Tomato sauce comes from Fujian fish sauce? This book teaches you the language of reading food.

Can you believe it? Is ketchup actually evolved from fish sauce in Fujian, China?

The most popular condiments in the world today, from the fish sauce with fish as the main ingredient at first, to the sauce with walnuts as the main ingredient later, and now to the tomato sauce with tomatoes as the main ingredient, are the best representatives of trade globalization. It also reveals the history that China was once the richest country in the world.

"We are all immigrants, and no culture is an island." The story of ketchup is a window, showing us the collision between eastern and western cultures.

From fish sauce to tomato sauce, the difference between them seems to be far greater than the similarity, and linguists only find the origin from language (of course, there must be other evidence). This is one of the contents presented in the book Food Linguistics.

The author Ren Shaotang is a real crooked nut. This name, full of China flavor, should be named by his Chinese biologist wife. Ren Shaotang is a professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford University and a winner of the Mather Prize for Genius. Many of the contents in this book are the lessons he gave to freshmen in linguistics at Stanford University. Although it comes from the ivory tower, it is not boring and full of fun.

In addition to the source of ketchup, Professor Ren also studied many interesting topics:

Why are turkeys and turkeys called turkey in English and D 'Inde in French?

Why is toast related to toast?

Why flour and flowers used to be the same word in English (shocked? I thought it was just homophonic! )?

……

Relying on his background as a computer science professor, he led the team to study 6,500 menus and 650,000 dishes in seven American cities for data analysis, revealing the relationship between menu terms and restaurant positioning and pricing. Next time you go to an American restaurant, it doesn't matter if you can't read the menu. Just remember that the longer and more uncommon the words used in the menu, the higher the price of the restaurant.

Of course, the premise is that people have a menu. A restaurant that doesn't even provide a menu is beyond the reach of most people.

Many questions are as naive as those raised by three-year-olds. We may have all thought about them in our minds, but we have long accepted their existence as a matter of course and swallowed up our exploration spirit with food. And a good scholar always keeps children's curiosity. San Francisco is never short of good restaurants. Professor Ren loves to eat and play, but he never wastes time waiting for meals. From the words on the menu, the order of serving, the origin of toasting, to why there is no dessert in Chinese food, nothing does not arouse his curiosity and imagination.

Books written by foodies must have the characteristics of foodies, so this is the first time I have seen books arranged in menu order. Professor Ren first taught everyone how to read the menu, and then stripped all kinds of familiar foods from appetizers to desserts.

You don't need to be a gourmet to understand this book. In fact, I think anyone who studies linguistics, social science, brand marketing, restaurant management or any food-related work can get the knowledge he needs from this book. For example, after reading this book, I will know more about how to choose restaurants and order food through menus (see whose guests they are), how to read the subtext printed on food packaging by merchants on supermarket shelves, and how to implicitly allude to some people who like to put X on the dining table.

Unfortunately, due to cultural background and language differences, many knowledge points in this book may not work in the context of China. Under this expectation, any scholar who is also a foodie will also do a research on China's dietetic linguistics.