Food/media: eating, cooking, and provisioning in a digital world

In recent years, the world of food has been quietly colonised by an array of electronic devices, online content, and information and communication technologies. For consumers in Australian cities, digital food practices have quickly become habitual and often passed unnoticed in people’s daily lives, from ordering take away food online via platforms like Deliveroo and searching and reviewing restaurants using smart phone apps to ‘connecting’ with food producers and farmers via online food hubs.

Media content, too, has undergone complex shifts. As scholars who have had a long-standing interest both in food media and in particular food television (Lewis, 2008, 2014, 2018; Lewis & Phillipov, 2016; Phillipov, 2013, 2016, 2017), in just 10 years we have found the focus of our own work increasingly shifting towards the digital realm, reflecting broader changes in the food cultures and everyday practices of the Global North. While food programming and reality TV celebrities still hold significant cultural sway, many of their offerings converge and compete with a huge and growing amount of online food content, from the ‘serious amateurs’ and ‘ordinary experts’ of YouTube food advice channels to the micro-celebrities and media influencers of foodie lifestyle blogs and the high-end aesthetics of Instagram.

Some of the perhaps more surprising developments include the embrace of online platforms by food activists, and by local and organic food producers seeking online solutions as means to increase the scale of otherwise limited markets. Less surprising is the engagement and investment in social media and online advertising by some of the big players in agribusiness, such as Monsanto. Like all digital practices, everyday online food interactions are also prone to the same practices of surveillance and algorithmic tracking that are increasingly in the critical public spotlight.

Given the critical and timely nature of such concerns, we are very pleased to have the opportunity to publish one of the first special issues on digital food. The papers collected here are selected from a masterclass that Tania Lewis conducted on ‘Eating, cooking and provisioning in a digital world’ for an international conference, Food politics: From the margins to the mainstream, hosted by Michelle Phillipov. Many of the contributors to this special issue are senior postgraduate students, and their papers offer a range of methods, approaches, and frameworks vital to answering the new questions about food and the digital that are emerging as we eat, cook, and provision in an increasingly digital world.

The special issue begins with a paper by Tania Lewis. Introducing the concept of ‘digital food’, Lewis’s article offers a broad overview of the growing intersections between the digital realm and the world of food, from consumers sharing food photos via social media and watching ‘how to’ cooking videos on YouTube to the impact of digital connectivity on both alternative food movements and agribusiness. Discussing the complex links between the digital realm and eating, growing, and food retail and promotion, she makes the case that food is a particularly generative space through which to understand the pervasive, but often hidden, role of the digital in our lives. Here, she uses a number of critical frameworks to interrogate the role of digital food, from theories of lifestyle and consumption through to critiques of the creeping monetisation of digital food communities. Discussing what she terms ‘the antinomies of connectivity’, she explores both the political potential of online platforms for alternative food movements and the colonisation of social media and associated data flows by corporate agribusiness. She concludes by arguing that today’s ‘food citizens’ require both media and food literacies, and in particular, a reflexive awareness of the commercial logics and interdependencies that support the information and communication ecologies in which we increasingly engage with everyday food and lifestyle practices.

Like Lewis’s, Judith Friedlander and Chris Riedy’s article engages with the potential for forms of critical food activism via online platforms, focusing in this case on social media campaigns aimed at reducing meat consumption. Examining Meat Free Week Twitter campaigns over 2 years, they used interviews with a range of influencers combined with innovative social media methods (including capturing the ‘trace data’, or digital records, that influencers leave behind as they navigate the digital world, as well as tweet text and word cloud frame analysis) to examine the ways in which social media might reach a range of media publics. Discussing the limits of agenda setting theory in a new media context, they draw on ‘agenda melding’ and ‘connective action’ frameworks to develop an approach that takes into account the potential roles of celebrities and experts (at a range of levels) as crucial influencers in the social media news landscape. They argue that, while media traditionally struggle with communicating unappealing messages (such as the need to eat less meat), these social media campaigns benefitted from the role of familiar influencers who presented a more palatable combination of messages (such as environmental, animal welfare, and health issues), and who were perceived as credible, trustworthy, and personally engaged in change.

Again addressing the issue of meat consumption and social media campaigning, Emily Buddle, Heather Bray, and Rachel Ankeny discuss their research examining Australian meat consumers’ perceptions of animal welfare activism activities on social media. The authors argue that despite the ongoing normalisation of meat consumption, there has been increased media attention given to welfare in animal agriculture in recent years. They hypothesise that, within this context, stories that highlight the mistreatment of animals might resonate with a framework of ‘dominant news values’ focused on conflict and contestation. Conducting focus groups and interviews with 66 meat consumers from across Australia during 2015 and 2016, they found an overwhelmingly negative response to animal welfare activist content on social media, with most viewing animal welfare organisations as not being credible sources of information about farm animal welfare issues. They suggest that the considerable traffic generated by animal welfare activists online does not necessarily indicate the success of this content in changing the public’s views, and they argue that the content shared online by animal activists is likely to be preaching to the converted by influencing micro-publics rather than reaching a broader population of consumers.

Morag Kobez’s paper considers the impacts of digital disruption on professional media work – in this case, on the professional food critics whose day-to-day work has been transformed by the proliferation of amateur blog and online consumer reviews. Through interviews with 11 food critics working for major Australian media outlets, including Australian Gourmet Traveller, delicious, Fairfax Good Food Guide, and The Australian, she reveals profound changes to the processes, ethical frameworks, and formats of professional criticism as mainstream publications seek to mirror the conventions of popular consumer-generated reviews. With the democratisation of food criticism forcing the ‘professional’ to adopt many of the techniques of the ‘amateur’, critics have increasingly found themselves in discursive and professional struggles over their status as cultural intermediaries, which has in turn shaped a gastronomic field that is now larger, more contested, and with more diffuse boundaries than ever before.

While Kobez points to the profound professional changes wrought by digital disruption, Katherine Kirkwood’s article shows how food and media consumers often engage with the affordances of digital food in much more banal and routinised ways. Kirkwood’s data from 13 Brisbane households show that audiences have not necessarily abandoned traditional media forms, as much popular wisdom would suggest, but rather combine the traditional and the digital in a variety of ways – sometimes using an app, sometimes a cookbook, sometimes a television cooking show, depending on the culinary experience they are engaging with at the time. Guided by theories of domestication of technology, polymedia, and serious leisure, Kirkwood highlights digital technology’s gradual integration into ordinary culinary routines alongside the endurance of traditional media forms, resulting in complex negotiations between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘digital’, with new media and culinary experiences emerging as a result.

Bhavna Middha’s paper takes a somewhat different slant, discussing the development of a set of digital food methods to tackle research on sustainable food practices on a university campus. Conducting ethnographic research with university students, Middha sought a way to track her participants’ mobile food practices, which moved, in real time, between domestic spaces, university lounges, lawns and cafes, and food spaces in the surrounding city. Setting up a private social media group called ‘Selfoodie’ in collaboration with her participants, Middha encouraged participants to post images and text capturing their everyday food practices. In combination with more traditional qualitative focus group interviews, the material gleaned from social media offered insights into not just beliefs and motivations but also foregrounded often hidden everyday practices including the routinisation of convenience eating on campus.

To conclude, Nathan Taylor and Megan Keating’s paper also engages with the methodological questions necessitated by food and media’s digitisation. In this case, the authors draw upon the analytical techniques of visual art and art history to reframe and rethink key concepts through which we have typically understood contemporary digital images. Taking stock photos as their object of analysis, they point to a continuum of imaging trends between contemporary and historical food representation, and to an increasing ubiquity and ordinarisation of tropes associated with the genre of ‘food porn’. This, they suggest, indicates that the visual techniques of contemporary digital images are neither especially ‘new’, nor are they especially well captured by our current conceptual frames: new types of image classification are needed to fully capture the rapid evolutions of contemporary digital food, as well as its powers and pleasures.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank Terry Flew for his support for this special issue. We are also grateful to Jacinthe Flore for her careful administrative support, and to the authors and reviewers who contributed to the special issue. The ‘Eating, cooking and provisioning in a digital world’ masterclass and the Food politics: From the margins to the mainstream conference were supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE140101412) and the University of Tasmania.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE140101412) and the University of Tasmania.

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 or co-editor of four 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.

Michelle Phillipov

Michelle Phillipov is a lecturer in Media at the University of Adelaide. Her research explores how media interest in food is shaping public debate, consumer politics, and media and food industry practices. She is the author of three books: Media and food industries: The new politics of food (Palgrave Macmillan), Fats: A global history (Reaktion Books), and Death metal and music criticism: Analysis at the limits (Lexington Books). With Katherine Kirkwood, she is currently co-editing Alternative food politics: From the margins to the mainstream for Routledge’s Critical Food Studies series.