CHAPTER 10 Food Talk Studying Foodways and Language in Use Together Kathleen C. Riley and Jillian R. Cavanaugh  Introduction Anthropologists have been investigating relationships between food and talk for decades, whether they were aware of it or not. Early studies of food production, preservation, distribution, preparation, and consumption also included evidence of language in use: lists of native terms for foods and dishes, ritual phrases to be said when hunting game or growing yams, and rules for talking while taking food or drink. Our primary focus here, however, is the work of linguistic anthropolo- gists who explicitly look at how language and food meaningfully co-occur within specific sociocultural contexts. he methods used in such endeavors share much with other linguistic anthropological studies: ethnographic participant observa- tion, contextualized interviews and focus groups, and analysis of language in use. he latter includes audio and/or video recordings of naturally occurring speech activities, followed by transcription and analysis of these recordings, sometimes with the assistance of participants themselves. In this overview, we offer the first systematic review of methods useful for looking at how our interactions with food are connected to how we interact using language (but see also the introduc- tion to the topic in Cavanaugh et al. 2014). In what follows, we review past and contemporary work, at times referring to as-yet unpublished research. We categorize this work by types of methods em- ployed: (1) researcher-elicited talk about and around food, (2) audio- or video- recorded naturally occurring food-and-talk events, and (3) various types of medi- ated engagement with food involving language. Researchers use these methods to answer a range of research questions, looking at food talk in terms of its content (what is said), form (how it is said), and/or function (the effects it has on the