Connections among language, food and culture in the movie "The hundred-foot journey"

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. EVERYONE EATS AND TALKS

1.2.1. The impressive power of food 1.2.2. You eat what you are

1.3. Food ways around the world

1.3.1. Nutritional needs, ecology, human logic and historical accidents

1.3.2. Change and ever-changing fads 1.3.3. Food and religion

1.3.3.1. Taboos and avoidances 1.3.4. Food and health

1.3.4.1. Junk food

CHAPTER 2. CORPUS AND METHODOLOGY

2.2. Methodology

CHAPTER 3. CONNECTIONS BETWEEN FOOD AND

LANGUAGE

3.1. Food talk 3.2. Food writing 3.2.1. Recipe

3.3.1. Eponyms 3.3.2. Borrowings 3.3.3. Compounds

3.3.4. Nomenclature 3.4. Food related expressions 3.4.1. Metaphors 3.4.2. Similitudes

CHAPTER 4. FIVE SENSES, CLASSY AND

UNSOPHISTICATED RESTAURANTS

4.1.1. Hassan’s relationship with smell 4.1.2. Appearance matters

4.1.3. Culinary nostalgia

4.2. Classy vs. unsophisticated restaurants

4.2.1. Unexpected dishes or vast amount of choice? 4.2.2. Delicacy and home cooking

4.2.3. The language of expensive restaurants

CHAPTER 5. CONNECTIONS BETWEEN FOOD AND

CULTURE

5.1. Food as a symbol of ethnicity 5.2. Word wide cuisines

5.2.1. Indian cuisine 5.2.2. French cuisine 5.3. Stereotypes

5.4. Matter of culture 5.5. (Un)familiar food

5.5.2. Accepting suggestion from outside

CHAPTER 6. INDIAN ENGLISH AND FRENCH

6.2. Phonology 6.3. Morphology

6.4. Interferences between Hindi and English 6.4.1. Code-mixing 6.4.1.1. Bhaiyya 6.4.1.2. Namaste 6.4.1.3. Tandoor 6.4.1.4. Tikka 6.4.1.5. Arrey 6.4.1.6. Chalo 6.4.1.7. Jaldi karo 6.4.2. Code-switching 6.5. French

CHAPTER 7. CONCLUSIONS

INTRODUCTION

Why writing a thesis about the connections among language, food and culture? Sincerely, at first I was short of ideas, I could not think of any interesting theme for my thesis. Then, after I have been given a few hints regarding different topics I could have analysed, I made my choice. English and cooking are indeed my two passions and culture is inevitably linked to both of them.

At present, food lovers may enjoy themselves in a number of different ways. They may leaf through culinary books, surf the millions of food blogs on the Internet or watch the endless TV programmes about cooking. Funnily enough, watching Masterchef Italia 5 while writing my thesis has proved to be helpful, like for example the episode about the cuisines around the world. Truly, one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Enough thinking of insects, which are considered a delicacy in Asia while are frowned upon in a continent like Europe. As well as cats and dogs which are daily eaten in China because I was once told that they are cheaper than chicken or pork.

Differences in taste could be found within the same community; it is just a matter of personal preferences. In general children tend to enjoy sweets, chocolate, fried snacks while avoiding heathy food such as fruit, vegetable and fish. Adults are more sensible and they usually know that this appetizing but unhealthy food should be eaten only at times.

Let alone personal preferences, everyone should agree by and large with what the chef Simone Rugiati says in a commercial on television “Il miglior ristorante del mondo è casa vostra” (The best restaurant in the world is your house). People may taste different dishes in different restaurants and parts of the world, but the best ones, those whose taste is still in their memory, are those prepared at home. Obviously, through the passing years, as new ingredients and techniques are discovered, recipes should be slightly changed. Tradition and innovation, one next to the other, with the only purpose of preparing a unique dish.

Connections among food, culture and language are much more than what anyone may think of. First of all, eating and talking are universal human traits. Every

healthy human being, every society eats and talks. While food enters the body through the mouth, language leaves the body through the same cavity. Our language codifies what is significant to us and since eating is a biological necessity, every language will invariably contain food terminology. Both language and food are culturally dependent. If the Italian language does not have an equivalent for Pòyò, which is the green banana destined to exportation, it means that it is not relevant to us, as we only know the yellow fruit we find in the market. If African dialects do not have an equivalent for mixer is simply because they have never seen such an appliance.

Both food and language are prefabricated by building larger units out of small identities, see ingredients and phonemes. Even if linguistic rules are more strict than cooking ones, failing to check the temperature of the oven or changing the quantity of the various ingredients may be as disastrous as getting wrong an entire verb conjugation.

Moreover, both the taste of a dish and certain words or nursery rhymes may recall to mind childhood memories acting like a bridge to the past.

After having considered the possible connections among food, language and culture, I decided to examine as they were represented in the movie The

hundred-foot journey where the French and Indian culture clash with each other and

eventually meet halfway in a context surrounded by dishes, products and recipes. Food related topics will be analysed in order to see how the passage from one lingua-cultural scenario is rendered in the audio-visual translation given the constraint of the images.

CHAPTER 1.

EVERYONE EATS AND TALKS

1.1. Culture: the basis of food-related behaviour and language

Eating and talking are universal human traits. Every healthy human being, every group, every society eats and talks. Both language and food are culturally dependent and vary according to factors such as gender, age, situational context or even lifestyle. There are differences both in the food-related behaviour of different cultures as well as in the languages of the world (Gerhart 2013).

Indeed, while at the dinner table, people coming from different backgrounds not only do they speak different languages but also use different cutlery. Fork and knife are maybe the most familiar to us, but in the East some people use chopsticks and, in other countries, it is not unusual to see persons eating with their hands.

Another difference may be found in the use of spices for the preparation of dishes. In India indeed, spices are the core ingredient of many recipes. This means that the quantity used by the cook do not correspond to a pinch of curcuma (as it would hypothetically be in France) but to a full spoon or even more than one.

Undoubtedly, every society eats at some point during the day, but across the world, mealtimes may not correspond. In America it is acceptable to eat alone on a frequent basis, and there are fewer occasions for eating together, and even fewer for exquisite meals. It is not a coincidence that they are considered snacks eaters and that their food culture is associated with street food.

Food is fuel in the United States. We're in love with hand food, snacks, and eating at our desks. 1

The situation is reversed in Italy where people are passionate about food and they always find the time to eat; but the same could be said of other countries. As stated before, what often changes is the mealtime. Indicatively, for example, the English are the first (having dinner at 6:30 p.m.), followed by Italians (8 p.m.) and by the Spanish (10 p.m.).

Let alone differences linked to food taboos. Muslim do not eat pork because the Koran indicates it is meat from an impure animal, whereas Indians do not eat cow meat because it is considered sacred. Obviously, the issue of food taboo is connected with the religious aspect, but it is also related to common sense. In the case of the pork in fact, the prohibition is connected to the rapid deterioration of the meet due to the hot weather in an age in which refrigerators did not exist.

Then came vegetarians, who make a subculture of their own. Some abstain from meat simply because they hate the thought of killing animals, others because they simply do not like it. Vegetarians can be quite militant, zealously propagating their cause, often to the acute discomfort of meat eaters.

People also identify themselves in terms of locality. American regional cooking is less developed than European or Chinese, but Americans still stereotype “Boston” baked beans or Kansas City barbecue.In France, every village or rural region has its own distinctive cheese, wine, baked goods, and preserved meat specialties (Root 1958). Italy seems to have a truly different cuisine in each town (Root 1971). These mark identity and people from the place in question often make a point of eating their specialty. Funnily enough, a claimed speciality is

1_{Kathleen Soriano-Taylor, Le Bon Vivant: Understanding French Culture through Food <}

https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/posts/le-bon-vivant-understanding-french-culture-through-food>, 7 May 2013.

often present in many places under different regional names, but the said dish is exactly the same.

Virtually all cultures differentiate between animal and vegetable foods, fish from land flesh. Most distinguish leaves from root foods. Beyond these obvious distinctions, classification and terminology can be confusing. To the botanist, all plants are vegetable productions, and all structures that enclose a seed in a flower-derived covering are fruits. To the folk, vegetables are edible non-sweet plant tissues, and fruits are the sweet ones. Thus, many items are vegetables to the folk but fruits to the expert: eggplants, tomatoes, red and green peppers, and so on.

At one level, sandwich includes hamburgers, but at another level, it contrasts it: “Do you want a hamburger or a sandwich?” (Frake 1980:5–8). The “fish” category can include shellfish or exclude it. During the colonial encounters, compounding and meaning extension are frequent strategies to name unknown plants. In fact, newly discovered plants are often likened to prototypical fruit, such as, in Europe, the apple. Moreover, what may have one family denomination in most languages, can show further classifications in others. For instances, in Caribbean Creoles, banana is differentiated into different types not only by botanists, but also by people in general. Pòyò indeed, is green, when harvested, and destined to exportation. The same fruit is called fig or fig-jón when yellow and eaten raw (Blank 1997). In parts of Mexico, fruta even includes sugar cane and sweet potatoes because they are eaten as snacks and are sweet.

Similar words can cover very dissimilar things. Think for example about the term pepper which is used to refer to various unrelated plants which are alike in that all of them are piquant. In addition to the miscellaneous peppers, we have a range of potatoes, from white to sweet to air (the air potato is a yam that bears small tubers on its aerial vines). Spinach has become a general term for a boiled green-leaf vegetable. In short, words extend from an original focus.

This stresses the fact that food is not a given, but a cultural construct which can be analysed by looking at languages. Different language communities conceptualize the world differently, depending on their cultural needs.

Brillat-Savarin, one of the earliest food writers, claimed: “Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are” (1825:3). This seems to imply that “every coherent social group has its own unique food ways” (Counihan 1999:6) and its own unique language use. National food and national languages are claimed to construct national identity (Peckham 1998:74). Therefore, we are different or the same according to what we eat and how we speak. That we are what we eat explain why so many of us expend so much effort to control what we do—and do no—eat. We are also how, where, when and why we eat. Human eats many different foods in different venues, on different occasions and for different reasons. Making and remaking social worlds with every bite we take, we eat what we are and to become what we would like to be. Therefore, what we do with food, how we use it and think about it, inheres in what we are as societies and as individuals (Ferguson 2004).

When migrants come to a new land, they gradually change their food ways. Eventually, they usually come to eat like the majority in the new home. However, it is also true that some groups or some individuals are more resistant to change than others and merge less rapidly.

Typical dishes of a specific culture may be unknown by the others and the latter may be reluctant to taste them. On the other hand, as I have already stated, often what exists in the outside world is more or less the same thing wether we are talking of a baguette, a French loaf or a filoncino; wether we are going out for an aperitivo or a happy hour. These different terms simply reflect the act of labelling foodstuffs by people of different cultures. Surely, it is worth saying that in our time, there is also the tendency to make use of local names either to sound more fashionable or simply because our society is by now multi-ethnic.

Every one eats. But why do we eat what we eat? How many of our food ways are determined by biology, how many by culture? Why do we love spices,

sweets, coffee? Why do the British and the French eat so differently and tease each other so merciless about it? The British call the French “frogs” to which the French respond that “English have a hundred regions and only one sauce” (Anderson 2005, pp. 1). This very same idea that the French have a long tradition as regards sauces returns in the movie The hundred-foot journey. Here indeed, we are told by Marguerite that the first step to become a real chef consists of mastering the five basic French sauces. Below are reported her very same words.

1.2. Food as a communication system

Inevitably, people use food to satisfy many needs beyond those for simple nutrition. Food is used in every society on earth to communicate messages. Throwing tomatoes at a politician signals something; taking Holy Communion signals something very different. Food carries messages about status, gender, role, ethnicity, religion, identity and other socially constructed regimes. The popularity of American fast foods in the contemporary world owes much to a desire to be identified with the rich, powerful, and successful Americans. Many people believe that by eating American style, they can actually acquire those qualities but they are unaware that the food ways of their emulation are the mark of the poorest and least successful of Americans (Watson 1997).

Food is used to keep us awake. We rarely think of it as a problem, yet an enormous percentage of international trade in foodstuffs—up to 15 % of the value of international trade in foodstuffs, in past years—is in foods whose sole

MARGUERITE I was twelve, and I started with the five basics, which is béchamel, veloute, hollandaise, tomato, espagnole.

A dodici anni ho cominciato con I cinque fondamentali, ovvero béchamel, vellutata, olandese, pomodoro spagnola.

value is to wake us up: coffee, tea, cola, and other caffeine sources (Anderson 2003). No food actually works as aphrodisiac. However, every culture has its body of lore about “aphrodisiac” foods, and countless books have been written about them (Benedik 2000). Most obvious candidates for “aphrodisiac” value are the penises and testes of notoriously randy animals: bulls in Europe and America, seals and deer in East Asia, and so on. Everything that looks even slightly like testes (oysters . . .), penises (asparagus . . .), or female genitalia (peaches . . .) has been credited with “aphrodisiac” properties. Actually, all of these foods can sometimes work only if the eater believes strongly enough.

There are some societies, all very food-short ones, in which eating is a private or even secret matter. In the vast majority of societies, however, eating is done in an open, sociable fashion. One eats with family, friends, workmates, or the general public. Cafés have large picture windows or tables right out on the sidewalk. Feasts are wide-open, general-invitation affairs. Food markets and restaurants are open to the world, and are often the centres of activity and life for the communities that support them.Such venues as cafés, coffee shops, coffee houses, cafeterias, bars, neighbourhood restaurants, and other eateries are vital to social life. Ray Oldenburg, in a very important book, showed that such “third places” were almost as important as home and work (the other two places) in people’s lives (Oldenburg 1989).

People eat every day and eating naturally takes on the role of communicating everything. Indeed, it may be second only to language as a social communication system. Elaborate social messages are carried out in feast behaviour. In Chinese formal hospitality, honour and respect are showed by the host using his own chopsticks to serve the guest; by hosts serving chicken and wine rather than salt fish and boiled water; or by literally thousands of other gestures. Weddings are supposed to include shark-fin soup. At birthday parties, long noodles mean “may you live long” (Anderson 2005).

More generally, food has its own meanings. Everywhere, food is associated with home, family, and security. One main message of food, everywhere, is solidarity.

Eating together means sharing and participating. The word companion means bread sharer (Latin: cum panis). Buying dinner, or otherwise feeding a partner, is so universal in courtship, business, and politics that it is almost certainly grounded in inborn tendencies. We evolved as food sharers and feel a natural link between sharing food and being personally closed and involved.

The other main message is separation. Food marks social class, ethnicity, and so on. Food transactions define families, networks, friendship groups, religions. Naturally, one group can try to use food to separate itself, while another is trying to use food to eliminate that separation.

However, the immediate reason for most social feeding is that people simply like to eat with others. In cultural contexts that require polite formulas rather than honest words, language may lose almost all its communicative function, and here food often takes over the role. In formal dinners around the world, for instance, it is not usually appropriate to send the important social messages verbally. Words are bland and carefully chosen. More information about the actual social transactions going on at the dinner is transmitted by food choice and distribution. The whole purpose of a feast is usually to bring people together and affirm their solidarity. Alliances are formed, deals are struck. In Chinese society, important deal cannot be concluded without food and drink. The more important the contract, the larger and more expensive the meal.

Food conveys messages about group identification. Regions are defined by preferred staple: rice, bread, potatoes. Religions are defined by food taboos. Foods can convey a rich symbolic mix of religion, philosophy, lifestyle, and identity (Curtin and Heldke 1992). In China and especially in Japan, a traveller visiting a place has to bring back samples of its specialty foods for his family and friends. Therefore, Japanese travellers who have put off buying the “local products” until the last minute are then forced to buy something at the airport, at any price. So as not to disappoint the folks they are returning to.

Family structure food in important ways. Every family has its traditions and these are passed on indefinitely merely because they are considered as such. This

assertion is exemplified by an old folktale of a girl who was learning how to cook a roast. Her mother was teaching her to cut the ends off the roast. The girl asked why and the mother answered “That’s the way my mother did it.” The girl then sought out her grandmother and got the same answer. Fortunately, the great-grandmother was still alive, and revealed that when she was first married she had a small pan, and had to trim the ends off the large roasts to get them to fit!

1.2.1. The impressive power of food

Jack Goody (1982) has shown that fancy cuisine is a product of social differentiation. Societies divided up into elites and commoners have a corresponding division of food. We all know the social roles of fancy restaurants, champagne, caviar etc. They show off personal power and authority, particularly if one addresses the maître by first name, knows the fanciest wine to order, and so forth.

Cross-cultural comparison shows that women almost everywhere are particularly impressed by male ability to feed them. (This is true not only of other cultures, but also of other animals, ranging from storks to wolves.) Human females respond especially to high-status food. Bringing home large amounts of meat made sense in the days of hunting and gathering; a girl really needed to know her boyfriend could do that. Today taking one’s enamoured out for dinner remains the commonest and most successful type of date. Traditionally, women preparing home cooked meals impressed men. Women were also told that “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” But societies change and women cook less today than they used to and many men have also learned this ability.

Elite groups always try to mark themselves off by consumption of special status or prestige foods (caviar, champagne, goat cheese, etc.), and upwardly mobile people try to rise in respect by being seen eating those foods (Goody 1982; Mintz 1985). Status emulation leads, inevitably, to an endless progression. The foods and restaurants of the “in” individuals are quickly discovered and patronized by people who yearn to be “in”. Of course, when there are too many of these “outs,”

the “in” restaurants, people go somewhere else—and the cycle starts again. People naturally want to imitate the high and they also derive benefit from doing so, because people tend to treat anyone who acts elite as a real elite.

The status of foods can change for different reasons. In Portugal couve

tronchuda, the collard-like food of the poor, is revalued as a nostalgic ethnic

marker. Therefore, the traditional Portuguese “green soup” of finely chopped collard greens and pureed potatoes is found in virtually every Portuguese restaurant. It is gourmet fare now. Conversely, foods can fall in status. The most spectacular example is white bread. It was the prestige food in Europe for millennia. In the nineteenth century, the development of processing machinery made it cheap. After that, its low nutritional value and lack of taste caused it to fall farther and farther, while brown bread rose. At last, in the late twentieth century, “artisanal” white bread came back into fashion—but the everyday loaf sank to very low status. Foods can fall in and out of popularity, exactly as any other product.

1.2.2. You eat what you are

Anna Meigs (1997) has described the complex rules regarding what men and women can eat in New Guinea. A whole series of foods is reserved for men; another whole series is strictly women’s share. Especially in the past, (but in some way this is still true) men were regarded as more like brute beasts, and ate and drank accordingly. Barbecue, rare steak, beer, whiskey, and the like were purely men’s foods. Women were refined and cultured and ate salads, yogurt, and other pale, bland, soft foods. No proper man would eat such things; any more than a “decent” woman would gnaw on a barbecued rib or order a double whiskey. Among the Inuit and many other hunters, adult women get one part of the game animal, girls get another part, the hunter gets yet another, other adult males get still another (Boas 1888; Rasmussen 1927, 1931). Chickens and eggs go to the senior men in much of East Africa (Simoons 1994). The top of a fish’s head is sacred to the chief in some Pacific Northwest groups, and in Southeast

Asia the head of the sacrificial buffalo goes to the local headman (Anderson 2005). It seems that we are not allowed to eat what we would like, or at least, there are some restrictions or preconceptions about it.

In this respect, I would like to mention a personal experience. Two summers ago, I was sitting in a Greek restaurant in Kefalonia waiting for the moussaka I had ordered. I had never eaten it before, but after reading hundreds of reviews and comments on the internet, I knew its basic ingredients: minced meat, tomatoes, fried aubergines and potatoes. However, when it arrived, my moussaka was different. Out of curiosity, I asked the waiter for clarifications and he said that he served me a vegetarian version of the true moussaka because most women prefer to eat healthy and do not like meat. The thing is that I do like meat and I ordered a different dish!

Children are assigned special foods everywhere. Mother’s milk remains by far the best food for babies. Breastfeeding is supplemented with some sort of weaning food, usually a soft, tasteless mush, at around six to nine months. Solid foods are gradually increased and nursing tapers off. Children tend to stop nursing, spontaneously, at around two to three years. Some go on indefinitely, especially in societies whose food is uncertain and scarce. Much has changed with the coming of baby formula. Cow’s milk is so poor as a human food that it never could substitute for breast milk; infants nursed or died, until the last six or seven decades. Cow’s milk has too little vitamin C, iron, and other nutrients. It also lacks the stimuli to the infant’s immune system that human colostrum and breast milk have. Even now, formula is a rather poor substitute for breast milk. Every year, new substances critical to development are found in breast milk. Formula-fed babies are sicklier. This is especially true when formula is mixed with not very clean water. Also, poor families are tempted to dilute the formula too much, slowly starving the baby (Van Esterik 1997).

1.3.1. Nutritional needs, ecology, human logic and historical accidents

Human food ways are a complex result of the interaction of human nutritional needs, ecology, human logic or lack of it, and historical accidents (Anderson 2005). However, no one knows the names of the great inventors who developed the staple foods that support us, or those of who created the complexity of cuisines that enrich our lives. We know the names of a few latter-day chefs, but food history—unlike the history of war and violence—is generally a history without names. We know nothing about the indigenous maize breeders who kept their loved ones fed and steadily improved crops and recipes; though we know the names of the conquistadors and generals who massacred their descendants.

Food ways set societies apart from one another. The French can invoke a vast number or regional specialities from Roquefort cheese to foie gras. Americans can turn out a sizeable list of culinary products defined by place—from New York bagels to North Carolina barbeque, from New England clam chowder to Southern fried chicken. These foods, anchored in place, lay the foundation of regional cuisines—the culinary practises defined and enriched by local products and producers. A truly National cuisine is something else—a culinary system both different from and greater than the sum of its regional parts (Ferguson 2004).

There is perhaps no better way to understand a culture than examining its attitude toward food. Food provides the daily sustenance around which families and communities bond. Food preferences also serve to separate individuals and groups from each other. Among the basic differences which the multiple cultures employ in the building of their food culture, some are physiological taste experiences (sweet, salt, sour, bitter, cold, warm, dry, spicy...), some have to do with preparation (raw, boiled, fried...). Yet others refer to the social ties (traditional, public, private, luxurious, festive, everyday-like, exotic...). By studying the food ways of people different from ourselves, we also grow to understand the rich diversity of practises around the world. Whether it is eating

green chili with the fingers of your hand in India, folding tamales with friends in Mexico or going out to a Michelin-starred restaurant in France; understanding these food traditions, help us to understand the people themselves. As globalization proceeds apace in the twenty-first century, it is also more important than ever to preserve local, unique food styles and traditions.

In trying to understand food ways, nutritional considerations as well as cultural ones need to be taken into consideration. Basic human biology sets limits—very wide limits—for what we can eat. Unlike koalas, we cannot digest eucalyptus leaves. Unlike the cat, we cannot live on mice. We do not have squirrels’ internal enzyme laboratory which lets them devour mushrooms fatal to us and to many other mammals. Our eating apparatus so ready to adapt to new and strange food cannot deal with cellulose, tannins or large bones. No one will use strychnine as a staple food, or construct a diet lacking in vitamin C. Actually, starving people will eat anything available (if edible), but anyone above the desperation threshold exercises considerable choice. Even quite hardscrabble communities and societies can have very complex, elaborate food ways, often structured by religion or other symbolic systems. Food ways can only be understood holistically, with just about every aspects of human life taken into account. From need for vitamin A to desire to emulate the rich and famous. Unity is provided by the fact that people must integrate into one meal, or one snack the satisfaction of many needs: health, affordability, social and sexual life, tradition, a sense of control and last but not least enjoyment.

1.3.2. Change and ever-changing fads

Food ways change. We all know this, yet we sometimes talk as if food ways were conservative or even changeless. All things change, though sometimes they change very slowly. Probably, most change throughout time has occurred because of necessity, or at least economic pressure, not taste (Lentz 1999). Far too often, change is toward coarse, inferior, nutrition-poor rations, thanks to unfortunate political occurrences and policies (Sen 1984, 1992), economic

vicissitudes (Lentz 1999), or local crop failures. The brutal force of poverty and the still more brutal one of war routinely cause whole populations to stop eating their culturally preferred and nutritionally reasonable diets, and live instead on coarse grains or, worse still, bark, weeds, husks, straw, and even the bodies of the dead. This is not really culture change; it is response to immediate environmental necessity. Far different is cultural change—voluntary, socially constructed alteration in the tastes of people. The worldwide spread not only of hamburgers and hot dogs but also of French fries, brand-name candy bars, and all the rest of the constellation, needs no elaboration (Schlosser 2001). Most universal of all are the sodas. However, we often forget how much the healthier types of modern food have also spread. Breakfast cereal, non-fat milk, yogurt, and whole-grain products have gone worldwide along with the hamburgers.

Health, status, and pricing all influence each other. Today, formerly very expensive foods like white bread and white sugar are very cheap, thanks to industrial processing techniques. But, on the other hand, formerly very cheap foods are now very expensive or totally unavailable, because of environmental devastation. Game and caviar depleted and now we are also facing the loss of ordinary vegetables, which require good soil, a lot of work and fertilizer. They are getting rapidly more expensive in the First World and are often completely unavailable in Third World cities. Similarly, local staple starches are losing out to processed grains. Fruits, even more expensive, are losing out to white sugar.

In former times, when white bread and rice were more expensive and thus were markers of higher status, they were believed to be the healthy foods. Nowadays, with the brown forms more expensive, the nutritional beliefs have shifted; brown is good. In fact, white is less rich in nutrients but is more digestible. When white was expensive, digestibility counted for much. Today, with brown more expensive, vitamin content is featured. Price, again, affects perception of nutritional value.

Today, health and food interact in other ways. Starting around at the end of the eighteenth century, western Europeans began to react against processed food,

followed by the United States in the early nineteenth century. Americans were especially prone to adopt the gospel of whole grains and simple country foods; and Sylvester Graham, inventor of the graham cracker, was the first preacher of this gospel to win fame (Nissenbaum 1980). He inveighed against white sugar, white flour, and other processed foods that were poor in nutrition. He taught that people should live largely on Graham flour: whole-wheat grain and bran, all ground into meal. Ironically, the graham cracker is now mostly sugar and white flour—the very things he hated (Anderson 2005).

The resulting diet was not, however, either very natural or very healthy (Deutsch 1977; Gardner 1957). The category “health food” was established long before vitamins and minerals were known to be nutritionally significant; vitamins were not even discovered until almost eighty years after Graham’s first work. Instead, the issue was unprocessed versus processed, whole grain versus white flour, brown sugar versus white sugar, and so on.

Surely, over the rest of the century, concerns with healthy eating grew rapidly. Fads grew and died. In America, the health-food movement fragmented into many streams. Some people depended heavily on pills (“dietary supplements”). Others took up the Mediterranean diet known to be associated with longevity. Others were still devouring avocado sandwiches on whole-grain bread. Most simply tried to abstain from high-fat foods, especially animal fats. Salad and yogurt exploded in popularity.

Similar changes, meanwhile, were taking place in Europe and elsewhere. Animal-rights activists made vegetarianism especially common in England. Germany began to slide away from beer, its historic drink. An unexpected trend that had much to do with image. In fact, “healthy” eating often has as much to do with image as with health. What is unhealthy turns out to be associated with those whom one does not like. Health foods are defined in opposition: they are the opposite of what “The Enemy” eats.

Much of these fads are really healthy, but sellers of fads know how to manipulate images; they thus sometimes sell their messages more successfully than real nutritionists do.

When food ways persist unchanged, the reason is often that they are identified with the old, the traditional. This does not prevent change. Frequently, a traditional food is subject to drift over time. A traditional food that is not liked much will simply fade away. If it is liked, it will often be made more sophisticated: as time goes on, and people acquire new resources, they will add spices, new techniques, and other elaborations to it (Cooper 1993).

Alternatively, a food may lose its old virtues. Biscuits, tarts and apple pies have been replaced almost everywhere by store-bought ones that have the same appearance but taste largely of hydrogenated vegetable oil and sugar.

1.3.3. Food and religion

Food ways are perhaps at their most complex when they become involved in religion. Some religions order the eating of meat, when sacrifices are shared out (Smith 1894); others ban the eating of meat, since it involves the killing of animals, a violent act. The religions based in India (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism) share this commitment to “nonviolence.” Enough saying that the most devout Jains eat only fruit (Chapple 1998).

Durkheim showed that religion is the way a society can hold itself together. To accomplish its goals, a social group embraces everyone in the powerfully emotional activities of ritual, ceremony, and celebration. Inevitably, such intense and all-involving actions involve food. Food is central to religion, as symbol, as subject of prayers, as marker of sharing and as communion. For the vast majority of human beings, religion is a matter of sociability, festivals, and personal faith. It is food sharing, not solely dogma and creed, that unites them all. The sharers eat together at ritual meals. Often, they go farther, and define their congregation by shared rules. All must eat certain foods, often in a certain way; all must avoid

certain other foods. The most impressive feasts that bring people together around religious themes include Thanksgiving and Christmas in standard American Christian traditions; Christmas and Easter in almost any European Christian society, Passover and Hanukkah in Judaism; Buddhist temple feasts throughout East and Southeast Asia; and the countless sacrificial or hunting-related feasts of indigenous peoples.

1.3.3.1. Taboos and avoidances

Taboos are found in most societies. Technically, we distinguish taboo (a religious law) from simple avoidance. Some religious food rules are related to sanitation, some to kindness to animals (Feeley-Harnik 1994), some to symbolism and logic, and some simply forbid usages typical of the religions of enemy tribes. Christians have no real taboos but have many avoidances, including insects, dogs, and horses. Our avoidance of horsemeat (Harris 1985) is, in fact, a religious taboo, but we have forgotten that. Avoidance of insects has not even that excuse, since certain insects are explicitly said to be good food, in the Bible. Countless modern nutritionists have counselled eating them. They are an excellent, cheap source of nutrients, widely eaten around the world (Ramos-Elorduy de Conconi 1991; Ramos-(Ramos-Elorduy 1998; Ramos-(Ramos-Elorduy and Pino 1989; Schwabe 1979; Sutton 1988). Yet, most English language books on food insects concentrate on the shock value rather than the nutritional value (Hopkins 1999; Menzel and D’Aluisio 1998). Avoidances remain very difficult to explain and people seem squeamish about an increasing number of things. Taboos seem much more straightforward, though still confusing.

In Polynesia, chiefs impose sacred taboos to prevent overfishing, to protect fruit so that it may ripen, and to save leaf crops from destructive overharvesting (Firth 1936, 1959). The most sacred Hindu castes and Buddhist religious devotees must avoid all bloodshed, and thus all meat (Simoons 1994; Doniger and Smith 1991). Eating meat necessarily involves bloodshed and it is thus violent, even if one does not do one’s own butchering.

The pig taboo is quite widespread, we find it in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and several minor religions. It is known that the pig was not banned because it carries diseases (i.e. trichinosis), contrary to the myth still occasionally found in the popular press (Simoons 1994). A theory started by Carleton Coon (1958:24) and recently upheld by Marvin Harris (1985, 1987) maintains that the pig was banned because it is a bad long-term economic risk in the Middle East. For one thing, it is not an “all-purpose animal” (Coon 1958:24); it is not a source of milk, wool, or traction power. Less believably, it is said to do poorly under conditions there, and that it is hard to herd. This is untrue; wild pigs abound in the less desert parts of the Middle East, and pig keeping was a common and very successful occupation of other religious groups, i.e. Christians. Finally, Eugene Hunn (1979) showed that the pig is banned because it eats blood and carrions. All the creatures banned in the Old Testament are carnivores or scavengers, and all the carnivores and scavengers in the Near East are banned. The animals specifically listed as clean are those that are clearly vegetarian. The Bible actually says this explicitly.

Other Near Eastern and South Asian religious groups share some or most of these prohibitions. The Muslims simply picked up the Jewish taboo. Buddhists are supposed to be vegetarian; in practice, only the monks usually are, but lay Buddhists usually avoid carnivorous animals (Anderson 2005).

The cow taboo in India is a different matter. The medieval Muslim al-Biruni (1971) thought the Hindus banned cow killing and cow eating because the cow was so useful alive: it is a plough animal, cart puller, source of fertilizer, source of milk, and even a source of warmth (the peasants took in the cows on cold nights). However, other cultures that use the cow do not worship it or need to make it sacred as a conservation measure. Actually, the cow was sacred before modern Indian society arose. It may even have been sacred before it was domesticated. It was at first a sacrificial animal, the most sacred of all along with the horse. When nonviolence came into Indian religion, the most sacred animals came to be protected along with people (Doniger and Smith 1991). Gradually

the idea of nonviolence was extended to more and more species, but the cow remained in first place. Its utility certainly has been important in protecting it.

History reveals too many cases in which food has been shaped by status, religion, ethnic rivalry, and other factors. Many food ways do make perfect ecological sense, but others (notably taboos and avoidances) do not. Abstention from insects, for instance, is ecologically and economically foolish. Yet this avoidance still persists in many parts of the world.

1.3.4. Food and health

Staying healthy is an obvious life-or-death need for any organism. We all know that a person who is too hot (feverish) is sick, and a person who is too cold (hypothermic) is in trouble. We all know that a characteristic syndrome of fever, pain, and diarrhoea follows consumption of poorly kept food. We know that a feast with much alcohol produces headache and indigestion later. We know that chronic poor nutrition leads to pallor, weakness, and low body temperature; the modern nutritionist calls this anaemia. Chicken soup is a well-nigh universal recourse in case of colds. Tea is a highly effective stomach medicine, and almost everybody knows it. Food-borne infections (notably Salmonella, but also E. coli, Listeria, and dozens of others) are abundant even in rich countries. Nothing could be more natural and easy than to assume that food affects our health.

The Chinese observed that everywhere in the world, the balanced and temperate food is the local staple: cooked rice in China, bread in the Near East, tortillas in Mexico. Foods that are pallid and greenish are cooling. Hot colours foods (red, bright yellow, orange…), spices, alcohol, foods that cause a burn-like reaction (reddening, swelling, and irritation) are heating.

Foods that treat such burn-like conditions are cooling, while foods that treat “cold” conditions are heating. Lacks of vitamins A and C are classic “hot” conditions (reddening, sores, dry skin, etc.), and vegetables are the cure. Anaemia is the classic “cold” condition (pallor, weakness, etc.), and gently warming meat, especially organ meats and blood, is the standard cure. The old hot/cold theory, which lasted in both China and the West well into the twentieth

century, was soon supplanted by newer concepts that stood up better under experimental testing. Most cultures have belief systems concerning their foods. China has a whole series of beliefs connected with cleanness, dangerous food combinations, poison-potentiating foods, tonic foods, strengthening foods, energy foods, and so on (Anderson 1988). India has a quite different but equally rich and complex system of beliefs (Achaya 1994).

1.3.4.1. Junk food

The modern urban foraging in the supermarket, is faced with the hardest choices of all. There are thousands of items. The cheap, easily prepared foods are exceedingly non-nutritious, while the nutritious foods are not particularly cheap and take some serious cooking. White bread and candy bars contrast with stew meat and broccoli. We are all blessed and cursed with an insensate craving for sweets and fats. What everybody likes is fat: animal fats and vegetable fats equally. This is not new; our early hominid ancestors knew and relished vegetable fats in the form of nuts, seeds, and oily fruits such as the fruit of the African oil palm (Anderson 2005). Therefore, the human tendency to crave certain foods is biologically grounded. The desires—which also differ in strength from person to person—are for bulk calories, for fat, for sweet and sour-sweet, and for salt. Food processing firms have learned to take advantage of the human cravings for sugar, salt, and fat by putting enormous quantities of these in processed foods (Schlosser 2001). Such food is now appropriately called junk

food, a term translated into various languages (comida chatarra in Spanish, cibo spazzatura in Italian for example). No one has accurately defined this category,

but in general, it refers to snack food that is low in nutritional value and high in sugar and/or fat. Candy, chips, cakes, and cookies are obvious examples. Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s was properly censured for promoting ketchup as a “vegetable” for school lunches; ketchup is sugar and vinegar, with purely token amounts of tomato and flavouring added. Close reading of the ingredients list on the label always shocks naïve buyers of frozen dinners and

other ready-made foods. The goods almost always turn out to have formidable amounts of salt, sugar, fat, and bulk starch, and astonishingly little else. Thus does junk food subtly invade our homes, and thus do the giant corporations take advantage of human instincts. All this makes it easier for people to grow obese.

The rise of mass-produced sweet and salty snacks, white bread and white-flour, mass-produced baked goods, hamburgers and fried chicken, was originally due to two factors. First, it is seen as American which makes it more attractive. Second, it is cheap to make and store. As mentioned before, this food is also high in those things people crave: sweetness, salt and fat. The rise of fast food and highly processed food has a long and complex history, involving a great deal of political manipulation. The giant food corporations have lobbied industriously to get their products blessed rather than banned by local and national governments.

Fortunately, some international chains have recently responded to criticism by upgrading the nutritional quality of their offerings. By contrast, any number of campaigns for healthy eating and against “junk” food have failed dismally. The most common problems are four. First, such campaigns are usually preachy. Young people everywhere hate to be preached to; yet young people are the ones who most need the message. Second, such campaigns are usually phrased strictly in terms of health. They do not address the fact that people choose foods for many other reasons. Third, the campaigns tend to nest in health agencies, not in food markets or shopping areas. Fourth, the campaigns are rarely very visible in the schools. Even if they are taught in the classrooms, they do not affect the actual food ways of the school. As parents know, school lunches and other foods found in schools are often among the lowest in nutritional terms. Also, corporations have placed vending machines selling candy, cakes, chips, and soft drinks in many schools.

CHAPTER 2.

CORPUS AND METHODOLOGY

The present study intends to observe the relationships among food, language and culture represented in the movie The hundred-foot journey (Lasse Hallström, United States, 2014; sentimental comedy) and how they have been translated in the relative Italian version Amore, cucina e curry.

Displaced from their native India, the Kadam family, led by Papa, settles in the quaint village of Saint Antonin in the south of France. It is the ideal place to settle down and open an Indian restaurant, “La Maison Mumbai”; at least until the chilly chef proprietress of “Le Saule Pleureur”, gets wind of it. Her icy protests against the new Indian restaurant a hundred feet from her own escalate to cold war between the two establishments. Things will get better later on, thanks to Hassan’s passion for French haute cuisine and his talent to weave magic between the two cultures.

2.1. Corpus

The corpus on which the present study is based consists of one recent movie of American production set mainly in France. Indeed, only a few flashbacks at the beginning of the movie take place in an Indian context and in England. The film under consideration includes both the original American English version and the Italian dub. As regards the original transcription, the corpus contains the

dialogues of the characters speaking American English, Indian English2, Hindi and French. While in the Italian dubbed version, the languages employed are Standard Italian, French and very few Hindi expressions.

The scarce number of Hindi exchanges (even if incomprehensible to the audience) contribute to create a lively linguistic environment and to represent the Indian cultural identity. However, when an audio-visual text is dubbed in another language the process of representation of identity takes one further step, passing through several negotiating processes (Bollettieri Bolsinelli and Di Giovanni 2009). The Italian translators indeed opted for rendering the meaning of these few Hindi expressions (with only one exception); perhaps considering that the Indian heritage could be transmitted through other means (see images) or desiring not to floor the spectators. Actually, while watching the movie, people do not ask themselves what the actors are uttering while they switch to Hindi. This is because it usually occurs in moments when it is the setting or the tone of voice, the gestures which contribute to give the meaning to those unintelligible words. For instance, this happens in scenes when the actors are more emotionally involved, infuriated, spur the others or if the Kadams speak to themselves.

Since the movie is set in France, both movies contain French words. However, their use does not impair comprehension since they appears as well-known expressions such as bonjour, bonsoir, merci, voilà, or they are limited to dialogues among French characters (for example at the market) with the only function of enriching the socio-linguistic scenario. The presence of these few but carefully selected French elements serves to give credibility to the story. As a matter of fact, they contribute to the creation of a French setting, despite the language employed in the film is mostly English and Italian in the dubbed version. The linguistic variety adopted in the original movie, which is produced

2 _{By Indian English I refer to Vernacular Indian English—a non-standard variety that bears traces of the} influence of local languages of India, thus differentiating itself from proper Standard Indian English, which in contrast is essentially similar in its core syntax to Standard British English, from which differs only in the domain of phonetics.

in the United States, is specifically American English. This is why I have employed American English spelling, interjections, exclamation, etc.

I decided to analyse this film as representative of a popular genre in which food and cooking are used to construct lingua-cultural scenarios. To the purpose, I transcribed some of the original and dubbed dialogues of the film. More than drawing generalisations from a limited dataset, I will pinpoint some of the trends that emerge from a qualitative analysis.

The dialogues that I chose to transcribe depict different contextual scenes, from more controlled contexts such as when at the beginning Madame Mallory politely tries to convince the Kadams not to buy the premises for the new restaurant, to scenes of open warfare between the two restaurant owners. The scenes during which the Kadams are represented through common western stereotypes contribute to the reinforcement of the idea that “the others” are always inferior. Relevant references to food have been carefully analysed, as food was one of the major themes of this paper, with a special focus on a few important topics: food as memory, food metaphors, and culinary reviews. The variety of scenarios involves a certain degree of variation in the number of the speakers taking part in the interaction. In those scenes regarding the member of the Kadams it is likely to see six people onscreen, as they are indeed a family that loves to do things together. Madame Mallory appears instead as a lonely woman (at least at the beginning) and even in the scenes set in the kitchen of “Le Saule Pleureur” when she is surrounded by her chefs, she is always emotionally detached from them.

The majority of the transcriptions contain spontaneous face-to-face interactions among the speakers; however, there are also transcripts of some voice-over monologues that work as a support to the image or justify a temporal ellipsis.

Next to the dialogues, images and soundtracks are a powerful tool used to describe Indian culture: colours, spices, chaos, joy, noise and exaggeration. The transcription has been helpful to examine in depth the Kadams’ customs. As regards the peculiarities of Indian English employed by some of the characters in the film, I intended to verify how they have been translated into the Italian dubbed version. In the tradition of dubbed Indian movies, usually the only elements that are preserved are the lexical ones, so loanwords. Maintaining an Indian accent or the use of substandard forms will inevitably result in a ridiculous and stereotyped representation. This is why I focused my research on the lexicon.

I found a basic transcript of The hundred-foot journey on the internet (film transcription is indeed a time-consuming and laborious task). However, I verified the scenes I was interested in again, and I made a more accurate transcription. Surely, the original one has been a helpful resource in providing me with Hindi expressions and words which otherwise, I would not have recognized. It has been imperative to identify the salient features of Indian English before proceeding with the analysis of the transcription because in this way it has been easier to identify a non-standard construction.

As mentioned before, I found a ready-made English transcription of the film, whereas as regards the Italian one, I have transcribed it from scratch without particular difficulties. Conversational turns are indeed generally respected and background noises rarely hinder comprehension.

For the purposes of the present study, both orthographic and prosodic transcription have been employed, but with a greater propensity towards the former. Prosodic transcription is more specific and it requires the recording of paralinguistic and kinetic elements, including background noise and the speakers’ gestures when relevant in the talk exchange, written in double round brackets. Therefore, it has been limited to the scenes that deserved the recording of intonation patterns, stress and pausing, fillers, interjections, filled pauses and backchannel cues. As well as extra information about the setting, manner of

speech, when a character talks to a precise interlocutor or if his/her voice is heard in the background.

Thanks to the use of the software AntConc 3.4.3w it has been possible to analyse the corpora in a very straightforward way. Not only is it useful as a double-check device but it also permits to find what you are looking for quickly. Given the case of food similitudes, all I had to do was to search for the item as and like and then select among the hits the suitable examples. Similarly, when interested in expressions denoting culinary nostalgia, I looked for words such as memory,

remind(s) and remember(s). Another example could be the research of Indian

English question tags yes? and no?. In this regard, one of the occurrences was pronounced by Marguerite. Since I was analysing the Indian English elements traceable in the dialogues of the Kadams, I did not consider it. In this case, it is reasonable to think that Marguerite has not employed the tag no? (And why

would I do that? You're the enemy now. No?) but she has switched to French

using the tag non? which has a similar pronunciation.

As regards the analysis of the “Indianness” in movie language, I started from a series of phenomena which have been indicated as indices of the linguistic creativity of Indian English. For example, tags, ellipsis of various elements, a different use of some verbal tenses, lack of inversion of subject and auxiliary verb in the interrogative form and finally code-mixing and code-switching. Then, I carried out an analysis of the type of possible strategies employed in the Italian dubbed version to recreate the same effect of “Indianness” realizing that it was completely wiped out with the exception of a few Hindi words. It has not been a surprise, since I have already done a similar work a few years ago regarding the translation of African American Vernacular English in the Italian dubbed version of “The help”. This is also one reason why I left the section about Indian English at the end of my paper. Obviously, the translator’s choice is motivated by an ethically correct attitude. In 2014, it is no more conceivable to let the Kadams speak like “Me Tarzan, you Jane” namely in broken Italian.

The most striking difference between the original and the dubbed version of the movie (save the elimination of the “Indianness”) is the translation of the film title. The hundred-foot journey refers to the moment in which Hassan decides to take a new road, in order to give a meaning to his future as a chef. He will leave “La Maison Mumbai” for an apprenticeship at “Le Saule Pleureur” with the intention of learning about French cuisine. Obviously, the journey is a metaphorical one; however, if we want to see it from a spatial point of view, it is exactly a hundred-foot journey since the two restaurants are the one opposite the other. The Italian title “Amore, cucina e curry” does not contain any references to Hassan’s culinary educational path and it presents the movie as a pulp one.

CHAPTER 3.

CONNECTIONS BETWEEN FOOD AND LANGUAGE

Food and language are much more than sustenance and a tool to transmit information. They are sophisticated human products. Only humans flavour their food and create unique dishes and food style, such as paella or French cuisine. Similarly, only humans have created a communicational system that allows for international treaties, scribbled shopping lists, haikus and email (Gerhardt 2013).

The “little chef” of the animated cartoon Ratatouille is well aware of the genius of the humans when he says:

Both food and language are prefabricated by building larger units out of small identities. One can point to the equivalence of ingredients and phonemes (meaningful linguistic sound units), and to the similarity of a complex dish and word made up of phonemes. A dinner made up of such dishes is rather like a sentence; a feast is a paragraph and so on. Food is, indeed, rather like language, but one can be freer with food. It is not so tightly structured as the elements of a language are (Anderson 2005).

RATATOUILLE I know I am supposed to hate humans, but there is something about them. They do not just survive. They discover they create. I mean, just look at what they do with food!

So che dovrei odiare gli umani, ma hanno qualcosa che mi affascina. Non si limitano a sopravvivere. Loro sperimentano, creano. Guardate cosa fanno con gli alimenti!

Cuisine is best analysed not simply as a single meal or recipe, but as a process which involves several distinct steps. The divisions of culinary labour correspond to similar stages in the creation (writing), production (publication), diffusion (publicity, criticism, and teaching) and reception or consumption (reading) of a literary work (Clark 2013).

Anybody can cook, as well as all those who have received basic education can write. However, not everyone has the potential to become a chef or a writer.

Cooking is a craft with its own tricks. In fact, virtually indigestible tubers such as beetroots or potatoes are made digestible by prolonged cooking because starches like inulin are broken into sugar that we can digest. But this is not all. Cooking detoxify many food that are poisonous in the raw. It softens all manner of stems, leaves, and fruits. It opens the shells of molluscs. It kills bacteria and moulds that would otherwise cause disease. Claude Levi-Strauss (1964) pointed out that many South American native peoples see cooking as the invention that made humans human. After all, ants and bees have societies; parrots and other animals can learn to talk. Clothing was not an issue to these South Americans, who wore virtually nothing. Only cooking distinguished humans from animals (Anderson 2005).

While food enters the body through the mouth, language leaves the body through the same cavity in its primary form (Gerhardt 2013). Moreover, both of them can act as a bridge to the past. A single mouthful of a dish may bring forth chains of associations connected to childhood memories and words have the same potential. In this respect, once again, we can refer to the above-mentioned animated movie, and in particular to the scene in which the food critic has a little forkful of ratatouille which brings him back to his youth.

The two social acts of eating and using language are strongly connected to each other. Since eating is a biological necessity, every language will invariably contain food terminology. Moreover, similar dishes may indicate cultural contact or common ancestry and it is the same with similar words or grammatical structures.

3.1 Food talk

Food is often a central component of social events, ranging from the most formal and ritual celebrations, such as weddings, to regular family dinners where family members meet to share family gossip and maintain their relationships. The focus of many studies about food talk is often on family dinner, even though, groups of friends having lunch or coffee together may be equally meaningful. The dinner table is a site for socialization and language acquisition. Having meals together is a core practice in families that serves more than the simple intake of sustenance. It used by parents to show their children the appropriate behaviour outside the immediate family context as well as how to behave while at the table. For example, demonstrating the appropriate practises of accepting or refusing a meal, sharing and non-sharing of food-items as well as teaching not to waste food or indicating how to speak properly.

Ochs shows how the present act of eating may occasion story telling about past eating. The dinner table provides children with opportunities to listen to stories told by adults as well as to become co-narrators telling their own stories (Ochs et al. 1989; Blum-Kulka et al. 1992). Dinner-related talk has been studied from a number of perspectives: Blum-Kulka’s research on politeness indicated that the highest number of directives at the dinner table is requested for action or requests to stop an action. With regard to the parents’ utterances only, the portion rises to 85% (Gerhardt 2013). This is an indication both of the asymmetrical relation as well as the need perceived by the parents to control their children at the table (Blum-Kulka 1990). Erickson instead points out that in his data an offer of food (to a guest) is reciprocated by a compliment about the food. Evaluations of food items occur to compliment the cook, and they are often taken as request for more. Evaluations can also be used to justify not eating one’s food (Wiggings 2001). In talk, people differentiate between subjective and objective evaluations, i.e. personal preferences and qualities of the food item. In addition, Wiggings describes the function of the gustatory mmm, which is often followed by an evaluation, as an interactional activity. It can be used by speakers as physical

proof for bodily sensations linked to food and to embody verbal claims of pleasure (Wiggins 2002).

The following examples are taken from The hundred-foot journey. The first evaluative comment refers to the tomatoes that Papa has picked along the way in France.

MAHIRA very big. lovely.

mmm… it's an eight!

sono enormi. che buoni. mmm… per me è otto!

Marguerite has been so nice to invite the Kadams to have dinner at her place the very same night of their arrival in Saint Antonin. Obviously, they are grateful to the young woman and this explains the various appreciative comments regarding the food they are tasting. Moreover, what can be noticed from the example below is that their dinner talk focuses on food. They show interest in what they are eating and ask for more information about the products laid on the table. This comes as no surprise, since the pervasiveness of food talk has been universally acknowledged .

PAPA mmm! mmm!

HASSAN where did you buy this?

mmm…

dove hai comprato questo?

MARGUERITE oh, the bread? I bake it. Oh, il pane? Lo faccio io.

PAPA nice! buono!

HASSAN oh god!!! papa try this! this oil, where is it from?

senti assaggialo! prova questo! e quest’olio da dove arriva? MUKTHAR mmm… this is amazing! mmm… il fromaggio è buonissimo!

Here Papa is savouring Beuf Bourguignon a la Hassan at “Le Saule Plereur”.

PAPA mmm… mmm…

MADAME MALLORY well? you like it? allora le piace?

PAPA yeah! si!

Obviously, people can also be disgusted by a particular dish. In the next example from the same film, however, Aisha’s expression of repugnance is more likely to be related to her prejudices regarding French cuisine than to the actual taste of the dish.

AISHA ugh!!! it's french food! bleah!!! cibo francese!

Talking about food can be a powerful resource for relaunching conversation (Mondada 2009). Moreover, in “delicate” situations, the diners may employ food-related talk to close controversial topics and initiate new ones. Obviously, different behaviours can be attributed in part to the individual or group in part to ethnicity.

In sum, when humans gather, food and talk are often intertwined for the fulfilment of a variety of human needs such as bonding and socialization. This can happen in a number of public places associated with the consumption of edibles and talk: dinner tables, restaurant lounges, bars, pubs, coffee shops etc.

3.2 Food writing

As a term, “food writing” is a relatively new descriptor. It came into wide use in the 1990s and, unlike “sports writing,” or “nature writing,” has yet to be included in the Oxford English Dictionary. Food writing is often distinguished into two forms: gastronomic literature and cookery books (Mennel 1996; Ashley et al.