Por una semiótica de los objectos de cocina

Abstract

When and how did cooking come into being? Many would say with fire and then with cooking. Cooking had to take place by suspending food over a flame, but this moment must have occurred much later in human history. Taste, and therefore cooking, was born precisely when we began to think of what nature offered us as something to transform. In the beginning, therefore, there was the knife. Cooking derives from the ability to imagine rather than to do; this ability to think about transformations develops when it is possible to conceive of an instrument that intervenes on matter. The knife-object is both a tool for doing things and a necessary device for thinking differently. Analyzing it semiotically as a text allows us, therefore, to reconstruct the set of transformations it presupposes and, consequently, the culture that produced it.