The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (3 page)

Baby lamb chops grilled
to your liking

Marinated flank steak with eggs
your way

Quiche with
your choice
of either house salad or a cup of soup

Biscuits and gravy with eggs
anyway you like ’em

We found that expensive ($$$$) restaurants have half as many dishes as cheap ($) restaurants, are three times less likely to talk about the diner’s choice, and are seven times more likely to talk about the chef’s choice.

Fancy restaurants, not surprisingly, also use fancy words. In menus from 50 to 100 years ago this often meant long French words, but now lots of other foreign words are used on fancy menus. In our sample of expensive modern menus this means words like
tonnarelli
,
choclo
,
bastilla
,
kataifi
,
persillade
, and
oyako
(from Italian, Peruvian Spanish, Arabic, Greek, French, and Japanese, respectively).

But there are fancy words in English too—what my dad, using the old term for fifty cents, calls “two-bit words,” long multisyllabic words with 11 or 12 letters or more. Why would a word be fancy just because it is longer? Well, for one thing, many of our longer words came into English from French or Latin, historically high-status languages. For another: longer words are used less frequently; in fact, the longer, the rarer. This is obvious if you think about it; short words (words like
of
,
I
,
the
,
a
) are grammatical words that appear all over the place, while very long words (like
accompaniments
) appear in much fewer situations.

This relationship between word length and word frequency was
first discovered by Sibawayhi
, a Persian grammarian of the eighth century, in one of many scientific revolutions and inventions that come from the Muslim world. Sibawayhi came to what is now Iraq just after the construction of Baghdad, the fabled capital of the Abbasid Dynasty and perhaps the greatest center of learning and science in the medieval world. (As we’ll see in later chapters, Baghdad was also where the fabulous foods of the caliphs were developed that became the source of many of our modern foods.)

Sibawayhi originally came from Persia to study law, but then one day when reciting out loud he made an embarrassing error in pronouncing an Arabic word. His fellow students shamed him in public for his bad language skills (I guess eighth-century law students were
no less cutthroat than modern ones), and according to at least one story that’s why Sibawayhi switched fields and
spent the rest of his life studying linguistics
. (Public humiliation is not a method that is normally recommended in modern universities to get students to choose a major. Unless, of course, it gets students interested in linguistics.)

Sibawayhi’s theory was reinvented and formalized 1200 years later, in the 1930s, when
linguist George Zipf suggested
that frequently used words are shortened so as to make communication more efficient; you can pack more words in a smaller space and time for your listener if the ones that you use more often, the frequent ones, are shorter. Zipf’s ideas helped lead to the brilliant work of Claude Shannon 10 years later at Bell Labs in creating information theory. Without these ideas, our modern digital collections of menus (or sound recordings, or photographs) would be impossible.

Anyhow, these rare, long, fancy words that appear more often in expensive restaurants are words like
decaffeinated
,
accompaniments
,
complements
,
traditionally
,
specifications
,
preparation
,
overflowing
,
magnificent
,
inspiration
,
exquisitely
, and
tenderness
. By contrast, cheaper restaurants use shorter forms:
decaf
instead of
decaffeinated
,
sides
instead of
accompaniments
or
complements
. Words on menus at expensive restaurants average about half a letter longer than those on menus at cheap ones.

Fancy words are thus an indicator that we are at a fancy restaurant. But using a fancy word in a dish description tells you something even more specific: it tells you about the actual price of the dish!

To study this, my colleagues and I looked at the price of all 650,000 dishes on the 6500 menus, and used statistical tools to find which words are associated with higher and lower prices. The most important factor that affects the price of a dish is the type of food; lobster costs more than chicken, which costs more than a side of toast. So we statistically controlled for the type of food, the cuisine of the restaurant (Chinese, Italian, steakhouses, diners, cafes) and how expensive the restaurant is
, and which city and neighborhood the restaurant was in. After all these controls, we then studied the additional affect of individual words on the prices.

What we found is that when a restaurant uses longer words to describe a dish, it charges more for the dish. Every increase of one letter in the average length of words describing a dish is associated with an increase of 18 cents in the price of that dish! This means that if a restaurant uses words that are on average three letters longer, you’ll be paying 54 cents extra for your roast chicken or pasta. To our surprise, the phrase “two-bit words” turns out to quite literally (if accidentally) refer to the fifty cents more per dish if the restaurant uses long, fancy words on the menu!

Counting letters is one way to find out the hidden information that restaurateurs are sneaking onto your menu, but another is to check whether the restaurant emphasizes how exotic or spicy the food is. If so, watch out! Look for phrases like “exotic blend of Indian spices” or “exotic Ethiopian spices” or even just “tamarind fish soup with exotic vegetables.” Our study found that every use of the word
exotic
or
spices
raises the price of a dish. Presumably the reason is that such foods would not be exotic to someone who is in fact Ethiopian or Indian: These restaurants are not advertising to native eaters of the cuisine, who eat it every day and are aware of the exact value. That “exotifying” or orientalist stance is instead directed at the nonnative eaters, food tourists like me who want something different and, fair is fair, get charged more for it.

Five Spices Duck:
Young duck boiled in exotic five spices broth, deboned and served with spicy vinaigrette.

Bhindi Masala:
Okra cooked with onions, tomatoes
, and
an exotic blend of Indian spices.

Here’s a third trick for reading between the lines in menus: hunt for what I call “linguistic fillers.” Consider for example positive but vague words like
delicious
and synonyms
tasty
,
mouth-watering
,
flavorful
,
scrumptious
, and
savory
, or words like
terrific
,
wonderful
,
delightful
, and
sublime
. These words seem to promise something special about what you’re going to get, but in a subjective enough way that the restaurant sneakily avoids incurring any sort of actual obligation (you can’t sue because you thought your scrod wasn’t scrumptious). Another type is what my colleague Arnold
Zwicky calls “appealing adjectives”
: words like
zesty
,
rich
,
golden brown
,
crispy
, or
crunchy
. These aren’t completely uninformative (
golden brown
means something different from
crunchy
) but whether something is
zesty
is a matter of opinion.

Both of these categories of linguistic filler words are associated with lower prices. After controlling for the factors mentioned above (the food itself, the type of cuisine, the average price and location of the restaurant), we saw the relationship between the words on the menu and the price. For each positive vague word like
delicious
,
tasty
, or
terrific
you see on a dish, the average price of the dish is nine percent less. Each appealing adjective like
rich
,
chunky
, or
zesty
is associated with a price that is two percent lower.

Our finding is one of association rather than causation. That is, we can’t say for sure whether restaurants actually base their price on the number of times they call the dish
delicious
, or whether they decided to call the dish
delicious
after looking at the price, or whether some other unknown factor (what we technically call an
exogenous
factor) is causing both the price and the wording. All we can say for certain is that lower prices and filler words seem to go together. Nonetheless, we have a hypothesis about what’s going on. We suspect that empty words are linked with lower prices because they are in fact fillers; stuff you put in the description of a dish when you don’t have something really
valuable like
crab
or
porterhouse
to talk about instead.
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in
Freakonomics
show
that this same principle applies to real estate advertising as well. They found that houses whose real estate ads had words like
fantastic
or
charming
tended to sell for lower prices, while houses whose ads had words like
maple
and
granite
tended to sell for higher prices. Their hypothesis was that real estate agents used vague positive words like
fantastic
to mask the lack of any specific positive qualities in the house. Indeed, in restaurants, the words that correlate with higher prices are not the empty words like
fantastic
but the words describing truly valuable products like lobster, truffle, or caviar.

Here are some examples of sentences stuffed with fillers; see how many total fillers you notice in these three dishes:

BLT Salad:
a flavorful, colorful and delicious salad mixture of crispy bacon bits, lettuce, tomatoes, red and green onions and garlic croutons tossed with bleu cheese dressing

Homemade Meatloaf Sandwich
:
Flavorful, juicy, & delicious. Served warm with our BBQ ketchup, caramelized onions, & melted American cheese

Mango Chicken:
Delicious golden fried white meat chicken nuggets sauteed in a sweet savory sauce, with freshly sliced mango chunks, carrots and bell peppers

I counted at least 13:
delicious
(three times),
flavorful
(twice),
colorful
,
crispy
,
juicy
,
warm
,
golden
,
sweet
,
savory
, and
freshly
.

These filler words tell us something else about the restaurant. Consider the restaurants that have very long, wordy menus with lots of filler words. You might think these could be the very expensive
restaurants with the high-powered menu-writing marketing consultants. Or it could be the very cheap restaurants, using filler words to make up for not-very-fancy food.

In fact, it’s neither: long, wordy menus with lots of filler words occur in the middle-priced restaurants, chains like Ruby Tuesday, T.G.I Friday’s, Cheesecake Factory, or California Pizza Kitchen or local places.

Descriptive adjectives like
fresh
,
rich
,
spicy
,
crispy
,
crunchy
,
tangy
,
juicy
,
zesty
,
chunky
,
smoky
,
salty
,
cheesy
,
fluffy
,
flaky
, and
buttery
appear significantly more often in menus from these middle-priced restaurants:

Crisp Golden Brown Belgian Waffle
with Fresh Fruit

Mushroom Omelette:
Our fluffy omelette filled with fresh mushrooms and topped with a rich mushroom sherry sauce

Chicken Marsala:
Tender chicken breast in a rich marsala wine sauce with fresh mushrooms

Rustic Apple Galette:
Hand crafted tart in five inches of butter flaky french puff pastry. We layer fresh ripe apples and bake to a golden brown

Why would it be middle-priced and not expensive restaurants that use more of these adjectives?

To understand the answer to this we have to consider the function of these adjectives. The literal meaning of “delicious” is that the food tastes good. The literal meaning of “ripe” is that the apple wasn’t picked when it was still sour and green. But why would a restaurant serve unripe apples or cook bad-tasting food? Doesn’t it go without saying that the food will taste good and the apples be ripe?

One of the most important language philosophers of the twentieth
century, H. Paul Grice, gave an answer to this problem.
Grice pointed out
that when we are trying to understand a speaker, we assume that they are acting rationally. If they say something is fresh, there must be some reason to say it’s fresh; speakers don’t just add in random words. (Grice called this the “maxim of quantity”; there is also a related “maxim of relevance” that says that speakers try to say relevant things.) So if I hear someone say that something is fresh (or ripe, or fluffy, or golden brown), I immediately consider why it would be relevant to mention ripeness. We generally mention ripeness because there is an implicit comparison with unripeness. It’s something like saying, You might worry that this fruit is unripe, but don’t worry, I hereby reassure you that it’s ripe. That is, just the mention of ripeness brings up the possibility that there might be some people that might not think it’s ripe, and I’m mentioning this to convince them.