A taste of semiology

I’ve spent the last 2 days with Jonathan Culler’s introductions to Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes, with a view to thinking about how semiotics (the science of signs, born out of linguistics) might be applied to the Bible and the Lord’s Supper, considered as a (visible) sign.

Semiotics is now used to analyse the significations of any meaningful human activities or systems (codes, art, music, literature, fashion, etiquette etc), and so as a taste of it, here are a couple of its key ideas applied to food:

For a semiologist studying the food system of a culture… parole consists of all the events of eating and langue is the system of rules underlying these events, rules that define what is edible, what dishes go with or contrast with one another, how they are combined to form meals; in short, all the rules and prescriptions that enable meals to be culturally orthodox or unorthodox. A restaurant menu represents a sample of a society’s ‘food grammar’. There are ‘syntactic’ slots (soups, appetizers; entrees, salads, deserts) and paradigm classes of contrasting items that can fill the same slot (the soups among which one chooses). There are conventions governing the syntactic ordering of items within a meal (soup, main course, desert is orthodox, while desert, main course, soup is ungrammatical). And the contrasts between dishes within classes, such as main course or desert, bear meaning: hamburger and roast pheasant have different second-order meanings. Approaching such material with the linguistic model, the semiologist has a clear task: to reconstruct the system of distinctions and conventions that enable a group of phenomena to have the meaning they do for members of a culture.

Culler, Barthes: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 1983, 2002) p59

Reading this stuff makes me hungry!