Why does a caprese salad costs $8 at a casual restaurant but then somehow jump to $28 when described as "heirloom tomatoes, hand-pulled curd, and micro-basil with 25-year aged balsamic reduction" at the one down the block?

Why does the "Patagonian toothfish" suddenly became more appealing when renamed "Chilean sea bass?"

The language we use to describe food does so much more than influence our dinner orders. It shapes our perceptions, informs our purchasing decisions, and reveals deep cultural values around what we eat.

This week, we’re diving into the linguistics of food—from how menu descriptions subtly manipulate our perceptions to why we have such complicated relationships with words like "artisanal" and "vanilla."

History 101: The Surprising Colonial History of Vanilla

TLDR—vanilla was once a sacred Mesoamerican treasure guarded by Aztec royalty, then it became a colonial luxury so valuable it sparked global trade wars, and now it’s reduced to linguistic shorthand for "boring" or “missionary.”

Vanilla comes from the Spanish vainilla, meaning "little pod" or "little sheath," but before European contact, the Totonac people of Mexico's eastern coast called it xanat, and it was considered nothing short of sacred. The Totonacs believed vanilla was born from the blood of Princess Xanat when she and her lover were beheaded for defying her father's wishes. From tragedy sprang the vanilla orchid—a plant so precious that only royalty and high priests were permitted to enjoy its flavor.

Enter Hernán Cortés, who in 1519 observed the Aztec emperor Montezuma drinking xocolatl—a bitter chocolate beverage flavored with vanilla. Cortés swiftly transported this exotic flavor back to Spain, where it became an immediate sensation among European royalty. Suddenly, vanilla was the height of culinary luxury, a status it would maintain for over three centuries.

Ok, but here's where it gets juicy—for 300 years after its discovery by Europeans, vanilla cultivation remained frustratingly impossible outside Mexico because the vanilla orchid could only be pollinated by a specific Mexican bee, the Melipona, or by hummingbirds native to the region. So, Mexico maintained a complete monopoly on vanilla production until 1841, when Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old enslaved boy on the French colony of Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean, discovered a method for hand-pollinating vanilla orchids using a thin bamboo stick to transfer pollen from male to female parts of the flower. By the late 19th century, chemists had isolated vanillin, the primary flavor compound in vanilla, and by 1874 were producing synthetic vanillin from pine bark.

This ubiquity eventually led to vanilla's semantic transformation. Vanilla became so common in Western desserts that it gradually transformed from signifying luxury to signifying plainness. This linguistic journey reflects broader patterns in how we assign value to food. When something rare becomes common, we often devalue it.

Heilala is my favorite vanilla extract and paste (besides homemade ofc!)

Mad Science: The Cultural Etymology of "Artisanal"

While we’re on the subject of words, what the heck does “artisanal” actually mean?

As Dan Jurafsky explores in "The Language of Food," the word comes from the Latin "ars" or "artis," meaning skill or craft. In medieval Europe, artisans were skilled craftspeople who belonged to guilds—organizations that controlled the standards, techniques, and knowledge of specific trades.

For centuries, the term remained utilitarian rather than glamorous. An artisanal product wasn't inherently superior; it was simply produced by an individual craftsperson rather than in a factory. In fact, when industrialization gained momentum in the 19th century, many consumers preferred factory-made goods for their consistency and lower prices. Handmade often meant inconsistent and expensive.

As industrialization reached its apex in the 1970s and 1980s, producing ever more homogenized, mass-produced foods, a countermovement began to emerge. People started to question whether efficiency and standardization should be our primary food values. The artisanal food movement capitalized on this and used traditional techniques, worked in small batches, and prioritized flavor over shelf stability.

But as "artisanal" products gained cache among food enthusiasts, large corporations took notice. By the early 2000s, the term had begun its march toward semantic saturation. Corporations co-opted the language of small-batch production while maintaining industrial practices, creating what marketers call a "premium mass" category—products with artisanal branding but factory production. Essentially, that’s how we ended up with the labeling on all the early Trader Joe’s snacks and things like "artisanal" water or potato chips.

The word has experienced what linguists call "semantic bleaching"—using a term so broadly that its original meaning becomes diluted.

The Etymology of Fish Names

"Chilean sea bass" must have had a wild marketing team because that fish had a shocking rebrand to turn it into the delicacy we see it as today. The fish was originally known as the "Patagonian toothfish" and was a deep-water species that was largely ignored by the culinary world until 1977 when fish merchant Lee Lantz proposed renaming it. Despite not being a bass and not exclusively from Chile, the new moniker worked marketing magic. Within a decade, this once-obscure fish became so popular that it faced severe overfishing.

This isn’t the first or last time this has happened though. "Orange roughy" was originally marketed under its taxonomic name, "slimehead." "Monkfish" was once called "goosefish" or "sea devil." And "Mahi-mahi" sounds much more exotic and appealing than its English name, "dolphinfish."

As Jurafsky notes, these rebranding efforts reveal our deep-seated food prejudices and anxieties. English-speaking consumers typically avoid foods with names that:

1. Sound too anatomical: Hence "sweetbreads" instead of "pancreas" or "thymus."

2. Reveal the animal's identity too explicitly: We prefer "beef" to "cow meat" and "pork" to "pig meat."

3. Sound ugly or dangerous: "Slimehead" becomes "orange roughy," and "wolf fish" becomes "ocean catfish."

4. Evoke creatures we see as pets or intelligent beings: "Dolphinfish" becomes "mahi-mahi."

This has been the case for ages, though. After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, many English food terms split along class lines. The Anglo-Saxon farmers who raised the animals used words like "cow," "pig," and "sheep," while the French-speaking nobility who ate them used words like "beef" (from French "boeuf"), "pork" (from "porc"), and "mutton" (from "mouton"). This linguistic distancing helped separate the living animal from the food product—a psychological buffer we maintain today.