Abstract

"Pleasure in Food: From Counterculture to Critical Food Consumption"

Daniela Pirani, University of Liverpool Management School (d.pirani@liverpool.ac.uk), Beatrice Toti, University of Parma (beatoti97@gmail.com)

We are exploring the relationship between politics, counterculture and consumption in the 70s and the 80s in Italy. Our analysis is set across a decade in which Italy developed a modern consumer culture (Arvidsson, 2003). Through the example of the consumer movement Arcigola, we look at how counterculture informed critical food consumption, setting the scene for a new ideology of consumption and the emergence of a political ‘foodie’. We argue that tensions born within the political sphere, such as emphasis on austerity, trust in the industrialisation and focus on rational choices, were answered by counterculture, which advocated for immediate access, new spiritualism and an emphasis on pleasure. Through a cohesive corpus of news articles, we follow the ride of Arcigola from its constituency as a consumer association in the late 80s in Italy and established as Slow Food since 1989. We explore the rise of a ‘right to pleasure’ with political connotations (Sassatelli and Davolio, 2010; Soper, 2007) as emerging from the tension between consumerism and counterculture. Our final argument highlights how critical consumption, while biased and limited, answered immediate concerns ignored by politics, while developing themes close to the counterculture movement.