Food we think and talk by

After clarifying the central role of metaphorical competence in everyday communication and explaining its importance as an essential component of communicative competence, this contribution analyses Italian food metaphors as an example of the strategic relevance of metaphorical competence for additional language teaching. Food is a cognitive and socio-cultural device that characterises Italian language use, as it enables us to think and talk about aspects, events, characteristics, and relationships related to the properties and experiences of food, thus using the semantic domain of food as a source domain for metaphorical thinking. A corpus of Italian idioms based on food metaphors is analysed from the perspective of language education to demonstrate the possibility of teaching these expressions as types of metaphors to learners of L2 Italian by showing the images on which they are based. This study suggests that this possibility could enable learners to achieve conceptual fluency in the target language, expand their vocabulary, and develop cultural knowledge.