Cultural psychology as the study of symbolic systems mediating the variety of human forms of thought and practice (Valsiner 2007) has always been interested in the symbolic value of food and food-related practices (Rozin 2007). Paraphrasing Freud, a food is never just food but always a psychocultural object loaded with meaning derived from associations, connotations, metaphors, and cultural practices in which those senses are embedded and materialized.

Despite the great interest in the symbolic value of food and its related practices, studies that use computational tools to examine the semiotics of food are rare. In this chapter I aim to address this challenge. The chapter is based on a paper I co-authored with my colleagues Daniel Unger, who is an art historian interested in the visual representation of food, and Norbert Marwan, a physicist who has developed sophisticated methods for analyzing dynamic processes. More specifically, we focused our study on one main practice of food consumption: dinner, the main meal of the day in the West.