Disgusting conspiracies: frame analysis of insect invasion fears in the Italian gastronomic field

This chapter analyzes the discursive constructions and narrative frames formulated within the Italian national context following the introduction, across Europe, of “novel foods” based on insects. Such narratives, aimed at stigmatizing the potential erosion of an Italian gastronomic identity, replicate the features of the most conventional conspiracy theories. This chapter conducts a frame analysis of the public discourse generated within Italy, in the period from November 2022 to April 2023, related to this particular case of “event conspiracy” generated by disgust about the invasion of Italian gastronomy by insects. It will be shown how diverse agents are subject to different layers of framing (keyings) and thus moralized as perpetrators or defenders with respect to an inexorable mechanism of national identity erosion, so that this specific “event conspiracy” is progressively transformed into a broader case of “systemic conspiracy”. In its conclusion, the chapter describes how in Italy-rather than the conventional worries related to the effects on health and food safety-food-related conspiracy theories lean on gastro-nationalist rhetoric. They help to shape and sustain a certain understanding of Italian identity as a geopolitical entity and as a symbolic space able to define itself both in opposition to the machinations imagined outside it and with respect to those generated within it.