Appetite for words

Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.

—Mark Abley, Canadian journalist, Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, 2003 (obtained from WordSpy.com)

Some people can content themselves with rifling through the pages of the Betty Crocker Cook Book; others need to immerse themselves in a vat of Jell-O. And yet others simply must allow the very words of the food world to roll off their tongues.

If a mere perusal of mouth-watering recipes isn’t quite enough for you, put your fingers on the keyboard and surf on out to www.wordspy.com. Select “Subject Index,” and then scroll down to “Culture” and click on “Food and Drink.” If you’re a word freak—and I know there are plenty of you out there—you’ll revel in the wealth of cuisine-related words just as some of your friends revel in that vat of Jell-O.

Even if you’re not a word-ninja, you’ll inevitably enjoy some of the recent coinages in the gastronomical scene. My latest favorite is globesity, which is a noun meaning “The worldwide epidemic of obesity.” It’s the invasion of the fat people! The example citation offers a rather panoramic view: “A woman frowning at her bathroom scale in St. Louis, a man whose pants are suddenly too tight in Jakarta, and a roly-poly child playing under a tree in Cairo all are part of a 1.1 billion-person trend called ‘globesity.’ “ Now there’s a trend we might want to pass up.

While you’re pondering the image of “globesity” (which is almost like trying to fathom “infinity” after drinking a robust bottle of Lambrusco), you will want to consider adopting what is apparently affectionately called the ape diet—which is heavy on whole grains, nuts, soy, fruits and vegetables and is “cheaper than medicine, has fewer side effects and, if properly prepared, tastes a heck of a lot better.” According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the best way to avoid a high cholesterol count may be to eat like Koko, the famous gorilla who learned to communicate using sign language. It’s a simple equation, really: humanity - ape diet = globesity.

If the image of a non-ape-diet-eating global population beset with globesity isn’t depressing enough, check out deprivation cuisine. No, it’s not a weekend at your mother-in-law’s—it’s food that is steamed, which evidently qualifies as the dullest way to cook anything (but what about boiling, which is what my mother of English heritage did to everything?). The buzzwords for menu writers lean more toward “roasted,” “grilled” and “braised,” it seems, as “steaming sounds like deprivation cuisine—too healthy, too boring.”

Of course, if you’re ready to “kick food,” you can simply become a breatharian. Breatharians emulate ascetic saints who supposedly get all the nutrition they need from the air. But this might be a real challenge for people who adore their comfort foods; I mean, who can imagine a “comfort breath"? It’s simply not in the same category as hot apple pie à la mode.

If you hate vegetables and salads, then you’re a salad dodger—just like everybody in Scotland, where the soil is so rocky and bad that little else besides gorse can grow, and there are “chips with everything.” Astronaut Patrick Baudry, the first Frenchman to ride aboard a U.S. spacecraft, has the distinction of being the first gastronaut. He was disappointed in NASA’s menu for space, so his space meals included crab mousse, rabbit stew and lobster in a cream sauce—prepared in France and canned and shipped to Johnson Space Center (leave it to the French to improve space meals).

Another food word from wordspy.com that I love is food futurist, which is exactly what I want to be when I grow up: A person who predicts food and dining trends.

What’ll we be eating in 2025? I’ll have to get back to you on that.