Semiotica del cibo

Abstract

Good to think about. The possibility of a semiotics of food, as well as its cultural value, is all given in this famous expression with which Claude Lévi-Strauss summarizes the enormous anthropological question related to food. It is Gianfranco Marrone who clarifies the extent of the debt to the great scholar in the note to the introduction of a book that, not surprisingly, uses these same words as its title. Lévi-Strauss's idea is as simple as it is dense with consequences: the enormous differences found in the food systems of different peoples can only be explained if it is assumed that choices take place not on the basis of utilitarian criteria or variables external to the individual such as environmental ones, but under the impetus of "internal" forces. Hence the importance of food in defining identity on various scales, from that of entire peoples to that of individual families or even individuals, and hence the immediate ritual value that every aspect of food takes on. what makes food a semiotic is not the meanings it can make itself bear but, as we shall see, the possibility it has of articulating a set of messages and relationships not only through the food matter in the strict sense, but also through that enormous set of objects and practices that accompany its production and consumption.