Mangiare l’immangiabile: spunti(ni) di semiotica cacogastromaniaca

The paper focuses on uneatable-and-yet-eaten food and cacogastromania (“mania for the bad food”), meaning the reversal of ‘gastromania’ (“food-mania”) — the aestheticising obsession for food, cooking and their discoursivisation — as thoroughly studied by Gianfranco Marrone. Examples of “anti-food” (inedible, impossible, wrong or forbidden food) are briefly reviewed, commented on and interrelated: the anti-traditionalist recipes of Futurist cuisine; scatophagy, hyperphagia and pica as oppositive identity practices (often connoted in a sub or countercultural fashion); various types of post food, including Soylent, in vitro meat and experimental creations that seem to imitate science fiction (e.g. the ‘Living Food’ project). In the end, the case of ‘cucinaremale’ (“cookingbadly”, “badcooking”) is addressed: an Italian Facebook group precisely focussing on non-edible food but nevertheless featured with measures of internal self-regulation, including self-censorship, that sanction the modes and boundaries of such a core.