Cooking and communicating: a complex approach to thinking about the inseparable relations between subject-object, nature-culture and real-symbolic

Abstract

The article presents the preliminary reflections of the current search entitled “Food: a complex
and practical communication system”. We propose the perspective of studying the complex
issues related to food production and consumption as a problem of knowledge, communication
and learning, which must be analyzed together, in an inseparable way with their antagonisms,
competitions and complementarities. In this sense, we defend the thesis that the link between
the scientific-technological knowledge system, the industrial food system and the media system
tends to favor monopolistic and hegemonic practices, which obscure the relationship between
being, knowing and thinking. We will point out some emergencies for the study of food,
as a total human fact. The agroecology has been shown a fertile environment to undertake a
complex thinking to investigate the structures of knowledge and the organization of knowledge.