Tasty Talk, Expressive Food

An Introduction to The Semiotics of Food-and-Language

Abstract

This special issue of Semiotic Review collects articles that address the semiotic relationships between food and language in a number of ways; and in this introduction, we contextualize these pieces by highlighting their analytic threads and suggesting how these may be woven into a single theoretical paradigm. We begin with a brief consideration of how these two terms ‘food’ and ‘language’ index separate but somewhat similar semiotic systems and then move on to a discussion of how these two semiotic systems can be intertwined, as well as what is at stake in undertaking such an analysis.