The Right Face of Food

Abstract

The article questions the relationship between the face and food. The face is, theoretically speaking, an affordance that one recognizes in the environment when it presents itself as endowed with meaning; this explains the origin, in anthropological, evolutionary, and cognitive terms, of folkloric traditions that assign a face to food, a correct direction to its handling, or that even associate its shape and fiber with entire cosmologies, as in the case of macrobiotic gastronomy. Ultimately, what drives humans to assign a face to food and to normalize the human approach to it is the intrinsic semiotic nature of the species, and thus the innate aptitude to transform every asymmetry into a difference that is a harbinger of meaning and axiologies.