Food for Thought

​Simona Stano is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the University of Turin (UNITO, Italy) and Visiting Researcher at New York University (NYU, US). She has been awarded a Marie Curie Global Fellowship for a research project (“COMFECTION”, 2019-2021) on the semiotic analysis of food communication. She also worked as Senior Researcher at the International Semiotics Institute (2015-2018) and as Visiting Researcher at the University of Toronto (2013), the University of Barcelona (2015-2016) and the “Observatorio de la Alimentación” (2015-2016). Dr. Stano deals mainly with semiotics of culture, food semiotics, body semiotics, and communication studies, and has published several papers, edited volumes (including special issues of top semiotic journals such as Semiotica and Lexia), and monographs (I sensi del cibo, Aracne, 2018; Eating the Other. Translations of the Culinary Code, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015) on these topics. Since 2020, she is the vice-Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication (CIRCe) of the University of Turin. Amy Bentley is Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. A historian with interests in the social, historical, and cultural contexts of food, she is the author of Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet (University of California Press, 2014), which was a finalist for a James Beard Award, and also winner of the ASFS Best Book Award. Other publications include Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (University of Illinois, 1998), A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Era (editor) (Berg, 2011), as well as articles on such diverse topics as ketchup in Reagan's America, the politics of southwestern cuisine, and a historiography of food riots. In addition to her work as a food historian, she’s been involved in a wide range of food-related academic and applied projects, including as co-founder of the NYU Urban Farm Lab and the Experimental Cuisine Collective (2007-2016). The former Editor-in-Chief of Food, Culture, and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (2013-2019), Bentley is co-editor of the book series Food in Modern History: Traditions and Innovations (Bloomsbury).

• Chapter 1. Food for thought: An introduction (Simona Stano).- Part 1: Food, taste, and global cultures.- Chapter 2. Alimentation: A general semiotic model of socialising food (Ugo Volli).- Chapter 3. On the face of food (Massimo Leone).- Chapter 4. Phenomenology of a symbolic dish: What Su Porceddu teaches us about food, meaning, and identification (Franciscu Sedda).- Chapter 5. Food heritage, memory and cultural identity in Saudi Arabia: The case of Jeddah (Cristina Greco).- Chapter 6.  Bittersweet home: The sweets craft in the urban life of Tripoli, Lebanon (Henry Peck).- Part 2: Law, power, and media.- Chapter 7. “An act authorizing sterilization of persons convicted of murder, rape, chicken stealing...”: Southern chicken theft laws as an expression of racialised political violence (Daniel Thoennessen).- Chapter 8. Free breakfast and Taco trucks: Case studies of food as rhetorical homology in political discourse (Suzanne Cope).- Chapter 9. “Superfine quality, absolute purity, daily freshness”: The language of advertising in united cattle products’ marketing of tripe to British workers in the 1920s and 1930s (David Bell).- Chapter 10. New generations and axiologies of food in cinema and new media (Bruno Surace).- Part 3: Nutrition and culture. Chapter 11. Beyond nutrition: Meanings, narratives, myths (Simona Stano).- Chapter 12. Laughing alone with salad: Nutrition-based inequity in women’s diet and wellness media (Emily Contois).- Chapter 13. Virtue and disease: Narrative accounts of orthorexia nervosa (Lauren Wynne).