Cooking Memes is an odd book about food by Alessandro Mininno and issued by Brescia-based Krisis Publishing who describe themselves as 'interested in the entanglement of theory, fiction, media and beliefs that invites us to see the world as it really is not'.
Over almost 500 pages the author collects food memes from a surreal digital landscape where food is reduced to an image, a slogan, or a remix, and becomes a lens through which to observe the sociopolitical tensions running through culture, economics and power. Culinary meme culture, Alessandro Mininno says, operates as an unruly semiotic system that cements stereotypes and subverts them, displays identities and dissolves them, and employs irony as an analytical tool.
Pizza, carbonara, matcha, and vegan sushi appear not as neutral objects, but as focal points for class, gender, ethnicity, political affiliation and self-representation. This open archive gathers fragments without deference, suggesting that even the most unhinged food meme can serve as a historical document of the present.
Krisis Publishing, 486pp, 12cm x 19cm, illustrated paperback (English text but Italian copy on cover)
