Le politiche del cibo, tra l’urbano ed il locale. Un’analisi del discorso online

Abstract

The topic of food policies has a long-standing presence in both public and scientific debate. More recent, however, is the reflection on the territorial declination of food policies, and in particular the analysis of their configurations at the micro scale. Such reflection originates in North American and British contexts, and when it arrives in Italy it emerges with approaches in which different traditions of action and analysis hybridize. The result is that nowadays discourses on the topic present a consistent heterogeneity and blurring, even from a lexical point of view. The aim of the article is to reflect upon this heterogeneity, reconstructing the discourse about "urban food policies" and "local food policies" in Italy, trying to understand whether there is a clear characterization of these concepts with respect to the more general concept of "food policies." In this sense, the article presents the results of textual content analysis of 579 web pages within which at least one of the three expressions recurs, showing that the concept of "local food policies" is currently less widespread but more defined.