The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu

by Dan Jurafsky

  Some languages do have somewhat richer olfactory vocabularies, like Janet’s native language, Cantonese. Unlike English, Cantonese has a common word that means “smells good,” heung , often translated as “fragrant.” Fragrant in English is rare and poetic, but the everyday Cantonese heung (and its Mandarin cognate xiang) is just how you say you like the smell of what’s cooking. It’s such a frequent word that you’ve all seen it: heung is the first part of the name Heung Gong (Hong Kong; “smells-good harbor”).

  Cantonese is particularly rich in words for negative smells. Here are some:

  suk1 the bacterial smell of spoiled rice or tofu

  ngaat3 the ammoniacal smell of urine, ammonia

  yik1 the smell of rancid or oxidized oil or peanuts

  hong2 the stale, rancid smell of old grain (uncooked rice, flour, cookies)

  seng1 fishy, bloody smell

  sou1 musky, muttony, gamy, body odor smell

  lou3 the smell of overheated tires or burnt hair

  Note the numbers following each word. Cantonese has six tones, characteristic rising or falling pitches, and the meaning of a word varies depending on the tone used. The richness of this language is not limited to ways to say stinky.

  Many of the words listed above exist in other Chinese dialects as well, and some are very ancient. An essay on cuisine in a third-century BCE Chinese encyclopedia (which Chinese cuisine scholar Fuchsia Dunlop calls “perhaps the world’s oldest extant gastronomic treatise”) records the ancient advice of the sixteenth-century BCE cook Yi Yin on how to eliminate fishy (seng1 ) and gamy (sou1 ) smells.

  Sadly, use of this ancient and rich negative smell vocabulary seems to be dying out of Cantonese. Studies show that younger Hong Kong speakers know fewer of these words than their elders, as sanitization and plastic wrap eliminate opportunities to experience what linguist Hilario de Sousa delicately calls “the variety of olfactory sensations experienced by their ancestors.”

  The minimal smell vocabularies of many languages may be recent and due to urbanization (languages retaining the vocabulary are often spoken outside the cities), ancient and genetic (many genes coding for the detection of specific odors are turned off in humans, perhaps dating back to the development of tricolor vision in primates), or related to human variation in smell perception. For example, genetic variations lead to differences in detecting the grassy smell of sauvignon blanc, partially caused by the flavor compound cis-3-hexen-1-ol. The ability to detect the sulfurous smell of asparagus in urine has similar genetic links; according to one recent experiment, about 8 percent of people don’t produce it, and about 6 percent can’t smell it. (My biologist wife, upon reading that paper, immediately conducted an impromptu experiment on yours truly by cooking up a big batch of asparagus.) The vast variation over the many different abilities of smell might have made it harder for a language to develop a stable shared olfactory vocabulary.

  The greater differentiation of negative smells is but one aspect of negativity bias, the idea that humans are biased to be especially aware of negative situations. Bad reviews like the one at the start of the chapter display another. To understand, we need to look beyond the negative emotional words like horrible, terrible, awful, and nasty and focus instead on the story being told. Yes, story.

  Linguist Douglas Biber has shown that we use past tense, communication verbs (said, told), and event words (then, after) much more frequently when telling stories, and the negative reviews are filled with these features. Let’s also look at the common nouns most strongly associated with them:

  manager customer minutes money waitress waiter bill attitude management business apology mistake table charge order hostess tip

  Not a one of these words refers to food! Instead, bad reviews are stories about bad things done by other people. The waiter or waitress made some mistake, messed up the order or the bill, or had a bad attitude, the manager didn’t help, the hostess caused a long wait, and so on.

  In addition, bad reviews overwhelmingly use the pronouns we or us (“We waited,” “our entrées,” “us having to”). While other reviews use those pronouns too, “we” and “us” are vastly overrepresented in negative ones. What is the common denominator of these three features: negative emotional words like terrible and horrible, narrative stories about other people, and a vast increase in we and us, all strongly linked to 1-star reviews?

  The answer comes from the pioneering work of Texas psychology professor James Pennebaker, who for decades has studied how words like function words are veiled cues to people’s personalities, attitudes, and feelings. Pennebaker has particularly studied the aftereffects of trauma. His “social stage model of coping” suggests that immediately after a traumatic event, people feel a need to tell stories about the event, stories expressing their negative emotion, and suggests that traumatized people seek comfort in groups by emphasizing their belonging, using the words we or us with high frequency.

  Pennebaker and his colleagues identified these tendencies in bloggers talking about their feelings after September 11, 2001, in fans writing about the death of Princess Diana, and in student newspaper articles after campus tragedies. In each case, what people write is just like terrible reviews of restaurants: narratives, stories about the negative things that happened to them, bulwarked against these negative emotions by the solidarity of us and we. In other words, bad reviews display all the linguistic symptoms of minor trauma.

  We always confirm our automated methods by carefully reading selected samples of the reviews. And the tendency toward negative bias is clear, from the negative differentiation in describing skunky beers to the trauma narratives of bad restaurants.

  Why do we find negative things more intense and more differentiated than positive things? One possibility is that negative things in the world really are more different from each other than positive things. Perhaps there really is more difference between being evil, brutal, sad, sick, or skunky than there is between being good, gentle, happy, well, or nice. Another possibility is that negative things aren’t actually more different or more potent than positive things, but it’s evolutionarily useful for us to treat them as if they were so. Humans need to worry about and be exceptionally good at distinguishing among negative events. The intuition of this theory is that there are a lot of ways for things to go wrong in life, and even though they may be very rare (like tiger attacks and earthquakes and bee stings), they require very different responses. Having different words to talk about how to avoid them helped our ancestors outlive the tiger and the earthquake.

  Of course, reviews aren’t all negative. What are the metaphors and other linguistic structures that reviewers use in positive reviews of food or wine?

  Let’s start by talking about sex.

  Adrienne Lehrer, a linguistics professor at the University of Arizona, studied how wine reviews changed over time from 1975 to 2000. She noticed that in the 1980s wine reviewers began to increase their use of the body as a metaphor, starting to use words like fleshy, muscular, sinewy, big-boned, or broad-shouldered. At the same time, influential wine writers like Robert Parker began to emphasize the sensual pleasure of wine, repeating words like “sexy” and “sensual,” describing wines as “supple and seductive,” “offering voluptuously textured, hedonistic drinking,” or even “liquid Viagra.” Literature professor Sean Shesgreen says that all this erotic talk about wine as “pretty and caressing,” “ravishing,” “pillowy,” and “overendowed” affirms that “in the kaleidoscope of Americans’ fixations, gastronomy has eclipsed sex.”

  This metaphor of sex seems especially associated with expensive foods as well. We examined this in the million restaurant reviews by extracting every mention of sex (or related words like sexy, seductive, orgasms, or lust) in the reviews. We then used regression, a statistical technique that allowed us to ask how these mentions of sex were associated with people’s ratings of a restaurant, after controlling for factors like the type of cuisine and the city.

  Reviewers
who liked a restaurant were indeed more likely to use sexual metaphors. But we also discovered an economic interaction; mentions of sex like these are especially frequent for expensive restaurants:

  the apple tarty ice cream pastry caramely thing was just orgasmic

  sumptuous flavors, jaw-droppingly good, sexy food

  succulent pork belly paired with seductively seared foie gras

  The association is quite strong: the more mentions of sex in a restaurant review, the higher the price of the restaurant.

  People use a very different metaphor when they like the food at cheap restaurants. In reviewing inexpensive restaurants, they use the language of addiction or drugs instead of sex to talk about their fries or garlic noodles:

  garlic noodles . . . are now my drug of choice

  these cupcakes are like crack

  be warned the wings are addicting

  . . . every time I need a fix. That fried chicken is so damn good!

  I swear the fries have crack or some sort of addicting drugs in them

  The examples above show what we “crave” or are “addicted to”: chicken wings and fried chicken, cupcakes, garlic noodles, French fries, and burgers. It’s the snack foods and bar foods, guilty pleasures because of their fat, sugar, and deep-fried goodness that invite the comparison to drugs. Researchers still aren’t sure of the biochemical link between junk-food cravings and drug addiction, but in any case the cravings for fat and also sugar are quite strong. A study that varied the fat and sugar in chocolate milkshakes suggests that sugar may light up the reward center of the brain even more effectively than fat. Writer Adam Gopnik describes nights during his experiment in giving up dessert when he would wake up and—like a golem controlled by external command—sleepily wander toward the freezer and the ice cream.

  In any case, the linguistic ubiquity of this metaphor of drugs demonstrates how deep this addictive understanding of junk food and desserts is embedded in our culture. By placing the blame on the food, we’re distancing ourselves from our own “sin” of eating fried or sugary snacks: “It’s not my fault: the cupcake made me do it.” Our research also found that women are more likely than men to use drug metaphors in reviews, suggesting that they are especially pressured to conform to healthy or low-calorie eating.

  What are people eating when they talk about sex in reviews? We can study this by looking at food words that occur more frequently near sexual words. Two kinds of foods are associated with sex. One is sushi, because of the modern trend of giving sexy names to sushi like these:

  sex on the beach roll

  foreplay roll

  sweet temptation roll

  orgasmic spicy tuna roll

  sexy mama roll

  sexy lady roll

  hot sexy shrimp roll

  sexy lizzy roll

  The other food most frequently associated with sex is dessert:

  molten chocolate cake . . . honestly an orgasm on a plate

  I still lust for the silky panna cotta and tantalizing sorbet

  marshmallows . . . so . . . sticky and sweet, they’re nearly pornographic

  warm chestnut mochi chocolate cake . . . seductively gooey on the inside

  The examples above also exhibit another class of words associated with both dessert and sex: texture words like sticky, silky, gooey. Here are the sensory words most commonly used to describe desserts in the million reviews:

  rich moist warm sweet dense hot creamy flaky light fluffy sticky dry gooey smooth crisp oozing satin soft velvety thick melty silky oozing thin crunchy spongy

  All of these are from the sensory domain of “feel,” of textures and temperatures. When we talk about desserts, we talk about their feel in the mouth, not their appearance, smell, taste, or sound. Americans usually describe desserts as soft or dripping wet, a tendency that linguist Susan Strauss, in her comparison of TV advertising in the US, Japan, and Korea, found to be a general property of food advertising in American English. US commercials emphasize tender, gooey, rich, creamy food, and associate softness and dripping sweetness with sensual hedonism and pleasure.

  This association between soft, sticky things and pleasure isn’t a necessary connection. For example, Strauss found that Korean food commercials emphasize hard, texturally stimulating food, using words like wulthung pwulthung hata (solid and bumpy), ccalis hata (stinging, stimulating), thok ssota (stinging), and elelhata (spicy to the extent that one’s nerves are numbed).

  The link between dessert and sex is visible in many aspects of our culture, from the sensual advertising of chocolate to women (like Ghirardelli’s slogan, “Moments of Timeless Pleasure”) to modern music, where my students Debra Pacio and Linda Yu found that recent songs like Kelis’s “Milkshake” or Li’l Wayne’s “Lollipop” use dessert and especially candy as a metaphor for sex. There is a gender effect with dessert too. Our study shows that women are more likely than men to mention desserts in their reviews.

  Dessert is also so prized that people find it very difficult to say anything bad about it. Notice the overwhelmingly positive sentiment of the 20 most frequent sentiment words associated with dessert:

  delicious amazing yummy decadent divine yum good OK wow fabulous scrumptious delectable wonderful delish refreshing awesome perfect incredible fantastic heavenly

  In fact, the more Yelp reviewers mention dessert, the more they like the restaurant. Reviewers who don’t mention a dessert give the restaurants an average review score of 3.6 (out of 5). But reviewers who mention a dessert in their review give a higher average review score, 3.9 out of 5. And when people do talk about dessert, the more times they mention dessert in the review, the higher the rating they give to the restaurant.

  This positivity exhibited by reviews, filled with metaphors of sex and dessert, turns out to be astonishingly strong. Despite the negativity bias that makes us especially sensitive to negative situations, people are actually much more positive than they are negative.

  One sign of our positive nature is word frequency. Positive words, though weak in variety, occur much more often in reviews than negative words. Restaurant reviewers use words like great, delicious, and amazing 3 to 10 times more often than words like bland, bad, or terrible.

  Review scores themselves are also skewed toward the positive. Reviewing scores on most sites go from 1 to 5, so the median score should be 3. Instead the median score, whether for restaurants or beers, is about 4 out of 5. My colleague down the hall Chris Potts has shown that this skew is true wherever people review things on the web—books, movies, cameras, you name it.

  This tendency toward the positive is not a recent trend caused by the Internet, but has been shaping our language for millennia. Linguists are deeply interested in linguistic phenomena that hold across all languages, key to our goal of discovering true human universals. A bias toward positivity in vocabulary is one of the strongest universals we have found. This idea that people are positive is called the Pollyanna effect, after the heroine of Eleanor Porter’s 1909 book for children, Pollyanna, an orphan who always looked on the bright side. In common usage “Pollyanna-ish” describes a naïve or foolish optimism, but the Pollyanna effect is a more neutral observation of humans’ remarkable tendency toward optimism.

  The Pollyanna effect is not just specific to reviews. If you ask Google how frequent a word is (or check the frequency in a carefully constructed academic database of texts), positive words are (on average) more frequent than negative words. English good is more frequent than bad, happy than sad; Chinese kaixin (happy) is more frequent than nanguo (sad); Spanish feliz is more frequent than triste.

  More subtly, positive words have a special linguistic status called unmarked. Markedness has to do with oppositions: in pairs of words like happy/unhappy, good/bad, capable/incapable, or honest/dishonest, the first of each pair is unmarked or neutral and the second is marked. There are many linguistic cues to which member of a pair is unmarked. The unmarked form is shorter (marked unhappy and dishonest have an extra un- a
nd dis- than unmarked happy and honest). Unmarked words tend to come first in “X and Y” phrases like “good and evil” or “right and wrong.” Unmarked words are neutral in questions. Asking “Is your accountant honest?” is the neutral way to find out about the honesty of your accountant. If I instead ask, “Is your accountant dishonest?” that suggests that I already have some reason to believe you have a cheating accountant. Sure enough, across languages, the unmarked form is much more likely to be positive (happy, honest) rather than negative (unhappy, dishonest); it’s very rare across languages for a negative word like sad to be the basic form and unsad to be the way to say “happy.” Thus we have English words unhappy, incapable, uncomfortable, but not unsad, un-itchy, unklutzy.

  The Pollyanna effect has been confirmed in dozens of languages and cultures, and comes up in all sorts of nonlinguistic ways as well. When psychologists ask people to think of items or remember them from a list, they name more positive things than negative things. When people forward news stories, they are more likely to forward the positive stories than the negative ones.

  In other words, although humans have a lot of ways of talking about negative events, and are especially traumatized when other people are rude or mean to them, although people differ in all sorts of ways, perceive different tastes and smells, and range hugely in their personalities, these differences only serve to highlight a fundamental similarity as humans: we are a positive, optimistic race. We tend to notice and talk about the good things in life. Like dessert. And sex.