Digital Food Cultures

Deborah Lupton, Zeena Feldman, Deborah Lupton, Zeena Feldman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429688058
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book explores the interrelations between food, technology and knowledge-sharing practices in producing digital food cultures.

Digital Food Cultures adopts an innovative approach to examine representations and practices related to food across a variety of digital media: blogs and vlogs (video blogs), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, technology developers' promotional media, online discussion forums and self-tracking apps and devices. The book emphasises the diversity of food cultures available on the internet and other digital media, from those celebrating unrestrained indulgence in food to those advocating very specialised diets requiring intense commitment and focus. While most of the digital media and devices discussed in the book are available and used by people across the world, the authors offer valuable insights into how these global technologies are incorporated into everyday lives in very specific geographical contexts.

This book offers a novel contribution to the rapidly emerging area of digital food studies and provides a framework for understanding contemporary practices related to food production and consumption internationally.

1

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL FOOD CULTURES

Deborah Lupton

Introduction

For centuries, media portrayals have made a major contribution to the generation and reproduction of cultural meanings and knowledges associated with food: including religious tracts, medical journal articles, cookbooks, film and television series, advertisements, news reports and many other media forms. Since the emergence of personal computing, the internet and the World Wide Web in the 1980s and 1990s, digital media have offered a host of novel opportunities not only to represent food cultures, but also to create and share content. Websites, blogs and online discussion forums have been joined by social media and content sharing sites, mobile devices and apps in producing a richly diverse array of portrayals of food preparation and consumption activities. Encouraged by the mobilities and participatory ethos that has emerged in relation to new digital media, people can now use online technologies and apps to nominate their geolocation and show where they are consuming food, rank and rate restaurants, share their dietary and cooking practices and view those of others, engage in food activism, connect with communities of people who share similar dietary beliefs and locate and order foodstuffs and food-related products.

A search on the internet empire Amazon’s platform for ‘food’ returns over 300,000 results, including products available for online sale such as a multitude of cooking, nutrition and diet books, food products such as sauces, oils, tinned foods, sweets and spices, food storage containers and cooking DVDs. The major app stores Apple’s App Store and Google Play feature hundreds of food-related apps for mobile devices, including children’s games and apps for cooking and meal-planning, health-related apps providing nutrition and additives information, calorie-counting apps and those designed to support food sustainability and ethical eating practices. Restaurant-rating apps and booking and ordering apps for restaurants and fast food outlets are rapidly increasing in number and popularity. Cooking videos constitute a popular genre on YouTube, while images of food are integral to the content uploaded by users of Instagram and Pinterest. Facebook, the most popular social media site globally, offers an expansive multitude of food-related special interest groups, including those dedicated to niche eating styles, weight-loss efforts and food activism as well as for sharing recipes and cooking hints. Some of the more popular Facebook groups, such as Tasty, Buzzfeed Food and Food Network, have tens of millions of followers.

This book is the first to take up the term ‘digital food cultures’ to examine representations and practices related to food across a variety of digital media: blogs and vlogs (video blogs), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, technology developers’ promotional media, online discussion forums, and self-tracking apps and devices. As our title suggests, the contributors take a sociocultural approach in their analyses of the entanglements of people, food and digital technologies. The affordances of the various digital technologies examined in the book are important attributes. Affordances are the intentions for use that are designed into digital devices and software, or what they invite users to do (Davis & Chouinard, 2016; Nagy & Neff, 2015). These intended uses may be taken up, or alternatively may be avoided, ignored, resisted, challenged or re-interpreted. From a sociomaterialism perspective, affordances can be understood as engendering and distributing capacities for action as part of people’s encounters with digital media and devices. Technological affordances come together with human bodily affordances to generate agential capacities (Lupton, 2019a). Affordances differ between devices and software and different communities of users respond to them in different ways.

This book’s chapters emphasise the sheer diversity of food cultures available on the internet and other digital media, from those celebrating unrestrained indulgence in food to those advocating for very specialised diets requiring intense commitment and focus. Restricted diets include the paleo diet (involving limiting foodstuffs believed not to be available to Paleolithic humans, such as grains, sugars, most dairy products, vegetable oils and legumes), veganism (in which adherents avoid consuming animal products), and ‘clean’ eating (a style that focuses on the consumption of foods that are believed to be ‘natural’ and ‘uncontaminated’, such as organic foods and those that have undergone minimal processing). Contributors to this book also demonstrate the entanglements between cultures of human embodiment, identity, ethnicity and social relations with digital technologies. The chapter authors are all located in the global North: UK, Australia, New Zealand and continental Europe. While most of the digital media and devices on which they focus their attention are available and used by people across the world, the authors offer valuable insights into how these global technologies are incorporated into everyday lives in very specific geographical contexts. The book therefore simultaneously takes both a local and a global perspective of digital cultures as they operate in relation to food.

Previous research on digital food cultures

Despite the development of a large and lively body of academic literature on the sociocultural dimensions of digital technologies, the popular and ever-expanding streams of digital content concerning food production, preparation and consumption has not received a high level of attention until recently. With the exception of a book on food and social media by Signe Rousseau (2012), academic interest in digital food cultures has had something of a slow start. However, there are encouraging signs of late that attention to this topic is beginning to burgeon. De Solier (2018), Lewis (2018) and Lupton (2018a) have published overview pieces on digital food cultures. Other researchers adopting a sociocultural perspective have investigated the discursive and visual content of food blogs (Dejmanee, 2016; Hart, 2018; Lofgren, 2013), online restaurant review platforms (Kobez, 2018; Vásquez & Chik, 2015; Zukin, Lindeman, & Hurson, 2017), digital food media in the context of body weight and size (Lavis, 2015, 2017; Lupton, 2017a), apps and platforms for food-tracking (Crawford, Lingel, & Karppi, 2015; Lupton, 2018b; Niva, 2017) and food-related hashtags, GIFs and memes (Lupton, 2019b). Studies have found that the ‘food selfie’, showing food itself or people cooking, preparing to eat or in the act of eating food, is one of the most common form of selfie uploaded to social media – particularly on Instagram (Mejova, Abbar, & Haddadi, 2016; Middha, 2018).

In other research, sociotechnical imaginaries concerning the novel technology of 3D food printing (Lupton, 2017b) and consumers’ responses to these food products (Lupton & Turner, 2018a, 2018b) have been investigated. The portrayal and support of specialised eating practices such as veganism (Forchtner & Tominc, 2017; Hart, 2018; Véron, 2016), the Korean phenomenon of meokbang, involving public displays of over-eating (Donnar, 2017) and competitive eating (Abbots & Attala, 2017) in blogs, online forums and social media platforms have also received attention. Some studies have investigated the ways in which people use digital media for culinary practices (Kirkwood, 2018), food-related apps (Didžiokaitė, Saukko, & Greiffenhagen, 2018a, 2018b; Lupton, 2018b) or online weight-loss services (Niva, 2017). Researchers have further focused on the ways in which online discussion forums and social media can be used to cultivate pro-anorexia or pro-bulimia practices (Boero & Pascoe, 2012; Cobb, 2017; Ferreday, 2003; Lavis, 2017) or lead to recovery from restricted eating (Chancellor, Mitra, & De Choudhury, 2016; Ging & Garvey, 2018; LaMarre & Rice, 2017). Several previous analyses have identified the gendered dimensions of digital food cultures. These include studies on how food blogging can be a performance of postfemininity (Dejmanee, 2016), the ways in which norms of masculinity are being incorporated into veganism (Forchtner & Tominc, 2017; Hart, 2018), how a liking for chill-flavoured food is gendered on the YouTube interview show Hot Ones (Contois, 2018) and the gendered intersections of fitness, health and eating cultures enshrined in the #fitspo, #healthylife and #eatclean hashtags and calorie-counting apps (Lupton, 2017a, 2018b, 2019b).

‘Food porn’ is a term commonly used in food cultures to describe aestheticised visual or verbal representations of food that focus intensely on its desire-inducing qualities. The creation of food porn images by consumers has received the attention of several digital media researchers. They have emphasised the ways in which such portrayals have moved beyond professional photography to snaps or videos taken by people with their mobile devices (Dejmanee, 2016; Donnar, 2017; Lavis, 2017; Mejova et al., 2016; Taylor & Keating, 2018). Digital media users have taken up the term in the use of hashtags such as #foodporn and #foodgasm, particularly in social media or curation platforms that focus on visual media, such as Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr and Pinterest (Lupton, 2019b).

Researchers have demonstrated that social media influencers play an important role in drawing attention to food cultures and trends. Social media influencers are people who have accumulated a large following on social media and profit in some way from their prominent profile. Influencers may be established celebrities who go on to build their brands using social media, but also include unknowns, who establish their public profiles from canny (or in some cases, serendipitous) use of social media. These influencers are also sometimes known as ‘micro-celebrities’. They tend to become famous to small niche groups of people and construct their social media content strategically to attract and maintain this following (Abidin, 2016; Marwick, 2015). So-called ‘lifestyle influencers’ who focus on aspects of everyday life such as diet, food preparation, home production of food, food preservation and sustainable food consumption practices have in some cases attracted a large following on their blogs or platforms such as Instagram or YouTube and generated income from spin-off activities such as publishing books. One example is the young Australian woman Belle Gibson, who contended that she had successfully recovered from terminal brain cancer after following the lifestyle practices she subsequently advocated on her blog, social media accounts and a customised app that then became a book released by a major publishing company. Gibson’s claims to educate people in how to cure their cancer using dietary practices were eventually discredited, but not before she had enjoyed a lucrative following of her health advice (Lavorgna & Sugiura, 2019; Rojek, 2017).

The use of digital media and devices for food activism and sustainability initiatives has been addressed in several recent publications. These include discussions of the employment of social media by fishermen and women, chefs and food cart operators in the US state of Rhode Island (Pennell, 2016) and by animal welfare organisations (Buddle, Bray, & Ankeny, 2018). Hashtags are frequently used by activists on social media accounts to draw attention to the practices of Big Food companies (Guidry, Messner, Jin, & Medina-Messner, 2015). The edited collection Digital Food Activism (Schneider, Eli, Dolan, & Ulijaszek, 2018) includes chapters on a diverse array of digital media employed to facilitate organised efforts to change the food system and seek social justice in relation to food production and provision. These include discussions of the use of Twitter by diabetes activists (McLennan, Ulijaszek, & Beguerisse-Díaz, 2018), Mexican small coffee producers’ use of online record keeping and email to document their production and processing methods (Lyon, 2018), hashtag food activism in Australia (Mann, 2017) and activist organisations’ employment of barcode scanner apps, wikis, email newsletters, Twitter and Facebook to support ethical consumption practices (Eli, Schneider, Dolan, & Ulijaszek, 2017).

In recent times, an area of human–computer interaction (HCI) has emerged, focusing on the interactions between people, digital technologies and food preparation and consumption. It is sometimes referred to as ‘human–food interaction’ (Khot, Lupton, Dolejšová, & Mueller, 2017). ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Understanding digital food cultures
• Part 1 Bodies and affects
• Part 2 Healthism and spirituality
• Part 3 Expertise and influencers
• Part 4 Spatialities and politics
• Part 5 Food futures
• Index