Semiotics of food

Abstract

“Good to think with.” The potential of a semiotics of food, as well as its cul-tural value, is perfectly expressed by this famous statement from Claude Lévi-Strauss. It affirms the importance of food in defining identity on various levels, from entire peo-ples to individual families or even individuals, and thus emphasises the immediate rit-ual value that every aspect of nutrition assumes. It is not merely a matter of stating that food inherently conveys something else, that gastronomy becomes the carrier of mean-ings that go beyond it and have no connection to its nutritional function, but rather of demonstrating its systematic nature. The relationship between food and language, upon careful consideration, can be understood in two different ways: there are discourses that have food as their object, the discourses on food, as well as those of food that employ food as an expressive medium to signify something specific. However, it is not sufficient to claim that bread signifies something in a certain tradition to make it semi-otically relevant; one must argue that bread is capable of articulating a broad range of concepts. This possibility is what the semiotics of food investigates.