One Food to Rule them All

🧠🤷‍♀️Introduction

A Twitter post from Sean Kelly, @StorySlug, that states "Canonically, the Lord of the Rings is a memoir by hobbits, which has several detailed descriptions of meals throughout, so maybe whole saga is just one of those recipe blogs where they have to tell you a whole epic story before getting to the food." Posted 12:20 AM June 3rd 2021 on Twitter for Android
Full respect to all food bloggers honestly. They are doing the real word.

If you are going to marathon The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings movie trilogies, you’d better have your Shire-style menu set. Not only because an extended edition marathon will run over 20 total hours with no breaks, but because a lifestyle consisting of breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner, and supper is synonymous with the quiet, idyllic lifestyle of the Hobbits in Middle Earth. Many modern fantasy writers have taken inspiration from Tolkien’s epic fantasy, and descriptions of food are commonplace due to his influence. After all, reading a high fantasy novel set in a medieval world would disappoint readers without a thorough description of the ales, loaves of bread, jams, and stews served in inns and cottages throughout the land.

❓🤓 Hypothesis

Tolkien inspired many modern fantasy writers to include in-depth descriptions of food which is not inherently present in other genres of literature. However, I believe that over time the function of these descriptions has shifted from Tolkien’s original purpose to a new modern purpose more suitable for the experiences of modern writers and readers.

As a veteran of the Great War – World War I – Tolkien knew firsthand the trauma of food scarcity. This permeates the experiences of the Hobbits, humans, and Elves of Middle Earth and their journies. Depictions of rich foods are used in Tolkien’s work to emphasize luxury, peace, and prosperity. On the other hand, descriptions of scarce food, mundane food, and repetitive food (Lambas bread, anyone?) emphasize war, conflict, and fear. Depictions of food are used to enhance the setting and theme throughout the narrative of Middle Earth.

In modern writing, fewer authors have first-hand experience with war and food scarcity. The focus of literature has also shifted to emphasize individual characters and choices. Following these trends, modern fantasy writers use food not necessarily to emphasize the setting and tone of the story but to give insights into the characters eating the food. For example, describing a character eating an apple at breakfast instead of eggs indicates something about their personality and beliefs.

📃✅ Methodology

To test this hypothesis, I will examine passages describing food from the Lord of the Rings trilogy and a comparable series written in English within the last 10 years (I.E. Game of Thrones). These passages must be focused on eating primarily, though other activities can be occurring such as dialogue. I will focus on three sets of terms when collecting data: adjectives (positive and negative), cultural terms, and personal terms.

Adjectives will be those describing the food quality and quantity: crunchy, pleasant, rich, dry, bitter, and so on. Adjectives will be sub-classified into positive and negative categories. Cataloging these words will allow for cross reference of cultural terms and personal terms to determine if there is a correlation between how food is described and how authors use food to influence reader’s perception of setting and/or characters.

Cultural terms will be those describing the setting and population of the meal: mentions of the town/inn/people serving the food, the origin of the food, the process of eating or cooking, the setting of the meal (table, chairs, outside by a fire, etc). Cataloging these terms will help determine how often meals are associated with the setting and surroundings in both Tolkien’s work and modern work to determine if there is a change.

Personal terms will be those describing the individual character’s interaction with the food: choose, liked, disliked, ate, spit-up, preffered, ordered, and so on. Cataloging these terms will determine how often food and meals are directly interacted with by the characters in-scene. This will show any change in correlation between Tolkien’s work and modern writers between the use of food as a setting creation device and a character creation device as characters would interact more with food as a character creation device than a setting creation device.

📚📑Literature Review

In my review of existing studies and articles, I found several articles discussing Tolkein’s work. Especially of note were articles describing Tolkien’s influences and impact. Among influences were the Great War – World War I – and his experience in the war, and his impacts include the legacy of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and related works on later fantasy writers and story-based role playing game developers. The works related to Tolkien focus on the inputs and outputs of his life that contributed to his creation of the Middle Earth narratives, but I found no articles or research that focused on his use of food in the texts. I would like to expand my search of Tolkien’s influences to include more of his experience as a linguist and medieval scholar, and trends in food at the time of his writing to see what resources I may find that contribute to his use of food in the texts.

Since I could not find any sources discussing food within Tolkien’s work, I searched for and found discussions of food in literature broadly. This still seems to be a slim category, but there were several sources that explore food in literature through a critical lense. There were two articles that explored the use of food in Jane Austin’s work and in the novel Satire, and though these works are not the same genre or time period as Tolkein may still be beneficial to give insights in what other scholars are doing with food studies in literature. Several articles pertained to the depiction of food and it’s relation to culture in literature so these will be useful in establishing the connection between these elements not only in Tolkien but also in modern works. One article explores the use of food in Anglo-Saxon Old English literature, which may be beneficial for establishing patterns seen in Tolkien’s work. I would like to expand this research to explore more food trends at the time of Tolkien and modern food trends to establish the food culture and environment of Tolkien and the modern writer chosen for this study.

A final addition to this list of sources would be to explore influences of the modern writer chosen for the study. Any background on the modern writer and their influences in food and fantasy writing would be benefical for the purpose of this study.

🧙‍♂️🌄Works Related to Tolkien

Tolkien among the Moderns, edited by Ralph C. Wood, University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wichita/detail.action?docID=3441198.

Bainbridge, W. S. (2022). Dimensions of Online Role-Playing: Anchored in the Tolkien Mythos. Social Science Computer Review, 0(0). https://doi-org.proxy.wichita.edu/10.1177/08944393211072268

Arjun Satish, Ramesh Jain, and Amarnath Gupta. 2009. Tolkien: an event based storytelling system. Proc. VLDB Endow. 2, 2 (August 2009), 1630–1633. https://doi.org/10.14778/1687553.1687610

Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth. Houghton Mifflin, 2003. https://libcat.wichita.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=1136561

Isaacs, Neil David, and Rose Abdelnour Zimbardo. Tolkien: New Critical Perspectives. The University Press of Kentucky, 1981. https://libcat.wichita.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=384846

Clark, George, and Daniel Timmons. J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views on Middle-Earth. Greenwood Press, 2000. https://libcat.wichita.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=1092697

Croft, Janet Brennan. War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Praeger, 2004. https://libcat.wichita.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=1155311

Young, Helen. Review of Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones, by Kellyann Fitzpatrick. JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 121 no. 1, 2022, p. 121-122. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/850649.

☕📖Works Related to Food in Literature

Shahani, Gitanjali. Food and Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2018. https://libcat.wichita.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=3158747

Tigner, Amy L., and Allison Carruth. Literature and Food Studies. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. https://libcat.wichita.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=2801176

Shahani, Gitanjali. Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature. Cornell University Press, 2020. https://libcat.wichita.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=4067959

Cammie M. Sublette, and Jennifer Martin. Devouring Cultures : Perspectives on Food, Power, and Identity From the Zombie Apocalypse to Downton Abbey. University of Arkansas Press, 2016. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.proxy.wichita.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1102477&site=ehost-live.

FOX AVERILL, Thomas, and Bassima SCHBLEY. “Food in Literature and Film, Five Meals: Lessons in Cultural Communication.” Global Media Journal: Turkish Edition, vol. 7, no. 13, Fall 2016, pp. 1–5. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.proxy.wichita.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=119509138&site=ehost-live.

Keyser, Catherine. Review of Table Lands: Food in Children’s Literature, by Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard. The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 44 no. 3, 2020, p. 333-335. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/uni.2020.0031.

Lane, Maggie. Jane Austen and Food. Hambledon Press, 2007. https://libcat.wichita.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=681609

Gigante, Denise. Taste a Literary History. Yale University Press, 2005. https://libcat.wichita.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=1209642

Armacost, Evan J. “Food and Fictionalization in Juvenal’s Eleventh Satire.” Classical World, vol. 113 no. 1, 2019, p. 65-86. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/clw.2019.0078.

Wadiak, Walter. Review of Political Appetites: Food in Medieval English Romance, by Aaron Hostetter. JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 119 no. 2, 2020, p. 272-275. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/755698.

Magennis, Hugh. Anglo-Saxon Appetites: Food and Drink and Their Consumption in Old English and Related Literature. Four Courts Press, 1999. https://libcat.wichita.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=751153

Anantharam, A. (2017). “I can think, I can wait, I can fast”: Teaching food literature and experiential learning. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 16(2), 209–220. https://doi-org.proxy.wichita.edu/10.1177/1474022215597442

Honey Bears Care

I love honey. I love to eat it with some peanut butter and bananas (or just the peanut butter) and drink it in hot tea or coffee. I love honey so much I started keeping bees. I have a few bottles of my own honey in my office drawer at all times to sell to coworkers. That said, having a tap in a live hive means I don’t actually purchase honey anymore. If I run out mid-winter (unlikely) I will wait until I can harvest in the summer before I buy honey at the store. There’s just something different about store-bought honey (rumor says it’s corn syrup). I still thought it would be interesting to see how honey is being marketed in grocery stores today. You could say I was spying on the competition but really, there’s no competition when the honey is still hot from the sun when it goes in your baklava.

I found nine brands of honey. They ranged in price from $3.94 a bottle at the cheapest to $13.92 a bottle at the most expensive. This breaks down to a range of about twenty-five cents per ounce ($0.33 at the cheapest, to $0.58 at the most expensive). This is not a terribly wide range of cost, but honey is 1) an animal product and 2) sold by weight not volume so the pricing of honey is actually monitored and kept pretty consistent across sellers. Farmer’s market honey may be a little more expensive than store-bought honey, but in my experience, it tends to run within this range as well. Since the price range is so narrow, I focused only on the two most expensive per ounce brands, Great Value and Cooper’s, and the two least expensive per ounce brands, Local Hive and Jamie’s, to explore in-depth, but some information from other brands may be incorporated.

Brand OZPrice per BottlePrice per Ounce
Great Value12$3.94$0.33
Cooper’s Raw12$4.48$0.37
Fischer’s24$8.94$0.37
Organic Great Value12$4.84$0.40
Fischer’s12$4.87$0.41
Cheatwood’s12$5.12$0.43
Nate’s16$7.67$0.48
Local Hive16$9.02$0.56
Jamie’s24$13.92$0.58
Chart displaying the brands, bottle size, price per bottle, and price per oz of the honey brands found.

🍯🐝 Trends in the Language of Honey

There are two main factors that contribute to a bottle of honey’s expense: the honey quality and the locality of the producer.

A veiw of the label on Cooper’s Honey featuring a description of their harvesting process.

When discussing honey quality, a few factors come into play including the harvest processing method and the honey’s health benefits. Processing words like “raw” “filtered” and “pure” and references to suspended impurities like beeswax or pollen sources like clover appeared more often in the cheaper brands than in the more expensive brands, while mention of health benefits appeared more often in the expensive brands. Honey quality as a whole was mentioned more often in cheaper brands with a frequency of thirty-six quality-related words in the cheap brands to only twenty-nine words in the more expensive brands. Though there is a slight preference for process-related language in the cheaper brands, this narrow gap may be due to necessity. Different types of harvest processes can affect the honey’s taste and alleged health benefits so having verbiage to describe whether the honey is “raw” “pure” “filtered” or “strained” all imply a different amount of processing. For instance, raw honey cannot be heated to pasteurize it, filtered honey has been heated to remove micro impurities like pollen, while strained honey is not heated and has micro impurities such as pollen, but larger impurities like beeswax have been removed. Cooper’s Raw had the most process verbiage as the label explained the process and guaranteed this process did not heat the honey past the point of removing health benefits. More expensive brands had only the required wording to describe the type of processing the honey underwent.

The back label of Local Hive featuring a map of their hive sources.

When discussing the locality of the producer, the frequency of words used reverses. Words emphasizing familiarity of the producer such as “we” “our” “partner” and “support” and words emphasizing the distance between the hive and consumer such as “local” “straight” and “table” appeared more frequently on expensive brand labels. The frequency nearly doubled in expensive brands where these words appeared thirty times compared to only sixteen times on the inexpensive brand labels. The proximity of hives to consumers and the familiarity of the company to consumers is the most important factor in determining the price of honey. Supporting the idea of familiarity selling the product, out of all nine brands, only three were not named after people. Two of these were the store brands – one regular, one organic – and the third was Local Hive which while not being a proper noun name still emphasizes the locality of the hive. Many bottles even included American flags, and Local Hive even included a map of the United States with the states their honey is sourced from highlighted to emphasize their geographical closeness to the consumer.

🧐📝Conclusions

Whenever someone steps into a grocery store to buy a bottle of honey for their tea, what they really crave is the unadulterated product from the hive and a friendly local beek to go with it. Bottles sold at grocery stores have adapted their labeling to appeal to consumers who increasingly find their honey in their backyards or at farmer’s markets. Cheaper brands focus on describing the harvesting process to ensure consumers know they are purchasing honey with all the anticipated health benefits (and not cut with corn syrup). More expensive brands focus on establishing a rapport with consumers through familiar language and emphasis on close geographic distance.

(re)Introduction

Hello and welcome! I am reviving this long dormant (pronounced: /ded/ ) blog to post assignments for the Linguistics of Food course I am currently taking. This post is meant to serve for Assignment 1 of the course.

🗣💬 Language Background

I taught myself to read from Shel Silverstein books. I still remember the first time I spelled my name for the first time sitting in the threshold between my bedroom and the living room. I can remember sitting in Kindergarten reading ahead of the teacher on assignments. I started writing down the stories I actedout with my Barbies when I was around seven years old. I don’t ever remember a time when language wasn’t important and a huge part of my personal identity.

After the movie Atlantis, the Lost Empire came out I wanted to be a cartographer/linguist double threat like Milo Thatch and find Atlantis when I grew up. (Did I think I could do that by cutting out the continents and putting them together like a puzzle and finding the hole then pushing them apart based on tectonic drift to find out where that hole would be in the present time and then looking there? Yes. But, that’s a post for another time.) Fun fact, the Atlantian language developed for the movie was made by the same guy who invented Kingon. The more you know! This was one of the first times I thought of branching out of the English language and into another language. I knew growing up that my mother spoke Spanish, but it’s not something she ever spoke in our home. Around the same time, I watched a lot of Japanese anime shows and took an interest in learning about the language written in the background of the shows. The audio was always translated, but the signs animated were still written in Japanese.

As a kid, I did think that a linguist was just someone who spoke a lot of languages so I went to a middle magnet school that required three years of Spanish. Boy was I shocked when I discovered that other languages were not just secret codes like I’d been using with my friends to write notes. Rather just changing English to another language (like pig latin), I discovered that other languages were actually completely different and I had to memorize new words and grammar entirely. Unfortunately, I do not remember much of my Spanish grammar, but I recognize enough nouns to know when my mom is making fun of me in Spanish.I didn’t continue taking Spanish in high school because I was protesting my school not offering Japanese which is what I really wanted to study by that point. Dumb move on my part honestly. I did study Japanese in college and can speak, read, and write Japanese. For my Japanese degree I also took a course in Japanese linguistics.

Between disappointment that Languages are not codes and high school not offering Japanese, I lost an outward professional interest in languages and linguistics. But, I never really stopped pursuing it on my own time. I love looking at how the rise of technology and social media has affected our written and spoken language. I use a lot of social media writing when teaching English as a means to bridge the gap between “common” spoken English and “academic” language which is a topic I’ve presented at a local conference. Also the difference between how different generations engage with social media written language is facinating. Since languages and linguistics are hobbies/passion projects of mine I have dabbled a lot without having what I would call any “real ” experience. Beyond Japanese and a bit of Spanish, I’ve dabbled in learning French, Italian, Irish, Navajo, German, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew via DuoLingo and similar apps.

I work intimately with language every day. I don’t think I will ever truly tire of learning new facts about languages, linguistics, learning new languages or new methods of communication in general.

🍕🍜Food Background

My relationship to food has always been a little… hot and cold.

Haha, see what I did there?

Ahem, anyway…

“That’s where all the nutrients are!”

I was a picky eater growing up. My parents both grew up food insecure so I usually got the default Kraft Mac N Cheese at dinner time as well as or instead of their dinner to make sure I had something to eat. We went through a period of having very little money when I was in middle school so I do remember eating the same inexpensive meals repeatedly. I haven’t been able to stomach spaghetti since then, if I’m honest. I did grow out of my pickiness phase when I started cooking around middle school age and learned that onions aren’t always gross all the time and are actually great in shrimp stuffed mushrooms. I like trying new foods now. When traveling I try to eat the local specialty foods wherever I go. The strangest thing I’ve had to date is horse sashimi. Yes it was raw. It tasted like bologna. I do not like bologna.

I do have a sweet tooth. I love my deserts and sweets. I’ve made more than one meal of coffee and cake in my life and don’t plan on changing that trend anytime soon. I also really love spicy food. I went through a biting phase as a todler and my mom used a drop of Tabasco sauce on my tongue every time I bit someone to break me of it. I’m pretty sure that’s why I’m the only one in my family who loves spicy food. I don’t really like to cook, and I’m not a huge fan of traditional holiday foods.

In more recent years I’ve tried cutting different foods from my diet to see if any were migraine triggers. Some include gluten, caffine, sugar, and dairy. None of them showed any significant effect on my migraine frequency so I didn’t cut them out permanently. I do avoid caffine and get decaf coffee as a rule though. I am currently on some medications that surpress my apetite so I do have to encourage myself to eat by making it enjoyable with deserts and eating with company.