Wear words wisely
Our monthly round-up of published work and some thoughts on the power of words, especially when it comes to food and culture - an extreme earnestness in saying ‘language matters’, because it does
Welcome to the free issue of the SOURCED newsletter, where we give you monthly updates about what we’ve published, what we’re reading and what to look forward to. If you would like to upgrade your free subscription…
We are excited to announce that we are very close to our paid subscriber goal for the year. For December we will be donating the £3.50 subscription fee from new sign-ups to the Trussell Trust. Please tell your friends or if you’re feeling generous, give them a gift subscription!
Word Choice
We see SOURCED as a resource for learning, engaging and growing in the food industry. The pieces we publish on our website are meant to inform the way we discuss food and drink so that we can cultivate a conversation that is empathetic and engaging. For us that starts with knowing how the language we use impacts the way culinary traditions and cultures are perceived.
In November we published a 2-part series on the impact colonial narratives shape our perception of rum by Israel Meléndez Ayala. In ‘Rum: History and Myths’, Ayala examines the language used to market rum to show how language rooted in a colonial narrative erases the history of labour and ingenuity of rum makers and misrepresents the culture of rum in the Caribbean. In ‘Classic Daiquiri or Canchancharra?’ he looks at the politics of credit under colonial rule – and offers a couple cocktail recipes sure to brighten the ever-darkening winter evenings. Both of these pieces help us consider the role language plays in our understanding of food and drink culture.
Whether intentional or not, word choice matters when you profit from food and drink. Branding can have the effect of engaging or alienating the communities you hope to nourish. In the age of social media branding goes beyond formal marketing campaigns and is present in our profile bios, the hashtags we use to promote our work and in the way we describe the food and drink we make. But the pervasiveness of unimaginative marketing buzzwords and the influence of SEO-driven traffic can seduce a creator into the misstep of using unintentionally hurtful language.
We don’t expect people to be perfect all the time. Our experience with academia has taught us how much of a divide exists between the people who study the effect of colonial narratives on food and the people who actually produce our food. In our November tutorial on transparency, Anna and Chloe discuss how concepts like ‘cultural appropriation’, ‘erasure’, ‘foodways’ and ‘white/colonial gaze’ exist as a short-hand for academics but when applied practically can come across as convoluted or out of touch.
This doesn’t make these concepts any less important to the broader conversation of inclusivity and equity in our culinary systems, rather these are barriers we are working to overcome. Academics like Mukta Das, one of our ‘The Ten’ interviewees, are working to bridge this gap through interdisciplinary programs that connect food academics with industry professionals. Chloe has written about Das’s work and how the academy and the food industry can benefit from one another for Contingent Magazine.
There is extreme earnestness in saying ‘language matters’ but it does. This introductory season of SOURCED has been focused on ‘origin’ and how narratives around food have an impact on the way they are sold, eaten and valued - the aim was to examine our culinary systems. Each of the pieces we’ve commissioned and published introduced an the idea that an understanding of history and origins is required to understand how our these culinary systems are created.
We are wrapping up the year with a few more additions to our audio series – you can hear November’s discussion between Anna and Magnus Nilsson, chef and academy director of MAD here. Next month we start Season 1.2 and will continue to explore the importance of how we tell stories of food and drink culture through an examination of soil. In this season we will look at things like the politics of land rights and the demands of farming specialty ingredients.
Reading list:
Writer & Editor David Paw’s Instagram post, relating to words…
Longthroat Memoirs, Introduction, Yemisi Aribisala
Written in 2016, Aribisala opens her book with this explanation of her journey into food writing:
‘From eating food with people from other cultures, I learnt that you had to talk about food and this talking helped to concretise a personality/identity for the food. This talk would find its way into literature, film, television and other forms of media, forming the persona called ‘food’, made up of speech and culture and stories, glamorised by patriotic affection and sentimental associations.
Nigerians have never created that person from speech and stories and exaggerations, so that when I brought him up, the response was like talking about someone who never existed. If he didnt exist for us then he couldn’t internationally.’
This book shows the way Nigeria’s food is experienced and explored by Nigerians and follows Aribisala’s journey to translate Nigeria’s food persona into a language of food that has been written for and by the Global North. In next week’s paid-subscriber newsletter Chloe’s essay will discuss Longthroat Memoirs and the difficulty of translating global food culture within the limited language of traditional food media.
The Allusionist Podcast, Survival: Custodians of the Languages
Aboriginal language workers, Karina Lester and Rudi Bremer discuss their work to revive and record aboriginal language in Australia. They also discuss how language erasure is used as a tool of colonial violence and why revivals of these languages are important actions of reclamation.
We believe that food and drink are a biological and cultural right; aast month’s free newsletter focused on how we look after the community, which is one of the reasons we wanted to donate to Trussell Trust this month. This newsletter gave background on the free school meals programme in the UK as well as people to follow who address these matters of access to food.