Media and food studies scholars Emily Contois and Zenia Kish and their co-authors have produced an in-depth, analytical, and highly interdisciplinary book that includes writers from the fields of various “studies” (food, media, American) as well as history, science and technology, sociology, anthropology, and political science. It also involves artists, a journalist, and an influencer. The editors frame this edited collection of seventeen chapters with a lengthy introduction and an afterword that points the way to future enquiries. The volume focuses on the ways in which the social media platform’s users engage with Instagram “to construct identity, to seek influence, and to negotiate aesthetic norms, institutional access, and cultural power, as well as social and economic control” (3).
Contois and Kish situate their study of food Instagram in the historical context of visual representation and photography, food porn, and the ways that the social media platform itself influences what and how people post. They and the other authors explore how the site’s “affordances,” the tools and website architecture that Instagram provides, affect posts, photography style and perspective, and engagement. While the resulting platform democratized and blurred the lines among food journalists, chefs, and users, there are also restrictions related to those very affordances that made it so accessible.
The three subtopics in the title provide the book’s structure, though all chapters deal with these themes to one degree or another. There is too much content to cover in this brief review, so my focus is on those aspects of greatest interest to folklorists. Two overriding themes that all chapters explore are the related but different concepts of Instagramability and food porn. The former refers to the appeal of a particular food photograph, but it’s not a simple as it sounds—or appears. Style, focus, framing, perspective (a flat lay-shot from above), and certain colors (brights and pastels) are all factors in how popular a photo might be.
Although several chapters explore Instagramability, in the section on influence, Emily Truman’s “Picturing Digital Taste: #unicornlatte, Social Photography, and Instagram Food Marketing” stands out for its discussion of how looks are often more important than taste for trending and branding for users and food businesses. Truman looks at several “unicorn” (unique) foods, explores the marketability of the unicorn as cultural icon, and discusses the impact of both on Instagram. The very success of Starbucks® in getting its “prosumers” (consumers whose posts effectively provide free marketing) to post pics of their Unicorn Frappucinos resulted in Starbucks® having to settle a trademark infringement dispute with End Brooklyn’s Montauk Juice, which had originated the (superfood and plant-based) Unicorn Latte; prosumer marketing clout outweighed actual taste.
Other notable chapters in this section include KC Hysmith’s “My Life and Labor as an Instagram Influencer Turned Instagram Scholar” and Katherine Kirkwood’s “FreakShakes and Mama Nois: Cases of Transforming Food Industry Influence on Instagram.” Hysmith’s essay focusses on the work and expertise in a multiplicity of areas (photography, writing, cooking, styling, promotion, engagement) that being a successful Instagram influencer requires. That hidden, unpaid labor, she notes, has particular socio-economic consequences for women. Kirkwood’s essay examines the dynamics among food industry professionals, food media, and consumers, and the power negotiations among all three; she focuses on food porn (food depicted as an object of desire, featuring excess and oozing, dripping, or glistening) and presumption (blurring lines between producers and consumers). Her case study analyzes former reality cooking show contestant Marion Grasby and Grasby’s videos of her mother, Noi, a Thai-born and Cordon Bleu-trained chef who produces cooking sauces and demonstrates recipes using those sauces. Grasby’s food porn video techniques (close ups, slow pans) combined with Noi’s personality work to portray her “as an endearing Thai auntie” (186) with slow-motion bloopers. The innovative, seemingly unpolished presentation capitalizes on personality.
In the identity section, food porn also provides a critical way to look at how nations, regions, and individual businesses use salacious photos of food to obscure cultural identity and obfuscate political conflicts. Michael Newman’s “@hotdudesandhummus and the Cultural Politics of Food” examines Israeli efforts to juxtapose a regional food with attractive men in order to brand Israel as unpolitical and Israeli men as attractive (to women and gay men). The marketing campaign blurs the cultural and political meanings of hummus and its role as a site of struggle and negotiation. Playing off the feminist concept of the “male gaze,” Newman (and others in this volume) look at the ways that a “meal gaze” is exploitative, in more ways than one. Robin Caldwell’s “Uncle Green Must Be Coming to Dinner: The Joyful Hospitality of Black Women on Instagram during the Covid-19 Pandemic” provides a different and quietly subversive perspective to the pervasive food porn images on social media. Using bell hooks’s concept of home place as resistance, Caldwell writes about her quest for intimacy and comfort during the pandemic. The “homey” posts that other Black women shared of their vernacular foods provided a form of communion, gathering, and self-care, a “feast on the familiar” (98).
The final section on negotiation features essays that more overtly engage with the political. And they do so with more subversive imagery that forces issues around race, religion, the far right, body shaming, and historical relationships around food and gender. Jonatan Leer and Stinne Gunder Strøm Krogager’s “Transgressive Food Practices on Instagram: The Case of Guldkroen in Copenhagen” focuses on the specifically disruptive and un-Instagramable images that chef Umut Sakarya posts on Instagram. While clearly intended to be food porn at its most extreme, Sakarya’s images evoke the early days of performance art (à la Karen Finley and Jana Sterbak) that used food out of context to make a political point. While the authors’ do not use the term, the intent to do the same is clear—the Turkish and Muslim-born chef posts pics of his pork-draped corpulent body posed on a table or bathing in gravy. The predominant colors are browns and reds—not Instagramable pastels. Sara Garcia Santamaria’s “Posing with ‘the People’: The Far Right and Food Populism on Instagram” contrasts the ways that Brazil’s and Italy’s leaders use food to promote their political views. Bolsonaro chose austere, simple foods, while Italy’s Salvini used pics of himself eating traditional, regional, meaty, fatty “comfort” food. Both emphasized traditional and authentic dishes to promote nationalism and populism versus the elite Other and foreigners.
Food Instagram’s very readable collection of essays is suitable for classes in folklore and foodways, social media and cultural politics, and social media and research methodology. A final chapter provides examples of several assignments revolving around food Instagram. Although this work does not include, mention, or cite any folklorists, it does take on some provocative topics and issues with which folklorists should engage and that they should explore, particularly around disruption, food and politics, food and culture, and (unseen) labor (particularly that of women and people of color). I was surprised that the authors did not cite or engage with the work of relevant food studies scholars such as Lucy Long (culinary tourism), Marcie Cohen Ferris (southern foodways), and Michael Twitty (African American foodways and identity politics), or even Mikhail Bakhtin’s still relevant work on food, festival, and performance. Despite this curious gap, the various chapters provide discussions about performance, authenticity, context, memes, multivocal images (oddly referred to as "empty signifiers" in Santamaria’s chapter), and binary opposition—all concepts that provide resonance for folklorists who should be more aware of how scholars in other disciplines are approaching topics and issues that we often regard as being on our turf.
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[Review length: 1254 words • Review posted on March 23, 2023]