Food and Language: Production, Consumption, and Circulation of Meaning and Value

Abstract

We interrogate the many ways that language and food intersect. Food and its uses provide setting and structure for language, just as language and its uses constrain and inform food activities. We illuminate where and how food and language co-occur and how they are dynamically co-constitutive, foregrounding the potential for food-and-language scholarship to contribute to understandings of political economic processes and structures. We organize our review around the mutual production, consumption, and circulation of food and language. We show that the richness of scholarship about consumption (especially around the family meal) has not been matched by research concerning the production of food and language, whereas the co-constituting circulation of food and language contributes to new meanings and values for both. More research is needed to clarify the surging attention to food, which may be motivated by the complex global food system and the speed and ease of mediatization and circulation of food images and ideologies.

Cuisine, Health and Table Manners: Food Boundaries and Forms of Distinction among Primary School Children

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“…Yeh (2018b) tackles the car in Tijuana, and the way traffic is experienced as a loss of autonomy by middle‐class residents, where Yeh compares this sense of loss to the liberal‐cum‐republican subject of the public sphere who fears becoming part of a crowd. Finally, Karrebæk, Riley, and Cavanaugh (2018) review the rich literature on the co‐construction of commensality and talk, and among their many insights, they discuss how food circulation and exchange is tied to textual and graphic artifacts.…”

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