Digital Food

Tania Lewis offers the first critical account of the impact of digital information, media and communication technologies on the realm of food. Encompassing everything from provisioning and consumption, farming and food marketing, activism and food politics, 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; the role and impact of digitization on social relations. From home cookery to restaurant-going, from farming to food politics, the world of food is being quietly colonised by an array of electronic devices, online content and information, and communication technologies. Meanwhile, the realm of the digital has been invaded by all things food-related, from endless food snapshots on Facebook and Instagram to the rise of Youtube cooking and food channels, the fastest-growing genre on the video-sharing service. Yet there has been surprisingly little written on the growing entanglements between the digital and the world of food. At the forefront of critical new research, and written with the student readership in mind, this is a fantastic text for scholars interested in media studies, cultural studies, food studies and cultural geography.