The Poetics of Food Consumption: Alimentary Rhetorics and Creative Practices

Abstract

Contemporary society is characterized by the spread of contradictory discourses around food, by alimentary hyper-reflexivity
and by the gradual individualization of food choices and alimentary-related risks. Food has increasingly become a means of personal
(e.g. nutritionism, scientific and spontaneous dietaries, eating disorders, consumption of industrial organic products) and global
(alternative modalities of production and consumption) identity management, and a tool that allows for the construction of new
subjectivities, forms of belonging and planning, and of specific worldviews. My hypothesis is that individuals select, manipulate and
utilize hegemonic food rhetorics to create new forms of self-representation and belonging, to subscribe to and to question values, and to
explore alternative meaning-making possibilities. This paper is intended as a critical examination of some of the contemporary
hegemonic discursive fields (nutritionist rhetoricals, advertising narratives, techniques of food traceability and labeling, certification,
speeches which promote alternative food production and consumption) that determine individual and collective food choices and
consumption practices. In this sense, food may be considered as a "technology of the self" and alimentary practices are strategies,
creative modes of resistance, subversion or adjustment to institutionalized structures of power, means to manage livelihoods,
uncertaninty and the effects of critical times and to “imagine” individual existences and alternative futures, in the acception suggested by
Appadurai.