Volume 2016, Issue 211 - Special Issue: Semiotics of food, Guest Editor: Simona Stano

Studying the translation of cultural elements has been one of the most interesting subjects in Translation Studies since the mid-1980s, as it often marks the limits of translatability and reveals not only specific translational strategies but also the attitude of the different agents, i. e., the translator, the editor, and the reader, and of society in general, towards the other or the foreign. Among all cultural elements, the translation of food holds a special position, as it has always been one of the most common extralinguistic elements in literature, which constitutes an important marker of everyday life in the source culture often not having a proper equivalent in the target language. The data gathered in this article show several trends in the translation of food lexicon into different languages since the eighteenth century, including various genres – from the ancient classics up to children’s or criminal literature. We will point out how, examining the translation techniques, it is possible to identify the dominant theoretical approaches according to the function of the texts as well as to their historical and sociopolitical context.

My interest in culinary dates back to approximately fifteen years ago when I collaborated with [Béatrice Fink 1999. The cultural topography of food. Special issue, Eighteenth century life 23(2)] on a special issue of Eighteenth Century Life on food topography. I proposed then a study on the reactions of an English physician to Moroccan food, mainly couscous and tea. I continued working on other studies, and I realized how much a semiotics of food could serve the history of mentalities and private lives. While doing my research, I discovered the works of Jean Louis Flandrin 1986. La distinction par le goût. In Roger Chartier (ed.), Histoire de la vie privée de la Renaissance aux Lumières , vol. 3, 267–309. Paris: Seuil and Flandrin 1992. Chronique de Platine: Pour une gastronomie historique . Paris: Odile Jacob), who had contributed to the same volume directed by Fink and also represented a great inspiration for me. I felt that I was concerned with the study of the relation with the Other, with culture shock or encounter through travelers’ reactions to the food or the culinary, the prepared dish, and the consumed product in ceremonies or in private occasions. While thinking about these points, I asked myself the following questions: in which way does the reaction to food reveal the attitude of the traveler, his prejudices on the culture, the society, the food or the dish in question? In which way would reaction to food reveal his culture? This article explores these and other related issues.

This paper sets out to analyze cultural semiotics of migrants’ food and culinary practices. Moving from the perspective of the Tartu school of semiotics, which views culture both as a grammar (a set of codes) and as a set of texts, food can be characterized as a specific cultural element where grammar and text (code and experience) are woven together. International migrants live one or more ruptures and changes in their status quo due to their adaptation to the receiving country, which puts their cultural habits into questions. In this framework, even “normal” and well-established culinary practices might need to change. In this relation, I claim that it is on the basis of migrants’ new experience abroad that it is possible to change culinary grammars. In order to move beyond a descriptive account of change, and understand the reasons why migrants construct a new semiotics of food, this paper also integrates elements from argumentation theory in order to analyze the reasons given by migrants to explain the changes they are making. The analysis proposed here is based on a corpus of interviews to migrating mothers of different origins, all living in the greater London area.

Food preferences and taboos, by revealing our taste, express our identity. Moreover, in present-day globalized societies, the crossing and overlapping among different foodspheres incessantly relates identity to otherness. It becomes therefore essential to consider and investigate the links existing between the signs, texts, discourses, and practices concerning the food universe, on the one hand, and the processes of construction and expression of sociocultural identity – or, better, identities – on the other hand. This paper deals with a specific case study: sushi and its Western variations. Ranging from the material level to a semiotic description, we aim at analyzing the processes of “translation” to which sushi is subjected when it becomes “ethnic” or “fusion” food.

The essay investigates the relation between glocal and food. As it engages the task, it touches upon three principal domains: (I) the first is the intimate and constitutive relation between the idea of farming and the rise of the term glocal; (II) the second, and more substantial domain concerns the exploration of the device of appropriation within the European semiosphere of the foods originating in the Americas – such as the tomato, the potato, turkey, chocolate, coffee; (III) the third domain engages the semiopolitical tensions centering around the symbolic dish of Sardinian cuisine, su porceddu (suckling pig), before and within the European context. More broadly, the essay draws a comparison between the unperceived glocality of past food exchanges and hybridizations with aspects of alimentary contemporaneity. By means of this comparison the essay will show how today’s explicit recognition of gastronomical-cultural diversity produces paradoxical effects of limitation of alimentary translatability. At the same time, the comparison underlines how and why contemporary food consumption can be described as a glocal production of the authentic.

Junk food is an anomaly when it comes to historical traditions of cuisine. It emerges in the context of youth culture in America in the model part of the twentieth century but soon morphs into a type of food eaten by people of any age. This transformation of its meaning is part of a symptomatology inherent in consumerist cultures, whereby objects of any kind (including food) are produced quickly, cheaply, and faddishly, reflecting a discontinuity with historical traditions. The semiotic analysis of fast food corroborates Barthes’s critique of consumerism as a culture of commodification and it also points out the power of socioeconomic forces to transform historical meaning structures.

Since Lévi-Strauss’ declaration “good to think, good to eat,” the social sciences have supported the idea that foods first have to be edible for our minds and only subsequently physically digested by our organism. If so, then it is culture that creates the categories that we use to classify foods. But, with the process of nutrionalization, food is understood as a collection of biochemical nutrients that are necessary in order to achieve the balance needed to live a long and healthy life. The categories scientists use to classify our foods have changed considerably. This fact implies an important qualitative change in our perception of food and our diet in its totality. With food technology, nutrition and genetics food identification (identity?) escapes the reach of today’s citizens as members of each respective culture. In any case, even if our primary preoccupation seems to be exclusively nutrit ional, and today it is very easy to “modify” the foods we eat and create new combinations to “improve” our diet, we must not forget that those food habits that are damaging our health are also determined by sociocultural factors because when we “modify” the original composition of a food, it seems that we are acknowledging the importance of such sociocultural factors.

Present-day economically developed societies devote unprecedented attention to food. The culinary discourse, in all its facets, gains increasing centrality in cultures. Institutions, media, and common people are obsessed with what they eat. In Italy, a country already aware of itself with regards to food, gastronomy turns into the main concern, the most debated and cared of system of norms. Social phenomena like Slow Food and Zero Kilometer originate in Italy and then conquer the world, claiming that improving the quality of food is the way for a better planet. But what is the deep cultural meaning of this massive trend? What lies behind the culinary reason? Aesthetic neutralization of socioeconomic conflicts, chauvinistic marketing of stereotypes, and anti-intellectual subversion of sensorial hierarchies, the article contends.

Considering as a starting point Greimas’s last work (De l’imperfection), taken into very little consideration by later semiotic research, I would like to see whether it would be possible to make, in the field of taste, the distinction that Greimas did in the visual field: between a “figurative” taste (that I should call tasty) and a “plastic” taste (that I should call flavorful). Much has been discussed about the synesthetic nature of gustatory sensoriality. But very little has been said about links and differences between an intellectualistic taste perception (i. e., recognition of figures of food through semantic grids) and a taste perception of a pure aesthetic nature, supported by the former and producing further significations that cannot be reproduced through language words. How does an aesthetic grasp of taste work, if it works at all? In order to answer this question I will briefly analyze different kinds of texts.

Résumé Le discours gastronomique prend une place toujours plus grande dans la société et se repose plus que jamais sur l’image pour communiquer sur la cuisine, le goût, l’émotion gastronomique. Au cœur de ce discours, la saveur et les sensations gustatives. Les sciences expérimentales ne définissent pas autrement le goût, mais les sciences humaines n’hésitent pas à donner une définition extensive du goût, dans toute son amplitude figurative. Pour autant, la saveur constitue le point d’origine et l’essence du goût et, à travers tous les possibles de communication, l’image se heurte à une problématique foncière: comment figurer la saveur? Nous faisons l’hypothèse qu’il faut d’abord penser le cadre figuratif en termes de figures, du figural à la figurativité, en passant par les figures rhétoriques. Puis situer cet espace figuratif dans la perspective d’une sémiotique esthésique, selon quatre modes de valorisation qui font système: les valorisations synesthésique (primat figuratif: la composition culinaire), esthésique (primat figuratif: une modalité sensorielle), hyperesthésique (primat figuratif: la matière) et anesthésique (primat figuratif: l’univers et l’esprit des lieux). Le figuratif de la saveur exige donc une réduction considérable par rapport au figuratif du goût, mais il ne conjugue pas moins la trinité du sensible, entre esthésie, esthétique et éthique.

A basic anthropological fact is that, although hunger is a constant experience in human history, not everything that from a biochemical point of view could be nutritious, in fact is eaten. In every human culture, food, not unlike language, is controlled by rich sets of rules that establish obligations and prohibitions, contextual bonds to time, and circumstances and syntactic structures for different types of meal. Often these rules – as well as linguistic ones – are unconscious, taken as “natural.” All of these rules detach food from its simple and natural properties, and give it some meaning, although this meaning is not easy to define, making food more similar to a self-referential mark than to a regular text. In this paper I analyze a specific case of these almost linguistic alimentary systems, the set of the dietary laws in the Jewish tradition and in particular its complex alimentary interdictions. The hierarchical structure of these rules is discussed and the problem of the connected effects of sense is addressed.

The objective of this study is to provide insight into culinary systems. Each culture expresses its own identity through the way in which it transforms food into an elaborated cuisine. The phases of a cooking process start with the choice of ingredients, their preparation, their processing, how they are served, and how they are eaten. Each of these phases makes it possible to understand the semiotic and social behavior of a human group in the moment they choose to prepare and eat a particular food. Therefore, this article contains a contrastive analysis of how Mexican, Texan, and Italian cuisines show how spicy and hot food is interpreted depending on the values that ​​are given to it in regards to being considered a dish, a spice or a vegetable. It bases its analysis on the mechanisms built around the meaning of chile (“chilli”) in order to express cultural characteristics and differences. The recipes and their narrative processes, in addition to the use of color, allow the identification of parameters to describe the various cuisines through recipes books.

The purposes of this paper are, first of all, to present a model of semiotic ritual in food consumption, and, second, to carry out a general analysis of the rites of preparation and consumption of the traditional Venezuelan Christmas dish known as hallaca, a particular kind of tamal well known in most Caribbean and Latin American countries. Our ethnographic research is based on the observation and participation field method, during which we have taken photographs, held interviews, and had discussions with actors involved in this family ritual. We have also taken advantage of our own thirty years of experience as direct participant actors. In its first part, this paper presents some theoretical and conceptual definitions that guide us through the analysis. Hallaca is not only a strong symbol in historical and contemporary Venezuelan culinary culture but it is also a living expression of a particular syncretic mixing of semiotic and culinary elements and cultural traditions. We conclude that, as a whole, semiotics of food will benefit from a ritual and symbolic approach to what is done before, during, and after cooking and consuming food. Our analysis shows as well that hallaca preparation and consumption is not only a matter of gathering and having fun but a strong, deep rooted way of expressing, communicating, and renewing profound values and beliefs among family members.

This paper analyses how food is represented in cinema, using as its main examples Spanish films from 1970 to the current day. It will focus on how food and eating become semiotic objects and how these semiotic objects are used as a cinematographic tool. To undertake this analysis it is important to differentiate between three food-related aspects: (1) The act of eating, (2) Places for eating, and (3) food itself. The methodological approach in the paper is based on the study of the functions that these distinct food-related aspects have in movies and as indicators of national identity. These functions span a large range of narrative, aesthetic, ideological, metaphorical or symbolic, structural or referential dimensions. They contribute to the development of characters as well as framing other stories and critical representations. They also criticize habits, social groups, ideologies, and gender roles, etc.

Several documentaries about celebrity chefs were released between 2010 and 2012, building on trends that have turned knowledge of and access to fine dining restaurants into a crucial arena for globalized elite’s construction of social status and cultural capital. The analysis of three of these films – Three Stars, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and Step up to Your Plate – indicates how media contribute to the formation of a global canon of practices, performances, and discourses that naturalize the accomplished, knowledgeable, and male chef trained in established and prestigious food traditions as the culinary ideal.

It is not easy to say what food design is. Contemporary design finds in food a playground that gives new incitements but, at the same time, presents relevant challenges. Of course, there are several “objects” involved in food consumption and preparation, but more frequently food design means also working on edible substances and on the communication artifacts that come with them. The question then is: can we think about food as the result of a project? Analyzing the artifacts – from the logo to the dishes – that Michel Bras has constructed and through which he has raised his identity as a chef, in this paper I will advance the thesis that not only a theory of food designing is conceivable but also that it has an indispensable counterpart in semiotics. Only through understanding the mechanisms of intersemiotic translation that Jean Marie Floch indicated in one of his most famous books, can the heteroclite group of artifacts that populate the world of gastronomy be recognized as a coherent – and therefore effective – discourse; a discourse whose aim is to create a tasteful identity.

Food is brought to our tables in an endless array of shapes, colors, and recipes – it is designed. We transform food for greater pleasure, and for practical purposes such as longer storage life, but also to convey values and tell myths. Food design helps to pass on cultural information collected by former generations and provides structures how to lay out life. Symbolically charged bread is one of the oldest examples of food design. Some of the ancient motifs have survived until today, for example the plaited pastry or the croissant. In ancient Greece, curved pastry symbolized the crescent moon and was used as an offering to the moon goddess. Plaited bread presumably replaced an earlier practice of sacrificing one’s own hair. Traditional food is not a question of good taste, nor of age or originality, but how it conforms to our cultural standards and confirms our views of existence. The conveyance of symbolic contents and higher cultural values is a fundamental issue when it comes to successful food. The Surprise Egg is a modern example of how age-old myths like metamorphosis, birth, and new life can be used to connect a food to a higher symbolic universe and charge it with “extra” sense far beyond simple classifications like “tasty” or “nourishing.” In this paper we present research about the origin of the shapes and forms our food comes in, the factors playing a role in its design and who it is that actually decides what the things we eat every day are like.

Ever since Roland Barthes began to analyze food as a language, a symbol of culture and ideology, semiotics also began to study food in its connotative value or as a form of social identity and as a new “lifestyle.” As a matter of fact this approach is evident because our contemporary postmodern society can be defined as an orthorexic society, in which everybody, everywhere is constantly speaking about food. This phenomenon is called foodism, a practice particularly emphasized in the new media. In this article a specific type of foodism is analyzed: the practice of food–photography. This includes both an individual practice meant to be a self-expression, known by the famous name “food porn,” a sort of food “selfie” and also photography as an artistic expression, a new art form, a practice which can be seen at food photography exhibitions. Different from other forms of foodism, this particular form of food practice is emphasized by the viral use of photography through social networks. Nowadays, new media is the place in where social and individual identity originates therefore semiotics and sociosemiotics must study these new forms of communication to interpret the value of food in contemporary society and the sense of this phenomenon.