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Paper short abstract

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.