Tag Archives: chef

food semiotics October 08

The Semiotics of Cutlery: Eating food symbolically off course.

Hunger is a universal physiological drive but we also take great delight in eating. While cuisines and cooking is astonishingly diverse, cutlery has remained remarkably elementary. While we need to eat, food more broadly is used across individual, social and cultural dimensions to build, share and demarcate our identities. How and what meaning cutlery adds to this semiotic conversation is worth degustation. Cut, Stab and Scoop are how we eat, but what meaning is within these gestures?