The semantic representation of food is shaped by cultural experience

Abstract

While eating is universally salient, food habits vary greatly even across similar western cultural groups. Italians, for example, are renowned pasta consumers whereas this habit is less pervasive in other western cultures. This variability might shape the conceptualization of food of different cultural groups. Against this backdrop, it has been proposed the semantic representation of food is universally organized along two main axes, with natural food (e.g., vegetables, fruit) relying more on sensory properties and manufactured food (e.g., pasta) relying more on functional properties. In this exploratory study, we compared the semantic representation of pasta, vegetables, and fruit across Italian and English-speaking participants with a free-listing task. We find the representation of pasta is not restricted to functional properties. Moreover, Italian and English speakers differed both quantitatively and qualitatively in their representation of pasta. Italians produced more exemplars of pasta than English-speaking participants, and their conceptual organization of pasta also included fine-grained distinctions (e.g., egg-based vs. flour-and-water pasta), whereas English-speaking participants mostly focused on perceptual components (e.g., long) – even when accounting for differential consumption, cooking, and preparation experience of pasta. Our results suggest that culture-specific experiences can shape the conceptualization of food.

The role of language in nonbinary identity construction: Gender words matter.

“…To get a more exhaustive picture of nonbinary participants’ discourses related to their gender identities, we used semantic networks to visualize how the most correlated pairs of words in the interviews related to each other (Mazzuca & Majid, 2023; Mazzuca et al, 2021; Wulff et al, 2022). Due to the data set size, we only show correlations higher than 0.45.…”

“…In the literature on concept representation, semantic memory is defined as our knowledge of things in the world stored in our memory systems. This knowledge is thought to be influenced by multiple factors, among which specific life experiences (Wulff et al, 2022), cultural and linguistic aspects (Mazzuca & Majid, 2023; van Putten et al, 2020; Wnuk & Majid, 2014), and linguistic associations (Lupyan & Lewis, 2019). Researchers in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and anthropology employ a multitude of methods to access semantic memory, among which some of the most common are the so-called “semantic fluency tasks.” In this kind of tasks, participants are asked to produce properties of target concepts (i.e., property generation task; e.g., “is yellow” for “banana”), or to simply list things that come to their mind when thinking about the target concept (i.e., free-listing task).…”

“…In semantic networks, words are represented as nodes, and their relations are represented as edges connecting nodes. Leveraging on these approaches, scholars have been able to describe differences in the semantic structure of various concepts across age cohorts (e.g., Krethlow et al, 2020), cultural groups (e.g., Da Rold et al, 2023; Mazzuca & Majid, 2023; van Putten et al, 2020), as well as distinctive conceptual patterns emerging from the spread of new concepts such as COVID-19 (e.g., Davis, 2023; Mazzuca et al, 2021).…”

Crosslinguistic Differences in Food Labels Do Not Yield Differences in Taste Perception

“…Just as cultural practices have been found to shape the conceptualization of food (Mazzuca & Majid, 2023), the examples above suggest that language‐specific categories of edibles (e.g., “onion”/ Allium ) may influence the written conceptualization of food‐related activities such as cooking, eating, and planting.…”

Optimizing Sensory Attributes: Exploring the Placement of the Ideal-Product Question in Check-All-That-Apply Methodology

“…The latter involves prompting evaluators to list as many perceived attributes as possible related to a specific product [9,10]. Described as "a deceptively simple, yet powerful technique" [11], freelisting stands out from other qualitative methods because it allows for more authentic consumer associations that are less constrained and more realistic [12,13].…”