The Language of Food | Dan Jurafsky | Talks at Google
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters link it when food etymology comes up (ketchup, worcestershire) and as an example of text analysis showing how menu wording correlates with price.
Recommended by 1 people across 1 different months, 2016 to 2026.
What it is
Stanford computational linguist Dan Jurafsky presents his book The Language of Food at a Talks at Google event. He uses computational analysis of menus and restaurant reviews, plus word histories such as ketchup's origin, to explore history, economics, and psychology.
What people said
Strong rec jacobolus · 2016-09 · Hacker News · on “The Building Blocks of Japanese Cuisine”
Funny enough, the word ketchup comes from Southeast Asian/southern Chinese fermented fish sauce. After it became popular among European sailors after 1600, the word was coopted to refer to a wide variety of different sauces, because Europeans didn’t have any idea how to make the original sauce. The modern American ketchup is a descendent of a descendent of a cheap European knockoff of expensive imported Chinese fish sauce. :-) This lecture is great: [this video]
Cites jasode · 2018-05 · Hacker News · on “I was a corporate restaurant consultant”
A related video from Dan Jurafsky where his team analyzed the words in 6500 menus and found correlations of adjectives & nouns used by the cheap vs expensive restaurants.[1] (Or put another way... imagine this thread's "menu design" story being multiplied 6500 times and DJ researchers analyze the output of those consultations -- the 6500 menus. The corpus reveals some interesting repeating text patterns.) To apply DJ's findings, we notice that the author India Mandelkern writes: >Back at the office, our team pooled our observations on multicolored sticky notes that we stuck to a giant whiteboard. “Dishes have no freshness cues.” We assume this results in a Pei Wei menu[2] with these excerpts
Cites bwv848 · 2026-09 · Hacker News · on “Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)”
茄ke2 汁zap1, but if I remember it correctly, Dan Jurafsky believes it is from 喼git1 汁zap1, worcestershire sauce [this video]