Promoting ‘Good’ Food in Italy Positive Evaluation and Fear Appeal in Promotional Discourse

This paper examines how Italian food is promoted in non-commercial institutional and sectoral discourse, comparing two sub-corpora: the website of the Italian Ministry of Health and that of Coldiretti. Combining word-frequency output with qualitative discourse analysis, it investigates the interplay of positive evaluation and fear appeal across health, cultural identity, sustainability and economic value. Both actors construct Italian food as ‘good’, yet differently: the Ministry integrates risk awareness into public-health education, whereas Coldiretti reserves conflictual framing for external threats