Framing Food in the News: Still Keeping the Politics out of the Broccoli

ABSTRACT

How food is produced and consumed matters for both our health and our societies’ ecological footprint. Yet, food practices are a topic at the margins of news coverage and journalism studies. We narrow this research gap by exploring the framing of food in the news. Combining automated and manual content analysis, we study 10,022 articles published in elite newspapers from Germany, the United States (U.S.) and India (2016–2018). Food-related terms are frequently mentioned, but rarely become the main topic of an article. We identified 23 topics associated with five broader frames. The frames Pleasure and Art of Eating and Drinking and Body and Health are most prominent, while other aspects as articulated in the frames Sustainable Living, and Rituals and Traditions as well as Convenience and Price are neglected. U.S. newspapers tend to focus on recipes and restaurant reviews. Indian newspapers highlight health issues and weight loss. In Germany, there was less coverage focusing on food, but with a more even attention to different frames. Food reporting remains to be apolitical, a diversity of food choices is covered – with subtle disregard for questions of sustainability.

KEYWORDS:

• food
• journalism
• framing
• topic modelling
• international
• comparative research

Acknowledgements

This paper is part of the research conducted in the context of the Working Group Sustainable Lives at the Center for Sustainable Society Research (CSS) at Universität Hamburg. We would like to thank Radhika Mittal who coordinated the working group in its founding years and conducted a qualitative content analysis that was instrumental as a building block for this paper. Furthermore, we would like to thank the reviewers for this manuscript for the constructive and inspiring feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).