Digital Food Activism is a new edited volume that investigates how digital media technologies are transforming food activism and consumers' engagements with food, eating, and food systems. Bringing together critical food studies, economic anthropology, digital sociology, and science and technology studies, Digital Food Activism offers innovative multi-disciplinary analyses of food activist practices on social media, mobile apps, and hybrid online and offline alternative spaces. With chapters that focus on diverse digital platforms, food-related issues, and geographic locales, this volume reveals how platforms, programmers, and consumers are becoming key mediators of the mandate of food corporations and official governing actors. Digital Food Activism thereby suggests that emerging forms of activism in the digital era hold the potential to reshape the ethics, aesthetics, and patterns of food consumption.

This book offers the first methodological synthesis of digital food studies. It brings together contributions from leading scholars in food and media studies and explores research methods from textual analysis to digital ethnography and action research. In recent times, digital media has transformed our relationship with food which has become one of the central topics in digital and social media. This spatiotemporal shift in food cultures has led us to reimagine how we engage in different practices related to food as consumers. The book examines the opportunities and challenges that the new digital era of food studies presents and what methodologies are employed to study the changed dynamics in this field. These methodologies provide insights into how restaurant reviews, celebrity webpages, the blogosphere and YouTube are explored, as well as how to analyse digital archives, digital soundscapes and digital food activism and a series of approaches to digital ethnography in food studies. The book presents straightforward ideas and suggestions for how to get started on one’s own research in the field through well-structured chapters that include several pedagogical features. Written in an accessible style, the book will serve as a vital point of reference for both experienced researchers and beginners in the digital food studies field, health studies, leisure studies, anthropology, sociology, food sciences, and media and communication studies.

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.

This book explores the interrelations between food, technology and knowledge-sharing practices in producing digital food cultures. Digital Food Cultures adopts an innovative approach to examine representations and practices related to food across a variety of digital media: blogs and vlogs (video blogs), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, technology developers’ promotional media, online discussion forums and self-tracking apps and devices. The book emphasises the diversity of food cultures available on the internet and other digital media, from those celebrating unrestrained indulgence in food to those advocating very specialised diets requiring intense commitment and focus. While most of the digital media and devices discussed in the book are available and used by people across the world, the authors offer valuable insights into how these global technologies are incorporated into everyday lives in very specific geographical contexts. This book offers a novel contribution to the rapidly emerging area of digital food studies and provides a framework for understanding contemporary practices related to food production and consumption internationally.

Tania Lewis offers the first critical account of the impact of digital information, media, and communication technologies on the topic of food. Lewis critically analyzes how our relationship to food consumption, production, and politics is being re-mediated through digitally connected electronic devices, practices and content. By drawing together the world of food and the digital, the book speaks to a number of pressing contemporary themes including the tensions around digital engagement in increasingly commercialized spaces; the changing nature of politics in a social media context; the growing naturalization of digital devices and related practices of data monitoring; and the role and impact of digitization on social relations. At the forefront of critical new research, and written with a student readership in mind, this text is essential for scholars interested in media studies, cultural studies, food studies, and cultural geography.

This book explores the new theoretical and political questions raised by food TV’s digital transformation. Bringing together analyses of food media texts and platform infrastructures—from streaming and catch-up TV to YouTube and Facebook food videos—it shows how new textual conventions, algorithmic practices, and market logics have redrawn the boundaries of food TV and altered the cultural place of food, and food media, in a digital era. With case studies of new and rerun television and emerging online genres, Digital Food TV considers what food television means at the current moment—a time when on-screen digital content is rapidly proliferating and televisual platforms and technologies are undergoing significant change. This book will appeal to students and scholars of food studies, television studies, and digital media studies.

This volume interrogates the intertwining of the local and the digital in environmental communication. It starts by introducing a wave metaphor to tease out major shifts in the field, and situates the intersections of local places and digital networks in the beginning of a third wave. Investigations that feature the centrality of place and digital communication platforms show how we today, as researchers and practitioners, communicate the environment. Contributions identify the need for critical approaches that engage with the wider consequences of this changing media landscape, unpacking local and global tensions in environmental communication research. This empirical case study collection from different parts of the world shows that environmental activists and citizens creatively use digital technologies for campaign purposes. It identifies new environmental communication challenges and opportunities, as well as practices, of environmental activists, NGOs, citizens and local communities, in the fight for social and environmental justice.

Systemic Inequality, Sustainability and COVID-19 provides an opportunity to engage in a critical dialog on the consequences and interactions of COVID-19 with social inequalities and environment management.

The food industry has seen many changes over the last several decades — new technologies have been introduced into the way we cook, manufacture, and present food products to consumers. Digital gastronomy, which combines new computational abilities such as three-dimensional (3D) printing with traditional food preparation, has allowed consumers to design and manufacture food with personalized shapes, colours, textures, and even nutrition. In addition to the personalization of food, 3D printing of food has other advantages such as promoting automation in food preparation and food sustainability through 3D-printed cell-based meats and alternative proteins. Entire meals can be constructed just by 3D food printing alone.In this textbook, the background, principles, commercial food printers, materials, regulations, business development, as well as the emerging technologies and future outlook of 3D food printing are explored. In terms of 3D-printed materials, four main classes are reviewed: namely, desserts / snacks (comprising dairy products, chocolate, sugars, and dough), fruits / vegetables, meats /alternative proteins, and pharmaceuticals / nutraceuticals.This textbook has been written to offer readers keen to learn more about 3D food printing in terms of concepts, processes, applications, and developments of 3D food printing. No prior knowledge is required. At the end of each chapter, a set of problems offers undergraduate and postgraduate students practice on the main ideas discussed within the chapter. For tertiary-level lecturers and university professors, the topic on 3D food printing can be associated to other subjects in food and nutrition, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical sciences, and food engineering.Related Link(s)

As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas. The first part, Technologies and Connections, historicises concepts like network, media convergence, multimedia, interactivity and artificial intelligence. The second one is related to Agency and Politics and explores global governance, datafication, fake news, echo chambers, digital media activism. The last one, Users and Practices, is finally devoted to telepresence, digital loneliness, amateurism, user generated content, fandom and authenticity. The book aims to shed light on how concepts emerge and are co-shaped, circulated, used and reappropriated in different contexts. It argues for the need for a conceptual media and communication history that will reveal new developments without concealing continuities and it demonstrates how the analogue/digital dichotomy is often a misleading one.