The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu Read Free

Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles). This allowed us to control for the city, the neighborhood, the type of cuisine, and many other factors that economists control for when studying restaurant price (such as being on a main street versus a side street, a factor I learned from economist Tyler Cowen’s An Economist Gets Lunch ).
    We then wrote software to count the number of references to farms, ranches, pastures, woodlands, gardens, farmer’s markets, heritage pork, or heirloom tomatoes that occur on the menus of restaurants of different price classes—from cheap one-dollar-sign restaurants [$] to expensive four-dollar-sign restaurants [$$$$]. Across this verylarge dataset, very expensive ($$$$) restaurants mention the origins of the food more than 15 times as often as inexpensive restaurants! This obsession with provenance is a strong indicator that you are in an expensive, fancy restaurant. (Or that you are purchasing an expensive package of junk food, marketed with the exact same strategies, as we’ll see.)
    We discovered many other linguistic properties with economic implications in our study. For example, the tendency of expensive restaurants to choose what you’re going to eat extends far beyond posh Michelin-star places like Saison. Even on a la carte menus, a more expensive restaurant is more likely to offer a prix fixe selection, or to describe an individual dish as being composed of a “chef’s choice” or the “chef’s selection,” as we see in the following examples:
Sashimi Omakase: ten kinds of chef’s choice
Antipasto Della Casa: The chef’s daily selection
     
    In cheaper restaurants, by contrast, the diner has a lot of choice, as linguist Robin Lakoff pointed out . First of all, inexpensive restaurants just have far more dishes. On average twice as many. Think about the menu at the last Chinese restaurant you went to, or the last diner, compared to the last fancy restaurant. Cheap restaurants are likely to give a choice of sizes (small, medium, or large), or a choice of proteins (chicken, shrimp, or tofu). Another linguistic cue on menus of cheap restaurants is that the word you appears much more often, in phrases like “your choice” or “your way.” Here are some examples:
Baby lamb chops grilled to your liking
Marinated flank steak with eggs your way
Quiche with your choice of either house salad or a cup of soup
Biscuits and gravy with eggs anyway you like ’em
     
    We found that expensive ($$$$) restaurants have half as many dishes as cheap ($) restaurants, are three times less likely to talk about the diner’s choice, and are seven times more likely to talk about the chef’s choice.
    Fancy restaurants, not surprisingly, also use fancy words. In menus from 50 to 100 years ago this often meant long French words, but now lots of other foreign words are used on fancy menus. In our sample of expensive modern menus this means words like tonnarelli , choclo , bastilla , kataifi , persillade , and oyako (from Italian, Peruvian Spanish, Arabic, Greek, French, and Japanese, respectively).
    But there are fancy words in English too—what my dad, using the old term for fifty cents, calls “two-bit words,” long multisyllabic words with 11 or 12 letters or more. Why would a word be fancy just because it is longer? Well, for one thing, many of our longer words came into English from French or Latin, historically high-status languages. For another: longer words are used less frequently; in fact, the longer, the rarer. This is obvious if you think about it; short words (words like of , I , the , a ) are grammatical words that appear all over the place, while very long words (like accompaniments ) appear in much fewer situations.
    This relationship between word length and word frequency was first discovered by Sibawayhi , a Persian grammarian of the eighth century, in one of many scientific revolutions and inventions that come from the Muslim world. Sibawayhi came to what is now Iraq just after