my Stanford seminar on the Language of Food, a fact that will not surprise you if you have ever been a teenager. Moss’s book and others are fascinating studies of the unscrupulous ways that snack manufacturers design their products to create bliss points and food addictions. But for this class, instead of the nefarious production of nutritional waste, we focus on the equally morally fraught attempt to convince you to buy it. What are the subtle linguistic techniques used by snack advertisers?

Josh Freedman, now a young political researcher in Washington DC, was an even younger freshman in my class in 2008 when he and I became interested in studying the language of food advertising. But what food to study? We needed one that was easily available and potentially eaten by everyone, but it had to have many similar brands and be accompanied by sufficient advertising language, which ruled out kettle corn or chili cheese dogs or even bananas.

The obvious solution came to Josh in the supermarket one day: potato chips, the great American snack whose bags are obligingly covered with lots of lovely advertising words. Josh is a brilliant budding social scientist, but he was also a college student, which meant he was too broke to actually purchase the potato chips. So he sat down in the aisle of the supermarket and used his phone to take pictures of the front
and back of each bag. Later we relied on the vast financial resources of Stanford University to actually buy 12 carefully selected bags of potato chips. Six of them were more expensive (Boulder Canyon, “Dirty,” Kettle Brand, Popchips, Terra, Michael Season’s, averaging 68 cents per ounce) and six were less expensive (Hawaiian, Herr’s, Lay’s, Tim’s, Utz, and Wise, averaging 40 cents per ounce).

We then typed in all the advertising text from the back of the chips, coded it up in various ways, and examined how the words differed between the two classes of chips.

To gain some insight into what we found, take a few seconds to look at this (anonymized) excerpt from the back of one of the expensive potato chip bags we examined:

“Anonymous Brand”

potato chips are

· All natural

· Cholesterol free

· Kettle cooked in a peanut oil blend

· Kosher certified

And contain:

· No MSG

· No artificial colors

· No artificial flavors

· No preservatives

· No wheat glutens

· No hydrogenated oil

· No trans fats

· No artificial sweeteners

At “Anonymous Brand” we don’t wash out the natural potato flavor, which makes our chips crunchier and tastier.

After seeing this example you can probably guess the one universal characteristic of potato chip advertising: potato chips turn out to be a health food, at least in the special world inhabited by advertising
copywriters. All the bags were covered with language emphasizing how healthy and good for your body the chips are, using phrases like “healthier,” “0 grams trans fat,” “low fat,” “no cholesterol,” “lowest sodium level.”

Now you and I both know that potato chips are not actually healthy. And so do the restaurant reviewers studied in the previous chapter who lightheartedly used words like “crave” and “jonesing” and “fix” to characterize similar deep-fried snacks as addictive drugs. The linguistic evidence demonstrates that potato chip advertisers are similarly aware of the unhealthiness of their products, and they know we know it. In Chapter 1 we used the ideas of the philosopher H. P. Grice to argue that when a menu protests too much about the freshness or crispiness of its food, it means the menu writer suspects the customer needs to be convinced. Similarly with chips: the ridiculous emphasis on health is an admission that the manufacturers are well aware that you may be skeptical of the nutritional value of their products.

Even beyond this overall flood of health talk, we found a huge difference between the words used to describe expensive chips and inexpensive chips. Health-related claims occur on expensive chips six times as often as on inexpensive chips, as often as six times per bag!

This difference in health language is not, as far as we can tell, due to actual differences in the chips. For example, none of the 12 kinds of chips contains trans fats, but the text on inexpensive chips doesn’t emphasize this—it’s mentioned on only two out of the six inexpensive chip bags. By contrast, text on every one of the six expensive chip bags emphasizes the lack of trans fats. In other words, advertisers try to sell chips to richer, presumably more health-conscious consumers by pretending, or at least actively encouraging the belief, that the chips are good for them, or at least just healthy enough to overcome the guilt.

That’s not the only marketing trick for targeting the rich. Another tool is to use more complex words and complex sentences. The
simplest way of measuring these is counting the number of letters in the average word. We also counted the number of words in the average sentence. The widespread Flesch-Kincaid measure of language complexity simply averages these two counts to assign a very rough “grade level” to a text. Sure enough, we found that advertising text on inexpensive chips uses simpler sentences and simpler words, on average at the eighth-grade level. Notice the simple grammar and vocabulary in this sample from an inexpensive chip:

What gives our chips their exceptional great taste? It’s no secret. It’s the way they’re made!

The advertising on expensive chips is written at the tenth- to eleventh-grade level; notice the more complex words (“stage of preparation” versus “way they’re made”) and structure in this sample:

We use totally natural ingredients, hand-rake every batch, and test chips at every stage of preparation to ensure quality and taste.

So advertisers aren’t just trying to get you to believe that potato chips are good for your health. Advertisers, like writers of menus, figure that the more money you have, the more you’ll be pleased to have an advertiser talk to you in complicated language. Maybe those expensive student loans were worth it after all.

Also similar to menus for expensive restaurants, text describing expensive chips is riddled with natural authenticity, calling chips “natural,” obsessed with the lack of anything artificial or fake, and emphasizing the handcrafted wholesomeness of the manufacturing process. Researchers call this
craft authenticity
, and you’ve seen it in phrases like “sea salt,” “nothing fake or phony,” “absolutely nothing artificial,” “only the finest potatoes,” or “hand-rake every batch.”

We found one final characteristic of advertisements on expensive chips. The ads are chock-full of the language of differentiation and comparison. Expensive chips use words like
more
or
less
, suffixes like
–er,
or superlative words (most, least, best, finest). Phrases like “in a class of their own” or “deliciously different” or statements that these chips have “a crunchy bite you won’t find in any other chip” or “less fat than other leading brands” assert that the expensive chip possesses some quality or ingredient (goodness or fat) to a greater or lesser extent than other chips.

Expensive chips also have a lot more negative markers, like the word
no
or phrases like “never fried” or the word
don’t
in “we don’t wash out the natural potato flavor.” Negation emphasizes bad qualities that a chip does not have, subtly suggesting that other brands have this bad quality. The message is that other chips are unhealthy, unnatural, or addictive (recall the drug metaphors of the previous chapter). Here is some copy we took directly from the back of one of the chip bags:

nothing fake or phony.

no fake colors, no fake flavors,

no fluorescent orange fingertips,

no wiping your greasy chip hand

on your jeans. no, really.

To get a more fine-grained analysis, we also ran a regression, the same statistical tool we used to analyze the menus and reviews in earlier chapters, to test exactly how much these negative words were correlated with the price. We found that a bag of potato chips costs four cents more per ounce for every additional negative word on the bag. This does not mean that advertisers literally raise the price when they add negation; we didn’t attempt to find a causal link between the two. Our results are merely an association, suggesting that these go
together. But it does mean that if you see six negative words on the back of the package you’re going to be paying about a quarter more per ounce.

Why should words related to what a product isn’t, or words related to differentiating a product from others, be linked to its expense? The answer comes from French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu, whose famous book
Distinction
surveyed French society in the 1960s, examining the daily habits and tastes of the upper class and the working class. Bourdieu showed that our position in society heavily influences our tastes, with the working class expressing “popular” tastes for the “Blue Danube Waltz” while the high-status class preferred the “Well-Tempered Clavier” or Brueghel. In food, the lower class expressed preferences for traditional hearty meals, heavy in starch and fat and generous in portion size. The high-status classes instead tended to value more exotic foods like curry and other ethnic foods newly arrived in France at the time, or health foods like brown rice.

Bourdieu argues that there is nothing inherently better about curry versus cassoulet; that hip or fashionable tastes are just a way for the upper class to display their high status, to
distinguish
themselves from other classes. Taste, says Bourdieu, is “first and foremost . . . negation . . . of the tastes of others.” A high-status group maintains its status by legitimizing some tastes but not others, independent of inherent artistic merit, and by passing on these tastes as cultural preferences.

Bourdieu’s model explains the massive amounts of comparison (less fat, finest potatoes) and negation (not, never) in expensive chip advertising as a way of explicitly emphasizing these distinctions. Upper-class taste in food advertising is defined by contrast with tastes of other classes; what it is to be upper class is to be
not
working class.

But advertising copywriters don’t just target the rich. The text on inexpensive chips targets a specific audience too. Josh and I found that less expensive chips emphasized family recipes or a grounding in American history and geography. These advertisers harkened back to a
traditional authenticity
by using phrases like “the chips that built our company,” “85-year-old recipe,” “time-honored tradition,” “classic American snacks,” or “[from] the great Pacific Northwest.” Advertisers presume that customers of less expensive chips are more concerned with family and tradition than distinction, uniqueness, and health.