Speaking of Food: Understanding How People Talk About Food Experiences

’How was your lunch?’ Even simple food talk reveals how people translate multisensory impressions into language, offering insights for HCI applications such as food recommendation and health management. While prior work has emphasised the multisensory nature of eating, less is known about the linguistic strategies through which people articulate such experiences. We conducted a mixed-methods study combining self-reports and interviews to examine how non-verbal sensory input is transformed into verbal expression. Our analysis shows that participants structured their accounts through temporal phases that integrated perception, cognition, affective reaction, and behaviour; employed associative strategies that shaped expectations; and expressed ambivalence, where positive and negative evaluations coexisted in descriptions such as guilty pleasure. Building on these findings, we propose a lens that highlights the role of time, association, and evaluative language in food talk, enabling designers to translate everyday expressions into actionable insights for food-related HCI design.