Italian Lockdown and Consumption: The Rise of Flour during Forced Domestic Isolation from a Digital Perspective

Abstract

This article analyses the first Italian lockdown in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of a digital scenario, trying to find assumptions from social media to understand the amazing increase in flour consumption that occurred, up to an average value of +80%. The focus of this article is on the most common social platforms of the country, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, and the analysis took place around the keyword “flour”. The aim was to find some answers looking at the media consumption of content related to the topic, looking at the first 100 most engaging posts on Facebook pages, Facebook public groups and Instagram profiles. What emerged is that after an initial dominion of professional content creation in the second month of the three months of domestic reclusion, user-generated content augmented on Facebook, while on Instagram, the most-followed profile was the one of a domestic cooking star. What seemed to emerge is that cooking at home and completing simple recipes based on flour could have been a sort of protection practice against the instability and terrific times due to the pandemic in the Italian cultural field.