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

would not be exotic to someone who is in fact Ethiopian or Indian: These restaurants are not advertising to native eaters of the cuisine, who eat it every day and are aware of the exact value. That “exotifying” or orientalist stance is instead directed at the nonnative eaters, food tourists like me who want something different and, fair is fair, get charged more for it.
Five Spices Duck: Young duck boiled in exotic five spices broth, deboned and served with spicy vinaigrette.
Bhindi Masala: Okra cooked with onions, tomatoes , and an exotic blend of Indian spices.
     
    Here’s a third trick for reading between the lines in menus: hunt for what I call “linguistic fillers.” Consider for example positive but vague words like delicious and synonyms tasty , mouth-watering , flavorful , scrumptious , and savory , or words like terrific , wonderful , delightful , and sublime . These words seem to promise something special about what you’re going to get, but in a subjective enough way that the restaurant sneakily avoids incurring any sort of actual obligation (you can’t sue because you thought your scrod wasn’t scrumptious). Another type is what my colleague Arnold Zwicky calls “appealing adjectives” : words like zesty , rich , golden brown , crispy , or crunchy . These aren’t completely uninformative ( golden brown means something different from crunchy ) but whether something is zesty is a matter of opinion.
    Both of these categories of linguistic filler words are associated with lower prices. After controlling for the factors mentioned above (the food itself, the type of cuisine, the average price and location of the restaurant), we saw the relationship between the words on the menu and the price. For each positive vague word like delicious , tasty , or terrific you see on a dish, the average price of the dish is nine percent less. Each appealing adjective like rich , chunky , or zesty is associated with a price that is two percent lower.
    Our finding is one of association rather than causation. That is, we can’t say for sure whether restaurants actually base their price on the number of times they call the dish delicious , or whether they decided to call the dish delicious after looking at the price, or whether some other unknown factor (what we technically call an exogenous factor) is causing both the price and the wording. All we can say for certain is that lower prices and filler words seem to go together. Nonetheless, we have a hypothesis about what’s going on. We suspect that empty words are linked with lower prices because they are in fact fillers; stuff you put in the description of a dish when you don’t have something reallyvaluable like crab or porterhouse to talk about instead. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in Freakonomics show that this same principle applies to real estate advertising as well. They found that houses whose real estate ads had words like fantastic or charming tended to sell for lower prices, while houses whose ads had words like maple and granite tended to sell for higher prices. Their hypothesis was that real estate agents used vague positive words like fantastic to mask the lack of any specific positive qualities in the house. Indeed, in restaurants, the words that correlate with higher prices are not the empty words like fantastic but the words describing truly valuable products like lobster, truffle, or caviar.
    Here are some examples of sentences stuffed with fillers; see how many total fillers you notice in these three dishes:
BLT Salad: a flavorful, colorful and delicious salad mixture of crispy bacon bits, lettuce, tomatoes, red and green onions and garlic croutons tossed with bleu cheese dressing
Homemade Meatloaf Sandwich : Flavorful, juicy, & delicious. Served warm with our BBQ ketchup, caramelized onions, & melted American cheese
Mango Chicken: Delicious golden fried white meat chicken nuggets sauteed in a sweet savory sauce, with freshly sliced mango chunks,