Abstract
Speakers of English often understand ethnic and racial differences in terms of food imagery. It is quite common in this language to encounter metaphors presenting different groups of people in terms of beans, rice, bread, cheese, apples or chocolate. Given the cognitive and social force of metaphor in our understanding of the world and of ourselves as well as the important role language plays as a channel through which ideas and beliefs are transmitted and perpetuated, such food images may offer a window on the (de)construction of ethnic identi-ties and, ultimately, hide racist views against others who are different because of their skin color, physical features, languages and, obviously, diets.
Highlights
The attitudes of racial superiority conveyed in Stevenson's (1913) Foreign Children may, after all, not have changed so much since 19th-century imperial England – a time in which encounters with different peoples gave rise to a wide repertoire of metaphors whose main focus was on the dissimilarities between different cultural groups
Just like the little child in the poem finds the dietary customs of others – be they Indians, Siouxes, Crows, Eskimos, Turks or Japanese – "curious" for, unlike him, who is "fed on proper meat," those "have eaten ostrich eggs" and "turned the turtles off their legs," distinctive food continues to be a rich source of racist metaphors
Another common metaphor is fodder, with which horses and other farm animals tend to be fed. Maybe it is this rural ambience which has motivated its figurative meaning to denote farmers in the USA. Other variants of this metaphor include twister fodder in reference to Midwesterners due to the fact that this area is prone to tornados and fodder beet, the red root vegetable fed to livestock whose color has prompted its sense of rural Native Americans
Summary
The attitudes of racial superiority conveyed in Stevenson's (1913) Foreign Children may, after all, not have changed so much since 19th-century imperial England – a time in which encounters with different peoples gave rise to a wide repertoire of metaphors whose main focus was on the dissimilarities between different cultural groups. Because the study is fundamentally theoretical in nature, how speakers feel or think when they are either the agent or the target of such racist metaphors is not considered here, but it could be a powerful area for future empirical research Despite these obvious flaws, the article does hope to bring to the surface how racist ideologies about different ethnic groups are very often channeled and perpetuated by means of metaphors based on foods. The section will focus on the folk cognitive model known as The Great Chain of Being metaphor (4), which will serve as a framework to understand how the use of food metaphors dehumanize people from different ethnic backgrounds and, are suitable to convey racist views This will be followed by an overview of common food-based metaphors that pervade everyday speech in English (5). Words, the gap between "the us" versus "the other." some conclusions will be drawn regarding the connection between food-based metaphors and racism (8)
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