La cucina oggi

Abstract

The kitchen, it is known, is the heart of an house, the place where the culinary value of food and its important social meanings are both constructed. No wonder that kitchens (and cousine) have profoundly changed recently. First the walls that used to keep them separated from living rooms and sitting rooms fell down, after that, they were contracted and optimized going along the chronic lack of time and space of contemporary world. At the end of the process they became a single object, the all-in-one of which the Vorwerk’s Thermomix is the forefather. This paper starts from such an object, an industrial product that becomes and informant for us, that is the witness of a relevant change that can be reconstructed by semiotically analysing the social meaning of such a non-human actor and the web of relationships it has with humans.