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Paper short abstract

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.