On the Face of Food

Face and food are both essential interfaces of social life. Their intersections in history and cultures are still underexplored. Humans see faces in food, as in the cognitive phenomenon of pareidolia; they turn food into the face of deities, as in Pastafarianism; they create artworks in which food compose faces, like in Arcimboldo; the face of non-human animals turned into food is often concealed, whereas other kinds of food, like the Japanese “character bento” and “chigiri-pan”, are anthropomorphized through the attribution of a face. Disquietingly, certain drugs, like the so-called “bath salts”, seem to urge users to cannibalize the face of other people. Face turned into food, food turned into face, face removed from food, face instilled in food: what happens, from the semiotic point of view, when food is visually given a face and what, on the opposite, when this face is hidden?