Brand on the run: a semiotic look at Slow Food

Abstract

In this article, a semiotic definition of slowness is constructed
—concept and value, lexeme and object, social praxis with
different forms of textual enactments— based on an individual
research project in which the theme of gastronomy comes into
play, on one hand, that of the body and of nature, and on the
other hand, that of brand communication and political discourse.
From this, the recurrence to the phenomenon of Slow Food, key
topic, since it interprets all these dimensions of sense and culture,
which frequently the theory of meaning insists on dealing with
separately, therefore excluding the possibility of explaining said
phenomenon reciprocally, and therefore of understanding it.
Through a detailed analysis of two key texts of this world-wide
movement —the manifest of its creation and the logo— are
made to stand a test of slowness in the various levels of the
generative path of sense, and not only within a broader semantic
category that opposes it to speed.