Political Language of Food

This collection of essays on the political language of food features two key emphases. The first emphasis addresses why the language used in the production, marketing, selling, and consumption of food is inherently political. Due to the often strategic vagueness of food language, it is rarely neutral and tends to serve the interests of powerful entities. As an example, food communication scholars have been critiquing the notion of "greenwashing" as it pertains to how industries encourage the consumption of consumer goods linked to positive, yet misleading, environmental messages. Following such approaches this book aims to deepen and expand the investigation of rhetorically deceptive practices (including, but not limited to, greenwashing) by critically examining the language of food. Specifically, this book critiques the language of food-based messages and examines how such language-including idioms, tropes, euphemisms, invented terms, etc.-serves to both mislead and obscure relationships between the production, marketing, selling, and consumption of food and the resulting community, health, labor, and environmental impacts. The second emphasis of this book is on textual and rhetorical production of food language. Employing diverse methodologies this book's contributors examine on a micro-level the textual elements of food-based language itself. Put colloquially: this book, like an investigative reporter on assignment in a food processing plant, examines how the sausage is made. The emphasis on the production of food language-the strategic use of invented terms, metaphors, and euphemisms-makes this book's subject timely and important.