Food and Communication: An Overview

Abstract

A growing and significant field of research in Communication has been connected to food. Branching off from the study of food in other disciplines such as Sociology or Anthropology, food scholars in Communication have asked questions about food as a site, practice, and medium of communication. The public talks about food constantly; magazine shelves and television channels are full of such discourse. Food is used as a signifying practice; people declare their social, cultural, and class allegiances in what they eat. Food is a part of everyday life and thus entangled in the communication strategies of everyday life. What we might think of as a First Wave of studies in food and communication mainly took a rhetorical focus, asking how food and talk about food served persuasive purposes. Methods were critical and analytical. Papers and panels at scholarly conferences have since followed a largely rhetorical focus. Popular culture beyond the academy is full of critiques of what political candidates eat. The four essays in this special issue take a different approach, considering legal issues connected to First Amendment issues in the context of communication about food. Their methods are more on the archival side, combined with legal analysis. I applaud this new direction, and in my remarks here I want to connect this new direction to the more rhetorical tradition of food studies in Communication. Almost any kind of human experience will have a wide range of dimensions to it. I think it might be useful to think of these dimensions, in addition to whatever else they are, as lying “closer to the ground” as everyday experience, or on a much higher level of abstraction, or somewhere between. We may see the stars in the sky, for instance, but stars are usually not much a part of the everyday experience of most people, whereas the scientific discipline of Astronomy deals with stars at a much higher level of abstraction, and quite successfully, too. So our experience of stars shifts up or down on a ladder of abstraction. I think that food is a dimension of human experience that is remarkable for its range of dimensions, from the everyday to the more abstract. Food is also remarkable for the degree of integration and connection among those dimensions. It is an existential, primitive means of survival, an aesthetic experience that can become high art, a resource of national security, a major economic engine, a kind of political