Metaphors: Describing and Sharing Our Food Experiences

Thursday, June 14 2012

Metaphors: Describing and Sharing Our Food Experiences

On the Formaggio Kitchen blog, Andrew Clark has a great post about the challenges of talking about cheese and the ways in which metaphors and language play a role in the daily lives of cheesemongers and food lovers alike. (Pictured above is Harbison, a cheese likely to inspire some creatively loving descriptors):

Not long ago, a fellow cheesemonger and I were talking about the way we describe food – specifically, in selling cheese to our customers. “Like ‘nutty,’” she said. “Nuts really have nothing to do with the production of cheese.”

Why do I think of the flavor of sesame seeds when I taste Moses Sleeper, from Jasper Hill Farm, in Vermont? Why Brazil nuts with a recent Taleggio or pistachio when tasting Caprotto? Why do we describe specific tastes, or hints of taste, with things that are most certainly uncheese-like? Because these metaphors help people understand what to expect from a cheese.

Selling cheese over the years has allowed me to work with many interesting people – people with plenty of wonderful and almost poetic taste metaphors. Here are a few of the gems I have heard:

• Lincolnshire Poacher: “pineapple upside down cake”
• Ekiola Ardi Gasna Fermier: “salted caramel”
• Bayrischer Blauschimmelkase: “sitting temperature salt & pepper ice cream”
• Försterkäse Krümmenswil: “melted leather”
• Winnimere: “hot dog”
• Beringse Gouda: “fresh, buttered South Carolina biscuits”

Perhaps metaphor is the best way we can share our very personal taste experiences with each other? This is more or less the essence of poetry, a most cherished and beautiful form of the written word, a tool we use to tell others how we experience the world.

Read the full piece here, including forays into the works of Rimbaud and Whitman:

Captivated by this idea, I pored over my library and found food metaphors sprinkled here and there among some of my favorite authors and poets. Arthur Rimbaud, in his poem, Festivals of Hunger, connects himself to food and the earth with inspiring zeal:

If I have taste, it is for scarcely more
than for the earth and stones
…
Turn, my hunger! Graze, hunger,
on fields of wheat!
Drink the gay poison
of the bindweed!

Stones broken by a poor man,
Old masonry from churches,
Pebbles, the children of floods,
Bread loaves sleeping in gray valleys!
…
Over the land, leaves have appeared:
I go for the flesh of pulpy fruit.
Deep in the valley I forage for
the corn salad and the violet.

It seems to me that Rimbaud’s metaphors here work on two levels by expressing a feeling through more common references to food and earth while also exposing a feeling which comes across to me as more than the sum of its parts. I can almost imagine a cheesemonger describing a cheese as, “bread loaves sleeping in gray valleys,” or as, “corn salad and violets.”