Turn it, flip it, serve it up.

Whatever their perspective or approach, media scholars are interested in those moments of human action that store and exchange meaning in some fixed and tangible form.

Media studies often begins with a some kind of object, artifact, or technical process – in this case, a list of items on heavy-grade paper, perhaps embossed or laminated, or the standardized script of a bistro chalkboard – and proceeds to ask a series of questions:

Why do we fix certain moments of symbolic action or human expression?

What does the character of the medium – its weight, its cost, its durability, its accessibility – tell us about the meaning of the message in a given social context?

How do media alter our relationship to time (i.e. permanence, memory, and ritual) and space (i.e. distance and exchange)?

So media scholars would be interested in what menus tell us about the substance and ceremony of a meal, but also in the first order decision to write something down.

And since every recording is in some way a conversation with the past and an attempt to send a message to the future, we are interested in how menus (and all related recordings of cooking and eating) reveal the social and cultural dimensions of food.