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Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I explore how oil and its viscerality is used to gauge food quality and business sanitary ethics, informing choice in app-based food ordering.

Paper long abstract:

Hyderabad has been marked by dramatic changes in the last two decades with the rise of the IT industry. Increased consumption, technological sub-cultures, stress and metabolic disease is the urban landscape in which app-based food delivery, more recently, has established its stronghold. Oil — floating as a layer over the food, its rancid smell wafting from deep fried street meat, or sticking to one’s fingers as it leaks through packaging — these visceral engagements characterized experiences of app-based food ordering, revealing participant considerations of quality, health, sanitation and safety, not just of foods but the businesses they came from. In this paper, I explore how choices for food consumption are made online, among middle-class, IT employed professionals with type 2 diabetes. Through interviews with participants and food businesses using app-based delivery to sell their products, I interrogate the circulating rhetorics around oil and its viscerality, and how it is used to decipher whether a food is from ‘outside’ and is safe, edible and healthy to eat. ‘Known’ establishments and familiar foods were preferred over unknown establishments and unfamiliar foods and business ethics were articulated through the quality of oil, its reuse and abuse. Attending to oil and its viscerality holds promise in understanding consumer preferences and contributing to existing conversations around ‘fat’ and its problematization in Global North nutritional discourses.