Abstract: Food Metaphors – A Form of Cultural Heritage and Linguistic Innovation. A Comparison between Romanian, English, and Italian Food Metaphors. Food is the centre of our world, both as a vital resource, and as a social, religious, and aesthetical experience. The cognitive theory of metaphor focuses on the capacity of food metaphors to convey representations of the world specific to individual languages. The aim of our research is to compare food metaphors in Romanian, Italian, and English. The cognitive frameworks taken into consideration reveal common representations of physical and moral human features that Italian, English and Romanian speakers associate with food metaphors. In this manner, food metaphors act as a cultural matrix encoding beliefs and stereotypes about us, about what we perceive as success and/or failure. Also, the food metaphors have a strongly motivated character, as the traits of food are similar to the physical and moral traits of the human beings. Nevertheless, the comparison of the three languages reveals differences in the foods that are considered central, vital to each gastronomic community and in the traits that are valued or disregarded. Another subchapter of our research analyses food metaphors in argot, albeit its fast transformation due to its functioning as a secret language.

Keywords: food metaphors, cognitive framework, cognitive theory, Italian, Romanian, English