Gastromaniac. How (food) influencers create trust

In the first part of the paper, I shall offer a brief overview of a hypothesis developed in another publication, which explores the relationship between the primordial feeling of trust that each person’s face elicits to varying degrees and how this represents a type of capital for influencers. In the second part of the paper, I shall develop this model using theoretical know-how from the field of brand management, where a beneficial link between the influencer communication model and that of legendary brands emerges. Thus, for an influencer to build invaluable trust capital with his/her followers in the first place, he/she must start from the position of some passion or sacred beliefs which give authenticity to the core expertise underlying the influence being exerted. In this model, the communicative performance of the influencer and the quality of his/her narrative take centre stage. Credibility depends on the synchrony between these elements and the extent to which the constructed public influencer’s character is true to itself in its various manifestations. An explicitly or implicitly defined lifestyle is always present in the system. It provides concreteness and makes it easier for followers to compare and imitate.

Veganism 2.0: Gastromania, nutrition, and digital communication

The vegan population has risen significantly over the past decade, and is expected to continue increasing. Social media are believed to have played a major role in such a rise. According to a Google study (2018), veganism started to spread markedly in 2012, the same year that Instagram became popular, and has then grown in correlation with the expansion of the social network (with over 88 million #vegan posts out of a billion monthly active users and more than 500 million people using the platform daily today). Since 2016 conversations around veganism have increased also on Twitter, reaching nearly 20 million Tweets in 2018 and registering a further growth of 70% in 2019. Moreover, the number of Google searches for veganism has spiked from a popularity rating of just 17 out of 100 in 2008 to 88 in 2018. Functioning both as platforms for sharing and commenting on information and as effective channels for proselytizing, these and other social media have evidently extended the boundaries of the vegan movement, making it become one of the biggest contemporary food trends. This paper aims at identifying and describing the main cultural transformations and forms of life promoted by “veganism 2.0”, based on a semiotic approach particularly attentive to the analysis of the narrative level and the patemic dimension. To this purpose, the intersections between the so-called “gastromania” and other trends characterising contemporary foodspheres, such as “gastro-anomy” and the “ideology of nutritionism” are taken into account, paying particular attention to the gastronomic discourse in present-day digital mediascapes and the complex dynamics characterising them.

Semiotics, blogs and gastromania

The current culinary megatrend owes much to Internet socialization practices. Discussions online began very early (the boards of Chowhound, for example, have already been operating since 1997), which says a lot about how much the “great conversation” of online communities is linked to gastronomic discourse. This paper propose a semiotic assessment of such a connection.

Gastromania on italian tv

By turning on the TV, at any time of the day or night, one can comeacross programs in which food is the undisputed protagonist. Actually, thepresence of food on TV is not a contemporary phenomenon, but it goesback to the origins of television. Over time, the way of narrating food hasbeen transformed, as well as the role attributed to it and the values (gastronomicand social) associated to it.In this paper, after having traced a historical overview of Italian foodtelevision programming, we focus on the analysis of four recent programs.The objective is to understand how settings, rhythmic and temporal scansion,and the distribution of roles among the various actors involved configurenarratives with well-structured mechanisms and convey differentways of understanding cooking, the role of the chef, and the relationshipwith the audience at home.

Virtual tryvertising. Marketing strategies for empowered customers

The aim of this study is to look at the experiential marketing strategy of virtual tryvertising, by analysing a specific case study: the augmented reality application Ikea Place. It provides customers with a set of tools to prefigure a virtual representation of a piece of a furniture within a physical space, in order to appraise its fitness in a prior time to its actual purchase, and hence to provide a benefit for him/her. The semiotic analysis will be carried out by taking into account the use practices prescribed by the application and the promotional discourses of the company. In particular it will look at two advertising videos which accompanied the launch of the application in 2013 and 2017. It will also consider the added value and the experiential gain for users that the adoption of this type of technology entails, in order to understand AR media not only as a mere strategy for commercial purposes, but as a tool for empowering the users’ appraising skills traditionally used in the context of a dressing room of a physical store.

Semiotics of digital cacogastromania

cucinaremale (“badcooking” or “cookingbadly”) is an Italian Facebook group created in 2014 which now (February 2020) counts more than 126,000 members. It was conceived to let members post their everyday culinary disasters and amusingly show solidarity with each other, while struggling in a cruel world where — as the official description suggests — everybody seems to have become a professional cook, capable of distinguishing even the different types of salt on the market: “Enough with this craze for cooking: hurray for pre-cooked food!”. The article proposes an analysis of the culinary ideologies at stake and a typology of the textual practices carried out by the cattivicuochi (“badcooks”). cucinaremale provides a true manifesto against the global food craze better known as gastromania — a true cacogastromania (“bad gastromania” or “mania for the bad food”).

When food mobilizes emotions: Reaching foreign and domestic audiences

This paper aims to explore food films and their symbolism. Food is a way of creating national identities, and enhancing the sense of belonging. It also evokes the concept of ‘nostalgia’ and has the capacity to mobilize strong emotions (Mintz 1996). The semiotic analysis of food underlines how the biosphere and the semiosphere intersect in various instances of human life (Danesi 2004). In cultural settings, food symbolizes substance and conveys different meanings. This research material will focus on the analysis of images (food, culinary preparations and different eating events) as portrayed in Tassos Boulmetis’s 2003 film Πολίτικη Κουζίνα/ A Touch of Spice, and the domestic and international trailers of the film. The analysis will be based on Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere.

Imagination and evolution of taste

Taste is a complex biological, cultural and even psychological phenomenon. We can trace both significant differences and significant similarities in taste quite easily, if we observe human communities in different regions, countries and continents. For example, it is no surprise that most of us share a passion for sweet taste and might dislike bitter or sour. At different ages, people appreciate a variety of foods and drinks and preferences usually change due to physical and social exposure to a given diet. One thing that remains clear is that our taste constantly evolves, notwithstanding whether we discuss taste as a personal system of preferences or if we analyze it as a social convention of favoured sensory experiences. The evolution of taste is a multidirectional process and its roots can be traced back to biology, geography, cultural and social studies, religion, etc. However, in the current paper we will focus on a less examined perspective which seems to offer a fruitful research direction. How does thinking and creativity influence the evolution of taste? How important is our imagination in the taste formation process? Are we able to create an unprecedented dish or we are obliged to follow certain rules and predispositions in our creative culinary experiments? In order to answer these questions, we will start by looking at imagination itself. We will trace this idea back to Aristotle and Kant to define the essence of this controversial philosophical concept and to specify its function in reasoning. Then we will analyze certain aspects of creativity in taste, in order to observe the evolution of certain culinary tendencies. Last but not least we will focus on the influence of social media and the digital communication. Does digital living today improve the culinary imagination or not? Is the culinary evolution in the XXI century triggered by the social media and ease of access to information online?

#Foodporn: Fetishized sharing of food and its images

Once translated into images, food acquires a broader meaning. Food is no longer merely something to eat, but to show, share and look at. The increasing amount of images and pictures of dishes on our social networks, associated with hashtags such as #foodporn, expresses this renewed social, communicative and provocative function of food. However, the exhibition of these images is quite ambivalent when it comes to establishing determined patterns of visual and social relationships with and between users. The aim of this article is to analyze and attempt to provide mediation to this ambivalence. The pornographic exposition of food images no longer presupposes a transitive form of consumption by the user, but becomes pure and self-reflexing spectacle. The images are obscene (Baudrillard [1981] 1994) and characterized by an excess of transparency on their object which abolishes any form of seduction (Baudrillard [1979] 1990). Barthes ([1980] 1981) defines this kind of image as unary. Pornographic images are an emblematic example. In terms of their self-evident objectivity, these pictures lack any punctum, any piercing sign of a relationship with or openness to the observer (see Eco 1962; 1979). Nevertheless, behind their apparent transparency, the images are always products of specific perspective cuts, and still able to convey mystery, meaning and involvement. The unary image of food is a further fragment in a series of multiple perspectives on the same object. Such potentiality is actualized in our (social) media culture in which sharing and continuous remediation of images and pictures of food constitute a complex storytelling of the object. This, in turn, fosters further participation by the users. The ambivalence between the indifference of the pornographic image and the involvement in the serialization of the detail is synthetized by the notion of fetishism (Baudrillard [1972] 2019). The social (and) media scenery seems to exemplify and radicalize a sort of commodity fetishism, in which social relationships between users are shaped and mediated by (social) media relationships between images of food.