Food design: Symbols of our daily nutrition
-
Sonja Stummerer
and
Martin Hablesreiter
Abstract
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.
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The Umberto Eco gaze
- “La morte non avrà signoria”: Domande per Umberto Eco
- Vistas for organized global semiotics
- Semiotics of food
- Introduction: Semiotics of food
- Food and translation
- The translation of food in literature: A culinary journey through time and genres
- Semiosis of intercultural cooking: The nineteenth century travel literature as a case study
- The semiotics of migrants’ food: Between codes and experience
- Lost in translation: Food, identity and otherness
- Glocal and food: On alimentary translation
- Contemporary foodspheres
- A note on the meanings of junk food
- Are nutrients also good to think?
- Critique of the culinary reason
- Food and taste
- Food meaning: From tasty to flavorful
- L’esthésique et l’épiphanique: Traces figuratives de la saveur
- Taste and meaning
- Cooking and eating
- The culinary and social-semiotic meaning of food: Spicy meals and their significance in Mexico, Italy, and Texas
- Semiotic food, semiotic cooking: The ritual of preparation and consumption of hallacas in Venezuela
- Food and communication
- Myths, traditions, and rituals of food in Spanish cinema
- Starred cosmopolitanism: Celebrity chefs, documentaries, and the circulation of global desire
- Food design chez Bras
- Food design: Symbols of our daily nutrition
- Food-ography: Food and new media
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The Umberto Eco gaze
- “La morte non avrà signoria”: Domande per Umberto Eco
- Vistas for organized global semiotics
- Semiotics of food
- Introduction: Semiotics of food
- Food and translation
- The translation of food in literature: A culinary journey through time and genres
- Semiosis of intercultural cooking: The nineteenth century travel literature as a case study
- The semiotics of migrants’ food: Between codes and experience
- Lost in translation: Food, identity and otherness
- Glocal and food: On alimentary translation
- Contemporary foodspheres
- A note on the meanings of junk food
- Are nutrients also good to think?
- Critique of the culinary reason
- Food and taste
- Food meaning: From tasty to flavorful
- L’esthésique et l’épiphanique: Traces figuratives de la saveur
- Taste and meaning
- Cooking and eating
- The culinary and social-semiotic meaning of food: Spicy meals and their significance in Mexico, Italy, and Texas
- Semiotic food, semiotic cooking: The ritual of preparation and consumption of hallacas in Venezuela
- Food and communication
- Myths, traditions, and rituals of food in Spanish cinema
- Starred cosmopolitanism: Celebrity chefs, documentaries, and the circulation of global desire
- Food design chez Bras
- Food design: Symbols of our daily nutrition
- Food-ography: Food and new media
