http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/dining/dan-jurafsky-a-linguist-decodes-restaurant-menus.html 2014-09-15 23:52:45 Decoding a Menu at Root & Bone A new book from a Stanford University linguistics professor looks at how we describe what we eat. === The menu at But on a recent evening, Dan Jurafsky, a linguistics professor at Stanford, was puzzling over the redundancy of “local upstate New York grits.” It didn’t quite have the protest-too-much ring of the promise of “real butter” at a greasy spoon, but it did prompt a potted (or maybe Mason jarred?) lecture on the principles known as “Grice said that when we say something, there’s an implicit understanding that we’re saying it to transmit information to the hearer, and we don’t say more than we need to,” Mr. Jurafsky said. “If I say the food is fresh, like cheaper restaurants do, you wonder why I said that. Is there a reason to think the food isn’t fresh?” This may not seem like the most enticing table talk. But it was part of an evening’s work for Mr. Jurafsky, whose new book, People may swoon over colorful expressions and interesting etymologies. And Mr. Jurafsky’s book offers plenty of that, including a chapter tracing the complicated global journey that turned the Fujianese fish sauce known as “ke-tchup” into the familiar American red stuff. But for linguists, the less obviously colorful aspects of our food-talk reveals much about the deeper structures of our language and psychology. “A lot of people are attracted to linguistics by words,” he said. “But language is about so much more. And for scholars, the language of food is particularly rich: it’s universal, it’s social, and now it’s easily available online.” True to his book’s subtitle, Mr. Jurafsky, 51, likes to read menus — preferably, tens of thousands or even millions at a time. A 2002 MacArthur “genius” award winner for his work on how computers process human language, he has more recently turned to the social side of computational linguistics, crunching huge, often food-related data sets, like the But don’t call his approach “big data.” “It’s a little like ‘foodie,’ ” Mr. Jurafsky said. “There’s been a counter-reaction and you aren’t supposed to say it, even though it’s not clear what the better term is. Maybe just ‘data science’?” Mr. Jurafsky, who grew up in Silicon Valley, traces his own food mania to a childhood discovery of Julia Child, and the more pungent dishes he encountered while doing research on Cantonese and Mandarin, among other subjects, in graduate school. He and his wife, Janet Yu, a biologist, met at a breakfast-for-dinner-themed cooking party, and spent part of their honeymoon visiting fish sauce factories in Phu Quoc, Vietnam. But his book, based on Food studies programs have taken off at universities in the last decade. But food-related research, Mr. Jurafsky said, is still viewed with some suspicion among some old-school empirical social scientists. “There’s this idea that it’s too pop, and if you work on it you’ll never get a job,” he said. Some of Mr. Jurafsky’s own research is only incidentally connected to food, such as a prizewinning 2013 paper (Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil was the lead author) that used 10 years’ worth of reviews on the sites RateBeer and BeerAdvocate to address a broader question in linguistics: how change occurs in a language community. Other work has aimed a bit more directly for the stomach. In an as-yet unpublished paper, Mr. Jurafsky and colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University analyzed more than 6,500 online menus containing some 650,000 dishes. While cheaper menus had more dishes and wordier descriptions, they found, more-expensive menus tended to use longer words, with each additional letter of length correlating to a 10-cent higher price a dish. Root & Bone’s menu, Mr. Jurafsky said, contained a few more participles (grilled, loaded, stuffed, dusted, brined) than you typically see on menus where meatloaf costs $24. Not that the extra words always gave a clear idea of the creative dishes to come. “Wow! That is amazing,” Mr. Jurafsky said when a dish billed as “Grilled Sweet Corn Cob ... Husk N All” landed on the table at Root & Bone, revealing itself to be an ear of corn slathered with cornbread-butter paste and buried in an avalanche of popcorn and fried hominy. It was presented alongside an elaborately knotted, fountain-like husk. He popped a golden kernel of hominy into his mouth. “This is really incredible,” he said. “Salty all the way down.” If his language lacked the vividness of the food, there’s another lesson there. In In short, Mr. Jurafsy said, authors of one-star reviews unconsciously use language much as people do in the wake of collective trauma. “They use the word ‘we’ much more than ‘I,’ as if taking solace in the fact that this bad thing happened, but it happened to us together,” he said. Another finding: Reviews of expensive restaurants are more likely to use sexual metaphors, while the food at cheaper restaurants tends to be compared to drugs. In his book, Mr. Jurafsky traces the gradual fading of French as the lingua franca of “fancy” American restaurants. “Entree” has gone all but extinct at the high end, though there are some holdouts like “jus,” used at Root & Bone to describe the silky chicken gravy served alongside “Grandma Daisy’s Angel Biscuits,” dipping sauce style. The “Southern Peach Caprese,” on the other hand, built around an oozing ball of fried pimento cheese, testified to Italian food’s rising fortunes. “Caprese has become such a common word, we can now use it as a metaphor for something else,” Mr. Jurafsky said. “You can expect your customer to know what it is.” Mr. Jurafsky loves a good riches-to-rags-to-riches culinary tale. One chapter in his book “The language of food is this secret hidden in plain sight,” he said. “We have all this amazing data all around us. How can we not use it?”