Identity and Ideology in Digital Food Discourse

Social Media Interactions Across Cultural Contexts

Alla Tovares, Cynthia Gordon, Alla Tovares, Cynthia Gordon

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350189249
• eBook ISBN: 9781350119161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Exploring food-related interactions in various digital and cultural contexts, this book demonstrates how food as a discursive resource can be mobilized to accomplish actions of social, cultural, and political consequence. The chapters reveal how social media users employ language, images, and videos to construct identities and ideologies that both encompass and transcend food. Drawing on various discourse analytic frameworks to digital communication, contributors examine interactions across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. From the multimodal discourse of a Korean livestreaming online eating show, to food activism in an English blogging community and discussions of a food-related controversy on Omani Twitter, this book shows how language and multimodal resources serve not only to communicate about food, but also as a means of accomplishing key aspects of everyday social life.

Part One

Negotiating Individual Identities in
Online Food Contexts

1

“Vegetables as a Chore”: Constructing and
Problematizing a “Picky Eater” Identity Online

Didem İkizoğlu and Cynthia Gordon

1 Introduction

Food and eating practices are loaded with symbolic, moral, and social meanings that are continually enacted and negotiated in everyday interactions, including those that occur in digital contexts. In this paper, we use computer-mediated discourse analysis (Herring 2004) to investigate posts from an online health and weight loss discussion forum where users seek and share advice about improving their diets. Specifically, we consider how posters create a “picky eater” identity for themselves (as well as for others), how they problematize this identity, and how they indicate their efforts to change their eating habits and move themselves out of this identity category. While there is no one definition of “picky eating,” it is generally understood as restricting intake to some small set of familiar foods, and a lack of willingness to try new foods, as noted by Taylor et al. (2015) and Fish (2005), among others. Such studies also observe that “picky” or “fussy” eating is usually associated with children, for instance a toddler who refuses to eat vegetables and will only eat “beige food” such as noodles with butter, and point out that picky eating is considered a problem that needs to be overcome, both for children and adults. Kauer et al. (2015) found that adult picky eaters were more likely than non-picky adults to self-identify as unhealthy eaters, for example (though Taylor et al. 2015 note that little is known about the actual health outcomes of picky eating).

In addition to health and nutrition concerns, choices related to food and eating often take on social and moral dimensions: Studies have shown that healthy foods – such as the green vegetables, fish, and whole grains that many picky eaters avoid – are associated with higher incomes (Block, Scribner & DeSalvo 2004), higher levels of educational attainment (Darmon & Drenowski 2008), and affluence (Wills et al. 2011). Further, as pointed out by Sneijder and te Molder (2006) and Karrebæk (2012), making healthy food choices is a way of demonstrating rationality, morality, and self-control. We summarize the broad cultural ideology, or what Tannen (2008) calls a “master narrative,” regarding adult picky eating as follows: Consuming a diet that consists predominantly of carbohydrates (e.g., white-flour-based baked goods, potatoes) and other bland foods (in color and/or flavor) is typically viewed as a problem that adults need to solve, and it can be solved through individual determination and active engagement. With this as a backdrop, it is not surprising that picky eaters might aim to change their dietary preferences, and therefore seek out advice and support online.

In this chapter, we examine five discussion threads that focus on adult picky eating that took place in an English-language online discussion board on a website affiliated with a popular weight-loss application (app) developed in the United States that we call “FriendInFitness” (or “FIF,” as users often abbreviate the name). Our analysis demonstrates how posters construct their identities by claiming, to use Sacks’s (1972, 1989) terms, the “membership category” label of “picky eater” and by invoking what he calls “category-bound activities,” specifically the activities of eating some (limited set of) foods while avoiding others (notably, vegetables). To do this, posters use negation, modals (especially abilitative), and negative emotion verbs. Participants’ descriptions of their strictly limited eating habits contribute to their problematizing of the picky eater identity in that they index master narratives about food and eating, especially the ideology that picky eating is expected of children but is not acceptable for adults. We also show how posters use discourse to imagine a transformation which involves a split of the current picky eater self and the desired rational self who will train the picky eater self to enjoy eating healthier and more diverse foods. To do this, they use reflexives, action verbs that presume a knowledge state difference between the agent and the patient, and the stacking of modals and modifiers to create a sense of “hyper hedging” that separates the poster’s current self from the disliked foods, as well as the poster’s current self from the desired reformed self.

In what follows, we first briefly review previous research on stances, acts, and identities, as well as research on self-transformation, including theorizing by Goffman (1971). Next, we introduce our data and methods in more detail. We then turn to the analysis, focusing on the creation of, problematizing of, and plans to escape the “picky eater” identity. In the conclusion, we address contributions our study makes to the study of food-related identities and ideologies online.

2 Background

2.1 Stances, acts, and identity categories

As Ochs (1992, 1993) demonstrates, interlocutors index identities in discourse by performing certain acts and taking up stances. She defines stance as a “display of a socially recognized point of view or attitude,” which includes displays of certainty/uncertainty and intensity, as well as type of emotion or affect toward referents (1993: 288). Sacks’s (1972, 1989) notion of membership categorization also links actions and identities. It highlights expectations people have regarding the actions performed by members of particular groups of people, or identity categories. For instance, in middle-class American culture (as in many cultures), it is expected that a person who belongs to a category of “mother” would comfort her crying baby. Thus, as Schegloff (2007: 470) describes it, by mentioning that some person engages in what Sacks calls a “category-bound activity” (such as comforting a crying baby), a speaker can “allude to” that person’s category membership (such as “mother”).

Previous research on the discourse of online support demonstrates that acts, stances, and membership categorization are important in online contexts and in regard to food. For example, Stommel and Koole (2010) show how, in order to attain membership in an online support group for people with eating disorders (most of whom are women in their study), a poster must display the point of view that she is ill; she cannot show alignment with people who glamorize disordered eating. Sneijder and te Molder (2009) demonstrate how posters in online discussions about veganism create their identities as vegans by defining vegan meals as ordinary and simple, and by constructing methods of avoiding vitamin deficiencies, such as taking supplements, as routine. In other words, they use language to “resist negative inferences about the vegan lifestyle” (Sneijder & te Molder 2009: 622), and engaging in this activity is part of what constitutes their identities as vegans.

In Gordon and İkizoğlu (2017), we draw on the concepts of membership categorization and stance to examine one thread (drawn from the same data source we use for the current analysis – a FriendInFitness discussion board). In this thread, the original poster asks for diet and health advice on behalf of her boyfriend (a phenomenon we refer to as “asking for another,” following Schiffrin’s 1993 notion of “speaking for another”). In how the original poster “asks for” her boyfriend in her opening post, she (inadvertently) evokes two identities that other posters to the thread comment on: The original poster is construed as a nagging mother-figure and her boyfriend as a childish victim of nagging. We demonstrate how two linguistic features in the original post index these identities. First, the original poster’s uses of extreme case formulations (Pomerantz 1986), realized via adjectives and adverbs, lead others to orient to her as inappropriately controlling, and to her boyfriend as immature. Second, the details she provides about her boyfriend’s diet, realized via nouns and adjectives pertaining to food and identity, link him to the category of “child” – she portrays him as a picky eater who eats items such as French fries, pancakes, plain crackers, and processed foods, while avoiding vegetables and fruit. The theme of gravitating to some foods while shunning others, and the utility of the notions of acts, stances, and membership categories in analyzing online identity construction, emerge in the threads we examine here as well.

2.2 Self transformation

As mentioned, some food-related communication involves a focus on transformation, such as changing ones’ orientation to extreme calorie restriction and other unhealthy practices (e.g., Stommel & Koole 2010). One common way that people show that they have transformed is by apologizing, and we thus draw on Goffman’s (1971) theorizing on this phenomenon. As Goffman notes, in issuing an apology, “an individual splits himself into two parts, the part that’s guilty of an offense and the part that dissociates itself from the delict and affirms a belief in the offended rule” (1971: 113). In uttering something like, “I apologize,” a woman for example splits herself as a new changed person (the “I” who issues the apology) from her past self (the “I” who misbehaved). Sidnell (2016: 2), who specifically emphasizes the idea of transformation in the context of food, uses the term “askesis” to refer to “the various techniques by which a person attempts to close the gap between what he or she is and what he or she hopes to be”; he also notes that “food choices and one’s dietary regimen are seen as part of an askesis or set of exercises by which an individual seeks to effect various transformations.” Indeed, numerous scholars have demonstrated how improving one’s diet is discursively and multimodally constructed as creating not only a healthier, but also a more moral, and more upwardly social mobile, self. For example, Gordon’s (2015) analysis of a family health makeover reality TV show demonstrates how the show’s expert nutritionist’s replacement of items from the families’ diets like pizza and fried chicken with items like bok choy and smoked salmon simultaneously serves as a nutrition and health makeover and as a means of acculturating them toward middle-class values. Underlying reality shows like this one, as well as other food-related infotainment shows (see Declercq, Tulkens & Jacobs, this volume), and indeed an entire dieting and weight-loss industry (which includes diet apps like FriendInFitness and their discussion boards), is the idea that self-transformation when it comes to food consumption is both desirable and possible.

3 Data and Methods

The threads we analyze here are extracted from the health and nutrition discussion boards hosted by the application (app) we call FriendInFitness or FIF (in this chapter, we have changed the name of the app/website and use pseudonymous usernames; see Gordon forthcoming for an in-depth discussion of this decision). The app, which was founded in the United States in 2005, facilitates, through an individual smartphone- or computer-based “logging” function, users’ recording of their food consumption (i.e., calorie intake) and exercise (i.e., calorie expenditure). The app, along with its accompanying website, which hosts message boards on topics such as “General Weight Loss and Diet Help,” “Food an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One Negotiating Individual Identities in Online Food Contexts
• 1 “Vegetables as a Chore”: Constructing and Problematizing a “Picky Eater” Identity Online
• 2 The Multidimensionality of Eating in Contemporary Information Society: A Corpus-based Discourse Analysis of Online Audience Reactions to a TV Show About Food
• 3 Mediatizing the Fashionable Eater in @nytfood #tbt Posts
• Part Two (Re)constructing and (Re)imagining Existing Food-related Language, Practices, and Actions in Digital Environments
• 4 Constructing Veganism Against the Backdrop of Omnivore Cuisine: The Use of Adjectives and Modifiers in Vegan Food Blogs
• 5 What if the Customer is Wrong?: Debates About Food on Yelp and TripAdvisor
• 6 Mukbang as Your Digital Tablemate: Creating Commensality Online
• Part Three Using Food as a Discursive and Material Resource for Online Activism and Political Engagement
• 7 Growing Online: Activist Identities in the “Grow Your Own” English Blogging Community
• 8 Food, Activism, and Chips Oman on Twitter
• 9 Parmesan and Patriotism on YouTube: Food as Ideology in Today’s Russia
• Afterword: Food, Language, and Social Media: Past, Present, and Future
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright