Gastronomy, Culture and Media: the long route "You are what you eat"

Abstract

This article is linked on a transversal way with the research we are developing related to three axes: body and subjectivity, the medicalisation of our society and the public representation of sciences in the scientific magazines and the technologic imaginary. We chose as our subject the gastronomy because participating of the first relationship between medicine and philosophy, we can find there two presences very important to our occidental experience: the use of pleasures and the care of oneself. Nowadays, when health has replaced the salvation, is interesting to think about the opposition between the straight regulations of the care of oneself and the prestige of the imagination connected to gastronomic imagination, the chefs de cuisine and what this contrast shows about our experience of living and consuming. Two forms of conceive the excess seem to be presents: the luxury and the grotesque.