Geoforum
(2020) academia.edu/44295367 [published online before print: 30 January 2020[1]].
Drawing on recent debates around food, space and digital
media, this paper introduces and develops the concepts of the digital foodscape
and ‘good’ food grammars. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of
the digital platforms, discourses and personas, we investigate the ways a key
set of digital food influencers (DFIs) construct, curate and share the meanings
of good food. We first explore who these influencers are, describe what
platforms they inhabit, how the variable social media affordances work through
these platforms and the notions of good food they construct. We then focus
specifically on DFIs’ communicative practices on Twitter to analyse the core
discourses DFIs produce and those that are taken up by audiences through
re-tweets and likes as well as the re-tweeted tweets of DFIs. Overall, our
findings suggest that first, good food grammars are being constructed by rule
setters beyond the already well-established food personalities and celebrity
chefs of the UK’s foodscape. Yet, these grammars also re-inscribe a form of
white, hetero-normative middle- and upper- class privilege that produces a
particular grammars of good food. Second, different social media and digital
platforms provide space for diverse good food grammars given their variable
affordances. Twitter, in particular, is the place where the grammars of DFIs
take on non-food themes such as self-empowerment, inspiration, charity
campaigning and awareness raising. Third, the notions of good food in DFI
grammars revolve around a range of constructions, with the most elevated
related to ‘clean’ eating and/or ‘clean’ lifestyles that combined healthy,
‘free from’ diets with fitness regimes and expand DFI grammars - and ultimately
their brands – into a more holistic lifestyle brand. This paper’s initial
empirical and conceptual foray into digital foodscapes and DFIs opens up space
for further research on food and digital media within Geography and beyond.
