ABSTRACT
This chapter interprets and criticizes the present-day economically developed societies’ unprecedented attention to food. The culinary discourse, in all its facets, gains increasing centrality in cultures. Institutions, media, and common people are obsessed with what they eat. Gastronomy turns into the main concern, the most debated and cared of system of norms. Social phenomena like Slow Food and Zero Kilometer conquer the world, claiming that improving the quality of food is the way for a better planet. But what is the deep cultural meaning of this massive trend? What lies behind the “culinary reason”? Aesthetic neutralization of socioeconomic conflicts, chauvinistic marketing of stereotypes, and anti-intellectual subversion of sensorial hierarchies, the chapter contends, claiming that the sacralization of food is a further marketing trap into which the digital society, bereft of material meaningfulness, shows tendency to fall.
