Adapting Food-Related Communication for Children in English: A Corpus-Based Investigation Using the FoRCCE Corpus

Most of the state-of-the-art investigating food-related discourse considers communication mainly aimed at adults, while children have been the focus of a relatively limited number of studies. These are, for instance, James et al. (2009), Rutsaert et al. (2013) and Weintraub Austin et al. (2018). However, they only consider the role of social media in the communication about food when addressing children and youths. These are individual studies that investigate the subject from the social media perspective, while studies such as Frerichs et al. (2016) or Singh et al. (2022) have focused on marketing strategies in food communication and how they influence parents’ and children’s dietary choices. What is missing seems to be a broader perspective that investigates more than one genre and communicative situation. The Chapter seeks to achieve this goal by investigating the materials composing the so-called FoRCCE Corpus (namely, the Corpus of Food-Related Communication for Children in English), specifically compiled for the purposes of a two-year research project funded by the “Ca’ Foscari” University of Venice (the SPIN2023 project bearing the same name as the Corpus ) whose aim is to fill the gap identified in the state-of-the-art. Since the Corpus is still under compilation at the time of writing, The Chapter examines only some of the materials available so far. The materials collected for the corpus are divided into three typologies (see also Chapter Five in this volume). For the purposes of the project, they are divided following the same categories already used in Cesiri (forthc.), namely, 1) ‘technical’ material including cookbooks and cookery manuals, domestic manuals, and recipes; 2) ‘commercial’ material including advertisements published in leaflets, newspapers, magazines, TV (commercials), and social media; 3) ‘institutional’ material that includes websites, infographics, booklets and leaflets in which international institutions – such as the European Commission, the World Health Organisation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), and UNESCO – inform parents and professionals through guidelines concerning the correct nutrition of children. The Chapter conducts a corpus-based analysis of the verbal characteristics on the ‘commercial’ products collected so far to compose FoRCCE Corpus. The aim of the analysis is to investigate how food is represented and narrated to children, and to compare and contrast the findings to already existing research on food representations and narration to adults.