Digital Food

From Paddock to Platform

Tania Lewis

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350055094
• eBook ISBN: 9781350055124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Tania Lewis offers the first critical account of the impact of digital information, media, and communication technologies on the topic of food. Lewis critically analyzes how our relationship to food consumption, production, and politics is being re-mediated through digitally connected electronic devices, practices and content. By drawing together the world of food and the digital, the book speaks to a number of pressing contemporary themes including the tensions around digital engagement in increasingly commercialized spaces; the changing nature of politics in a social media context; the growing naturalization of digital devices and related practices of data monitoring; and the role and impact of digitization on social relations.

At the forefront of critical new research, and written with a student readership in mind, this text is essential for scholars interested in media studies, cultural studies, food studies, and cultural geography.

1

From Culinary Aesthetics to Phatic Food: Food Photography on Instagram and Facebook

In many of our field sites, posting on social media is overwhelmingly visual. The growing popularity of platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat has shown that social media can work effectively where the core content is photographic and text is relatively peripheral.

Daniel Miller et al., How the World Changed Social Media (2016: 155).

It is no exaggeration to say that the rise of amateur digital photography on social media has and is playing a revolutionary role in shaping contemporary food culture, one that has occurred in a relatively short space of time. Back in 2010, for instance, when the photo-sharing Web site Flickr reigned supreme, the New York Times was marveling over the fact that the number of pictures with the tag “food” had increased tenfold to more than six million within two years while one of the largest and most active groups, called “I Ate This,” included more than 300,000 photos produced and shared by 19,000 followers (Murphy 2010). Fast forward to 2017 and Flickr is now rocking in the wake of the rise of social network Instagram which as of June 2018 now has 1 billion monthly active users (Carmen 2018). As per Flickr, food photography represents a significant part of the traffic on Instagram with Business.com in an article on the “Food Photo Frenzy: Inside the Instagram Craze and Travel Trend” noting that at the time of writing (February 2017) “there were 168,375,343 posts on Instagram for #food and 76,239,441 posts for #foodporn” (McGuire 2017).

As Forbes India observed in 2017, while food photography has a long history, today “photographing food has assumed a proportion that has perhaps never been seen before, thanks to the ubiquitous camera phone” (Banerjee 2017). This apparently global food photo “frenzy” has of course gone hand in hand with a broader embrace of photographic practices—with many of us now habitually engaging in styling, shooting, editing, and sharing images via social media, whether of our latest meal, our pets, human loved ones, or travel pictures. While people’s social media practices globally vary significantly across cultures, social groups, gender, generations, and classes, it seems the photographic image links us all, or many of us at least—with the over 65s also increasingly using photos to keep in touch with family (Foster 2016).

In How the World Changed Social Media (2016), a book coming out of a major global anthropological project headed by British anthropologist Daniel Miller looking at social media practices around the world with a particular focus on social media use in poorer communities, one of the rare generalizations he and his co-authors make—attentive as they are to the plurality of social media practices around the world—is that social media is dominated by photographic content rather than text. On the one hand this may seem like an obvious and perhaps banal observation, but the shift not only to photographic ubiquity but more importantly to photographs taken and shared for the most part by ordinary non-professionals is a highly significant one. Despite the technological capacities of smartphones and platforms to enable people to create and share sophisticated multimedia offerings of all kinds, photographs are still the visual media of choice, overwhelmingly dominating social media. Small manageable file sizes, easy sharing and readability across sites, and platforms and software that have democratized editing processes have all ensured that photos remain supreme when it comes to posting and sharing (Gunthert 2014), aided and abetted by the fact that small photogenic screens are increasingly for many the main route to engaging with social media and the internet more broadly. As French visual historian André Gunthert argues, while the digital camera was meant to usher in the death of photography quite the opposite has in fact happened, with photographic images remaining by the far the most shared content on the internet (Gunthert 2014). Meanwhile, employing a range of systems and platforms that streamline and normalize photographic modes of communication, micro-blogging and social media have further boosted the centrality of the photographic image, with Snapchat perhaps best embodying the photo-centric nature of networked communications (Gunthert 2014).

Along with diminishing newspaper budgets and general cuts in staff, one of the reasons for the dwindling numbers of professional photographers at newspapers is the growing impact of social media, mobile technology and amateur digital photography in breaking news (Anderson 2013). This is just one of the many developments that have also put into question the divisions between professionalism and amateurism in the context of the relative democratization of access to mobile technology and networked social media. In the food space, photography as a contemporary cultural technology tied to networked mobile phones (see Gómez Cruz 2012) has impacted in a range of areas from restaurant reviewing to high-end microblogging platforms such as Instagram where DIY photo editing and geo-tagged images are key to the role of “influencers” in the world of food and beyond (Hjorth and Hendry 2015; Rousseau 2012). For instance, while figures like celebrity chef Jamie Oliver continue to function as old school lifestyle gurus through TV shows, public health campaigns, and cook books, Oliver also has a very active Instagram account with a huge following and has accordingly managed to win the hearts of the social media generation. But Oliver is now joined by a host of other food Instagram influencers, some of whom are chefs, food stylists, and “professional” food photographers but also many of whom are people whose day jobs have nothing to do with food. At a more everyday level, food photography and sharing food images are now something that many of us engage with, often without thinking and sometimes on a very regular basis. A study conducted in Beijing shows that over 85 percent of young Chinese urbanites have shared food photographs on social media (Peng 2017) while, according to a 2016 survey of all supermarket use by UK supermarket Waitrose (Smithers 2016), one in five Britons had shared a food picture in the previous month.

Why are people who in the past may have had little interest in photography now engaging in the practice of sharing food imagery? The popular embrace of food photography has led to a frequently heard lamentation, echoed by the press, that “Instagram is ruining food” (First 2017) while the Independent tells us “How Instagram Has Ruined Restaurants” noting that “69 per cent of millennials take photos of their food before eating” (Petter 2017). But this kind of culinary purism tells us little about the specific role of food imagery in the digital realm. Food and photography have of course had a long and intimate relationship. In a pre-smartphone, analogue era, however, food close-ups were largely the domain of professional photographers while in Bourdieu’s study of amateur photography in 1960s France, Photography: A Middle Brow Art (Bourdieu et al. 1990), more everyday forms of photography tended to be largely tied to a conventional, “family function,” i.e., food might be incidentally captured in snapshots of family events such as weddings and birthday parties. Today, amateur food photography has taken on a much more prominent social, cultural, and economic role while, around the world, culinary culture and food aesthetics have become a much more prominent feature of cultural life. As the Waitrose report mentioned above also states almost half of people surveyed say they take more care over a dish if they think a photo might be taken of it, and nearly 40 percent claim to worry more about presentation than they did five years ago.

In this chapter I want to think about some of the reasons for the rise of the food photograph and also offer a number of different conceptual frames for understanding a phenomenon that cannot be understood as purely an offshoot of digital or online technologies and practices and that is likewise not easily reduced to a single group of practices (Lobinger 2015). Food photography today is shaped by a range of different albeit overlapping communities of practices and taste (from food bloggers to microbloggers, from Weibo and Yelp to Facebook and Instagram users) making it difficult to make universal statements about photographic trends. Another key element that is important to highlight is the changing nature—beyond questions of taste and aesthetics—of what we might understand as the function and meaning of a photograph in an increasingly automated, digitally connected context. While I am using the term photography in this chapter, arguably some of the practices I will discuss have transformed the photograph into something other than how we usually conceive of them, i.e., as a realist representational or symbolic form. Furthermore, the act of capturing and sharing images with one’s smartphone has taken photography into still new territories and produced different and often evolving sets of practices—communicative, conversational, transactional, ritualistic, and habitual.

The chapter is structured as follows: first I discuss the ways in which food photography can be understood as emerging from a larger culture of lifestyle media—from glossy food magazines to celebrity chefs and reality cooking shows. The chapter then turns to thinking about the role of “lifestyled” social media users in a contemporary culture in which people are increasingly expected to shape their own everyday lifestyle practices, linking today’s online “creators” and “curators” of food photography to earlier forms of craft consumption. The following section discusses the considerable labor involved in producing food photographs for public consumption, drawing on notions of serious leisure and creative labor to start to map the shift to post-professional practices in online culinary spaces. This leads into questions around the role of online foodies as new “cultural intermediaries” and Instagram in particular as a space where a certain kind of aspirational “hipster” food culture is promoted via glossy high-end photography and savvy food influencers, from celebrity chefs to entrepreneurial homemakers. The final two sections of the chapter take us in a somewhat different direction. Here I start to think about food photography using a non-media-centric approach, understanding the posting of food pictures on Facebook for instance as a connective social practice. Drawing on work discussing the role of photographic imagery as integral to new forms of online conversational and phatic communication, this part of the chapter paves the way for understanding photos as non-representational, non-symbolic devices. The last section takes this argument further examining the ways in which digital photographs today increasingly function not as signs or carriers of meaning but as carriers of “data” or as “interfaces” or points of translation into data systems (Gómez Cruz 2016). The use of food images as sources of nutritional information, the emergence of Twitter photo food mining, photo-based food diaries, and food images as interfaces on new smart kitchen appliances (such as smart fridges) suggests the ways in which food images function as devices or actors within a larger network of social and technical practices, supporting Gómez Cruz’s “call to think more about photography as a sociotechnical practice and less about photography as images, representations and depictions” (2016: 240).

Food photos as an extension of lifestyle culture

The very popularity of television programmes that feature food and cooking or the redesign and redecoration of household interiors or gardens, together with the many associated magazines and books, supports the suggestion that there exists a large population of consumers who want to be successful in creating their own aesthetically significant end products.

Colin Campbell (2005: 33)

In tackling a book on food and digital media, it becomes evident that the present digital moment is in certain ways unique, representing a significant break with our previous everyday relationships with food, media, and communicative technologies. Take one key example. While ten years ago, many of us would have turned to restaurant reviews written by professional food critics in the lifestyle section of broadsheet newspapers (with text dominating the review and often accompanied by, rather than centered on, food imagery), today many of us now rely on a combination of star and point ratings, brief review comments and images of food and décor provided by our peers and shared via online review platforms such as Yelp and TripAdvisor. The digital affordances provided by these easy-to-use, GPS-enabled “local” review sites have thus literally revolutionized how we talk about and rank restaurants, in turn having a major impact on chefs and on the restaurant trade (Gander 2017).

At the same time, we cannot understand the rise of food photography on the internet and its current centrality as something purely specific to and produced by the digital realm. Instead the rise of digital food photography (as in the case of food and cookery “shows” on YouTube, the topic of the next chapter) emerges out of and links to earlier media forms and shifts in food culture, i.e., we can understand digital food practices as de- and reterritorializing both earlier and concurrent spaces of food media and forms of consumption. In particular, I argue that the huge popularity of food images on a range of social media platforms, and the growing number of food videos circulating the internet, can be linked to a broader shift in lifestyle, media, and consumer culture over the past couple of decades.

When I started doing research on reality TV in Australia back in the early 2000s I was repeatedly told at the time by producers and TV executives that food television wouldn’t make it on primetime TV as “cookery shows” were only of interest to daytime viewers, i.e., housewives and retirees (this was despite the early success of Japan’s Iron Chef in the 1990s and its cult impact in the United States and Australia, and the widespread appeal of the breakthrough show The Naked Chef on BBC 2, 1999–2001). The rise of Jamie Oliver to international stardom, the stadium-ization of food TV via Iron Chef, and the international popularity of the MasterChef franchise—to name some key moments in culinary media culture—has since seen food TV and food media more broadly become a global cultural phenomenon. From China and India to the United Kingdom, the United States and of course Australia, where the home-grown version of MasterChef has been a huge success, we have seen audiences (across class, gender, and ethnicity) embracing food culture and celebrity chefs as part of a broader “lifestyling” of everyday life and a growing interest in food as a site of leisure, creativity, pleasure, and aesthetics (rather than domestic drudgery and housewifery).

Figure 1.1 MasterChef contestant congratulated by the show’s host [Credit: Flickr/Pedro Lorena].

So how did people (young people and the “man in the street” in particular) go from being relatively uninterested in the intricacies of culinary culture in the late twentieth century to being obsessed with food in the twenty-first (as reflected in the rise of the term “food porn”—perhaps one of the most overused phrases in media and food commentary)? How do we explain a situation where food, once the domain of gourmands and chefs and female “homemakers,” is now the second most popular type of image on China’s major social media Weibo, with pictures of food ranking as twice as appealing as “good looking people” (Danqi 2014).

As I am suggesting, one key way of understanding this phenomenon is to locate the rise of food photos within the broader lifestyle and consumer culture of late capitalist modernity. But what am I meaning by the term lifestyle culture here? Over the past couple of decades, we have witnessed some significant shifts in the nature of consumer and media cultures around how we live and manage our everyday domestic and personal lives, from what we eat, to how we dress, exercise, decorate our homes, manage our pets and children, and govern our existential and psychological selves. Ten years ago, writing about popular primetime lifestyle advice shows such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and The Naked Chef, I noted the trend toward discussing food, diet, grooming, and personal relationships as markers of “lifestyle.”

Used today as a descriptor for everything from New Age religious choices to sports drinks, lifestyle is a term that has become so ubiquitous in contemporary consumer culture it is increasingly hard to pin down. At the same time, its very ubiquity attests to the way it has now become a form of everyday, “commonsense.” Representing far more than just a convenient new way for the industry to re-label popular advice media, lifestyle instead has become one of the dominant frameworks through which we understand and organize contemporary everyday life (Lewis 2008a).

If the generation of people we now refer to as baby boomers and their seniors once lived in a world where options around how to live were relatively limited and structured around tradition, particularly for woman and working-class or regular middle-class families, in the contemporary Global North it seems we have many more opportunities to make “choices” around how we conduct and manage our daily lives, at least at the level of consumer and commodity culture. Linked to a shift to late liberal models of politics and governance and the growing privatization of the spheres of health, education, and social support more broadly, over the past two to three decades, then, we have seen this idea of a choice-based notion of lifestyle become key to our lives both in the Global North and more recently parts of the South. Accompanying this ideological focus on the lifestyle consumer as an agent capable of making significant personal change through “informed” choices around diet, health and well-being, family life and parenting, career focus and fulfilment, etc., we have witnessed the rise and mainstreaming of lifestyle advice and lifestyle media, with a wide range of lifestyle gurus and social influencers from celebrity chefs to health and well-being experts like Jamie Oliver seeking to offer people new blueprints for living in a so-called “post-traditional” world.

Overall, the rise of lifestyle culture can be seen to emerge out of a complex conjuncture of social, cultural, and economic factors. Linked to the growing push toward modes of reflexive, consumer-based individualism, the contemporary focus on creativity, lifestyle, and aesthetics is also seen to be increasingly articulated to a neo-liberal culture of self-governance and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Why Digital Food?
• 1 From Culinary Aesthetics to Phatic Food: Food Photography on Instagram and Facebook
• 2 Eating and Cooking Online: Cultural Economies of Video Sharing from YouTube to Youku
• 3 From Naked Chefs to Epic Bros: The Rise of Food Masculinities Online
• 4 Cooking in the Cloud: Domestic and Digital Ecologies of Meal Sharing
• 5 The Shopping Complex: Food, Ethical Consumption and Apptivism
• 6 Doing Food Politics in a Digital Era
• Digital Food Futures: From Smart Kitchens to Culinary Commons
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint