Food Between Nature and Naturalisms: Semiotic Reflections on the Mediterranean Diet

Abstract

Although food is a form of material culture, most present-day texts, discourses, and practices seem to stress a supposed “naturalness” inherent to food systems. Such naturalness is generally conceived as both the praise of everything that opposes artificiality and a return to an original and idyllic past, namely a “tradition” crystallised in “authentic” recipes, “typical” restaurants, etc. Responding to the urgency of enhancing the academic debate on these issues, this paper analyses the relevant case of the “Mediterranean diet,” mainly by adopting a semiotic approach centred on the processes of globalisation and hybridisation that have affected food in the last decades, with important implications on the grammars, syntaxes, and pragmatics of systems that, instead, tend to be subjected to a process of “crystallisation” denying such dynamism.