Semiotics of digital cacogastromania

Abstract

Cucinaremale (“badcooking” or “cookingbadly”) is an Italian Facebook group created in 2014 which now (February 2020) counts more than 126,000 members. It was conceived to let members post their everyday culinary disasters and amusingly show solidarity with each other, while struggling in a cruel world where — as the official description suggests — everybody seems to have become a professional cook, capable of distinguishing even the different types of salt on the market: “Enough with this craze for cooking: hurray for pre-cooked food!”. The article proposes an analysis of the culinary ideologies at stake and a typology of the textual practices carried out by the cattivicuochi (“badcooks”). cucinaremale provides a true manifesto against the global food craze better known as gastromania — a true cacogastromania (“bad gastromania” or “mania for the bad food”).