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Talking about Food: The social and the global in eating communities
Edited by Sofia Rüdiger and Susanne Mühleisen
[IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society 47] 2020
► pp. 167–188

Chapter 9
“Tell me about food and I tell you who you are”

Expert identity in intercultural food discourse via Skype

| Trier University of Applied Sciences
| Trier University of Applied Sciences
The paper presents the construction of two types of expert identity in conversations about food: cultural expertise and culinary expertise. The study is based on data from a corpus of informal dyadic conversations between international speakers of English as a Lingua Franca via Skype. Both cultural and culinary expertise are established and negotiated in a broader identity context. The study shows that the discursive construction of expert identity is a complex dynamic phenomenon that takes place on multiple levels, ranging from lexical choice and the organization of discourse to the employment of pragmatic strategies and negotiation processes. The paper illustrates the key role food plays in identity creation in an online video-mediated setting.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Food discourse and identity
  • 3.The construction of expert identity
  • 4.Dataset, setting, and methodology
    • 4.1Dataset: Intercultural conversations via Skype
    • 4.2Setting: Informal dyadic conversations
    • 4.3Methodology: Discourse analysis
  • 5.Types of expert identity in video-mediated English as a Lingua Franca discourse about food
    • 5.1Identity as culinary expert
      • 5.1.1Expert vocabulary
      • 5.1.2Elaborate explanations
      • 5.1.3Recipe tellings
      • 5.1.4Food storytelling
      • 5.1.5Evaluative statements about food
    • 5.2Identity as cultural expert through food
      • 5.2.1Cultural expertise through explanations of food items
      • 5.2.2Cultural expertise through discussion of food stereotypes
      • 5.2.3Cultural expertise through individual food contexts
      • 5.2.4Cultural expertise through food othering
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 18 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.47.09die
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