Supermarket culinary magazine: a telescope to observe Portuguese contemporary food culture

Abstract

This work aims to analyse the verbal-visual texts published in the custom culinary magazine’s Sabe Bem (SB), one of the branded content communication vehicles of Pingo Doce, a supermarket that is part of Jerónimo Martins, a Portuguese corporate group which is ranked as the 50th major global retails, and operates in food distribution in Portugal, Poland, and Colombia. SB has and has had the biggest culinary gender audience in Portugal and its editorial aims to promote a healthy diet amongst its readers, highlighting the Mediterranean Diet in its discourses. With ten years old, SB has become a relevant vehicle to reflect on Portuguese culture food. It has turned into an open door to verify contemporary food’s movement, from the food production to culinary proposals, and to understand discourses that stimulate people to consume new kind of food proposals, as well as in the time of coronavirus pandemic. In order to understand some transformation in Portuguese food culture during the first year of the pandemic, January/February 2020 to May/June 2021, SB´s editions were selected to be verified in this work. On the other hand, the guide question on this research is "What food cultures narratives had been presented in SB magazine during the coronavirus pandemic period?”. So as to answer this previous question, this study was supported by interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological frameworks, that contributed to organize quantitative and qualitative reports with the significant and some images features that had been presented in the selected corpus. Added to these fundamental signs, the enunciators' discourses were also examined to see how they organize a food semiosphere at a global crisis time. For this study, the semiotics of culture presented by the semiotician Y. Lotman (1986) were relevant, as well as the theoretical and methodological contributions of Discourse Analysis by P. Charaudeau (2009) about the Discourse of the Media.Thanks to this route, it was identified that in the period of the first year of the pandemic, the discourses in SB magazine has extolled the Portuguese nationalism through messages around different produced food items from different regions in this country. Thus, the enunciator has begun to adopted a new editorial line from the 55th issue (May/Jun 2020) content published after the first quarantine due to covid-19 held in Portugal. There´s a focus on a discourse that convokes the enunciatees to consume national products: the main speech induces the readers to support local farmers during the pandemic, a period classified as a difficult time. There´s also a new strategy of the picture uses, exploring more often images of the employees of the supermarket chain. The verbal-visual texts increasingly evoke nationalism, highlighting signs aligned with the colors of the Portuguese national flag - which starts to appear on the cover. There´s also an appeal to regional values that evolves to the point of promoting a specific kind of Mediterranean diet, which is called the “Portuguese style” Mediterranean diet. As a result, this research points out a narrative that reinforces food as more than just nutrition, but as an instance of belonging and identity. Moreover, there is a semiotic instrumentalization to stimulate citizenship and solidarity through consumption.