“eat your words” the language of food - class #1 · 2020-01-16 · human cuisine and human...

Fromm Institute Winter Session 2020 Wednesdays 1 PM

Alice F. Freed, Ph.D.

Painting by Maurice Freed “Fish and Chips.” 1978. Acrylic on masonite. 16 x 20.

“Eat Your Words” The Language of Food - Class #1

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Backstory of “Language of Food”Language and Linguistics | Food and Cooking

Linguistics Course 2009 “Language of Food”

Language of Food Blog http://languageoffood.blogspot.com/

Dan Jurafsky, Stanford Professor of Linguistics

Backstory of “Language of Food”The Language of Food, Dan Jurafsky - 2015

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Political Science

Childhood Memories Teaching

ChildrenSocial Life

Psychology

Travel

AnthropologyBiology

Community

Cooking/ Recipes

FOOD

LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Religion

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HUMAN HISTORY

Childhood memories and foodProust wrote: (Adapted from Swann’s Way, In Search of Lost Time)

“And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings, when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea…And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine … immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set…and with the house the town …. the streets along which I used to run errands, … the whole of Combray and its surroundings, … , sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”

Teaching children with food expressions• Don’t cry over spilled milk • Don’t put all your eggs in one basket • It’s easy as pie • You can’t have your cake and eat it too • Take it with a grain of salt • Something fishy is going on

• Biology studies: • the useful nutrients of foods • the effect of different foods on the

body • connections between food and disease

Biology: food and human health

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• “… medicine remains essentially a descriptive science, … The frequency with which allusions are made in medical writing to food and drink is impressive. We [found] 99 items of food [and] … 22 beverage-related items …”

• “Gastrology: the use of culinary terms in medicine” 1979. Terry & Hanchard. British Medical Journal. 22-29. December 1979.

Food terminology in medicine

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• “The strawberry seems to lend itself particularly to descriptive analogy: … the strawberry nose (rhinophyma) …, … the strawberry gall bladder (cholesterolosis). … a strawberry tongue is seen, with a coating, in scarlet fever;”

Food terminology in medicine

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• Psychology studies: • the significance of food for

individuals and groups • feelings, actions, thinking, eating

disorders

Psychology: food and human behavior

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Anthropology: food and culture • Discussions are about the social purpose

or significance of food and eating

•Anthropologists study food as an essential part of culture

•How food creates community •How food connects people •How food connects people to their gods

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Food and politics • Food and power

• Who gets to eat? • Who controls food production? • “Food insecurity” • Famine

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Food and politics • Agriculture • Manufacturing of food • Conditions in food plants • Laws about food handling • Research on nutrition

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Food labeling &

food names

Phonetics Cultural borrowing

Semantics of Cooking Terminology

Narratives

2nd language teaching

Structure of menus (as texts)

Dialects

Food News

Metaphors, idioms,

(aphorisms)

Structure of recipes (as texts)

LANGUAGE, LINGUISTICS

Identity

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Translation

Social & linguistic practices

The Language of Food• By studying human evolutionary history

we see the intersection of: • language (how we talk), • food (how and what we eat), • culture (how we live)

• “Helps us see the inter-connectedness of civilizations” (Dan Jurafsky)

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Language and Food: Examine ->• How we talk about food • What (and how) we eat • How what we eat is organized,

as revealed by how we talk about what we eat!

• How we use food to talk about our lives

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Eating, social life and human behavior:•Probably no other human activity

(except sexuality) is as connected to social and psychological meaning and human consciousness

•Eating is rarely seen as simply a biological activity

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To begin: What makes us human?• The nature of the human brain? • The unique characteristics of human language? • The use of tools?

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What makes us human?• The way we handle food?

• Human culture?

• Our spiritual nature?

• Our logical thinking systems?

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What makes us human?• Our social structures?

• Our cultural heritage?

• Art, music, literature?

• Various types of cuisines?20

What makes us human?• The use of fire?

• Humans controlled (and used) fire between 500,000 and 1,000,000 years ago

• Fire gave us: warmth, more advanced tools, a way to cook food

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What makes us human?• Cooking food changed our

diets and our behavior

• Did the size of our brains change before or as a result of fire being used for cooking?

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Language makes us human• What most makes us human is language…

(assisted by our brains and our social structures)

• Other animals’ communication systems are nothing like ours

Allows us to pass on what we learn to the next generation

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• Human linguistic creativity - based on our cognitive ability - • allows us to talk about the

past, present, future, fantasy or language itself

• Human LANGUAGE is unique

Overview of human language

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Human language• Watch this five minute Youtube

video • Only human language has all of the features described https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1FY5kL_zXU

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Features of human langaugeONLY human language has 1. discreteness 2. grammar 3. productivity 4. displacement

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Features of human langauge1. discreteness - a set of “discrete” units (American English has 44 discrete sounds) 2. grammar - a finite set of rules that determine how these units can be combined

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Features of human langauge3. productivity - an infinite # of combinations is possible 4. displacement - ability to talk about things not physically present

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What else makes us human?• Our relationship with food

• All plants and animals need nutrition

• For most species, diets are genetically pre-determined

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Types of eating/ feeding behavior• A classification system based on

the type of food that animals eat:

• Carnivore: the eating of animals • Herbivore: the eating of plants • Omnivore: the eating of both

plants, animals, fungi, etc. 30

Types of eating/ feeding behavior• Carnivores: lions, owls, snakes • Herbivores: deer, cows,

elephants, gorillas • Omnivores: squirrels, mice,

humans31

Types of eating/ feeding behavior• Herbivores: animals that cannot eat meat

• Vegetarians: humans who make a conscious decision not to eat meat

• Vegans: closest human example to a  herbivore is a vegan who eats only plant-based foods and no meat, dairy, or eggs

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What else makes us human?• Being omnivores is hard-wired

• What we eat is not pre-determined

• Problem: what is safe to eat?

• Contrast this with other animals

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For animals who are not omnivores:• Choosing what to eat is not a problem;

they eat a small variety of foods

• Cows eat only grass

• Gorillas eat stems, bamboo shoots fruits, sometimes termites and ants

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Gorillashttps://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/gorilla.htm

• An adult male gorillas can weigh 400-500 lbs • Gorillas: • don’t eat much protein (except some

insects) • eat around 140 different plants • eat about 60 lbs of food a day

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The Omnivore’s Dilemma• Humans eat a wide variety of foods:

• A conflict exists between:

• needing to find new foods to meet nutritional needs and

• fearing that new foods may be toxic or deadly

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The Omnivore’s Dilemma• In other words:

• being satisfied but bored with foods that are eaten often

• being curious about but fearful of novel (unknown) foods

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The Omnivore’s Dilemma• Being an omnivore puts considerable

demands on "behavioral" capacities

• Creates anxiety about eating

• But the need for a variety of foods helped early humans avoid an excess of toxins from any one food

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The omnivore’s dilemma and human “cuisine”• Anthropologists think we evolved large

complex brains to deal with the omnivore’s dilemma

• Our large brains recognized and remembered safe foods and preferred seasoning

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Culture and biology• Evolution of biological and

cultural features went hand in hand

• Both shaped the foods we ate

• Consumption of certain foods had biological consequences

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Biological changes• The human brain increased • Teeth became smaller • Food was more easily digested • Gut size decreased

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Human uniqueness and cuisineHumans • alter their food

• flavor/ season their food

• express food preferences through “cuisine”

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SUMMARY: The omnivore’s dilemma and human “cuisine”• Creation of “cuisine” is said to have

changed the course of human evolution

• Cuisine is an essential feature of human biological adaptation

• Cuisine = the solution to the omnivore’s dilemma

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Human cuisine and human uniqueness• This “food” behavior seems to be

unique in the animal world

• Cuisine and food flavorings can be seen as biologically adaptive

Elizabeth Rozin and Paul Rozin. “Culinary themes and variations.” Natural History, Feb 1981, pp. 6-14.

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Defining cuisine• “Cuisine is a cultural system that

defines the items in nature that are edible, how these items are extracted from the environment, eaten, or processed into foods, the flavor used to enhance the taste of food and the rules about eating.” (Rozin 1982)

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Defining cuisine: restated• Cuisine (a bio-cultural construct):

• Designated which items were safe and edible

• How to get these food from the environment

• How to alter specific items into foods

• Marked a set of foods as“preferred” 47

Defining cuisine• Also include “Rules for eating:”

• the number of meals • eating alone or with others • the ceremonial use of foods • food taboos • etiquette etc.

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Human cuisine and cultural “flavor principles”• The “flavor principles” of a

society:

• specify how foods are prepared

• are the unique ways a culture combines ingredients for taste

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Examples of flavor principles• Italy combines garlic with tomato • Greece adds cinnamon to tomato (also

uses lemon and oregano) • Korean use soy sauce, brown sugar, chili

and sesame • Indonesians use soy sauce, brown sugar,

chili and peanut 50

Food and language• What and how we eat is part of how we

shape our communities

• We pass the knowledge about food to the next generation - through language

• QUESTION IS: Does any other animal do anything comparable?

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Other animals and flavoring food • Consider another omnivore:

monkeys

• Macaques in Japan

• They eat nuts, fruits, seeds, flowers and sometimes bird's eggs, small lizards, insects, crabs, etc.

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Other animals and flavoring food

• Here we have monkeys washing sweet potatoes:

• First the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F07ar-ISpCo

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Other animals and flavoring food • The story “Monkeys Washing Potatoes: Do

Animals Have Culture?” • http://alfre.dk/monkeys-washing-

potatoes/

• Another learned food practice of monkeys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz8FlSKJ2JE

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Language, Culture and FoodSummarize:

• Humans are omnivores • Humans have unique linguistic abilities • Humans have unique cultural practices

for altering, preparing, seasoning, and serving food

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Human uniqueness, language and food• Our ways of cooking creates the specifics of our

culture’s “cuisine”

• We pass these on through LANGUAGE The combined effect of our language, what we

do with food, and the place that food has in our lives makes the human experience unique

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In Memory’s Kitchen 1996 Edited by Cara De Silva

In Memory’s Kitchen • Terezin was a Nazi concentration camp

in Czechoslovak

• Mina Pachter, a Jewish Czechoslovakian woman, was an inmate at Terezin

• She died in in the camp’s hospital in the fall of 1944

In Memory’s Kitchen • One day in early 1970, Anny Stern, Mina

Pachter’s daughter, received a phone call in NY from a stranger

• “Is this Anny Stern?” [She replied, “Yes”]

• “Then I have a package for you from your mother.”

In Memory’s Kitchen • The phone call was the culmination of a

25 year journey for a package that Mina entrusted to a friend

• It took 25 years for the package to go from Terezin, via Israel, to an apartment building on the east side of Manhattan

In Memory’s Kitchen • When the package arrived, it contained:

• a letter from 1960 • an old photograph of Anny’s mother

Mina with Anny’s son • a fragile hand-sewn cookbook of

recipes

In Memory’s Kitchen • The cookbook was a collective effort of

women who were in Terezin together

• It contained recipes written on scraps of paper

• The women who wrote the recipes were inmates in the Terezin camp

In Memory’s Kitchen

• From the book’s jacket:

• “The sheets of paper are as brittle as fallen leaves; the faltering handwriting changes from page to page; the words, a faded brown, are almost indecipherable. The pages are filled with recipes. Each is a memory, a fantasy, a hope for the future.”

In Memory’s Kitchen

• This sort of cookbook is not unique

• A genre of Holocaust creativity

• The women who wrote the recipes were not only prisoners in the Terezin camp - facing possible death -

• They were starving

In Memory’s Kitchen

• Food, eating, and cooking was a frequent topic of conversation

• It was so common, according to one survivor, that she said “We called it ‘cooking with the mouth.”

In Memory’s Kitchen

• The recipes were written by Jews from Bohemia and Moravia, and Czechoslovakia

• The recipes were mostly written in German - not the native language of the inmates

• The recipes contain errors, misspellings, missing ingredients, etc.

In Memory’s Kitchen De Silva writes:

“Food is who we are in the deepest sense, and not because it is transformed into blood and bone. Our personal gastronomical traditions – what we eat, the food and foodways we associate with the rituals of childhood, marriage, and parenthood, moments around the table, celebrations – are critical components of our identities. To recall them in desperate circumstances is to reinforce a sense of self and to assist us in our struggle to preserve it.” (page xxvi)

Language, Culture and Food• Other kinds of examples of the interaction

of language and food

• What happens when language, food, and culture intersect?

• What happens when we come in contact with people of different languages and cultures?

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Language, Culture and Food• Do we borrow eating patterns and foods

(and words) from other cultures?

• Do you eat Chinese food with “chopsticks?”

• Did you know that the word “chopsticks” was borrowed from Pidgin Chinese (chop-chop = fast)?

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Next week: Language, food, and cultural-exchange

Language, food, and dialects

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