ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ways in which humans use food as a semiotic system, much like language, to communicate. Levi-Strauss, Barthes, and Douglass interpret foodways as iconically mirroring language in that they use rules akin to phonology and grammar to encode cultural meanings. Foodways are also legible as linguistic registers for their indexical links to social meanings to do with age, gender, class, and ethnicity, with a focus on topics such as haute cuisine and symbolic capital and their relevance to gastro-politics. Finally, foodways, like other symbols, are processed and transformed, decontextualized and recontextualized, filled and emptied of value; this section focuses in particular on how “authenticity” is (re)claimed and (re)invented, certified and performed. The vignettes in this chapter probe foodways and discourse values in France, the Solomon Islands, and China.
