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Drawing on Latvian household ethnography, this paper shows how ChatGPT becomes a quasi-agent in cooking and meal planning, turning everyday food choices into algorithmic futuring and reshaping norms of “good” eating and care.

Paper long abstract

Digital foodscapes are increasingly shaped by generative AI systems that promise to “solve” everyday eating through personalised, conversational guidance. Building on practice theory and STS approaches to socio-technical imaginaries and futuring, this paper asks how ChatGPT becomes domesticated as a non-human interlocutor in household food decision-making, and what kinds of food futures it helps to perform in everyday life.

The analysis draws on qualitative fieldwork in Latvia: 15 semi-structured interviews with active ChatGPT users (aged 25–50), combined with three one-month participant-observation cases that included “digital practice tracing” of real-time prompts and responses.

The findings show that ChatGPT reconfigures domestic food practices on three intertwined levels. Procedurally, it shifts meal planning from improvisation to algorithmically structured routines (menus, shopping lists, time optimisation). Informationally, it enables low-effort evaluation and feedback, cultivating a form of conversational food literacy that makes nutritional reasoning and “healthy choices” feel more accessible and actionable. Relationally, ChatGPT can take on affective and mediating roles, shaping self-perception, family negotiations, and identity-based dietary choices.

Rather than meeting a pre-existing desire for AI-assisted eating, sustained engagement with ChatGPT gradually produces new orientations toward efficiency, structure, and self-discipline, thereby co-producing the very needs it claims to address.

I argue that these mundane interactions constitute a form of everyday futuring, where imagined “better” food lives are enacted through algorithmic dialogue—while also raising questions about standardisation, locality, and exclusion in digital food futures.

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Through digital ethnography on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and food-sharing apps, participant observation and interviews, I explore this creation of alternative digital networks that facilitate the redistribution/“foraging” for food (& other items) which many classify as waste in Athens, Greece.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I analyse Greek food waste redistribution and sharing practices, and present some ethnographic observations on how in Athens, Greece visions of future food systems emerge, mediated by digital technologies. From people gathering food left neatly by the trash bins, and from unofficial networks of food waste sharing in neighbourhoods, to the use of food waste sharing apps that have mushroomed in the city and to what I call “digital dumpster diving” on Facebook groups where people post pictures of items left on the street, I explore this creation of alternative digital networks that facilitate the “foraging” for food (and other items) which many classify as waste.

I reflect on these practices of reclaiming food and other items in the capital city and their changing meanings in the Greek cultural sphere: Is food waste foraging simply an economic necessity, or a creative way to craft solidarity networks, adapt and resist the multiple crises (financial, climate, energy) that the country has been experiencing? How do these changing ways of “foraging” clash with the cultural notion of dignity and deeply engrained beliefs on waste-as-cultural-dirt?

This paper draws from ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Athens, Greece, over the last decade. I engage with the dynamics, behaviours and motivations around the recirculation and consumption of food waste through digital ethnography on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and food-sharing apps, participant observation and interviews.

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This paper examines how future food systems are imagined through NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge series. Comparing its editions, it traces a shift from food technologies to integrated systems and shows how digital foodscapes shape which Earth–space food futures become visible or marginal.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how future food systems are digitally imagined and enacted through the Deep Space Food Challenge series. The first edition was developed as a joint initiative between NASA and the Canadian Space Agency to support food production technologies for long-duration space missions, linking space food to both astronaut needs and Earth-relevant food problems in extreme environments. The second edition, led by NASA, reframes these concerns within a more explicitly Mars-oriented context.

The paper asks how these two challenge editions differently frame what counts as viable and desirable food futures. Drawing on scholarship on socio-technical imaginaries and futuring as performative practice, it conceptualises the challenge series as a digital futuring infrastructure through which particular visions of food systems are digitally enacted. The research is based on a qualitative analysis of the Deep Space Food Challenge websites, promotional videos, YouTube engagement, and public-facing materials produced by selected winning teams from the first edition.

The analysis identifies a shift from an emphasis on food production technologies and Earth-oriented applications in the first challenge toward a systems-based framing of food as mission-critical infrastructure in the second. Although this second challenge broadens participation by explicitly inviting multidisciplinary teams, including chefs, nutritionists, and designers, it continues to privilege system-oriented and technocratic imaginaries aligned with long-duration settlement. The paper shows how digital foodscapes shape the visibility of certain Earth–space food futures, while marginalising or rendering others invisible.

Keywords: Digital foodscapes; socio-technical imaginaries; Earth-space food futures; sustainability; NASA challenges

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Food companies deploy blockchain technologies to perform futures of transparent, accountable and sustainable cold chains. This study examines how such sociotechnical imaginaries are co-produced by contradictory infrastructures that undermine their transformative promises.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, companies have increasingly deployed blockchain-based systems to securitise food supply chains, which encompasses tracking and stabilising cold-chain temperatures. While conventional traceability systems remain widespread and other digital tracking approaches expand, blockchain technology in particular is affectively charged with manifold promises of efficiency, sustainability, accountability and transparency by technically enabling shared ‘immutable’ records that reconfigure monitoring and trust along the food supply chain and its various business relations.

Digital securitisation technologies, and blockchains in particular, promise a new evidence regime: data, once entered, becomes ‘frozen’, just like the product it represents, and mirrors its movement as a supposedly immutable object through the cold chain. We analyse these linkages of digital foodscapes and coldscapes through the lens of thermal regimes (Starosielski 2021) and ask how infrastructures of cold are governed around a specific set of cultural values such as freshness and biosecurity.

Building primarily on industry sources and policy reports (whitepapers, roadmaps, strategy documents, websites), this exploratory review maps and questions dominant narratives that paint low-waste, accountable, transparent ‘coldness’ as a securitisable object, which can be stabilised through digital infrastructures. We argue that these promises are fragile: they are co-produced by energy-intensive information infrastructures that contradict claims of sustainability; by often invisible human labour, which stands in contrast to narratives of efficiency and automation; and by opaque platform governance structures that sit uneasily with the transparency narrative.

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Human navigation of digital foodscapes is strongly facilitated by algorithms. No Kitchen Is an Island treats digital recipes as more-than-human assemblages, where climate data and user input co-steer culinary evolution, exploring how algorithmic conformity can support sustainable food futures.

Paper long abstract

As culinary practices of home cooks become increasingly hybrid, mediated by algorithms and expanded through globalized ingredient flows, recipes can no longer be understood as static documentation or culinary heritage artifacts. Rather, it is methodologically useful to view them as organisms that mutate, adapt, and are hardwired to disseminate. Drawing on food-related assemblage thinking in New Materialism (Bennett, 2020; Mol, 2021), this paper reframes digital recipes as evolving assemblages of More-than-Human (MtH) actors, including ingredients, microbes, cooks, supply chains, climate conditions, search rankings, recommendation systems, and platform architects.

The platform No Kitchen Is an Island (NKI) explores how algorithmic mediation can amplify MtH perspectives within everyday cooking practices. It features average recipes derived from the most searched-for dishes in Germany over the past five years. Each recipe was calculated from the top 10 search results and represents statistical consensus—a computationally mediated form of taste.

In addition to user-generated comments, the NKI comment section features automatically synthesized comments based on recent local climate and environmental news. Each week, these MtH comments are incorporated into a revised recipe version, placing human needs and algorithmically mediated ecological signals on equal footing in steering recipe evolution.

Digital infrastructures already shape everyday nutrition. NKI seeks to redistribute agency within the adaptation processes our culinary practices undergo. We conceptualize recipes as assemblages that are negotiated between consumer choice and planetary boundaries, and ask how algorithmic conformity might be used to foster less anthropocentric and more sustainable food futures.

NKI: https://nokitchenisanisland.com/

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Digital Food Influencers leverage the affordances of digital platforms to boost community-building through engagement mechanisms. By doing so, they establish complex networks in which human actors and nonhuman entities interact to set aesthetic and moral standards for eating.

Paper long abstract

Digital platforms have become arenas for the circulation of food literacy, shaping information and norms about eating. These online environments, digital foodscapes, function as relational networks in which technology actively participates in the production of cultural and culinary meanings.

This paper examines the platformization of social food and the role of Digital Food Influencers (DFIs) on visual social media (e.g., Instagram, TikTok, YouTube). Study results show how DFIs produce food content and employ engagement mechanisms (visual, discursive, and interactive) to translate food knowledge into narratives and aesthetics, which audiences interpret and mediate.

Empirically, the research draws on digital ethnography, computational methods, qualitative analysis, and visual analysis of DFIs’ Instagram content and follower interactions. The analysis included 240 posts from 20 Spanish DFI profiles and 8 walkthrough interviews with active users.

DFIs are "remediators of taste" with a strategic position as central nodes in socio-technical assemblages comprising platforms, algorithms, and individuals. Interactions on these networks continuously produce, negotiate, and stabilize food discourses into digital food cultures, bringing together like-minded people through algorithms that enhance certain content creators' content for each user.

These collective dynamics boost community-building and co-shape imaginaries and moral orientations of how people should eat, reinforcing particular understandings of food and what counts as good, desirable, or authentic. By situating DFI-audience networks within a broader assemblage of human and non-human actants, this work aims to contribute to STS debates on digital eating and to highlight the role of everyday platform practices in the governance of food imaginaries.

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Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Chinese in London, this paper examines how digital platforms such as WeChat and the rednot shape everyday food practices. It shows how digital infrastructures mediate the search for, evaluation of, and sharing of “good” food across transnational contexts.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how digital platforms shape everyday food practices among young Chinese migrants in London. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how platforms such as WeChat, the rednote, and online restaurant review sites are embedded in the processes through which migrants search for, evaluate, and share food experiences across transnational contexts.

The paper argues that digital technologies are not merely tools for accessing information but infrastructures that actively structure food-related practices and social relations. Through digitally mediated interactions—such as sharing restaurant recommendations, discussing hygiene ratings, circulating discount information, and exchanging cooking tips—food knowledge becomes collectively produced and socially negotiated. These practices shape how migrants define and pursue what they consider “good” food, often understood through multiple criteria including hygiene, affordability, authenticity, and trendiness.

The analysis further shows that digital and embodied practices are mutually constitutive. Online content guides offline dining and cooking practices, while lived experiences in turn reshape how digital information is interpreted and circulated. At the same time, food-related information sharing functions as a form of care and social bonding among peers, demonstrating how digital infrastructures facilitate relational forms of food knowledge.

By examining how migrants navigate food through digital platforms, the paper contributes to discussions on digital foodscapes by highlighting how everyday digital practices shape food values, social relations, and transnational food experiences in contemporary migrant life.

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Paper short abstract

We chart the evolving role of the digital in cheesemaking discourse over four decades of articles from the trade journal Profession Fromager. Through computational controversy mapping, we discuss how cheessue publics are sparked through cheese-related issues and their digital melting pots.

Paper long abstract

The notion of digital foodscapes invites interdisciplinary reflection on the confluence of wider societal discourses and mundane practices of food production and eating that has taken place through the mediatization of both over the past four decades (Allgaier et al., 2025; Schneider et al., 2025). One way to invite such reflection is to ask how the digital has manifested itself in changing ways as a factor and a concern in the professional discourse of a particular agricultural situation. In this paper we draw on the archives of the major francophone trade journal for cheesemaking, Profession Fromager, to map the evolving issuescapes forming in and around caseiculture from the birth of the World Wide Web in 1991 (first website) until today. Using methods from digital controversy mapping (Venturini & Munk, 2021), particularly computationally assisted semantic mapping, we conduct a quali-quantiative analysis to identify major changes in the way cheese has been issuefied (Marres, 2012) and the shifting ways the digital has figured has part of this issuefication. This allows us to locate the effects of digitalized food and eating in the professional discourse of a specific agricultural situation where we know that controversies over issues like raw milk, climate change, cultural heritage or microbial diversity have become key factors of digital foodscapes. We coin the phrase ‘cheessue publics’, a spin on Noortje Marres’ issue publics (2007), to underline the fact that cheese sparks publics into being in ways that are particular to the situation and its digital media.

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This study examines moral food discourses on Instagram. Combining social network analysis and netnography of vegan and BBQ communities, it shows that while social media pluralize debates on “right” eating, they largely reproduce traditional food morals and gendered narratives.

Paper long abstract

Food has always been associated with moral ideas about right and wrong eating and therefore plays an important role in societal discourses on politics, social distinction, and ecology. Media strongly influence public debates about food. With digitalization, these discourses have become more pluralized and individualized, while social media platforms increasingly function as spaces for informal and democratized food education. At the same time, broader trends - such as the fragmentation and the loss of orientation - can also be observed in these debates. This raises the question of how discourses about right and wrong eating take shape on social media.

To investigate this, the development of food communities around German food influencers on Instagram was examined over a period of five years using social network analysis. In addition, a qualitative analysis of two Instagram food communities was conducted using netnography. The study included 404 accounts from the Vegan & Plant-based community and 471 accounts from the BBQ & Meat community, whose content was analyzed for central moral narratives about food.

The results show that over time these communities became less diverse, more polarized, and increasingly professionalized. While moral narratives are partially renegotiated, social media largely reproduce traditional ideas of good food and proper eating. In the Vegan & Plant-based community, narratives of moderation, asceticism, ethical responsibility, and restrictive food rules dominate. In contrast, the BBQ & Meat community emphasizes narratives of indulgence, power, violence, and masculinity. Across both communities, food discourse also reproduces traditional gender roles and attributes.

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Composite food data exposes power imbalances in EU data governance. Using Open Food Facts as a case, the paper shows how access rights, openness, and stewardship can transform fragmented, proprietary food information into a public data commons.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines composite food data as a critical site for understanding how power circulates through contemporary data infrastructures. Beginning from the observation that “you can see the nutrient data in a hundred grams”—a phrase that renders data seemingly stable and comparable—the analysis shows how nutritional information is in fact shaped by legal, commercial, and organisational architectures that determine who can access it, under what conditions, and with what guarantees of accuracy. Composite food data, especially for branded and frequently reformulated products, sits at the intersection of public‑health needs, proprietary control, and regulatory ambiguity. Although legally classified as non‑personal, these datasets are deeply relational, tied to everyday consumption, household decision‑making, and public‑interest research.

Drawing on documentary analysis and fieldwork with nutrition compilers and open‑data practitioners, the paper argues that the central challenge is not data scarcity but uneven access. Current European data law—split between the GDPR’s restrictive logic and the Data Act’s circulation‑oriented logic—struggles to accommodate socially essential but commercially protected datasets. The case study of Open Food Facts (OFF) illustrates how crowdsourced infrastructures can reconfigure access by combining open licensing, provenance tracking, and rights‑enabled data contributions. OFF demonstrates both the potential and the limits of open data: while it expands transparency and comparability, it also depends on sustained stewardship and unresolved legal questions around database rights and derivative works.

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This paper asks who benefits from food system transformations based on digital technology by examining the rebound effects of surplus monetisation on food charities, tensions between waste prevention and food security and explores structural pathways to reduce food waste and insecurity.

Paper long abstract

A key element of imagined food futures is the efficient management of flows to reduce food waste.

Drawing on research on food system sustainability conducted within the European project ToNoWaste, this paper explores the link between digital solutions for food waste and food charities. Exploratory interviews conducted in 2025 with coordinators of food redistribution organisations in Vienna, Austria, reveal a contradiction resulting from the deployment of efficiency-driven digital applications. Predictive software in retail or gastronomy or digital surplus-selling applications contribute to reducing the availability of food surplus. While positive for ressource efficiency, it considerably affects food charities, which currently rely on surplus generated by the food system’s inefficiency. These overflows therefore have, at least in part, a social function: despite normative concerns, for example that they do not contribute to healthy diets, they remain necessary within the current welfare state, particularly in times of crisis (Lambie-Mumford & Silvasti, 2020; Poppendieck, 2014; Riches, 2018).

Building on additional interviews with stakeholders from social markets, redistribution networks, and social organisations, I intend to interrogate charities’ dependence on food surplus, who benefits from digital food-system transformations, and pathways to reduce both waste and food insecurity.

Examining reorderings in the social realm, such as rebound effects that reduce opportunities for redistribution, the monetisation of food surplus, and the need for charities to reorganise in response this paper highlights tensions between waste prevention, overproduction, redistribution, and food security and argues for taking the reorderings and efficiency paradigm of digital food waste applications seriously.

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The paper explores the role of ‘the digital’ in enacting ‘policy imaginaries’ for a better food future. Drawing on FoodSEqual, it focuses on digital food adverts and the Foodtopia video game, and discusses the potential of digital technologies to change future food, policy and research practices.

Paper long abstract

A ‘digital turn’ is already taking place within modern foodscapes. This is inevitably implicated in food research unpacking the complex entanglements between people, food and digital technologies (Schneider, 2026; Allgaier et al, 2025; Goodman and Jaworska, 2020), with emphasis being given on social media and digital apps as technological infrastructures shaping food subjectivities, discourses and practices. This ‘digital turn’ is conceived as enacting more hopeful foodscapes, although it can fall within the trap of ‘techno-optimism’ and its ambivalent imaginary for food system transformation (Schneider et al, 2019). In this presentation, I turn to the role of ‘the digital’ in enacting more hopeful ‘policy imaginaries’ for food system change. Drawing on the food policy research I conducted for the UKRI FoodSEqual project, I explore the possibilities and limitations of different digital technologies in informing as well as enacting more diverse and inclusive policies for food system change. Specifically, I focus on: a. ‘Digital Bus Food Adverts for Healthy Start Vouchers’, a local food policy intervention developed based on the project’s policy findings; and b. Foodtopia, the FoodSEqual policy video game (https://foodtopia.itch.io/foodtopia), designed to embed as well as widen dissemination of the project’s community policy recommendations, or else ‘imaginaries’, for a more sustainable and healthy food system. I discuss the impact of these technologies on changing food practices and policy practices. However, as an STS food researcher, I also reflect on the role of ‘the digital’ itself as a ‘technology’ that can enable researchers to influence policy for a better food future.