The politics of the language of food

The always stimulating Thinking Allowed on BBC4 devoted last week’s episode to food. There were two interviews. The first was with linguist Guy Cook on his project looking at the specific words and language strategies that the food industry uses to describe its wares. There’s a paper about it too. A number of interesting observations in there, but here’s the one that stuck with me: Prof. Cook’s databases suggest that the word “frankenfoods” is now used much more often by GM enthusiasts to ridicule their opponents than by the green lobby to describe the alleged dangers of playing God.

The second interview was with Rachel Black, Assistant Professor and Academic Coordinator of the Gastronomy Program at Boston University, who talked about her book on what is apparently Europe’s largest open-air food market, Porta Palazzo in Turin. The money quote there was an observation by a native Italian stall-holder that the vegetables being sold by a neighbouring merchant, who happened to be Chinese, were not “nostrani”, meaning “ours”, even though they were pretty much the same as what he was selling, and grown just a few kilometers away.

Nowt so queer as folk, and nowt like language to prove it.