The Discourse of food promotion: bread packages in Lithuania

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Diskursas; Duonos pakuotės; Kultūrinis mitas; Maisto reklama; Multimodalumas; Bread packages; Cultural myth; Discourse; Food promotion; Lithuania; Multimodality.

ENFood narratives, which form an important part of contemporary life, are connected to narrative, performative language, and ideology, and thus are a part of the cultural rhetorical situation. The rhetoric of food narratives is currently gaining greater attention from discourse analysts, who usually deal with the discourse of food from a multidisciplinary perspective, and combines linguistics, sociology, and semiotics. The present study also relies on a multidisciplinary perspective by applying the theory of multimodality (Kress 2003, Kress & Van Leeuwen 1996, Kress & Van Leeuwen 2002) to the analysis of the discourse used to promote bread in Lithuania. The data that is analyzed in the present paper consists of the bread packages of different Lithuanian bread producers. The study focuses on the persuasive properties and promotional strategies of bread promotion by taking into account both the verbal and visual aspects of the packages under investigation. It is argued that the persuasion in the discourse of food occurs ideologically, often without public awareness, and may lead to consumer manipulation. The present analysis is an attempt to make a contribution to our understanding of how different discourses of food are constructed to achieve different producers’ aims, and how “food narratives ... are converted through discourse and behaviour into what Roland Barthes calls cultural myth” (Littlejohn 2008:209). [From the publication]