Language of Food

In his Teaching Company lectures on Chaucer Seth Lerer notes the ethnic and class distinction between terms for game and animals and the terms for the food produced from the game. Deer, cow, lamb, pig are all Anglo-Saxon; venison, beef, mutton, and pork are all French. The language traces the distinction (also observed by Walter Scott) between the peasants who raise food and the aristocrats who eat.

(Lerer’s lectures have some fascinating insights, but they are overlarded with postmodern obsessions. I REALLY doubt that it is helpful to speak of Chaucer’s obsession with “the other” or to read Canterbury Tales through the lenses of “gender construction.”)