Multimodal Food Discourse and Narrative Analysis: Culinary Persona, Ingredients, and Environment

Abstract

The study mainly investigates multimodal food discourse, such as socially constructed food videos rich in modes. It took Li Ziqi's "Life Series" food video as an example for analysis, aiming to find out three semiotic resources, namely "culinary persona", "culinary ingredients", and "culinary environment". The research methods are: First, it combined the visual narrative at the level of experiential meaning in Painter et al. (2013) with the auditory one. Second, it slightly adjusted the narrative structure of Labov (1972) to suit the analysis of the narrative structure of food discourse. Next, combined with the given case, this article analyzed the experiential meaning of food discourse from the situational context of the case. Finally, it generalized several cultural keywords based on the case study and discussed their cultural insights. Research has found that the culinary persona, ingredients, and the environment interact with each other, and the cultural connotation behind them is a manifestation of the way of food.