Restoring the Meaning of Food: Biosemiotic Remedies for the Nature/Culture Divide

This chapter explores the convergence between food studies and new developments in semiotic awareness known as biosemiotics. In alliance with ecological theory, biosemiotics draws on the sign theory proposed by C. S. Peirce, which reveals how meaning is not to be reduced to the structure of an object and a corresponding sign, but also takes into account a representative association of the former two elements. Contemporary interdisciplinary studies consistently and consequentially confirm some more “primitive” intuitions on how nature works in triadic structural patterns. This analysis dismantles narratives of nature seen as an endless resource or a nurturing parent, as well as certain meanings assigned to food in relation to the nature/culture dichotomy embedded in myths that have shaped Western imagination. Therefore, this semiotic “analysis” – which is literally “a breaking up” – reappraises such polarized disjunctions in order to reunite them and to reposition (human) nature and culture as communicating vessels running into one another in the manner of autocatalytic processes which sustain all forms of life. Having this aim in mind, methodological insights are taken correlatively from ecolinguistics, biosemiotics, and cultural anthropology, in order to find the hermeneutic traces our cultures have left in diverse mythologies and inherited systems of thought.