Digital food: from paddock to platform

ABSTRACT

This article examines the growing entanglements between the digital and the world of food while suggesting that food is a particularly generative space through which to understand the evolving but often hidden role of the digital in our everyday lives. The article starts by examining food photography on social media before discussing the role of ordinary people as participants in online food culture via video-sharing platforms such as YouTube. Mapping the shift from web 2.0’s dreams of creativity and sharing to the monetisation of digital food communities, section 3 focuses on food politics, and ‘the antinomies of connectivity’. The final section discusses big food players and their use of social media in an era of dataveillance and big data. It argues that ‘food citizens’ need to have an awareness of the commercial logics that support the communicative ecologies in which we increasingly engage with food and lifestyle practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital food
• social media
• online activism
• online cookery
• digital food literacies

Introduction

Millennials are bringing their I-want-to-do attitudes and their mobile devices into the kitchen. They’re turning to mobiles at every phase of the cooking journey – deciding what to make, learning how to prepare it, and actually cooking or baking – and smart brands are there to help in each micro-moment. Millennials ask lots of questions in the kitchen, but maybe none more frequently than: ‘Where do I put my phone so I don’t spill on it?’ (Cooper, 2015)

Digital solutions will help put a mix of high-tech and low-tech ingredients on our plates, and sooner than we think. This is what’s in store for us […] we’ll go from being growers to engineers. You’ll still need to garden, but there’ll be more and more technology to rely on (VPRO Documentary, 2015).

Although it may seem the most unlikely of catalysts, digital technology is jogging our memories of real food and agrarian culture [my emphasis]. We may be going back to the land, but many of us are bringing our laptops and smartphones (Hatfield & Layne, 2008).

The three quotes above – one from a ‘think with Google’ consumer trends blog, one gleaned from a documentary on ‘digital food’ made by Dutch broadcaster VRPO, and the third taken from a book aimed at the sustainable food community – speak to the changing (and potentially changing) nature of our engagements with food today in an increasingly digital world. From home cookery to restaurant going, from farming to food politics, the world of food is being quietly colonised by an array of electronic devices, online content, and information and communication technologies. Meanwhile, the realm of the digital has been invaded by all things food related, from endless food snapshots on Facebook and Instagram to the rise of YouTube cooking and food channels, the fastest-growing genre on the video-sharing service according to Google (Kantchev, 2014).

The digital ‘turn’ more broadly in the lives of many people on the planet has inspired a huge amount of commentary and reflection. Numerous studies have sought to engage with the emergent role of the digital in shaping our everyday domestic lives, interpersonal relations, and consumer practices (Bakardjieva, 2006; Haddon, 2016; Hjorth, 2009; Lally, 2002; Morley, 2006; Wilding, 2006), while a number of large-scale accounts have emerged examining the digitisation of work, society and politics, governance, democracy, and citizen engagement (Chayko, 2016; Fuchs, 2010; Miller, 2011; Miller & Slater, 2000; Papacharissi, 2010; Van Dijck, 2013). Yet, for all of this critical scholarship, there has been surprisingly little written on the growing entanglements between the digital and the world of food (exceptions include the pioneering work of Rousseau, 2012; Choi, Foth, & Hearn, 2014; De Solier, 2013, 2018; and Lupton, 2018).

This article seeks to sketch out then what is still a very new and emerging field. Aside from the importance of recognising the complex entanglements between the digital realm and food, eating, growing, and retail today, I want to make the argument that food is a particularly generative space through which to understand the complex evolution and impact of the digital realm in both our everyday lives and public and political cultures more broadly. On the one hand, food purchasing, cooking, and eating, like our mobile phone use, are profoundly ordinary and in many ways invisible – tied to the repetitive habits, rituals, and rhythms of daily life. On the other hand, both the realm of food and the space of digital connectivity have become highly politicised and contested spaces. If, as US farmer-activist Wendle Berry (2009) has famously said, ‘eating is an agricultural act’, then the seemingly banal habit of checking one’s smartphone similarly triggers a complex network of political, economic, environmental, and governmental associations.

This article offers a cook’s tour, so to speak, of the realm of digital food – from the banal and the everyday to the political potentials and limitations of culinary and agricultural connectivity – as a way of grounding and materialising our growing food-related engagements with digital media. The article is structured accordingly: the first section examines the role of the digital realm and food in relation to lifestyle and consumption. Discussing the rise of food photography on social media, I emphasise both its role as a marker of lifestyle and consumer identities and the way shared food snapshots enact and embody intimate and distant relationships and forms of sociality. In the next section on cultural economies of participation, I consider the growing role of ordinary people as key participants in online food culture in terms of the rise of ‘prosumerism’ via video-sharing platforms such as YouTube. I then map the shift from web 2.0’s dreams of connection, creativity, and sharing to the growing monetisation of digital food communities. In the third section of the article, I turn to questions of food politics and the digital, and what I term ‘the antinomies of connectivity’. Here I examine the constraints and affordances of digital connectivity in relation to food politics and food activism. The final section discusses the growing role of big food players in social media and the limits of data sharing and so-called informational transparency in an era of data monitoring and big data. I conclude by arguing that food citizens increasingly require a critical media literacy characterised by a reflexive awareness of the coded infrastructures and often commercial logics and interdependencies that support the information and communication ecologies in which we increasingly engage with everyday food and lifestyle practices.

Food photos: from conspicuous pro-sumption to digital sociality

One key way in which ‘digital food’ is becoming a routinised part of our everyday lives is through the production and circulation of amateur food imagery online. The democratisation of professional-quality digital photographic technology alongside easily accessible platforms for image sharing has seen an explosion in the social use of amateur photography, with the internet and in particular social media saturated with selfies and endless images of people’s pets (Gómez & Thornham, 2015; Murray, 2008). Similarly, in recent years Facebook has seen a large amount of food images being uploaded (Miller & Sinanan, 2017), with snapshots of restaurant meals and food tourism increasingly competing with domestic images of children’s birthday cakes, home-grown produce, and home-made preserves, as well as people’s own increasingly professional home-cooked culinary creations.

Outside of the home, the now ubiquitous practice of artfully taking pictures of one’s food and uploading it to social media before actually eating it (or ‘eating and tweeting’) has driven some restaurants to go so far as to ban the use of mobile phone photography by their customers (Eccles, 2014). Despite the odd outbreak of restaurateur rage, this phenomenon has expanded and diversified. The growing use of mobile photo-sharing services such as Instagram (Titcomb, 2015) has seen a rise in everyday amateur food photography (Hu, Manikonda, & Kambhampati, 2014).

One fairly evident way we might understand this circulation of food imagery is as a performance of lifestyle, aesthetics, and good taste. Holmberg, Chaplin, Hillman, and Berg (2016), for instance, in their analysis of how adolescents communicate food images using Instagram, found that users often imitated the aesthetics of food advertising and cookbooks. Personally crafted and curated food images here can be seen to represent both a kind of conspicuous culinary consumption and a performance of artisanal craft labour, a double mastery of the crafting of food and the shaping of associated imagery. Food photography might be seen then as a mode of conspicuous ‘pro-sumption’, drawing on both Toffler’s initial use of the term in relation to the ‘productive consumer’ and Bruns’ more recent use of the term ‘produser’, in relation to digital media production (Bruns, 2009).

The interest in and circulation of highly aestheticized food imagery also clearly draw and extend upon a wider, ‘lifestyled’ food-media ecology that includes globally popular reality-style cookery TV formats such as MasterChef and the rise of the celebrity chef as a major popular cultural phenomenon (Lewis, 2008, 2011, 2014; Lewis, Martin, & Sun, 2016; Rousseau, 2012). Associated with the global spread of middle-class forms of lifestyle culture, associated modes of consumerism, and forms of identity-related labour and self-branding (Hearn, 2008), ‘foodie’-oriented social media can be seen as the ultimate customised and personalised extension of and engagement with lifestyle media and culture (De Solier, 2013).

The growing prominence and ubiquity of images of people’s home cookery online provide an intimate connection between people’s domestic practices and these wider lifestyle trends (Miller & Sinanan, 2017). At the same time, technologies of geo-location provide a powerful link to people’s mobile engagements with food outside of the home – whether food shopping or dining out, as anyone who has visited a restaurant with their smartphone only to be alerted by TripAdvisor as to what they should be ordering from the menu will attest! Again, the links between leisure and identity practices and valuable, marketable forms of cultural labour are clearly evident, as I discuss further below.

While crafted food photos on Instagram and Flickr can be read as performances of personal ‘culinary capital’, that is, food-inflected cultural knowledge associated with social status (Naccarato & LeBesco, 2012), others see the imagery on social media as a marker not so much of narcissistic selfie-ism and consumer individualism but instead as an extension of practices of sociality. Anthropologist Daniel Miller, who has recently headed a large global team of researchers investigating ‘Why we post’ (UCL, 2018), argues that much of what we post image-wise is not so much about the self as it is about our relationship with others (see, for example, Miller, 2011). If we frame digital image sharing as essentially social, the images of baked birthday cakes, lovingly prepared evening meals, and brunches at a local café with friends that form our daily news updates in social media feeds can be read as performing relations of care and love towards others as much as they reflect self-identity. For Miller’s team of global anthropologists, rather than purely enacting a form of social distinction, the images that others post to your social media page and/or share with you by and large construct a shared sociality.

Share plates: cultural economies of participation and ordinary expertise

But what does ‘the social’ in social media mean here? How does, for instance, the use of social media platforms and apps to capture and share images of home cooking and dining out speak to broader digital disruptions in everyday interpersonal and social relations? José van Dijck, in The culture of connectivity, argues that ‘Within less than a decade, a new infrastructure for online sociality and creativity has emerged, penetrating every fiber of culture today’ (2013, p. 4). A key way in which this has been understood in much media and cultural studies work has been in terms of the rise of cultures of sharing and participation, and in this section, I want to briefly discuss the digital foodscape through the lens of the sharing or collaborative cultural economy (Belk, 2014).

In their book YouTube: Online video, and participatory culture (2009), Jean Burgess and Josh Green suggest that digital media engagement is no longer about consumers and producers, professionals and amateurs, non-commercial versus commercial players but instead needs to be understood in terms of ‘a continuum of cultural participation’ (2009, p. 57). Enabled by the affordances of web 2.0 and by video-conversion and -sharing technology, websites like YouTube have heralded a dramatic shift from the digital consumer as a passive downloader to an upload and exchange culture of creativity and pro-sumerism.

In my own work over the past decade on the evolution of lifestyle and lifestyle media, I have been similarly interested in the rise of a participatory culture in digital space, particularly in relation to sharing advice about managing everyday life or what I term ‘ordinary expertise’ via online platforms (Lewis, 2008, 2010; Lewis et al., 2016). In the digital foodscape, in particular, we have seen the growing role of so-called ordinary people providing advice and demonstrating expertise in food and cooking, accompanied by an increasingly blurred line between professional and celebrity chefs and amateur cooks. These displays of ordinary expertise around food are perhaps the most evident on YouTube, where food videos and food channels constitute a substantial proportion of the content and where advice videos related to cooking are, according to Google’s own research, ‘one of the top ten most popular how-to searches on YouTube’ (Cooper, 2015).

Similarly, as recent statistics of UK viewers suggest, online videos are regularly used as a source of advice, with 47% of those surveyed using YouTube when looking for information online (OFCOM, 2015). As noted earlier, according to Google, which owns YouTube, cooking and food is the fastest-growing genre on the video-sharing service (Kantchev, 2014). In ethnographic research I have been conducting with colleagues over the past few years on transformations in digital media use in Australian households, we’ve similarly noted the growing presence of laptops and other devices in the kitchen, with householders accessing recipes online and watching YouTube clips to learn how to make a dish or master a particular cooking technique (Lewis, Flore, & Tacchi, 2017).¹

While YouTube has enabled anyone with adequate internet access, skills, and resources to participate in the distribution and sharing of ordinary, amateur expertise, the practices of exchange associated with social media and collaborative platforms more broadly have of course become increasingly monetised, with YouTube known these days as much for personal branding, entrepreneurialism, and micro-celebrity (Marwick, 2015) as it is a space for advice. A highly visible example of this shift is Sorted Food, a cookery channel that began its life when a group of cooking-challenged men started making food videos for their circle of friends and that developed into what the Sorted Food app describes as

[A] global movement of over a million people who share a passion for food, friends and laughter. From absolute cooking beginners to kitchen pros, SORTEDfood is the place to learn how to cook your way, share inspiration around recipes and have a laugh with friends all around the world (www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/sortedfood/9nblggh4mg56).

One of YouTube’s top global performers in its cooking channel offerings (Kantchev, 2014), Sorted Food is supported primarily through advertising revenue and sponsorship and reflects the growing commercialisation of sharing platforms as well as an increasingly blurred line between amateurs and professionals, foodies, and fans. Furthermore, the channel illustrates Banet-Weisner’s argument about the paradoxically generative nature of brand culture (Banet-Weisner, 2013). It at once enables the building of a culture of community and sharing around food practices, drawing on the rhetoric, aesthetics, and practices of friendship and participation through zany ‘amateur’ media antics like ‘fridge cam’ TV and food-related music video parodies. At the same time, it inscribes such practices within a normative, neoliberal logic of entrepreneurialism. Indeed, it’s the ‘keeping it real’ affect-laden foodie/buddy culture performed on Sorted Food that arguably has enabled it to be so effectively monetised.

While the early days of social media seemed to represent an opening up and democratisation of media and communication systems, today digital access and interactivity come with an often-invisible price tag. As Nick Couldry argues in his call to understand and interrogate social media platforms as institutions, digitally connected sociality needs to be recognised as ‘a playground for deep economic battles about new forms of value, value generated from data, the data that we generate as we act online’ (Couldry, 2015b, p. 641). Our everyday digital food engagements can unwittingly become forms of free labour for corporations and marketers, a point I will discuss further towards the end of this article.

Food ‘apptivism’ and connected consumption

Another key realm being shaped by digital affordances is the realm of food politics.

While digital social relations are shaped and constrained by what we might term ‘compromised connectivities’, Couldry’s metaphor of the battleground speaks to the ways in which digital engagements often enact complex interplays of contestation and hegemony. For example, while social media may be increasingly commercialised, the participatory and connective affordances of digital culture have also enabled various forms of popular political engagement, from WikiLeaks to the Black Lives Matter movement. Likewise, in the arena of food politics, the digital turn has seen the rise of various forms of what Schneider, Eli, Dolan, and Ulijaszek (2018) call ‘digital food activism’, from apps oriented towards ethical consumption to digital food hubs that aim to challenge the dominance of global agri-business (Lewis & Potter, 2011).

In this section, I want to unpack what the affordances of digital connectivity might suggest for food activism and in particular alternative food movements. In what ways might digital tools and platforms be politically enabling for linking up food activists? How might we understand forms of digital political engagement in the face of the fundamental monetisation of the ‘social’ in social media? As Deborah Lupton suggests in her recent book Digital Sociology, ‘Digital technologies have created new political relationships and power relations’ (2015, p. 189), and this is no more evident than in the increasing power struggles over information, data, visibility, and transparency that mark the contemporary digital foodscape and the rise of digital forms of ‘food citizenship’ (Booth & Coveney, 2015; Gómez-Benito & Lozano, 2014; Wilkins, 2005).

A key area here is the growing use of app-driven engagement, or what has become popularly termed ‘apptivism’. In the food space, the rise of apptivism is linked to broader consumer movements concerned with the politics and ethics of commodity consumption and the rise of global agri-business, movements that have a long history in terms of consumer advocacy and anti-globalism/anti-consumerism (Binkley & Littler, 2011; Goodman, DuPluis, & Goodman, 2012). In the context of the contemporary foodscape, there has been a particular and growing concern with the disconnection between consumers and the origins of and production processes behind their food – from questions about health and food safety to concerns about animal welfare and the exploitation of producers from the Global South.

A large range of food apps have emerged that attempt to create conditions of what we might term ‘connected consumption’ but via virtual means, whether through enabling individual consumers to access information about the origins of a food product’s ingredients via a barcode scanning app or through linking consumers to a broader community of ethical citizens. A free app called OLIO is a good example of the latter. OLIO aims to connects neighbours with each other and/or with local businesses to exchange any edible surplus food they might have, with app users being able to post and share images of their unused food with the OLIO community and then search for items in the near vicinity. On its website, OLIO also emphasises the potential benefits for business of the app, noting that the act of advertising and sharing leftover food can bring in new customers, reduce food waste (and disposal costs), and also help business ‘connect with your community’. Meanwhile, the website’s pitch to consumers sums up both the potential and limitations of apptivism or what has been termed more derogatively ‘slacktivism’ (Morozov, 2009):

Here at OLIO we believe that small actions can lead to big change. Collectively, one rescued carrot or cupcake at a time, we can build a more sustainable food future (OLIO, 2017).

As per apptivism more broadly, OLIO emphasises a kind of civic-minded digital consumerism where the act of sharing leftover food is framed as a potentially collective and transformative act (‘a food sharing revolution’). If value-driven acts of consumption have become a new stage for enactments of civil society and political agency, then what US sociologist Juliet Schor (1999) has termed ‘the new politics of consumption’ has found its ultimate match in the just-in-time, connected affordances of personalised digital apps. At the same time, there are obvious limits to this kind of privatised, consumer-driven approach to ‘revolutionising’ food practices. Indeed, one could argue that such forms of apptivism in the case of food may deflect from rather than contribute to changing the reality of global agri-business by offering a quick ethical fix or salve for guilty consumers from the Global North.

While the political impact of apptivism might be questionable, what potentially collective and structural challenges might the digital turn and web 2.0 in particular offer? One key argument made by social movement theorists is that, despite the attempt by corporate players to appropriate web 2.0 for commercial ends, the digital realm can also be understood as a space of political action inhabited by a new generation of citizens who have been variously described as ‘cyberprotesters’ and ‘e-activists’ (Fuchs, 2006; Meisner, 2000; Pickerill, 2003; Van de Donk, Loader, Nixon, & Rucht, 2004). In the highly politicised and embattled area of food politics, the tools of the digital realm have enabled a range of social and political actors to come to the fore, from farmers and chefs to restaurateurs and consumers. These various players have been able to use digital platforms and social media to connect, organise, and increase the visibility of a range of food issues, from sustainability and food safety to animal rights. Interactive food documentaries online, such as A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World (http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/feeding-9-billion/), Peter Gilmore’s app for iPad (http://www.pollen.com.au/pages/peter-gilmore.html/), and ‘ethical shopping’ websites like Follow the Things, make visible and materialise the politics of production behind the ‘commodity chains’ or ‘networks’ that bring us Israeli avocados grown on illegally seized Palestinian land or bananas grown by Nicaraguan banana workers who have sued Dole, one of the biggest food corporations in the world, for exposing them to a banned pesticide linked to severe health problems (www.followthethings.com/grocery.shtml).

Food fights: from social media activism to alternative food networks

Beyond exposing hidden commodity networks and reconnecting food consumers to farmers and retailers, the digital realm offers powerful opportunities for more collectivised forms of virtual-civic engagement that aim to challenge political and business interests. As political communications theorist Zizi A. Papacharissi (2010) argues:

These commercially public spaces may not render a public sphere, but they provide hybrid economies of space where individuals can engage in interaction that is civic, among other things. These spaces are essential in maintaining a politically active consciousness that may, when necessary, articulate a sizeable oppositional voice in response to concentrated ownership regulation (p. 129).

Ginevra Adamoli’s research on the enabling role and impact of commercial social media on the progressive food movement in the United States is a generative case in point. Focusing in particular on the ‘Right to Know Rally’ of 2011, she demonstrates the ways in which a long-running online grassroots campaign led to major high-impact offline protests in which activists demanded that the US government introduce GMOs food labelling across the country (Adamoli, 2012). Initially launched by the Organic Consumers Association, an online grassroots, non-profit organisation concerned with ‘health, justice, and sustainability’ a year prior to the street protests, the campaign was picked up by a range of social actors. These figures used a variety of online tools not only to communicate, organise, and plan the protests but also to continue anti-GMO activism via social media after the offline protests were over. Adamoli’s research indicates that while social media users were aware of the limitations of Facebook in terms of privacy and data monitoring, the platform had huge benefits in terms of enabling a wide range of actors and networks to organise collectively online, resulting in significant impacts offline, including policy change (Adamoli, 2012).²

Another key area in which the intersections between food and the digital have enabled significant alternative forms of political organisation and community building is in the food and sustainability space. For instance, although still a nascent area of research, critical scholarship has begun to emerge on the role of social media in shaping and enabling various alternatives to globalised food (Hearn, Collie, Lyle, Choi, & Foth, 2014). In an article on ‘the online spaces of alternative food networks in England’, Elizabeth Bos and Luke Owen explore the way in which online space offers opportunities for reconnection with the ‘complex systems of food provisioning’ that have worked ‘to distance and disconnect consumers from the people and places involved in contemporary food production’ (2016, p. 1). Studying eight Alternative Food Networks and 21 online spaces, they examine the ways that producers and citizens alike are increasingly integrating the digital into their practices in order to enable reconnections with food and with local and rural production and to build sustainable alternatives to global agri-business. As their research on online food networks suggests, digital networks are as much about intensifications of the local and connections to place as they are about global connectivity.

A good example of this is the Open Food network (https://openfoodnetwork.org/) – which is based on open source technology developed by US food hubs – the Oklahoma Food Coop (http://oklahomafood.coop/) (Figure 1) and Local Dirt (http://localdirt.com), although Local Dirt also has a Facebook presence. Aimed at developing alternative foodscapes through linking multiple players from consumers, food hubs, and farmers to various local food enterprises, the network has been taken up by food communities around the world. The development of connected localised and regional food systems has tended to be hampered by problems of scale and networking. How do farmers and producers concerned with keeping food production local and adopting sustainable farming methods also collectivise their efforts and reach a broader range of consumers while still adhering to community and environmental drivers? Here the connective affordances of web platforms have enabled distributed local systems to expand and collectivise. Crucially, the networked spaces built here are inhabited by a range of civic and social actors from community groups and urban-based food markets to local food artisans and farmers shifting digital food activism away from atomised individual or household consumption practices to the collective construction of alternative foodways. Such practices shift food culture from industrialised, globalised long ‘chains’.

Figure 1. Front page of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative’s website (http://oklahomafood.coop/).

Complicating the culinary: social media wars, digital labour, and data divides

While the Open Food Network is based on open source software enabling it to (in part) bypass proprietary software and platforms, our predominant engagement with the digital realm today is largely through what Papacharissi characterises as ‘commercially public spaces’ (Papacharissi, 2009, p. 242). These are spaces not only owned by commercial interests but also increasingly dominated by corporate revenue flows and commercial content. In the domain of food, the top global agricultural and fast food corporations are all major users of social media (Stevens, Aarts, Termeer, & Dewulf, 2016), with many companies dedicating major staff and resources to managing their social media presence and strategies, while Facebook and increasingly Instagram draw a significant proportion of their revenue from online advertising (Johnson, 2017).

Controversial agricultural players such as Monsanto, recently described by Bloomberg as America’s ‘Third-Most-Hated Company’ (Bennett, 2014) for instance, have invested heavily in a social media presence. Where Monsanto’s internet outreach director once characterised the internet as ‘a weapon’, Monsanto’s more recent social media-based tactics have been rather softer, with the company attempting to reframe public debate around biotech along sustainability lines.

Rebranding itself via Twitter using discourses of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘biological conservation’, Monsanto has sought to counter the attacks of anti-GMO activists through a ‘be part of the conversation’ campaign, in which members of the public are invited to ask questions about the company and its practices. On Monsanto’s ‘The conversation’ webpage (https://monsanto.com/news-stories/conversation/), we see images of various members of the public, along with thought bubbles containing questions and answers, positioning the company as an interlocutor in a larger public dialogue around nutrition, health and safety, population growth, and environmentalism (see Monsanto, 2015; Peekhaus, 2010).

While few GMO critics are likely to buy Monsanto’s repositioning itself via social media as a sustainable corporate citizen, Monsanto’s use of Twitter to suggest it is in open interactive dialogue with the community foregrounds what Couldry describes as the seductive ‘myth of natural collectivity’ (Couldry, 2015a, p. 620) associated with social media. Here, communicative power asymmetries appear magically erased by the apparently flat networks that circulate the tweets of teenagers and those of global corporate CEOs. In reality, the new media landscape, although in many ways representing a radical break with so-called ‘legacy’ or old media companies, is still nevertheless dominated by corporations that seek to channel, control, and above all monetise the everyday connective practices of digital ‘audiences’.

Any discussion of questions of power and inequity in the new digital food era must necessarily account for two by-products of social media interactivity that are key targets for corporate players: consumer labour and the traces of data left behind by social interactions. While new media platforms have afforded foodies and amateur chefs significant capacity to create and share content, the flipside of this is that digital engagement, whether through the act of demonstrating one’s dining preferences through apps or through producing food videos for YouTube, provides lifestyle data and ‘free labor’ (Terranova, 2000) to commercial players. As van Dijck argues, while social media initially emerged out of a participatory, community-based ethos of creativity and exchange: ‘Connectivity quickly evolved into a resource [my emphasis] as engineers found ways to code information into algorithms that helped brand a particular form of online sociality and make it profitable in online markets’ (Van Dijck, 2013, p. 4).

In this space, people’s everyday domestic food interactions and practices – whether using digital apps to trace the ethical credentials of food products or searching for gluten-free recipes online – can be potentially converted into valuable commodities that are exchanged between digital media companies and advertisers (Fuchs, 2010). This creeping commercial exploitation of digital interactivity is also evident, for instance, in the subtle exploitation of daily life practices and experience, which is often referred to as the ‘experience economy’ (Pine & Gilmore, 1999; World Economic Forum, 2016). An example in the domestic space is the rise of ‘free’ life guides such as whatscook, a ‘service’, sponsored by the mayonnaise manufacturers Hellmann, that connects people to real chefs via WhatsApp. Aiming to help householders cook meals based on what’s in their fridge, the commercial subtext behind such services, aside from the positioning of Hellmann as a benevolent provider from free advice, is the collection of personalised data on food and lifestyle preferences that advertisers then use to target their advertisements.

As Lupton contends ‘[i]n the context of the digital data economy, digitised information about food – and eating-related habits and practices are now accorded commercial, managerial, research, political and government as well as private value’ (2018, p. 74). While the much-discussed arena of big data and data mining is a space in which theoretically anyone can play, it is the big commercial food players who are often best placed to use data to their own ends. Thus, if the ‘digital divide’ was once framed primarily in terms of access, the structural issues and inequities we increasingly face in a digital environment are around control and management of data (Rodino-Colocino, 2006; see also Selwyn, 2004), or what Mark Andrejevic calls the ‘big data divide’ (2014). As Stevens et al. (2016) point out in an article on social media and agro-food:

The food and beverage industry is at the forefront of interactive marketing and new types of digital targeting and tracking techniques. Food retailers have taken over social media marketing companies to gain more data and enhance their marketing strategies (p. 103).

Linked to concerns over the capture and commercialisation of personal data and everyday digital labour is the rise of what information technology expert Roger Clarke has termed dataveillance (Clarke, 1988), that is, the use of digital forms of connectivity to monitor either individuals or groups. Perhaps the most concerning uses of data surveillance for political actors such as food or environmental activists lie in the power for potential data abuse held by internet service providers, who not only keep tabs on internet traffic but who, without adequate controls, might also have the capacity to monitor, censor, sell, or block content.³

Communications surveillance of course goes much further than corporations and governments monitoring internet use. While this article cannot discuss the broader emerging ecology of data-linked devices and bodies, the rise of a range of technologies such as RFID tagging and geo-location enables constant connectivity and monitoring. In the food arena, this is played out in the consumer space where GPS enables apps such as TripAdvisor to make restaurant and menu recommendations based on our locations and previous preferences. At a broader level, such processes also tap into a concern with quantifying and managing the social and life itself (Lupton, 2015; Mansell, 2016). In the realm of agro-business, the rise of ‘smart’ farming for instance is seeing the use of geo-tagged animals, data-driven production techniques, and the use of drones to monitor crops and animals over large distances (Logan, 2017). Digital food here is increasingly about the rationalisation and efficiency of systems – with potential benefits in terms of food production and food ‘security’ – but often at the cost of environmental and ethical scrutiny.

Conclusion: decoding digital food

As we’ve seen, the realm of what I’ve termed ‘digital food’ is a far from unified space but consists of a range of fields of practices, technologies, discourses, and values, which, like the digital environment itself, are evolving as we speak. Given the potential breadth of the field, this article has necessarily represented a rather superficial tour of the digital food menu; for instance, the culture of food blogging (De Solier, 2013), the increasing use of digital technology by farmers (Hatfield & Layne, 2008), the growth of app-driven food reviews (Rousseau, 2012), the rise of 3D food printing (Khot, Lee, Aggarwal, Hjorth, & Mueller, 2015), and the growing use of digital technology for dietary and obesity issues (Choi & Graham, 2014; Keeney, Yeh, Landman, Leung, & Navder, 2012) are all important aspects of the growing links between food and the technology that I have not had the space to cover in this article.

The hugely diverse ways in which food-related practices are articulated via new media platforms (from open source food hubs to Instagram-ed culinary creations) indicate the difficulty of offering easy generalisations about the capacities and constraints of the digital realm for everyday food engagements. Nevertheless, the world of digitally mediatised food is framed by certain key tensions, which speak to the broader experience of digital sociality today, that is, the price of communicability, community, and connection (or ‘compromised connectivity’ as I’ve termed it), and the dialectic of visibility/invisibility that lies at the heart of encoded and data-ised social relations.

Much of the digital activism oriented towards food consumers for instance is concerned with making visible the origins and conditions of global food production via apps, interactive online platforms, or blockchain technology (Coff, Barling, Korthals, & Nielsen, 2006; Godsiff, 2016). Political engagement and empowerment here are equated with informational transparency (Choi & Graham, 2014), with the notion that through revealing the elongated commodity chains or networks that underpin the workings of global agri-business, we can challenge those processes and practices.

However, as noted, the digitisation of food through commercial apps like whatscook can intervene in our relationship to food in ways that are often hidden from view, embedded in an increasingly invisible algorithmic logic and culture. As Stevens et al. put it, while ‘organizations in the agro-food system are challenged by the disruptive effects of erratic information flows, mass self-communication on social media also generates data for new forms of governance’ (2016, p. 103). The somewhat utopian vocabulary of visibility, transparency, and connection then needs to be tempered by questions of governance and control, with a focus on understanding the social, cultural, and political economies of digital data processes and infrastructures. As critical technology gurus Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (2013) argue:

technological society is no longer understandable simply in terms of the globalizing spectacle of electronic images but in the more invisible, pervasive, and embodied language of computer codes […] when codework becomes the culture within which we thrive, then we must become fully aware of the invisible apparatus that supports the order of communications within which we live (p. 7).

To shift from being digital consumers to engaged ‘food citizens’ today (Booth & Coveney, 2015) thus requires a critical media literacy. As the Krokers suggest, critical digital citizens require an appreciation of the coded infrastructures and often commercial logics and interdependencies that support the information and communication ecologies in which we increasingly live our lives. They also need to develop what we might call a material or infrastructural literacy or consciousness. While food activists spent much of their time working to make commodity chains and material processes of food production visible to consumers, we seldom stop to think about the vast arrays of material infrastructure required to support an increasingly digitised world (Horst, 2013).

Such infrastructure triggers a larger set of political economy and governmental concerns in terms of maintenance, regulation, control, and security. But it also behoves us to ask key questions about – and to work to make visible – the potential environmental and social impacts of digital infrastructure and energy-reliant ‘smart’ communicative systems. Just as the food politics movement is seeking to build alternative sustainable ways of connecting all members of the food community, so too as increasingly digital citizens we need to build systems that take into account questions of e-waste and sustainable physical and digital infrastructure design (Maxwell & Miller, 2011), and, as I’ve argued in this article, that foreground the social, political, ethical, and material elements that underpin and constitute our daily digital engagements.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for their very useful feedback on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP130100813].

Notes on contributors

Tania Lewis

Tania Lewis is the Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre and Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Her research critically engages with the politics of lifestyle, sustainability and consumption, and with global media and digital cultures. Tania has published over 50 journal articles and chapters on these topics and is the author of Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise (Peter Lang), and co-author of Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia (Duke University Press) and Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practices (Sage). She is also the editor and co-editor of 4 collections with Routledge including Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction and Green Asia: Ecocultures, Sustainable Lifestyles and Ethical Consumption. She is currently completing a book on Food and Digital Media Practices for Bloomsbury, UK.

Notes

1. This household study of digital media use in Australia conducted from 2013 to 2017 was led by Jo Tacchi and Tania Lewis and funded by KPMG and RMIT University. Along with the lead investigators, the following researchers were involved in data collection and/or analysis at various points in the study: Dr Tripta Chandola, Dr Victor Albert, Shae Hunter, Dr Jacinthe Flore, and Dr Jolynna Sinanan.

2. As Adamoli (2012) notes, while mainstream media largely ignored the protests, this online-enabled activism has a significant policy impact, resulting in the reintroduction of three bills of the population, including the Genetically Engineered (GE) Food Right to Know Act, the GE Safety Act, and the GE Technology Farmer Protection Act.

3. See, for instance, the battles in the US over ISPs and consumer privacy regulations (Bode, 2018).