Language, Law and Food

Abstract

The language of law has been traditionally characterized by an extreme technicism and the use of a specific jargon whose comprehension is considered a prerogative of legal professionals. The situation is gradually changing. There is a general trend to make law more understandable to non-lawyers and to the normal people in general. This implies the use of a different, more colloquial, kind of language, that could be more familiar to ordinary people. On the other side, food today is no longer what humans eat to calm hunger, but has become an object of research, elaborations, and contaminations, an expression of the different world cultures and a social phenomenon. The links between food and law are as old as the concept of law. Many authors have been using such links in creative ways to express specific features of law. This is because the language of food and cooking offers legal scholars a lot of metaphors, comparing rules to recipes, and their combination to culinary processes. The paper considers the use of food related metaphors and language, and the relationship between law and food in an interdisciplinary perspective, to examine how food related topics can be used to identify different rules, norms, or prescriptions.