Josh Friedland - Eatymology: The Dictionary of Modern Gastronomy

Copyright 2015 by Josh Friedland

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Friedland, Josh.

The dictionary of modern gastronomy / Josh Friedland.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

(hardcover : alk. paper) 1. GastronomyDictionaries. I. Title.

TX631.F75 2015

641.013003dc23

2015021941

For Anya and Asher

Throughout human history, food has served as one of the great engines of linguistic invention and reinvention. Hundreds of thousands of years may have passed between an early hominids first grunt over a handful of tasty nuts and the glowing 140-character review of ramen you just read on Twitter (#amazeballs), but the instinct to put words to food is the same. Every time we eat something new and discover novel tastes, smells, and textures, we feel compelled to find words to describe our experiences. Tracing the origins of language, historian Simon Schama cites the first meals of infancy: If our defining characteristic is indeed as language animal, the lingo compulsion does actually get underway with mothers milk; that as soon as we eat, we feel the need to make some noise about it, a sound that will end up as verbalisation and, eventually, writing.

The history of food and language could easily fill a thousand pages. This slim volume looks at just a sliver of our most recent past, gleaning one hundred newly coined words from the world of modern gastronomy. Nearly all of the entries have been invented since the turn of the twenty-first century, a boom time for the celebration of all things culinary when food got big and, lets face it, a little weird. The rise of the rock star chef, hard-core locavorism, social media junkies, food fetishism, pastry mash-ups, and environmental dread have spawned a brand-new vocabulary to capture our wild and woolly new gastronomic reality.

As I came across these fascinating (and often hilarious) new words for eating, drinking, and thinking about food, I found myself driven to track down more. Eventually, this burgeoning collection turned into Eatymology.

My hope is that this book will serve as a snapshot of some of the excesses of the current food scene and also a window into some of its more curious corners. Entries like brogurt (coined by journalists to describe yogurt targeted at men) demonstrate the absurd lengths that the food industry will go to in order to reach consumers in a very competitive marketplace. Selmelier (salt sommelieryes, there are enough kinds of salt in the world to justify their existence), brocavore (male hipster gastronomes), and raota (ramen nerds) reflect the current demographics of food folk: diverse, niche, and extremely obsessive about everything they put in their mouths. Its not just the food industry thats caught this word fever either. From academia and science come strange new terms such as carnism (the ideology that supports eating meat) and food swamp (the inundation of poor neighborhoods with highcalorie foods), which attempt to grapple with the complicated food choices we face today and their larger impact on our bodies and the environment around us. Even the onset of global warming and the complicated relationship between food and the environment has spawned such fascinating new phrases as food bubble, virtual water, and bluewashing . As silly or strange as these may sound, they echo a very serious and growing concern about knowing where our food comes from and how its gotten to our plates. For all its pleasures, modern food can have an ugly underbelly, and neologisms like blood cashews (nuts processed under abusive conditions) and honey laundering (illegal trade in tainted honey) speak to the inherent dangers of globalization.

Its not all doom and gloom, however. New words can be great fun, and many of the ones collected here were chosen for their unusual character and quirkiness, not to mention their irresistible humor. A term like barista wrist (a cafinduced injury caused by the repetitive motion of making too many coffee drinks) might cause you to crack a smile. Some, like duckeasy (an underground foie gras supper club) or felfie (a farmer selfie, naturally), may even trigger a belly laugh. Others are wonderfully literary, such as white whale, an artful term for those rare beers that elude ale aficionados just as Moby Dick dodged Ahab.

As youll see, the entries take on many different shapes and forms. Some are portmanteau words that blend two words (or parts of words) into one. Others have been formed through affixation, where an old word has been cannibalized to communicate something new. Still more are loanwords that weve borrowed from foreign languages and assimilated into our everyday English. While many of the words collected in Eatymology have become part of the food lexicon, a number are what linguists call nonce words, coinages invented for a one-time use or a special occasion.

As odd as some of the terms may seem (Im looking at you, gastrosexual ), I can assure you that they are all entirely real and sourced from articles, books, film, and online media. Each entry includes a definition of the food word or phrase, information about its origins (wherever possible, as I was unable to locate exact origins for some of the words), and other interesting historical tidbits, related synonyms and homonyms, and cultural flotsam and jetsam. If these bitesized entries havent satisfied you, check out the sources at the end of the book for a complete bibliographic record and further reading on each entry.

What will happen next for these delicious neologisms? Are they destined to go the way of hollow-meat, phrygology, and numbles obsolete words for poultry, the art of frying, and deer offalthat have disappeared from modern speech? Or will future generations be bone luging, hoarding bacon for the aporkalypse, and complaining about Cronut -eating foodiots well into the twenty-second century? Only time will tell as we keep swallowing up new culinary experiences and fattening ourselves with novel ways to describe them.