A Day for Critical Foodies
There was an interesting conference on food design yesterday in the school where I currently teach. The pretext was the presentation of a book titled ‘La cucina di design. Cibo, tendenze, moda’ by a dear colleague and friend of mine, Loredana La Fortuna. The topic was food design, an issue analyzed from the critical lenses of social semiotics, definitely an unusal perspective for the students of a ‘Professionale Alberghiero’. Food is not just what we eat. It is a language and, as such, it can express several meanings concerning family and national traditions, lifestyle, environment, hierarchies, gender roles, religion, cultural politics and ... Art, as Loredana’s book highlights. Therefore, studying food means studying culture. I really recommend the reading of this book edited by Progedit (Bari 2016) to all the students and people interested in deconstructing the contemporary trend of ‘foodism’. Thanks a lot to all the participants to yesterday’s school event.