Digital Diets: Food and Politics on TikTok

• In Event: Science, Knowledge & Technology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 11: The Social Transformation of Knowledge in the Digital Age

Abstract

Food is a ubiquitous social issue and a critical dimension of the political economies of consumption. We all must eat, and in doing so, we must also learn to navigate the complex foodways of our modern industrial food system. Justifications for why we consume the foods we do are simultaneously intimate personal concerns and windows into broader sociopolitical problems and differences. Moreover, our relationships to and discourses on food and food systems are increasingly mediatized. In this context, the social media platform TikTok has emerged as a site in which consumption practices are infused with moral and political meanings. Social media influencers (SMI) have become alternative authorities in these spaces, cultivating credibility and spreading nutritional (mis)information. Despite this, the relationships between food, politics, and online spaces have rarely been integrated. Research on politicized food rarely discusses influencer involvement, while research on influencers doesn’t examine online food as a site of political action. Drawing on theories of everyday politics and lifestyle movements, which position individual consumers as moral and political actors through everyday practices and purchasing habits, as well as healthism–the ideological framing of health as a personal obligation rather than a structural outcome, this paper analyzes food content on TikTok as a form of tacit political communication. Through content on cooking, diets, and food choice, ideology is subtly expressed through narratives of health, purity, and self-optimization. These vernacular politics, and the ways they are communicated by SMI, offer a unique perspective into the construction of consumption habits, nutritional knowledge, and normative attitudes about food in online spaces.

Author

• Della Huntley, Skidmore College