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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the narrative that “bread is more digestible in Europe than in the US” as an econarrative that reveals how food chauvinism reflects narratives about culture (baking and fermentation) the body (gut health and the microbiome) and the environment (wheat and glyphosate).

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the popular narrative that “bread is more digestible in Europe than in the US” as an econarrative that reveals how food chauvinism and food cosmopolitanism is entangled in narratives about culture (traditional baking and fermentation) the body (gut health and the microbiome) and the environment (wheat and glyphosate). Drawing on ecolinguistics and discourse analysis, I examine how this transatlantic comparison operates not merely as nutritional folklore, but as a cognitive narrative that encodes anxieties about industrial food systems, cultural belonging, and the porous boundary between body and environment.

Through corpus analysis and qualitative discourse analysis, I show how bread stories enact an embodied critique of toxic agricultural practices and hyper-processed food culture in the U.S. While framed as individual health experiences (e.g. “I can eat bread in France, but not at home”), these narratives perform a border-thinking that reconfigures environmental identity where the self becomes readable through digestion, and nature is not perceived as merely “out there” but inside the gut.

Using Arran Stibbe’s ecolinguistic framework, I argue that this transnational bread story functions as an econarrative of permeability—positioning the body as a site where identity is co-authored by wheat, microbes, and cultural memory. This narrative perpetuates both inclusive and exclusionary logics, nodding toward multispecies entanglement while reinscribing Eurocentric ideals of purity, authenticity, and health.

Ultimately, I suggest that bread stories illuminate how environmental identity is negotiated through a semiotic amalgam of beliefs based on taste, discomfort, nostalgia, and imagined geographies.