Food Metaphors

In her article “Rebaking the Pie: The Woman as Dessert,” Caitlin Hines explores the WOMAN IS DESSERT metaphor and what it tells us about societal norms concerning women.  As we read in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book, Metaphors We Live By, however, metaphors are not simply random linguistic flourishes; rather, they underpin the way we view the world around us.  Since food is such an essential part of human life, it would be natural, then, for many of our metaphors to have something to do with food.  Here are three metaphors that come to mind: 

1.  The color brown is a (sweet, warm) food.  

The lexical overlap between food and color might seem obvious–after all, “orange” is both a color and a fruit in English.  However, while a chair can be “lime green” and a sweater can be “salmon” or “peach,” in coming up with food metaphors, I was struck by the the fact that all metaphors relating to the color brown came from foods that are sweet, warm, and dark–in fact, in Chinese, the word for brown is ka fei se, or “coffee color.”  Coffee, mocha, cocoa, caramel, and chocolate are all used to describe things that are brown (for example, my family’s dachshund, who has black fur and brown spots, is named Mocha).  Nuts, which are dense, rich, and often served warm, are also often used in metaphors related to brown things; however, beans and meat, which are both dense and warm, are rarely used (imagine the absurdity of buying a “roast beef” sofa!).  When this metaphor extends to people, however, it applies mostly to race (although it can apply to hair and eyes, as well, e.g. “chocolate-brown eyes”): the color of dark skin is often related in terms of the sweet, warm foods listed above (e.g. “Over the summer, she tanned from a light caramel to a warm mocha”).  Determining the degree to which these metaphors convey hegemonic ideas about people of color would require a deeper examination of their usages; I am merely pointing out their relation to food.  (Although it is interesting to note that descriptors of white skin are often firm and cold: in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example, Narcissus’s beautiful skin is likened to ivory and marble, and his bruised chest is compared to apples and grapes [Ovid 72]).  

2.   The sun is a cooking device (oven, frying pan, pot of boiling water)–part of the metaphor of people as food. 

This metaphor could be seen as more of an example of playful elaborations on the metaphor of THE SUN IS FIRE (what Lakoff would call an “imaginative” metaphor–that is, one that expands on another, more firmly established, metaphor [Lakoff 53]); however, the specificity and frequent occurrence of the relationship between the sun as “cook-er” and objects as food suggests that this is a metaphor in its own right.  A few examples:

We baked on lawn chairs all afternoon.  

“I’m a lobster!” cried Alice, putting a hand to her sunburned cheek.  

The children looked fried when they returned after a day of sailing.  

“If you leave the dogs in the car, they’ll cook!” (Or maybe that’s an expression unique to my mother).  

My eyeballs were fried after staring at the computer screen all day. (This is a slightly different metaphor; in this case, a different light source - a computer screen - is doing the cooking).  

3.  News is food–this builds off of Lakoff’s example of ideas being food (Lakoff 46).  

This metaphor is related to the idea that people hunger for novelty and excitement:

She drank in everything Sophia told her.  

What happened last night?  Give me the dish.  

What’s the scoop on Marco’s girlfriend?  

He gobbled up my piece of news.  

She said she had something juicy to tell me.  

The novel was full of delicious gossip. 

The concept of news as food is also evident in the way that news tends to be quantified (e.g. “a piece of news,” or “the scoop”; information can also be referred to as morsels, nuggets, and sound-bites).   A related example that came to mind was “lapping up compliments”–however, this might be part of a PERSON AS DOMESTIC ANIMAL metaphor (e.g. “she purred with delight”).  

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Works Consulted:

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson.  Metaphors We Live By.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Ovid, and Rolfe Humphries.  Metamorphoses.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960.  

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