OSPMADRD 65M: The Language of Food

OSPMADRD 65M
The Language of Food

Spring 2026

Course Description: How does the language we speak influence how we think? Can the way we talk about food influence how it tastes? What can a data scientific exploration of food language (recipes, menus, reviews, TV cooking shows, even dinner-time conversations) tell us about our cultural attitudes and framings? What do food migrations and the names for foods tell us about globalization, colonialism, and how languages influence each other? In this course we will answer these questions by using the language of food as a window into linguistics, culture, history, psychology, and data science. We will read classic papers (Bourdieu, Mintz, Ochs, Proust, Levi-Strauss), study Spain's history in global food exchange, and integrate Spanish language data science with field work on the language of food in Madrid. (This course satisfies the Aesthetic and Interpretative Inquiry (AII) and Social Inquiry (SI) Ways.)

Class hours:

Tuesday and Wednesday 14:00-15:20, Room 301

Professor:

Dan Jurafsky (jurafsky@stanford.edu)
Dept. of Linguistics and Dept. of Computer Science
Office Hours: Immediately after class both days (i.e. Tuesday and Wednesday, 15:20-16:00) in my office which is 401.

Required Materials

  • Books
    • Jurafsky, Dan. 2014. The Language of Food. Norton.
  • Other required materials (articles and videos) available on the course website below

Schedule (subject to change)

Week Date     Homework Field Food In class Readings (to be read before class)
1 Apr 9 - Torrijas (they are everywhere. check out El Riojano if you are in Centro and want the old-world feel.) Introduction to the course
  • No reading

First half: Linguistics of Food and its links with History, Anthropology, and Sociology
Module 1: Food and Language Migrations
2 April 14 HW1: Trace the linguistic, culinary, and social power history of a favorite food (in Spain or not). Use the OED and the Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española). Chocolate at San Ginés Food Migrations
  • Coe, Sophie D., and Michael D. Coe. 2013. The True History of Chocolate. Thames and Hudson. Selections from Chapter 2.
  • Sidney Mintz. 1979. "Time, Sugar, and Sweetness".
  • Jurafsky, Dan. (2014). The Language of Food. Norton. Chapter 11: Sherbet, Fireworks, and Mint Juleps
April 15 1:30-4:30ish (no homework because MOM lecture) Cookies at Monasterio del Corpus Christi las Carboneras. Joint class+lunch with MOM
  • Joint class with MOM Culinary Institute at the MOM location at C/ Serrano, 95. 28006 Madrid, not our normal class location, and starting at 1:30pm and including lunch at MOM.
3 April 21 HW2: Talk to your host family about their recipes and regular foods, choose a recipe, and talk about its history in their family and (from some simple research) its history in Spain. If another student is describing a similar recipe (especially one with lots of variations like cocido), then you can get extra credit by also comparing the recipe with one of your classmates. Membrillo (presumably they eat it at your host family. But if not, it's available with cheese at any local charcutería; if in Centro, you could check out Casa González or Abacería del Príncipe). Or turrón (Jijona o Alicante) or mazapán, available in tons of places like Casa Mira. Spanish borrowings
  • Rafael Chabrán. 2002. Medieval Spain. In Regional cuisines of Medieval Europe: a book of essays. Edited by Melitta Weiss Adamson. Routledge.
  • Jurafsky, Dan. (2014). The Language of Food. Norton. Chapter 3: From Sikbāj to Fish and Chips
April 22 HW3: Find a loanword food at the market you go to with your host family (or the Mercado Maravillas if it doesn't work out with your host family). The food name should be one that does not come from English (and is different from English). It can an ingredient food or a prepared dish. Analyze its linguistic and culinary history. Note that HW8 also is market-related, you should look ahead at that now.

Project: Proposal Idea due 		Food names at your local market with your host family. If that's not convenient, or in addition, because it's wonderful, go to el Mercado Maravillas. Plus don't miss the Venezuelan prepared food. Borrowing of words and foods cross-linguistically
Module 2: Cuisine and Structuralism
4 April 28 HW4: Do a mini-structural analysis of the Spanish cuisine system. Tapas (someplace traditional) The Grammar of Cuisine
April 29 HW5: Choose one of these two options: (1) Find a deconstructed recipe (on a menu or a description on the web or a cookbook). Discuss one element that remains the same and one which gets deconstructed and postulate why. Or (2) Find and eat some fusion food that is influenced by Spain, and is not the same fusion as you would find in the US. Again discuss the elements that come from the two original cuisines, what changes, what stays the same. Find and eat some locally-influenced fusion food. Any Spanish-influenced mix of cuisines that is different than the fusions you have eaten in America. It could be Spanish-style sushi. Or Chinese-Spanish. Or Mexican food that's Spanish-influenced. If restaurants aren't in your budget, see what you can learn by systematically checking out menus (or convince someone to take you to some fusion place like Street XO.) Deconstructing Cuisine
Module 3: Socializing Taste
5 May 5 HW6: Do a mini-analysis of a short passage (2-3 turns) from one of your dinner table conversations. Or perhaps compare and contrast your discussions of food when eating with your friends with your host family. Gazpacho or Salmorejo Socializing Taste
  • Ochs, Elinor, Clotilde Pontecorvo, and Alessandra Fasulo. 1996. Socializing Taste. Ethnos Vol 61:1-2.
May 6 HW7: Accompany your host family to their neighborhood market for fresh produce. Find one interesting example of the way the language you hear used in the market differs according to the social relations or demographic features of the speakers and listeners. Bocadillo de Calamares Distinction
  • Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. (You can read an English translation or a Spanish translation of the original French). Chapter 3: The Habitus and the Space of Life-Styles. pp 169-208. Harvard University Press.
Second half: Linguistics of Food and its links with Cognitive Science, Data Science, and Computer Science
Module 4: Food language as data: the Text Data Science of Food
6 May 12 HW8: Compare and contrast two Spanish menus. Escabeche How to Read a Menu
  • Jurafsky, Dan. (2014). The Language of Food. Norton. Chapter 1: How to Read a Menu
May 13 HW9: Do a close reading of two Spanish restaurant reviews. Discuss.
Project: 2-page proposal due 		Rosquillas de San Isidro How to Read a Restaurant Review
Module 5: Perception, Creativity, and Authority
7 May 19 HW10: Find a recipe in a (modern or old) Spanish cookbook in a library or bookstore or your host family's collection, and watch one cooking show. Compare and contrast the role of the reader/listener (their agency, assumed prior knowledge, expectation to modify the recipe, etc.) in the two genres. Cocido Madrileño Food discourse, the role of the listener, and Franco
  • Lara Anderson. 2020. Beyond the Kitchen: Food Texts, Gender, and Compliance in Franco Spain. Parts of Chapter 2 from Control And Resistance: Food Discourse in Franco Spain. University of Toronto.
  • Anya von Bremzen. 2023. Excerpts from Seville chapter, from National Dish. Penguin.
  • Spanish cooking video, TBD

May 20
11:30-2:30! 		(No homework because cooking class) Magdalena at La Magdalena de Proust The Language of Perception. Cooking class and tasting 11:30-2:30pm at MOM location, C/ Serrano, 95. 28006 Madrid! Note special time and location!
8 May 26 HW11: Write a mini-analysis of a food memory of your childhood, with emphasis on perception. Tapas in León, Barrio Húmedo, (morcilla, cecina, but also in León: Valdeón, mantecadas de Astorga, hojaldre de Boñar) Creativity in Chefs
  • Cooking show video TBD
May 27 HW12: Use a language model to make a more creative version of your favorite recipe. Analyze its failures. Project: rough draft due Creativity in LLMs
  • TBD
  • https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/dining/ai-chefs-restaurants.html
Module 5: Language and Thought
9 June 2 HW13: Go to at least two restaurants or food stands that differ in price/fanciness, ethnicity, geography, or clientele, and analyze the language the waiters/counter people use to speak to you or other customers. Consider the differences in vocabulary according to semantic field and social status. TBD Language and Thought
June 3 HW14: Find and discuss a Spanish advertisement in which the passive voice is used to avoid agency. - Language and Thought
Project Presentations
10 Jun 9 - Project Presentations
Jun 10 - - Project Presentations

Course Information

Assignments and Grading

Preparation, Attendance, and Participation:

It is important that you attend each session and complete the readings prior to class. The discussion and interaction during class time will be an integral part of the course.

Daily Homeworks:

The night before each class (by 5pm) you will be required to turn in one written homework, a 1-page mini-exercise ) that answers a question by making use of the analytic methods and linguistic/food topic being discussed that day. You can write in English or Spanish, I encourage you to use Spanish but it's your choice each week. Your homework should be about 1 page and should be turned in by posting it in Canvas. The exercise has two functions. First, it is designed to help you learn the method being used by that week's paper or topic. Second, it is designed to help you develop material that will contribute to the class discussion, and the student Discussion Leaders for the day will be using it to help know who to call on when. For this reason the 1 page should be personal, involving an element of language and food that you have experienced yourself. For these homeworks, the use of large language models is not allowed: we want your personal voice. For this reason, they will not be graded on style or grammar. They can be rough and informal, but they will be graded solely on their reflection of your personal experiences and your growth in doing the exercise.

Empirical Observation and Field Food

The class highlights the empirical investigation of the language of food. In keeping with our empiricism, each session we will have a required piece of field work that you must do that week, involving going someplace in Madrid and sampling a particular food, visiting a market, etc. This is listed under the Field food column. The field work must be done with a partner.. Don't spend a lot of money. The field food can be at your host house. I've picked foods (for example individual cookies) that are often only a few euros or less. You must do this every class session, but for 8 of the 18 possible field foods, if you aren't excited by them, you can replace them with a reasonable substitute food of your choice. It must be one that is new to you, and can be from any country as long as you ate it there. Just tell us the name of your field food as 1 sentence in on your daily homework.

Related to this, 10 times during the quarter (i.e. about once a week or every other class) you will be asked too bring to the class an empirical observation or finding about the language of food; it can relate to that week's reading or another week. Your observation can be an object (e.g., a food) or a photo of an experience or some data from the field that might inspire a study. Roughly half of you can bring their observation Tuesday and half Wednesday. You should expect to talk about it for 1 minute or less; we'll use 10 minutes for this part of class. I suggest you consider using one of your field foods for your empirical observation for each week but you don't have to, if you have a great idea unrelated to the field food that's fine too!

Discussion Leadership:

Twice during the quarter, you (together with a partner) will be asked to help lead the discussion for the week. You are expected to meet with your group partner beforehand to agree on the questions and issues you will use to frame and guide the discussion. You and your partner will decide whether our discussion that day will be in Spanish or English. I expect we'll get a mix throughout the quarter, which is fine!

We will rely on you to point out big themes and place the research in context. What is the value of the work? How can we apply it to understand your situation embedded in Spain? What does this work tell you in methods or substantive findings about language, food, culture, or society? What can we take away from this work that could enrich your life? Why could this work matter to the fields of linguistics, computer science, cultural analytics, psychology, and/or to the public at large? Bring in your own expertise on the issues to help inform the class and to push us beyond the readings.

You have free rein in how you structure your discussion day! It doesn't have to just be a simple conversation. You can set up a debate, or split the class into teams or discussion groups, or do a game show, or anything you want. Be creative!! You can decide to incorporate the 10 minutes of empirical observations into your design, or have us to empirical observations before you start.

The way each class will run is I will do 15 minutes of background or scene-setting lecture, and then the Discussion Leaders take over (perhaps with 10 minutes of empirical observations first)

Final Project:

The final project is a chance to go deep into a topic related to the language of food (and Spain). There are so many directions you could go. If you are interested in data science, you could pose and answer a question involving analysis of Spanish language data, like TV shows or recipes or reviews or menus or ads. If you are interested in computer science, you could do something with large language models involving Spanish language. You could do humanities paper that apply or extend any of the theoretical models we've studied (Bourdieu, Mintz). You could do a linguistics paper following Ochs by studying the themes in mealtime conversations. The only requirement is that the project be embedded somehow that takes advantage of your context here. Projects are strongly recommended to be done in groups (two or even three if you all plan to spend a lot of time together). To avoid all the work happening at the end, the work will be very evenly divided across the quarter. Project milestones:

  1. April 22 (Week 3 Wednesday): Idea (1 paragraph): Propose a topic/idea that you might be interested
  2. May 13 (Week 5 Wednesday) Proposal (2 pages): Propose a high-level plan for what you want to study.
  3. May 27 (Week 8 Wednesday) : Rough Draft: A first draft of the project, including progress on a first study.
  4. In-Class Presentation of Projects in Week 10
  5. Project Writeup due Week 10

Grading

  • Homeworks (20%)
  • Empirical Observations (10%) You are required to do 10 (of the 18 potential) field empirical observations (presumably but not necessarily based on one of the field foods). (Each presentation is worth one point).
  • Attendance and General Participation (20%)
    (Attendance is required. All students are expected to actively and productively participate, and unexcused absences will lower your grade.)
  • Discussion Leadership (20%)
  • Final Project (30%)
    (divided among all the milestones including the paper and the presentation)
  • Extra Credit You can get extra credit (the amount is at my discretion) for doing your final project presentations in Spanish.

Learning Goals

  • Become more aware of how yours and others' linguistic behaviors can be topics of academic inquiry.
  • Acquire tools to offer linguistic analyses in the humanities and social sciences.
  • Develop skills for cultural interpretation, historical thinking, evaluative reasoning and judgment.