The Visual and Verbal Representations of Healthy Diet Models: Adapting Cultural Diversity to Institutional Standards

The study analyzes a corpus of nutrition-related informative material in order to investigate whether international organizations and national institutions address the global concerns for public health. Moreover, the study seeks to ascertain whether the material included in the corpus maintains the cultural diversity that characterizes most food-related forms of communication (Faber and Vidal Claramonte 2017). The corpus is composed of brochures, booklets, infographics, and informative posters created by WHO, WFP and FAO as the international organizations that usually issue guidelines later implemented by national institutions, while the same kinds of material created by the Ministries/Departments of Health in Italy and in the United Kingdom (UK) are examined as national case studies. The study then examines how healthy food is visually represented and verbally described in the materials included in the corpus. The visual component of the corpus is investigated by means of a multimodal analysis, while the verbal component is examined using corpus linguistics methods of investigation. Moreover, food diversity and reference to seasonal food selection are also considered elements that influence food-related communication in the dataset and are used to contextualize the analysis. The visual analysis also pays specific attention to the depiction of specific social groups in order to assess whether the promotion of “social diversity, integration, and solidarity” (Guillaumie et al. 2023, 1) is actually visually represented in the corpus, while the verbal analysis focuses on the effectiveness of the dissemination of specialist knowledge to a lay public in order to effectively communicate how correct diet choices impact personal health.