Propaganda alimentare

Abstract

How can we investigate the symbolic meaning of food without reading the thoughts of those who eat? The answer can be found in the slogans that advertising proposes. Advertising, in fact, has precisely the role of constructing the "good to think" of which anthropology speaks, and not because of some kind of occult power that is occasionally attributed to it, but because of the social function it performs. What it does is to make a given product relevant within a wider system composed of many others, but also of values, problems, traditions, tastes, disgusts, principles and practices. Advertising has, in a certain sense, made its own the function of the ancient storytellers who, by declaiming their tales, offered not something in which to blindly believe, but an opportunity to reaffirm the organization of the culture in which every single story found its place. A political function that posters and commercials take up and revive in the contemporary world. Semiotic analysis will then allow us to reconstruct this semantic background and the mechanisms that bring it into being.