Food Speak

It’s funny how many hours a day we spend thinking about food. Even when we’re not eating or thinking about eating or full from eating it seems food nudges its way into our everyday speaking. This week I discovered just how imbedded food is into the English language as I tried to come up with different food metaphors. As I stared at pictures of food on the Internet to get inspired, I thought of three metaphorical categories that we use everyday:

1.  Domination is eating
2. Dishonesty and Bribery are oily substances
3. Insanity is nuts

I. Domination is eating

It seems that in the arenas of sports, competition, and life in general, often the actual act of eating is used as a metaphor for dominating or defeating another person. Here the act of eating is the source and domination is the target.  Examples of this can be seen in the following phrases:

• to eat someone alive
• to have someone for lunch/to eat someone for breakfast
• eat my dirt
• bite me/try me
• swallow you whole

The origin of this metaphor is not too hard to deduce. From our days as hunter-gatherers to the current era of National Geographic and Animal Planet, where we can see predators on television in their natural environment, we can see that eating is at its core the domination of one species over another. Something has to die in order for us to eat it, whether that something is a plant or animal. Thus it makes sense that to defeat an opponent or an enemy can be described metaphorically through the act of eating.

II.             Dishonesty and bribery are oily substances

It’s funny. After watching Paula Dean on the Food Network, I can never look at butter the same way again. But it turns out that Paula and her fatty, delicious Southern soul food are not the only things that can be buttered up. In fact, butter and other oily substances such as grease can actually be representative of bribery and dishonesty in the English language. The following are just a few examples:

• butter him up
• grease his palm
• greaser
• a greasy person
• he’s slick

Looking at the physical properties of oil, such a comparison makes sense. Oil is slimy and slippery and slick. Moreover, in the same way dishonesty and dirty deeds are hard to wash off your conscience, oil is very difficult to remove from your hands, no matter how hard you try.

III.           Insanity is nuts

I had never really thought about how we use nuts metaphorically until this week, but once I stopped to think about it, it’s true. We include nut language in everyday speak, and often nuts are a metaphorical representation of insanity or the mind. Here nuts are the source and insanity/the mind are targets. This is the case in the following expressions:

• He’s a nut.
• Our nutty professor
• He’s a hard nut to crack
• You crack me up
• He cracked.
• She’s a cracker.
• He’s such a nutter.
• That guys is a little bit crazy in the coconut.

Nuts with their generally tough exteriors are somewhat similar to our own human skulls, and perhaps that’s how the metaphor originally developed. Thus, when you crack a nut it’s as if you cracked someone else’s skull or mind, and made them become crazy. Perhaps from that idea insanity later became associated with any variation of the word “nut”. Or perhaps there is another explanation for the phenomenon.

In any case, thinking about food metaphors this week has made me really stop to think about our daily language and how much we need to use tangible items to express intangible ideas or even, sometimes, other indescribable things. Not only do we live, breathe, and eat food; we speak it as well.

LUNA Bars are for Ladies (not Gents?)

            “LUNA bars? I’m not eating those. They’re for women.”

            “Dude, you’re missing out. I eat them. I don’t know why they say they’re for girls cuz they’re really good.”

My favorite LUNA bar: "Nutz Over Chocolate"

            Are LUNA bars just for women? Is there such thing as food for one gender? After hearing this conversation transpire during my PWR class last week and after talking about feminine and masculine tastes in our last class, my interest was piqued. I decided it might be interesting to take a look at LUNA bars, some of my favorite snacks to go, and see what all the fuss was about.

            From a cursory glance, LUNA bars don’t seem that different from other nutrition snacks such as Clif bars, which are actually made by the same company. They’re both in the same aisle of the grocery store, marketed as some kind of nutrition or energy bar, and cost more than other similarly displayed items. However, upon closer examination of the packages, it becomes clear that LUNA bars and Clif bars are definitely catering to different audiences.

            With one look at the front of the LUNA bar package, it is immediately obvious that these snacks are catering to the female demographic. Even the name LUNA itself connotes images of the moon, often depicted as a female symbol in literature or connected with the ancient goddess Diana.  In addition, underneath the flavor title, “Nutz Over Chocolate” or “Chocolate Dipped Coconut” is written “The Whole Nutrition Bar for Women”. These are not made for men.

I found it very interesting that other than describing LUNA bars as having the “flavors we love,” the flavor titles were the only real descriptors of taste on the whole package. Even these few words, however, show a bias towards a feminine audience, with the word “dipped” describing a slightly dainty, genteel action and the “Nutz Over Chocolate” referencing the often-stereotyped love of chocolate by women. If that’s not convincing enough, the front also contains images of undeniably female figures, doing some sort of dance activity.

            Turning the bar over, the back is still definitely female oriented. With little notes from various women to other women who inspire them (“to my grandmommy”, “to my nieces”), the LUNA marketers ensure that people know that these are bars made by women for women. The back is especially interesting, because the words they use to describe the bars are again not related to taste or texture, but rather to the spiritual and visceral experience of eating. “Food feeds our souls, lifts our spirits, nourishes and sustains us” write “The Women of LUNA”. It’s as if they are emphasizing a special relationship women have with food that is more than just putting food in your mouth and swallowing. Rather, women savor the experience and enjoy each bite. The makers seem to be saying that for women, food is very much tied to emotions.

            When actually taking a bite out of the LUNA bars, I found it hard to separate the marketing from my actual sensory experiences to test whether LUNA bars do in fact taste like they’re for women. They certainly smell sweet and nutty, slightly smoky in the sense that there is substance to them. After biting into the “Nutz Over Chocolate” LUNA bar, it was definitely sweeter than other Clif bars I’ve tasted, which I suppose is more of a female characteristic. However, on the whole it didn’t taste particularly feminine to me, although I surely am not an unbiased or ideal subject, being a daily consumer of LUNA bars here in college.

            It certainly made me think, however, and in the future, I think it would be interesting to have someone who has never tasted a LUNA bar or a Clif bar try both and see whether they sense anything particularly feminine or masculine about either. For now, however, I must side with my classmate Marshall—while they may be marketed towards women, LUNA bars are certainly something nobody should miss out on.

Bigas, Kanin, and Palay. Or Rice, Rice, and Rice.

After Adrienne Lehrer’s article on Levi Strauss’s theory of cooking words, I got a chance to reflect on cooking words used in Tagalog, to see if they held true to this idea of “a neural structure of cooking concepts […] valid for all languages”. My findings were similar to Lehrer’s; that while some words are similar or virtually identical in use to words of other languages, like magluto, or “to cook”, other words just don’t cover the exact same parameters as they do in English. 

Boiling, for instance, has multiple words in Tagalog. Boiling simply water is magpakulo, but if you add any type of food to the water, then the word used is now maglaga. In addition, the terminology also changes when one boils broth and condiments together. Here Filipinos will use the term isigang. Although online dictionaries will translate isigang into “to stew” in English, what Americans think of as stew is really quite far from what is made from this boiling of ingredients.

Baking, on the other hand, is harder to translate into Tagalog, and does not quite have an exact equivalent in the language. While some online dictionaries translate “to bake” as maghurno, this word is in reality not commonly used, and is actually borrowed from the Spanish word for oven, horno. Instead, most Filipinos today will simply borrow from English, saying mag-bake in conjunction with cakes and other baked goods.  However, there are specific words for baking when related to certain dishes, such as magtinapay for baking bread and magbibingka for preparing the traditional Filipino rice cake, bibingka.

What I found most interesting, however, was the word mag saing, to cook rice, which appears to have no direct equivalent in English. Mag saing, I realized, was just one of the many terms in Tagalog that are associated with or mean rice with no direct translation in English. Reminded of our discussion last Thursday, where we found that that people with more experience with a certain item will probably have more ways to describe it, I found that this definitely holds true for rice and Filipinos.

Rice itself, in grain form, is called bigas and unhusked it is called palay, but as a food cooked on the table it is called kanin. Then there are different parts of the rice, like darak and ipa, in addition to various types of rice such as malagkit, which is sticky rice. Filipinos also have many words for various rice cakes, including suman, puto, bibingka, cuchinta, and more. The list continues on, and if there exists any doubt of how important rice is to Filipinos, a cursory glance at this endless list will undoubtedly emphasize that for many Filipinos, rice is life.

If nothing else, Filipino’s numerous ways of describing rice illustrates the idea that while yes there may be some inherent, basic cooking ideas shared by all languages, culture and environment play a huge role in defining and cultivating the definition of such terms, and should not by any means be neglected.

Rice terraces in the Philippines

Puto: a Filipino rice cake

Clammy for Omelets

Clams and omelet. Two things that I never would have thought would go well together. When browsing the Internet for different dishes and recipes, however, I happened to fall upon this exact combination of ingredients, not once, but twice. The first recipe I found while glancing at Victor Hirtzler’s The Hotel St. Francis Cook Book, published in 1919. Hirtzler, a celebrity chef of his day, included his “omelet with soft clams” recipe as a sort of appetizer for a classy winter luncheon at the elegant San Francisco hotel.

The other recipe I found for “Clam Omelet” was a version published online on the Clam Recipes website. Even after a cursory glance, the differences between the two recipes were quite obvious. As mentioned in the articles we read for class, which noted the comparative brevity of older recipes, the Hotel St. Francis recipe was much shorter, much less descriptive, and as it was written in the second decade of the twentieth century, was probably meant for very experienced if not professional chefs and cooks. The online “Clam Omelet” recipe, on the other hand, had 124 words to Hirtzler’s 46 words, not including the list of ingredients, and very clearly spelled out step by step how to make the omelet.

Upon closer examination, the disparity between the two recipes increased, and one can see that much has changed in recipe writing over the past century. First, unlike the online article, Hirtzler does not bother to explain how to go about extracting the bellies of the clams, nor does he explain things like how to heat the clams “through”, concoct a “cream sauce”, or even “make an omelet”. Instead, he expects his readers to have that kind of basic culinary knowledge, an assumption the online version definitely does not try to make. Instead, The St. Francis Hotel’s “season with salt and pepper” direction translates into a quantifiable amount, “1 teaspoon coarse salt,” in the Clam Recipes version, and Hirtzler’s “small piece of butter” becomes “2 tablespoons unsalted butter” online.

These explicit directions, unlike in cookbooks of Hirtzler’s era, are probably intended for everyday people like myself, who may or may not have knowledge or experience with clams or omelets. With so many new and different kinds of people learning to cook and having access to novel ingredients and dishes, it simply makes sense to create recipes today in an easy to follow manner. I for one am very grateful that most modern recipes try to baby readers somewhat, following a typical pattern of a list of ingredients with the required quantities first followed after by very descriptive, numbered instructions.

In any case, both recipes sound surprisingly delicious, and for any of you out there who are curious or brave enough to try these clam and omelet concoctions, below are the two recipes for your enjoyment!

From Victor Hirtzler’s The Hotel St. Francis Cook Book:

From clamrecipes.net:

Clam Omelet

Ingredients -

1 dozen small Hard Shell Clams2 tablespoons Unsalted Butter1 teaspoon Coarse SaltPaprika6 Large Eggs2/3 cup Heavy Cream

Preparation:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. 2. Steam the clams and removed them from their shells. 3. Place the clams in a food processor and pulse until the clams are in small bite size pieces. 4. In a medium saucepan, sauté the clams in butter over low heat. 5. Separate the eggs, whites in one bowl and yolks in the other. 6. Add the salt and paprika to the egg yolks and beat until light and fluffy. 7. Add the cream and chopped clams and mix thoroughly. 8. Beat the egg whites until they form stiff peaks. 9. Fold the whites into the clam mixture. 10. Pour the mixture into a buttered omelet pan and bake for about 25 minutes or until lightly browned.

Hello!

            Hi! My name is Sarah Espaldon and I am extremely excited to be taking this class this quarter. As a lover of both food and languages, two of my biggest passions in life, I was immediately attracted to the course description in the Introductory Seminar booklet for this course, The Language of Food.

Food has always been a huge part of my life. Growing up in a Filipino family, my life revolved around meals and “meriendas”, which were always more like full-blown meals than any kind of snack my American friends normally ate. I am an expert eater—I eat copiously and frequently—and I love all different kinds of food. I don’t exactly cook regularly, but I can follow a recipe and sometimes cook at home. I love to bake, however, and my favorite foods to bake are Chiffon cake and apple pie. However, I don’t discriminate when it comes to food, and am perfectly happy to try any other fun, yummy desserts.

I’m originally from the Philippines, although I grew up in Cincinnati, so I speak a mix of Tagalog and English at home with my family. I’ve also taken Spanish throughout high school and currently at Stanford, which I’ve really enjoyed. When I was really little we lived in Taiwan for two years, plus I’ve taken some Chinese classes on and off throughout the years, including this summer where I got the chance to spend a few weeks in China, so I know a little bit of Chinese but I’ve forgotten a lot of it. I would really love to learn a whole bunch of different languages, including Chinese, and Russian, and French at some point. I think languages are fun to learn and really give you an insight into how different cultures think and view the world.

In short, I’m so happy to be taking this class. I look forward to learning more about food, language, and my fellow classmates!

Food for the Gods

          “What are these called again?” ask my dorm mates as I offer them a homemade Christmas tin filled with aluminum foil-wrapped goodies. Inside the foil are bar-like baked goods of butter and dates and walnuts combined in one deliciously unhealthy taste of home, a dessert my family and other Filipinos refer to as “Food for the Gods”.

For as many years as I can remember, Christmastime not only meant holiday shopping and singing “Silver Bells” on repeat; it also meant that our kitchen counter would be invaded by pans and pans of these sweet treats baking, waiting to be divided into little pieces, wrapped up into tin containers, and tied nicely with red ribbon to be given out as gifts for the holidays. A Filipino tradition, Food for the Gods are like what fruitcakes are to Americans, only yummier and much more welcomed.

“Food for the Gods” has always, for me, seemed such a curious name for a traditional Filipino sweet. While we Filipinos have our fair share of odd foods and monikers, most traditional desserts at least have Tagalog or Filipino names with a pretty obvious connection to the food itself. However, throughout the Philippines, “Food for the Gods” is called simply that, no translation required, even among those whose English mastery is mediocre at best. The name presents even more of a quandary when trying to find out who “the Gods” actually refer to, considering the fact that most Filipinos pray only to one god, not the multiple “gods” indicated in the treat’s moniker.

When trying to determine the etymology for the name, I discovered that Filipinos are not alone in describing their food as delicacies of the divine. In ancient Greek mythology ambrosia was supposedly the food, or in some cases drink, of the gods, fortified with special immortality-granting powers, according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary. In modern times, however, the term ambrosia has become associated with a special kind of fruit salad, made with ingredients like cream, oranges, and marshmallows.

Furthermore, it turns out that the scientific name for chocolate, Theobroma cacao, literally means “food of the gods”, according to Cornell University’s Albert R. Mann online Chocolate exhibit. The Aztecs and the Mayans of Central America once believed that cocoa was truly a gift of the gods, using chocolate in currency and to concoct a strong, bitter drink from the cocoa plant. Chocolate was later introduced to the Europeans and eventually the rest of the world once the Spanish came and conquered the indigenous populations of Mexico.

But while I can attest that chocolate is a kind of “food for the gods” in its own right, it doesn’t really appear to bear any relation to the Filipinos’ own divine dessert. Hoping to maybe find an explanation for its origin, I decided to explore the history of the dessert itself. Unfortunately, not much information is readily available about the history of most Filipino dishes. However some have postulated about the origins of the food, and as Marelie of “Cookie Droplets Etc.” suggests, the bars may actually be a descendant of the Spanish “pan de datil”, walnut and date cakes that the may have been brought to the Philippines during the Spanish colonization of the islands. This is supported by the fact that Food for the Gods’ main ingredients, walnuts and dates, don’t even grow in the Philippines. They are imported from other countries. Thus the traditionally Filipino Food for the Gods may not be so traditionally Filipino after all.

If Food for the Gods did originate from the Spaniards, who were generally at the top of the social hierarchy, maybe the “gods” referred to are actually the Spaniards themselves and other first class citizens who could afford the fairly expensive imported ingredients. It’s possible that the term is actually a reflection of social class disparities during the period of colonization.

However, it still doesn’t explain why the treat has an English name. Looking back at the history of the islands, it’s possible that the actual English term was adopted sometime during the American era of colonization in the early twentieth century and the name simply stuck.

In the end, I’m still not entirely sure where Food for the Gods comes from, but if anything I’m even more amused by the treats—traditional Filipino desserts that don’t have a Filipino name or Filipino ingredients. However in a sense Food for the Gods are still inherently Filipino, reflecting the rich history of the islands as a crossroads of cultural interaction and exchange and a place where good food is appreciated, no matter where it comes from.

Sources:

http://exhibits.mannlib.cornell.edu/chocolate/theaztecs.php

http://www.cookiedropletsetcbymarelie.com/2011/06/food-for-godsfilipino-bar.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia#cite_note-OCD-0