The critic of anything—food, wine, art, film, music—must develop ways to describe an experience that go beyond the usual vocabulary lists. Good, bad, beautiful, ugly and a few hundred other words related to the way things look, sound, and taste, and smell might be sufficient for ordinary description, but the professional opinion-giver has to keep things vivid and fresh. To do this, they might come up with new or unusual words, or uncommon metaphors, but sometimes what’s called for is a new syntactic structure. At least that seems to be the idea behind a linguistic trend making its noticeable way through the judges of Top Chef.

In a recent post on Language Log, Ben Zimmer took a look at this trend after it came to light through Top Chef judge Padma Lakshmi’s use of the phrase “it eats salty” to describe a dish made by a contestant. Merlin Mann, co-host of Top Scallops, a podcast about Top Chef, registered his objection to the phrase with a tweet:

In response, Daniel Tse pointed out that this type of construction isn’t as unusual as it might seem. It’s similar to the grammatical “middle voice” (or “mediopassive voice”) which is somewhere between active and passive. It’s what allows us to say “the orange peels easily” (Who’s doing the peeling? Not the orange) or “the book is selling well” (Who’s doing the selling? Not the book). Jenaluca Herb Scissors... Best Price: $12.87 Buy New $14.87 (as of 02:10 UTC - Details)

However, the usual examples of middle voice have an adverb (easily, well) rather than an adjective (salty), so there does seem to be something new about this Top Chef construction. And, as discussed in the post, “it eats salty” is not the only example. Judges have also said “it eats sweet,” “it ate very savory” and “it didn’t eat that way.” Zimmer sees the construction as a hybrid between middle voice syntax and the grammar of verbs of perception like taste, smell, sound, feel, and look which do take adjectives. We say “it tastes salty,” not “it tastes saltily.” There is a blending where a middle voice take on the verb eat is under influence from the concept of “taste.” As Zimmer says, “We could call it gastro-syntactic fusion cuisine.”

So where is this coming from, and why don’t the judges just say “it tastes salty” if that’s what they mean? A quick look around at restaurant reviews shows that it’s not just the judges of Top Chef who find this construction useful, and the middle voice eats is not quite the same thing as taste.

Sometimes its meaning is close to taste:

“It eats dry.” [D Magazine]

“It eats like a lobster” [ny.eater.com]

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