Many assumptions of culture, economy, politics and ideology lurk underneath the surface of conversations around food and foodways. Twentieth-century French theorist Roland Barthes recognized that representations of social realities in popular culture often created myths to suit dominant ideologies. His book Mythologies (1957) studied a wide range of cultural artefacts, from advertising to cookery shows to food habits to state insignia. Barthes concluded that, often, cultural gatekeepers extract signs or symbols from their original contexts and artificially inseminate meaning onto them. Barthes’s semiotic theory continues to be relevant, perhaps more so today. For Barthes, a myth is not necessarily a lie but ‘a type of speech’ that works less by the literal meaning of its message and more ‘by the way in which it utters this message.’ A particularly interesting area in which we can see Barthes’s theory manifest itself is that of culinary signs and food advertising.