THEMATIC SWEETS AS A CURRENT COMPONENT OF NATIONAL-CULTURAL CULINARY CAPITAL: THE MASS-MEDIA ASPECT OF THE PROBLEM

Abstract

In our century, especially in the last 15 years, author’s thematic sweets began to appear and improve quite quickly. They gradually develop from elitist, too expensive, designed for luxury consumption, to democratic options for the general public. Their appearance is repeatedly imitated by confectioners for embodiment in fashionable delicacies for festive and everyday use, receives a peculiar, sometimes quite unexpected artistic and figurative, development during transformations for different types of audience and more effective business. Thematic sweets with visual plots, motifs, heroes, with an expressive story, which is told by materials, possibilities, means – from images to signs – of culinary and artistic arts, have become not only widespread modern manifestations of confectionery skill, but also leading tests of skill at professional competitions, events of confectioners. They have received support from various socio-mental groups, which are characterized by divergent standards of taste, and are even involved as a component of informational and psychological operations. This must be taken into account and studied from the perspective of the formation, action, and longterm intentions of national-state, social, symbolic, and cultural capitals and their component – culinary capital. Thematic desserts formed a certain specific unity with media texts, primarily the genres of food photo and short video. The article focuses on food photo as a simple media genre in the sense that the photo is a representative of only a static image, its language, composition, codes, and rhetoric. The purpose and task of the article are, firstly, to motivate the axiological, ideological topicality, conceptual and categorical expediency and methodological necessity of considering the meaningful form of thematic confectionery products, which is supported, reinforced, and developed by their media texts (primarily food photos) from the position of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital. Secondly, to prove that the meaningful form of delicacies, reflected in food photos, is an effective, but not yet properly evaluated, component of national-cultural culinary capital, a concept whose phenomenon is considered mainly from the point of view of the traditional interpretation of gastronomic culture in its connections with social and political cultures. Thirdly, to outline those national, universal meanings and languages of their realization that embodies thematic sweets as national and cultural culinary capital. To study food in its unity with mass media, the concepts of culinary capital, national culinary capital, and mediated foodscapes are actively introduced and used. They are directly derived from the theory and methods of Bourdieu, who substantiated the concept and idea of cultural capital, and are designed to clarify new sociopolitical, everyday, symbolic, and ethical relationships between society, food, and mass media. The ideas and approaches of Bourdieu’s “Distinction” should become one of the key theoretical and methodological foundations for studying the integrity of thematic sweets and media texts. Thematic desserts are ideologically effective representatives of the space of lifestyles. Thematic sweets, in their integrity with media texts, are characterized by the properties of three key types of texts, which constitute a stable ideologically marked coordinate system and represent values, tastes, and meanings that one must be able to “read” and read, decode. Research methods: conceptual approaches, steps, directions which had proved Bourdieu, Naccarato, LeBesco, de Solier, Buscemi; approaches and ways of semiotics Conclusions. Thematic dessert texts, their food photos need to be studied at the intersection of cardinal turns such as linguistic, visual, emotional turn. Thematic sweets, their media texts are manifestations of different types of capital and the language of their implementation. They are information-densely saturated food, which represents, as a rule, elite places, platforms and regimes (Naccarato, LeBesco) of consumption of refined, ideologically, meaningfully, plot-rich delicacies. The unity of delicacies and media texts acquires, actively develops values, norms, meanings, functions that contribute to the growth of business, the strengthening of the fields of economics, sociality and art, standards of tastes (Bourdieu), the elevation of the creative abilities of confectioners, photographers, journalists, advertising specialists, PR, the strengthening of state, national, public consciousness in different generations, segments of the population. This happens with the help of “mass media-gastronomic language”.