Tania Lewis - Digital Food: From Paddock to Platform

Contemporary Food Studies: Economy, Culture and Politics

Series Editors: David Goodman and Michael K. Goodman

ISSN: 20581807

This interdisciplinary series represents a significant step toward unifying the study, teaching, and research of food studies across the social sciences. The series features authoritative appraisals of core themes, debates and emerging research, written by leading scholars in the field. Each title offers a jargon-free introduction to upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students in the social sciences and humanities.

Kate Cairns and Jose Johnston, Food and Femininity

Peter Jackson, Anxious Appetites: Food and Consumer Culture

Philip H. Howard, Concentration and Power in the Food System: Who Controls What We Eat?

Terry Marsden, Agri-Food and Rural Development: Sustainable Place-Making

Emma-Jayne Abbots, The Agency of Eating: Mediation, Food, and the Body

Henry Buller and Emma Roe, Food and Animal Welfare

Digital Food

From Paddock to Platform

Tania Lewis

This book began its life in Tasmania. In 2016, fellow media studies scholar Michelle Phillipov held a conference on The New Politics of Food and the Australian Media in the coastal city of Hobart where I had the pleasure of sharing keynote duties with Mike Goodman. Speaking as I did on the topic of food and the digital, Mike in his wisdom thought it would make a good book length topic and encouraged me to write a proposal for his and David Goodmans Contemporary Food Studies series with Bloomsbury. Three years down the track I am supremely grateful for Mikes early encouragement and for his and Davids generous shepherding of the project from go to whoa. One couldnt wish for better critical but supportive readers when it comes to Mike Goodman and David Goodman. Thanks also to Miriam Cantwell and Lucy Carroll at Bloomsbury for their highly professional guidance and support.

I am indebted to the generosity of a number of academic colleagues who gave me feedback on the manuscript including Ramon Lobato, Edgar Gmez Cruz, Kelly Donati, Kathleen Lebesco, Jonatan Leer, Daniel Palmer and Yolande Strengers. Thanks to the American University of Paris for hosting my research leave in Paris in 2018 and to my always supportive boss, the Dean of my School Lisa French, for recognizing my need to take leave to complete this book. I would also like to thank my wonderful colleagues in the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC), and in particular the leadership team in DERCCo-Director Ellie Rennie and HDR Director, Ramon Lobato, and the other members of the DERC executive, Anne Harris, Anna Hickey-Moody, Jaz Choi and Rowan Wilken, all of whom kindly took turns to run the Centre during my absence in 2018, supported by Melody Ellis, Else Fitzgerald and more recently Yee Man Louie. Thanks to Larissa Hjorth, Robert Crawford, Ralph Horne and Julian Thomas for their collegiality and wisdom. Im also grateful for the support of Melody Ellis who was a kindly critical guide and one-woman personal cheer squad with this project! Thanks also to Andrew Glover for research support and to Allister Hill who did some early literature review work for the book. Id also like to express my thanks to the various peoplefrom food Instagrammers, bloggers and YouTubers to food activists and producerswho kindly permitted me to use their photos in this book.

Finally, I wouldnt have gotten through the research and writing process without my partner Frdric Rauturier. While I was writing about affective labor and the gender divide in the kitchen, he was doing all the cooking and cleaning while also juggling nappies, baby bottles and a new-ish baby. As a French-born millennial male and avid media consumer, he also offered a helpful alternative perspective to my antipodean-shaped, Generation X worldview. Lastly, to the ever delightful (now toddler) Chlothanks for regularly bringing me down from my writing cloud.

This book is about the intersection between food and the digital realm. The phrase digital food tends to conjure up visions of a futuristic automated present in which restaurant goers are served by robots, smart fridges order our groceries, 3D printers produce perfectly sculptured delicate culinary creations, and wearables monitor and anticipate our personal dietary needs. For most of us though the daily realities of how food and the digital world come together is much more mundane. The key images that probably best sum up todays engagements with the culinary in a digital era are the home cook using their (bacteria laden) smartphone in the kitchen to check for recipes, the restaurant goer painstakingly trying to capture the best image of their meal to post to social media, the tourist using a GPS-based restaurant app to find a good local caf for breakfast or the time-pressured parent ordering dinner for the family from an online restaurant service (a middle-class parent recently complained to me that their teenagers concept of cooking for the family essentially involved ordering Uber Eats).

Digital Food is a book about food and everyday life in a world in which digital devices and digital content have become not only central to much of what we do but are also largely invisible and taken for granted. Digital is in some ways now just a shorthand term for the contemporary moment. In other words, for better or for worse, it has become a thoroughly normative concept to the point where it is hard to imagine a future that doesnt involve complete connectivity and the automation of every aspect of our daily lives.

At first glance then the topics of food and the digital might seem like odd bedfellows. When we think of pressing contemporary food issues we tend to think of big picture concerns around public health, sustainable agriculture, food safety and security, and geopolitics and the future of global food systems. Or the emergence of critical counter-movements to a technologized future as reflected in the now-worldwide Slow Food (cittaslow) community and the rise of strongly localized approaches to food production and distribution, such as urban farming, backyard permaculture, community-supported agriculture and the revitalization of small-scale agrarianism.

Meanwhile the key themes circulating in discussions about the digital realmautomation, AI, blockchain, big data, copyright, privacy, trust and data security, identity and digital citizenship and inclusion, e-waste, and the monitoring, surveillance, and monetization of digital connectivity through algorithmic processesseem a world away from our daily engagements with grocery shopping, cooking, and eating. As I show in this book, however, our everyday food practices and experiences have become thoroughly entwined with the wider ethics and politics of digital media and technology.

Over the past decade the world of food, from grocery shopping and home cookery to restaurant going, and food politics, has been quietly colonized by the digital (see Figure I.1). Meanwhile, the realm of the digital has been invaded by all things food related. Indeed, it is hard to imagine social media platforms such as Instagram without the highly stylized and curated images of home- and restaurant-cooked meals that circulate daily through our feeds, while for many of us, going out to eat now habitually involves assessing a caf or restaurants ratings and reviews on Yelp and related apps. Similarly, YouTube would not be what it is today without its huge array of cooking and food channels, from creative food hacks and how-to cookery shows shot in peoples homes around the world, to the live, interactive broadcasts (or