The carbonara-gate. Food porn and gastro-nationalism

This chapter focuses on gastro-nationalism, specifically in relation to food porn. In general, by food porn we mean the overabundance of discourses around food, which has spread in a reflective way among the different levels and scopes of cultural production, as well as the practice of photographing food and sharing the image on social media. Among the other effects, this also reflects on the overflow of culinary formats shown on television. The idea took shape when the image of food, including its symbolic value and the aesthetics of the dish, started to acquire a greater value than its creators and the techniques of its preparation (Stagi in Food Porn. L\u2019ossessione per il cibo in tv e sui social media. Egea, Milan, 2016)

Introduction: Cooking, Cuisine and Class and the Anthropology of Food

In a review essay discussing Jack Goody’s (1982) Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology, the anthropologist Sidney Mintz describes the book as ‘a pioneering work, because it looks broadly at the many-sided relationship between food and the rest of culture’ (Mintz 1989: 185). Later, Mintz and Christine Du Bois (2002) argue that the publication of Cooking, Cuisine and Class in 1982 marked a ‘turning point’ in the development of the anthropology of food and eating. By the time of their writing in 2002, they assert that the field had ‘matured enough to serve as a vehicle for examining large and varied problems of theory and research methods’ (Mintz and Du Bois 2002: 100). Since then, the anthropology of food has continued to prosper and mature. This is evidenced by a growing number of academic conferences, research centres, university course modules and postgraduate programmes and by the proliferation and growing sophistication of publications in the anthropology and wider social science of food, including dedicated journals (e.g., Food, Culture and Society; Food and Foodways; Gastronomica; Food and History), readers (e.g., Watson and Caldwell 2005; Counihan and Van Esterik 2013) and handbooks (e.g., Murcott, Belasco and Jackson 2013; Pilcher 2012; Watson and Klein forthcoming)