Visual Narratives in Food-Related Public Service Announcements

The present study explores the communicative strategies used in those public service announcements (PSAs) relating to food waste and food management that are designed to transform people’s daily food-waste-related actions into behaviours serving the public’s social interest. Grounded in critical multimodal discourse analysis, three PSAs are used as case studies to fill the gap that has led to food waste being largely overlooked in food-related multimodal studies. The findings indicate that these examples of the PSA genre strategically embed social messages within specific cultural artefacts, including national sports (e.g. football in the UK and baseball in the USA), that resonate with the target audience’s life experiences. The findings show that they are reliant on a metacommunicative level guiding how these messages should be interpreted. From a methodological perspective, the study adopts a phasal model of analysis consisting of macrophases (MPs), subphases (SPs) and microphases (MrPs) defined as functional units that enact the narrative processes as they unfold in time. However, the phasal model is extended to include visual transitivity frames (VTFs), a fourth level of analysis which adds an atemporal perspective to the time-based events associated with MPs, SPs and MrPs. The VTF level makes it possible to detect critical moments in the PSAs functioning as social awakenings and, ultimately, instigating the desired social change.