Food and Language

Cooking may be simply the provision of nourishment palatable to the human body, but it needs language to soar beyond the kitchen stove and a viable vocabulary to make communication between cooks and diners profitable and possible. This is a rich field for the collective endeavours of the 28th Symposium at Oxford. Linguistics and etymology may be a tool for unravelling the history of foodstuffs and their migration from one culture to another; or language may supply a social and cultural subtext to what would otherwise be solely a culinary message; or the tools of literary criticism may be unleashed with profit on texts of cookery manuals or recipe books.