Neither Soul Food, nor Slave Food Made You Fat: Passion and Affection in Soul Food

Nowadays, food is probably living an unprecedented fame. Accordingly, discourse on food is equally popular. Studies on food discourse increase, mostly aiming at describing its features (Barthes, 2008; Cook, 2004; Frye & Bruner, 2012, Greene & Walters, 2011; Lupton, 1996; Parkhurst Ferguson, 2014) or exploiting it within the more general feminist approach to analysing food and food-related-jobs (Avakian, 2014; Bloom, 2018; Friedan, 1997; Harris & Giuffre, 2015; Salvio, 2012; Zoller, 2016 among others). Linguistically, research on food discourse mainly exploits the analytical tools provided by Discourse Analysis. Conversely, seldom has the role of affection been considered. In this paper we investigate the role of the affective framing in the analysis of the discourse concerning a special kind of food: soul food. The affective framing stems from the well known framing theory as devised by (Bateson (1972), Goffman (1974), Lakoff (2001) and Wedland (2011) to mention but a few. Drawing on Van der Sluis & Mellish's techniques (2008), we try to verify whether the articles deploy such strategies to conjure up passion and affection in the readership, or, rather, other kinds of textual cues can prove more effective.