The Economist reviewed The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu and outlined some fascinating statistics from the book:

• Mid-level restaurants constantly describe their food as ‘fresh’ – indicating anxiety about how people perceive their food.
• The cheapest restaurants like to assure diners that their food is ‘real’
• Expensive ones avoid such terms – suggesting that their food is fresh or real would allow patrons to consider the possibility that the food could be anything else.
•  More expensive dishes have longer names. Each extra letter in a dish’s name roughly adds $0.18 to the cost.
• Filler words such as “tasty” bring down the price by 9%, since it’s clear the restaurant has nothing useful to say about the food.
• Expensive food is sexy. High end restaurants may describe their food as “seductive” or “orgasmic”.

Read some other fascinating insights, find out why people like to describe their guilty pleasures as ‘addictive’, get some insights about reviewers, and more over at the full article here. We can only imagine how good the book is which you can find here.

Source: The Economist