Thought for food

Over the past few decades, an ever–increasing interest in food has contributed to the shedding of light on the complexity and socio–cultural implications of food events. Yet even in today’s ultra–connected and globalized world, food remains one of those terms which evokes various things in different people. Food cannot be simply considered as a means of survival related to our physical sustenance but must be framed within a socio–cultural set of values, for which there is considerable ethnographic evidence. The plethora of cookbooks and food magazines, worldwide culinary festivals, TV shows, celebrity chefs, blogs and podcasts, all witness the food mania of the twenty–first century and have altogether completely changed the perception of food and given it new significance. Food has even become a critical subject of observation and academic interest, and has been (and is still being) analysed from transdisciplinary fields embracing, among many others, Economics, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Aesthetics, Anthropology, Psychology, and Archaeology. Investigations may range from environment and sustainability to different dietary patterns, from semiotics to marketing and gastrolingo, from (g)local food and small–scale agriculture to literature, from agribiotechnology to media representations, from advertising to mythology, from religious to medical and psychological perspectives, which may include fasting practices, eating disorders or ‘gastrophysics’. This volume neither claims to consider all potential food–related topics, nor to be exhaustive about the topics that have been chosen and dealt with, but it aims to provide some ‘food for thought’, or better, some ‘thought(s) for food’. The whole study intends to offer clues for the investigation of how people(s) and/or individuals negotiate their identity (or identities) — and/ or the way in which they can be perceived by others — by means of the semiotic and symbolic power of food discourse. More specifically, from a wide cross–cultural/communicative perspective, in the first section of this volume, the dynamical interplay of some of the above–mentioned cultural, symbolical, socio–economical, emotional and religious values — all merging in food discourse — is considered. The second section mostly focuses on food language(s) as related to (some of) the many metaphorical and identitarian values of food, together with an in–depth analysis of the ways in which food terms are/may be translated.