Food Media and Communication

Keywords: Food media, Platformization, Agency, Media politics, Popular Culture

Over the past two decades, media and popular culture have been inundated with images of food. Among these, there has been a significant increase in attention to sustainability, communicated through the rhetoric of 'happy farming', 'rural idylls', or conversely, 'agro-apocalypses'. In public debates on media power, some commentators and writers argue that these images have trivialized 'gastro critique' (also known as critical thinking in gastronomy) by offering little guidance to envision a way out of the crisis beyond individualistic slogans such as "vote with your spoon" or "do it yourself". Others hold more ambivalent opinions, emphasizing the potential of popular culture - including food media - to enrich people's awareness and political engagement and even encourage processes of policy change. The advent of digital platforms in media consumption has also ignited similar debates on the potential of media technology to enrich food culture. Some researchers argued that this evolution of media environments and the advent of social media, encompasses the merging of food consumption and production, expanding into a more comprehensive ecosystem. With a generally optimistic tone, these writers claimed that ‘platformization’ introduces novel modes of individual and social engagement, reshaping food activism, movements, and overall political implications of one's own action. With a more pessimistic tone, other researchers argued instead that the ‘platformization of culture’ has expanded the commodification of ‘the social’, reducing rather than increasing users and audiences’ autonomy and potential for empowerment. This stream aims to explore both debates about narrative strategies and about technological change in food media and communication, offering insights from a diverse range of national and regional contexts.

Potential topics might include:

• Contemporary food representations in popular culture

• Food narratives in food television

• VoD platforms and new experiential environments for food media

• Agency and structure relationships in food communication

• Platformization and big data in digital food communication

• The politics of algorithmic culture and consumer’s food choices