Dan Jurafsky decodes 'The Language of Food'

'The Language of Food'
'The Language of Food' by Dan Jurafsky
Book cover courtesy of publisher

When you sit down to eat in a restaurant, you're experiencing more than just a good meal, Dan Jurafsky said. The language of the meal creates a much deeper cultural experience.

"Great food is created at the intersection of cultures as each one modifies and enhances what is borrowed from its neighbors," he writes in his book. "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."

As a Stanford University professor of linguistics, Jurafsky has also spent a lot of time analyzing menus. You can learn a lot about a restaurant through their language choice before even stepping inside, he said.

Jurafsky on NPR:

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Expensive restaurants are 15 times more likely to tell you where the food comes from - to mention the grass-fed things or the name of the farm or green-market cucumbers. But expensive restaurants also use fancy difficult words like tonarelli or choclo or pastilla.

But these expensive menus, they're shorter. The really long menus - those are the middle-priced restaurants. They're stuffed with adjectives - so fresh, rich, mild, crisp, tender, golden brown. And it's the cheapest restaurants - they're going to use those positive but vague words - that's your delicious, tasty, savory.

So the idea is that the high-status restaurant - they want their customers to just assume the food is going to be fresh and delicious. If you say it's fresh and delicious, that's kind of implying you have to be convinced.

Jurafsky joins The Daily Circuit to talk about the words behind the food you eat.

What food language intrigues you most? Is there a menu item you love at a particular restaurant? Leave your comments below.