Food and Cuisine in the System of Value-Mental Symbols of Culture

The purpose of the article is to identify the value-mental symbols of national culture, such as food and cuisine. The methods of analysis and synthesis have been used in research, which made it possible to consider culinary symbols as a result of human spiritual activity, which influences socio-cultural processes and broadcasts the socio-cultural experience of humanity. Formal and abstraction methods have been also used to understand the symbolic nature of the process, which reflects the transition from the consumption of things to the consumption of signs, which allows us to determine the value of cooking as a carrier of symbolic codes of a particular culture. Scientific novelty is to clarify the provisions on the semantics of the national cuisine components, as well as the regularity of information translation encoded in the attributes of the food industry, which allows us to speak about their ability to archetype and acquire the qualities of nationalmental symbols. Conclusions. Thus, the culinary symbol is the result of the spiritual activity of man, which influences socio-cultural processes and broadcasts the socio-cultural experience of generations and humanity as a whole. Thus, culinary symbols, as a cultural phenomenon, are involved in the complex mechanism of retention and intergenerational transmission of cultural values. The meaning of values is correlated with the ideals of the socio-historical era in which they originated. The long-held values are effective in the modern communicative process, they influence the development of socio-cultural life-support practices, which include the culture of food consumption. It has been shown that significant changes in the food culture have to do with the symbolization of food, the complexity of which is due to the fact that it is not specifically designed to convey messages. It has been found that current consumption practices indicate that there are trends associated with its symbolic nature, reflecting the transition from consumption of things to the consumption of signs