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Food and drink in Portuguese and Brazilian literature: the ReadingFood project

Original (Portuguese): Comida e bebida nas literaturas portuguesa e brasileira: o projeto ReadingFood

Paper · 2026 · Diana Santos, Eckhard Bick and Cristina Mota

Summary

ReadingFood is an ongoing project that brings distant reading to the theme of eating and drinking in fiction. It aims to compare four literatures (Portuguese, Brazilian, Norwegian and Italian) from 1840–1920, and this paper covers only the Portuguese-language part. The authors first built a provisional taxonomy of 27 food and drink categories from their nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary corpus. The categories cover dishes, edible plants and animals, beverages, containers, places, occasions and food-related people. Because many words have several senses, they disambiguate occurrences with hand-written rules, following a human–machine cooperation approach. They illustrate this with café, which can mean a plant, a drink, a product, part of a meal or a shop. Using AC/DC, R and CorpusEye, they explore patterns by period, country and author gender. They also manually annotated meal scenes in ten novels. From this they propose ways to detect food episodes automatically and a scheme for describing them. The resulting annotated corpora are meant to support cultural, lexical and literary research on food.

Key points

  • The taxonomy is not final. Its largest classes are food-h (200 named dishes), food-edibleplant (145) and drink-alco (126). Spelling variants and multiword units are not yet merged.

  • café occurs 1,838 times: about 46% drink, 23% place, 8.8% meal or part of a meal, and 22% other senses.

    • It is roughly four times more frequent in Brazilian texts.
    • The shop sense is mainly Portuguese (only 13% in Brazil).
    • An earlier study found that água refers to a drink only 7.7% of the time.

  • A word-embedding visualization in CorpusEye, which does not separate word senses, links wine to Portugal and coffee and beer to Brazil. It also unexpectedly associates wine with women and coffee with men.

  • Meals were annotated by hand in ten novels by Júlio Dinis, Eça de Queirós and Aluísio Azevedo (1867–1895). The set covers about 1.3M words, 273 chapters and 77 meals, with 0.89–6.13 food words per 1,000 words.

  • Proposed cues for automatic meal detection are:

    • clusters of food vocabulary,
    • the typical sequence of steps in a meal,
    • explicit meal names.

    Planned scene features include number of participants, location, presence of servants, direct speech, and the scene's plot function.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of OsloOslo · Norway51 works · 4,155 citations🎓University of Southern DenmarkOdense · Denmark8 works · 111 citations🤝Institute for Systems Engineering and ComputersLisbon · Portugal4 works · 361 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 519 works

Cite

Cite as Diana Santos, Eckhard Bick and Cristina Mota. 2026. Comida e bebida nas literaturas portuguesa e brasileira: o projeto ReadingFood. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 2.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{santos2026comida,
  title = {{Comida e bebida nas literaturas portuguesa e brasileira: o projeto ReadingFood}},
  author = {Diana Santos, Eckhard Bick and Cristina Mota},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 2},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-2.35/}
}

References

23 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Leonard Barkan. 2021. The Hungry Eye: Eating, Drinking and European Culture from Rome to the Renaissance. Princeton University Press. find
  2. Eckhard Bick. 2005. CorpusEye: Et brugervenligt web-interface for grammatisk opmærkede korpora. Em 10. Møde om Udforskningen af Dansk Sprog 7.-8.okt.2004, Proceedings, páginas 46–57. Århus University. find
  3. Charlotte Boyce e Joan Fitzpatrick. 2017. A History of Food in Literature From the Fourteenth Century to the Present. Routlegde. find
  4. James W. Brown. 1984. Fictional Meals and their Function in the French novel: 1789-1848. Univ. of Toronto Press. find
  5. J Michelle Coghlan. 2020. The Literature of Food. Cambridge University Press. find
  6. Terry Eagleton. 1997. Edible écriture. The Times, Oct. 24, 1997. find
  7. Michiel Korthals. 2008. Food as a Source and Target of Metaphors: Inclusion and Exclusion of Foodstuffs and Persons through Metaphors. Configurations, 16:77–92. find
  8. Diane McGee. 2001. Introduction: A Time to Eat. In Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. University of Toronto Press. find
  9. Diana Santos, Elizaveta Khachaturyan, Michael Preminger, Åse Kristine Tveit, e Eckhard Bick. Presenting Reading Food and its infrastructure. Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications. find
  10. Diana Santos, Luisa Lima, e Emanoel Pires. 2026a. Marcação de correferência para a caracterização de personagens em obras literárias em português. Em Proceedings of PROPOR 2026.
  11. Diana Santos e Cristina Mota. 2010. Experiments in human-computer cooperation for the semantic annotation of Portuguese corpora. Em Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2010), páginas 1437–1444. European Language Resources Association. find
  12. Diana Santos, Michael Preminger, Åse Kristine Tveit, e Elizaveta Khachaturyan. 2026b. Identifying food episodes in literary texts. In preparation. find
  13. Roger C. Schank e Robert P. Abelson. 1977. Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Routledge. find
  14. Christof Schöch, Tomaz Erjavec, Roxana Patras, e Diana Santos. 2021. Creating the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC): Challenges and Perspectives. Modern Languages Open, 1:1–19. find
  15. Véronique Traverso e Loubna Dimachki. 2017. “ktîr Tajjibe ce plat! fî garlic?”: Compliments and assessments in French and Lebanese dinner talk. Intercultural Pragmatics, 4(2):137–163. find
  16. Anna Meigs. 1997. Food as cultural construction. Em Food and culture: a Reader, páginas 95–106. Routledge. find
  17. Franco Moretti. 2013. Distant Reading. Verso. find
  18. R Development Core Team. 2008. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. find
  19. Diana Santos. 2014. Corpora at Linguateca: Vision and Roads Taken, páginas 219–236. Bloomsbury. find
  20. Diana Santos. 2019. Literature studies in literateca: between digital humanities and corpus linguistics. Em Humanists and the digital toolbox: In honour of Christian-Emil Smith Ore, páginas 89–109. Novus forlag. find
  21. Diana Santos. 2024. Distant reading of food and drink in three languages. find
  22. Diana Santos e Eckhard Bick. 2000. Providing Internet access to Portuguese corpora: the AC/DC project. Em Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2000), páginas 205–210. find
  23. Diana Santos e Cláudia Freitas. 2019. Estudando personagens na literatura lusófona. Em STIL - Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology. find

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