The Language of food

Dan Jurafsky from Stanford University took a new linguistic look at the origins and history of words that we use to describe everyday food in his new book The Language of Food – A linguist reads the menu. Travelling through time, he presented historic reasons for the change of many well-known recipes.

The book will appeal to linguists and food lovers alike and contains a lot of surprising facts and historic evidence that will certainly challenge food stereotypes and perceptions.
The word Ketchup, for example, hasn’t always been used to describe a tomato sauce that most people associate with American food. Originally, Ketchup was a Chinese fish sauce -Tchup . And the syllable ke means “preserved fish” in Hokkien, the language of southern Fujian and Taiwan.

Another topic examined in the book is the language of menus. According to Dan Jurafsky’s research, the status of the restaurant is reflected in the menu: many expensive restaurants have short menus with complex names of more exotic food, while middle-priced restaurants opt for longer descriptions containing many positive adjectives to describe their food as they feel the need to convince their customers that their food is fresh and delicious.