The tongue plays a key motor role in eating, drinking, and speaking. Through dynamic movements and deformations, the tongue manipulates food within the mouth, transports it during swallowing, and forms the many vowels and consonants upon which spoken language is built. But relatively little is known about the neuromechanics of tongue movement, since the tongue is hidden inside the mouth and difficult to visualize in 3D. In this dissertation, I use X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology (XROMM) to precisely quantify 3D tongue kinematics during feeding in Rhesus macaque monkeys (Macaca mulatta), a well-developed model for mastication and motor control. In Chapter 1 I provide an introduction to the neuromechanics of primate feeding, with particular emphasis on the role of the tongue, the sensory innervation of the oral cavity, and the role of the orofacial sensorimotor cortex. In Chapter 2 I describe a novel, high-throughput pipeline for processing XROMM data. My workflow integrates DeepLabCut, a recent machine learning software for animal pose estimation, and XMALab, the go-to program for XROMM data processing. In Chapter 3 I employ a temporary oral nerve block to examine the role of oral tactile feedback on 3D tongue movement and tongue-jaw coordination during feeding. I find that loss of oral tactile feedback impairs feeding performance via alterations to the pattern of tongue-jaw coordination. In Chapter 4 I endeavor to decode 3D tongue kinematics from the activity of neural populations in the sensorimotor cortex. I find that a Long Short-Term Memory network can accurately predict various dimensions of tongue posture and movement from the neural responses of both the primary motor and somatosensory cortex. In Chapter 5, I offer a summary of my work, comment on the implications of the results, outline plans for additional development of the XROMM-DeepLabCut pipeline, and propose various potential directions for future research in primate tongue neuromechanics. Overall, this dissertation provides novel insight into the neuromechanics of tongue function during feeding, and in doing so illuminates potential avenues for advancement of the treatment of the numerous sensorimotor disorders that impact eating, drinking, and speaking.