How We Speak About Food

Have you ever thought about the words we have for food, or how we speak about food? Have you ever wondered if the words you use shape your relationship to food, even in a small way?

I started thinking about those things after listening to an Earth Day podcast from Science Friday. It was about how people describe nature, and one of the guests was poet Kimberly Blaeser, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets.

At one point, Kimberly talked about how poetry changes when she’s writing in an Indigenous language. “So sometimes it’s because the language itself carries traditional knowledge and already has embedded allusions to different kinds of information about the world.”

Then she shared an example, speaking the longest word in the Ojibwe language, which is 64 letters long!

And, translated, these 64 letters mean simply “blueberry pie.”

Much more than blueberry pie

How does something that long mean something as simple as blueberry pie? Because it’s much more than that.

As Kimberly notes, the word is a story. It includes the idea of bread – the crust – and the blueberries being covered by the crust, as well as information about the seasons, and no doubt a lot more.

English doesn’t have words like that, but even hearing this made me think more deeply about blueberry pie. As someone from Maine, I’m very familiar with blueberries. I know the book Blueberries for Sal, and I’ve picked my share of blueberries.

Then I started thinking about the experience of picking blueberries, of kneeling among those low bushes, turning back leaves to search for clumps of berries, seeing if they were ripe, with the sun warm overhead, and my back getting tired from bending.

As for the pie, there’s also the experience of making the crust, of cutting butter into flour, rolling it, trying to make a circle that won’t break when you transfer it to the pie plate or over the berries. And how wonderful it tastes in the end, with blueberry juice bubbling up and around the berries.

Lack of shared experience

Those were fun memories, but it occurred to me that maybe we can’t have words like the ones in Ojibwe because we don’t all have the same experiences. I suspect a lot of people have never been blueberry picking or made a blueberry pie from scratch.

And it gets even more complicated considering our processed foods, or items that come pre-packaged in the store. It’s hard to imagine anyone having a 64-letter word to describe Cheetos, for example. Those aren’t foods that we can grow or make, so we don’t have that deeper experience of them.

For many of our foods, we can’t even picture where they’ve come from, or we may not want to. We may picture small farms, but even things that we like to think about as coming from farms – like milk and cheese – have been industrialized.

Trying to make those connections

Still, we could try to think more about everything that goes into our food, the effort that went into creating it and getting it to us.

Even if we can’t talk about it in a poetic way or in a long descriptive word, thinking about food more deeply helps change our relationship it, and that in turn reminds us to be thoughtful of what we consume.