Ariana Gunderson: What is the top argument you hope readers take away from Digital Food TV: The Cultural Place of Food in a Digital Era?
Michelle Phillipov: Essentially, the book’s central argument is that food TV’s digital transformation disrupts many of our previously scholarly assumptions about what food TV is, as well as what it does – culturally, politically, industrially.
Newer forms of digital food media remain deeply intertwined with legacy food media (with respect to their textual conventions, industrial logics, and audience pleasures), and there is far more blurring and cross-pollination between legacy and digital genres and industries than is typically acknowledged. But there are also key differences that are not yet well understood. To give an example: many previous studies – including my own! – have tended to understand the politics of food TV as primarily a politics of food. These studies have focused, for instance, on television’s role in shaping ideas about what constitutes good food, healthy eating, appropriate and desirable subjectivities and bodies, and so on.
Yet, the sustained popularity of digital food media now enables digital food TV to intersect with a range of additional questions and concerns. Put simply – and this is really the book’s key argument – the politics of digital food TV are now rarely to be found in its manifest textual content. Rather, they are to be found in the affects that its texts give rise to – for example, cultivating new forms of audience and industry labor which recast work as leisure (as I argue in Chapter 2), or offering new forms of identification and immersion that provide testing grounds for digital platforms’ market rationalities (as I argue in Chapter 3).
Ariana Gunderson: Your book calls for an analysis of food TV that goes beyond the textual, to include “what is imagined by digital food TV” and “what is made possible (or impossible) in these imaginings” (110). How did you go about that methodologically, and what makes that approach particularly fruitful for you?
Michelle Phillipov: Early in my career, I wrote a paper called ‘In Defense of Textual Analysis’, which argued that textual analysis, as a method, provides important analytical insights that are largely inaccessible through other means. Scholars invested in empirical methods can often dismiss the insights of textual analysis as merely anecdotal. And while it is certainly the case that the findings of most textual analyses are not replicable by other researchers (except perhaps those that describe the manifest content of texts, such as content analysis), they do provide ways of thinking differently about textual content. This is particularly due to the ability of textual analysis to uncover meanings and interpretations that may otherwise remain unexplored or unidentified by empirical methods.
My approach to textual analysis always goes beyond the text to consider the broader cultural, industrial, infrastructural and, yes, textual work that food TV texts do. In the specific context of this book, what this means methodologically is that I attempt to work at the intersections of textual representations, televisual production practices, and digital platform infrastructures: that is, to consider audience–text–infrastructure–industry simultaneously in my analysis.
What this approach does is not only take us beyond the manifest content of food TV texts, it also takes us beyond the food itself to consider what else is made possible by food TV’s representations. Admittedly, some of the ideas that I outline in the book do tend to lean towards the negative (for example, the role of new digital forms in masking exploitation, concealing commercial logics, weakening activist commitments), but there are also some moments of possibility – some possible re-imaginings – that I point to. For example, I use Misha Kavka’s concept of the cusp formation to explore the ways in which the textual intimacy and supposed closeness of the digital can enable new forms of connection between viewers that disrupt typical public/private boundaries and, in the case of the examples I use, link home cooking to broader food justice initiatives. Put simply, the digital can offer opportunities to do food differently if we can take the analytical opportunities offered by textual analysis to think food (and food media) differently, and this is one of things I am trying to do in this book.
Ariana Gunderson: The synesthetic experience of haptically scrolling on a phone through ASMR food videos with brain-tickling noises and fantastically fast food preparations produces what you call an “excess of affect,” (72). These food videos, you argue, operate as an example of Brodmerkel and Carah’s (2016) “affect switches,” or touchpoints where bodies and media systems come into affect-laden contact. How does food video as affect switch affect both the viewer and your analysis of the material?
Michelle Phillipov: Such videos affect the viewer primarily by situating them in the material – offering visual continuity between the hands preparing the food on screen and the viewer’s hands as they hold their digital device, or providing the viewer the point of view of the eater or the cook – in ways that give rise to immersive experiences. Analytically, the key is the excess of affect these experiences produce.
In the book, I give an example of a video that depicts the making of a layered crepe cake. Filming lingers on each step of the production process far longer than is necessary for instructional purposes – we see disembodied hands cooking all ten crepes in five different colors (when just one or two would have been enough to demonstrate the process), whipping the cream in nearly real time, plus almost two full minutes preparing and portioning the cake for eating. I read the video as more akin to an ASMR experience for relaxation, comfort, and calm than a how-to for people to make the cake at home. This is significant because short form food videos have typically been understood by scholars as tools of cooking instruction or inspiration but, actually, I think they offer all sorts of pleasure to the audience.
However, it is important to remember that while such excesses of affect are sources of pleasure for audiences, they also serve as touch points between bodies and calculative systems in ways that bring both bodies and data into the service of the algorithmic and market rationalities of digital platforms. Let’s be clear: our viewing habits, including of legacy media, have always been monetized, but the ways in which this occurs has previously been visible to us (for example, we would see the ad breaks, or the product placements or endorsements), but how and when and in what ways our viewing is monetized is now far more opaque. In the scholarship of ASMR, media academic Jessica Maddox has called this ‘transactional tingles’, where relaxation for the viewer is exchanged for metrics (likes, views, comments) for producer and platform, and we are seeing similar things occurring in the food space as well.
Ariana Gunderson: The feel-good Netflix food competition shows you analyze, like Crazy Delicious and Sugar Rush, take their lead from the Great British Bake-Off with mostly gentle evaluations, camaraderie between contestants, and happy, whimsical food creations. This is a far cry from a screaming Gordon Ramsay in Hell’s Kitchen. You identify this newer trend in digital food TV as a dampening of affect, a decrease in intensity, in contrast to the frenetic surplus affect of online food video. How might you read these two phenomena together in light of the practice of second screening: scrolling a phone in front of a TV?
Michelle Phillipov: Shows like Crazy Delicious, Sugar Rush and the like reflect a wider turn towards what has been called ambient TV. This is TV that has been deliberately designed for passive consumption – ‘visual wallpaper’ is a particularly apt term I have heard used. Ambient TV is not limited to food TV – perhaps the most well-known example is the series Emily in Paris – but what all of these examples share in common is that an assumption of distracted or atmospheric viewing is built into the narrative design of the series.
To return to your above example of Gordon Ramsay, even he is getting in on the act! Reviews of his Netflix documentary, Being Gordon Ramsay, have characterized the series as boring and as having a limited narrative stretched out over too many episodes to maintain interest, but I think that misses the point. The show is not designed for watching with focused attention – it is another example of ambient-style TV, and understanding this trend is essential for understanding contemporary food TV today.
In the book, I argue that these supposedly feel-good, easy-going pleasures work in such shows often serve to mask exploitative relationships between platforms, TV contestants, content creators, and audiences. But as the Gordon Ramsay example indicates, we are now also seeing this as a technique used in celebrity image softening or rehabilitation. I would suggest that Meghan Sussex’s series, With Love, Meghan, could also been seen as part of this category as well.
Ariana Gunderson: Your book traces the shifting strands of televisual food across traditional broadcast TV, streaming, and digital-first online video, exploring how the infrastructural context around the textual content shapes available readings of the material. You examine the recontextualization of broadcast shows from the 1990s and early 2000s made available to stream online, as well as the ways social media food videos have influenced new broadcast TV, as in the case of Jaime Oliver’s pandemic shows. Do you have any hunches or hopes about how emergent or future televisual platforms and infrastructures will shape digital food TV to come?
Michelle Phillipov: Most of the examples I examined in the book were of digital first food content. The only examples of supposedly traditional food TV I considered were in Chapter 4, where I looked at the adoption of digital techniques within Jamie Oliver’s cooking shows. The specifics examples I looked at were a product of COVID-19 – as a result of lockdowns, Oliver could no longer film in a studio, so filmed his shows at home, on his mobile phone – but we are now seeing even further encroachment of the digital into the traditional. For example, I just finished re-watching Donal Skehan’s show Superfood in Minutes and was struck by the frequency with which Donal adopts the conventions of short-form food videos (for example, disembodied hands, overhead shots, short ingredients lists) within the context of broadcast/streaming TV. This show is admittedly not that recent (it was made in 2019–2021), but we are seeing a lot more examples of this type. Yesterday, I was watching an episode of Silvia Colloca’s latest season of Silvia’s Italian Masterclass, which was made in 2025 and makes use of fast playback techniques and jump cuts – much like we see in online video – to keep the recipes moving.
More than just an increased blurring between the digital and the traditional, my prediction is that outputs will continue to become increasingly platform agnostic, with the distinctiveness of individual platform offerings likely to be further eroded. In the book I have chapters on specific output types – streaming TV, catch up TV, short form food videos, broadcast TV – but I suspect such distinctions will become progressively less meaningful as platform conventions merge.
One thing that has changed significantly since I wrote the book, and which I think gives us some cause for concern, is the extent to which our online screen-based experiences are now flooded with AI-generated content. This includes recipe slop, bizarre food dramas acted out by AI fruits and vegetables, kitchen hacks, AI-generated advertising, and a range of other things. Quite a bit of it is targeted at children. Much of it is terrible. And the nature of platform algorithms means that once we pause to take a look at one of these videos, our feeds become saturated with more and more recommendations for similar content. It is a phenomenon that reflects both voracious audience demand for new content and the capacity for cheap, sped-up production, but we are bombarded with so much content it is becoming harder work to curate our viewing experiences. What this means for the future of food media is anyone’s guess, but I’m (cautiously) optimistic that things will balance out over time.
Last month, American Eagle released an ad campaign with actress Sydney Sweeney, modeled after a 1980s Calvin Klein denim ad. The campaign plays with the homophone jeans/genes. In one version, Sweeney crosses out “genes” on a poster reading “Sydney Sweeney has great genes,” replacing it with “jeans.” Another ad features her saying, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.” The camera pans to her face as she says, “My jeans/genes are blue,” with no jeans in the frame.
This ad set off a fierce debate around its indeterminate meanings. As one commentator asked, “Are we supposed to want pants or Aryan features?” (Cunningham 2025). A vocal minority argued it was a dogwhistle for eugenics and white supremacy, while others insisted it was simply about Sweeney being hot. Beyond the jean/gene pun, there is also indeterminacy about which “genes” are being invoked, ostensibly her conventional attractiveness: her pouty lips, blue eyes, blonde hair, and “buxom” chest (“Hey, eyes up here!” she rebukes the camera in another ad).
The debate is animated partly by the politicized contradictions of Sweeney’s image, which is “semiotically potent and yet ideologically unfixed” (Jones 2025). Alongside acclaimed roles, Sweeney has lent her brand to numerous ad campaigns. Many of her roles hypersexualized her image, which she has alternately lamented and embraced, making her a right-wing darling as conservatives embrace “raunch” and celebrate her as an ideal female form that will end “wokeness.”
“Eugenics vibes”
For many, this ad was “fashy coded.” Some online commentators, like @Dewwwdropzz and @midtwesterngothic, called the ad Nazi propaganda, while others noted its “eugenics” or “master race” “vibes.” Right-wing commentators dismissed these interpretations as hysterical, treating accusations of Nazism as preposterous, characterizing it as “everything is Hitler” (a common right-wing refrain).
But eugenics and white supremacy was not just Hitler’s project. Trump has described immigrants as having “bad genes” and expressed preference for immigrants from blue-eyed countries; his time in office has seen expanded civil commitment for those deemed mentally ill, a massive expansion of ICE, and expanded habitual offender statutes(Cunningham 2025; Norwood 2025; Miller 2025). Trump recently federalized the California National Guard to suppress protests against deportations and took over the capital’s police to respond to “crime,” a racial dogwhistle.
These moves resonate with the rise of Christian nationalism and “great replacement” rhetoric (Ali 2025), both of which promote demographic engineering. Just weeks before the ad aired, the Department of Homeland Security amplified this vision, tweeting paintings that valorize Manifest Destiny. They were captioned: “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage” and “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” Commentators suggested the capitalization itself was a dogwhistle (Ali 2025).
The MAGA-led government has also energized RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement, described as social Darwinist “soft eugenics” for withdrawing care from targeted populations and stigmatizing neurodivergence and mental illness (Beres 2025; Sexauer 2025; Giroux 2025). Coupled with the hard eugenics of the genocide of Palestinians and callous indifference to disposable lives here and elsewhere (Miller 2025; Giroux 2025), these developments mark the normalization of dehumanizing ideologies.
At the same time, other groups are encouraged to reproduce. Pronatalist movements promoted by tech oligarchs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, with support from the Heritage Foundation, valorize “good genes” and fuel demand for gene-edited “designer babies” (Stein 2025; Elinson 2025). Within this pronatalist, anti-choice framework, some conservatives even point to pro-choice policies and liberal institutions such as Planned Parenthood as the real eugenics.
“It’s not that deep”
This slide to fascism is perceptible, yet for many “all of this reality is stripped away” (Warzel 2025). To them, it is just an ad, just about Sweeney being hot, or just about jeans.
This dismissal is bipartisan. PragerU pundit Amala Ekpunobi ridiculed “chronically online” Leftists who should “touch grass,” insisting the ad “didn’t mean anything.” Liberal commentators likewise treated it as a distraction unworthy of “incredible complexity” and analysis (Jones 2025; Ali 2025). Some argued that engaging with the controversy benefits the right, since “the right-wing-media apparatus has every incentive to go at the Sweeneystuff, as the MAGA coalition struggles to distract its base from Donald Trump’s Epstein-files debacle” (Warzel 2025).
“Woke is dead”
If liberals were hysterical, conservatives were triumphant. While mocking liberals as snowflakes and crybabies (McIntosh 2020) and insisting “it’s not that deep,” right-wing media reanimated a MAGA battle cry (Mendoza-Denton 2020): “Woke is dead!”
When asked whether Sweeney or Beyonce won the denim war, one pundit called the ad “normal” and declared it the “final nail in the coffin” of “woke.” Fox defines woke as “progressive, politically correct stances on race, gender ideology, and other hot-button topics,” but the political correctness framing is misleading (Beliso-De Jesús 2020). Its indexical range is much broader. While White House communications director Cheung decried “Cancel culture run amok,” Cruz and Vance talked about the attack on “beautiful women.” On the Ruthlesspodcast, Vance quipped, “everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive is a Nazi,” adding “she’s a normal all-American beautiful girl doing like a normal jeans ad, right?”
Trump characteristically said the quiet part out loud, praising the ad and contrasting it with ads by Jaguar and Bud Lite. MAGA media was feeling the vibe. A Fox News pundit said, “We’re over this woke agenda. We’re over the Lizzos, we’re over the Dylan Mulvaneys. If this was a 300-pound non-binary person, they would be applauding her.” On one podcast, hosts said they were sick of “DI stuff with big girls,” wanted more “ideal images” of “perfection,” and joked there should be “legislation against plus sized models.”
Other pundits also mirrored Trump’s rhetoric with fidelity. Tomi Lahren contrasted Sweeney with Dylan Mulvaney, saying conservatives want “hot people.” Matt Walsh called the ad “a move back to normalcy” and away from “freakish nonsense.” Other pundits added: “Woke ads are out and beautiful ads are in. Yes, welcome to 2025 where Dylan Mulvaney has been replaced by Sydney Sweeney” and said:
“This seems to be simply a return to normal…they changed and they started to use hideous people…people don’t want to look like Lizzo…they want to look like Sydney Sweeney….they’ve had ugly platformed for so long…we actually aren’t all created equal…we all look different.”
A Fox commentator called the ad “consequential,” representing the demise of “fat pride and gender androgyny and DEI.” Megyn Kelly praised Sweeney as “all woman,” “natural,” and “normal,” saying she hadn’t “Kardashianized herself,” and declaring, “we are fucking done with the Lauren Sanchezes of the world” and with “enormous lips,” and rejoicing at the return to “classic American beauty.”
The blonde bombshell’s others
MAGA commentators had been celebrating Sweeney as a return to classical ideals long before the ad. When she hosted Saturday Night Live in a low-cut dress, she had already “killed woke” (Grady 2025). Commentators lamented that body positivity had brought “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack … to the brink of extinction” (Furlano 2025) and that white people had been “banished from advertising.”
In this discourse, “woke” and “DEI” index what Sweeney is not: black, big, non-binary, non-feminine, non-traditional, working as shibboleths for dispreferred social types. “DEI” itself has become a “strategically deployable shifter” (Urciuoli 2025), “relayed” into a new domain (Gal 2018) and resignified as a slur that “clasps” (Gal 2018) Sydney Sweeney to ideal images of womanhood and clasps all her opposites together as undesirable social types.
The “blonde bombshell” recalls midcentury Americana, when the white feminine figure was unrivaled. Nostalgia for this time situates the campaign within a revival of regressive, white-washed femininity, from pinup girls to tradwives (Furlano 2025). Fascist movements have historically weaponized this ideal.
Sweeney’s image, combined with the ad’s images and language, draws on this charge: the paradox of white femininity as both sexualized and innocent. It enables a right-coded idealization of white, fertile, feminine beauty (Grady 2025; Cunningham 2025), set against the racial and gender diversity that unsettles a pronatalist white supremacist vision of a homogenous America.
Dogwhistles and semiotic containment
American Eagle’s campaign was a success, if only for the attention it generated. Its strategy: “Flirt with the public’s fear (or excitement) about fascism—with the help of Sydney Sweeney” (Cunningham 2025).
This flirtation plays with dual addressivity and multiple layered semiotic indeterminacies to send a dogwhistle. Dogwhistles are messages with an innocent meaning for most addressees and a coded one for some (Haney-López 2014; Slotta 2020). They are political uses of semiotic indeterminacy (Gershon 2025), and such indeterminacy is not always symmetrical (Dénigot and Burnett 2020).
Moreover, the participation framework and production format is complex (Goffman 1981). Dogwhistles are uttered by a “duplicitous speaker” who differentiates among “savvy” and non-savvy listeners (Dénigot and Burnett 2020), and this corporate ad, voiced by an actress speaking as herself but through a script, amplifies this duplicity. Even savvy listeners are multiplied: the target audience aligned with a racialized message and its liberal opponents who identify and repudiate it. Moreover, the indeterminacy here has a binary logic, with competing polarized meanings.
Racialized dogwhistles are central to conservative self-conceptions, exemplified by Lee Atwater, a pro-segregationist who directed campaigns for Reagan and Bush senior and later chaired the RNC (Haney-Lopez 2014). Atwater avoided the semiotic determinacy and rigid performativity of taboo language like the n-word (Fleming 2011; 2018; Miller 2022) by using “abstract” terms like forced busing or tax cuts, explaining that these economic policies would “hurt blacks worse than whites” while avoiding explicit slurs.
Dogwhistle tactics also use indeterminacy to differentiate within a single listener, bifurcating conscious commitments to equality from unconscious racism, so dogwhistles are hidden partly from the target audience itself (Smith 2016; Haney-Lopez 2014; Mendelberg 2001). This complicates the notion of the identity-based dogwhistle (Dénigot and Burnett 2020).
Indeed, identity here is unstable. “Woke” functions as a shifter designating not only an ideology one can adopt but also refers to groups of people who are like Lizzo, Dylan Mulvaney, or Oprah–even those who don’t adopt “woke” beliefs. Many “woke” critics of the ad were feminine white women, and many of its defenders were people of color or liberals. These “woke” identity positions don’t intersect neatly with “woke” listener positions.
In this way, a dogwhistle can hail white supremacist listeners while avowing a colorblind position (Dick and Wirtz 2011). If Sweeney’s “good genes” are about being hot rather than white or feminine, then hotness is universal, equal opportunity even. Listeners who hear racialized meanings are paranoid racebaiters, bearing the liability of racialization. Cultural value accrues to those who cannot hear it, who are figured as rational, and colorblindness enables racist discourses to proliferate under a guise of neutrality (Dick and Wirtz 2011; Williams 2020). As Haney-Lopez predicted, dogwhistle politics has evolved to recruit nonwhite support (2014). Racial identity is therefore a poor predictor of reception.
TikTok user @heyitstwig25 remarked, “So, the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad isn’t racist, but the only people I see supporting it and defending it are openly racist…got it.” This suggests the issue is less about identity than about participation in chains of discourse through which themes and cultural stories become intelligible (Slotta 2020). Names and labels work as condensed abbreviations for these stories (Ibid), and allusions or “vibes” similarly direct attention toward particular contexts–but only if those contexts are already available. Dogwhistles are one form of “strategically restricted communication,” relying on differentiated awareness of context, such as white supremacist discourse in right-wing media, without which the message is inaudible (Mendoza-Denton 2020). Further differentiation also depends on awareness of the cultural history of white supremacy, its motifs, values, and unspoken commitments. Heterogeneous audiences thus bring heterogeneous indexical associations (Agha as cited in Gershon 2025), enhancing and multiplying semiotic indeterminacy. Even defenders of the ad are heterogeneous.
This heterogeneity and indeterminacy is key to the plausible deniability that sustains racializing discourses (Dick and Wirtz 2011). By suppressing or manipulating context, speakers avoid responsibility for racist discourse and strategically differentiate their messages (Hodges 2020). This relies on ideologies of communication that privilege semantics and grammar over interactional context, common in the MAGA base and central to Trump-era tactics (Hodges 2020). Trump’s “dark innovation” has been to extend plausible deniability even further than his predecessors (Smith 2016).
The American Eagle ad exploits this affordance, building on the MAGA movement’s use of entertainment and humor as a “containment strategy,” a way to speak taboos while denying violating norms (Hall et al. 2016). The strategy also works on liberals and leftists who dismiss the ad as trivial, epiphenomenal froth atop a sea of material conditions. One LA Times critic asked why anyone cared about a silly ad when DHS was increasingly militarizing (Ali 2025). This dismissal shows how dangerous rhetoric slips by not only through semiotic indeterminacy but also because some genres render signs unserious and “not that deep.” Even the ad’s brevity functions this way. One critic wrote, “a 15-second denim commercial is not a rich enough text to sustain this level of analysis” (Jones 2025), reinforcing the idea that the micro doesn’t matter (Lempert 2024).
Does the ad even need indeterminacy? When Elon Musk can evade responsibility for a Nazi salute, with the ADL calling it “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm” (Connolly 2025), plausible deniability is already abundant. Nazi salute-like gestures now circulate widely on social media. Even determinate taboo signs are rendered indeterminate through selective disavowal (Resnick 2024; 2025). A rigid designator like the swastika can be framed as “just about” something else (Resnick 2025). This “determined indeterminacy,” like colorblind discourse, naturalizes white supremacy by denying its existence (Resnick 2024). As with political dogwhistles, it enables speakers to espouse repugnant views while appearing to conform to liberal norms (Resnick 2024).
This is why American Eagle did not need to apologize. One need not be accountable for vibes. It could dismiss criticisms by insisting the ad was just “about the jeans.” Though some videos were removed, Sweeney said nothing, and the company posted only one non-apology:
This message narrowed the contextual aperture. Regardless of uptake—which both critics and supporters saw as extending beyond jeans—they affirmed meaning only in what was explicitly spoken: Sweeney’s personal “jeans” and “story.” The inclusive gesture to “everyone” nodded to the criticism while deflecting it with a universalizing message. Anyone who saw race, it implied, was seeing things that weren’t there.
This affirms a restricted meaning based only on explicit referentiality, instructing readers and viewers to ignore co-textual signs and context (Hodges 2020; Gershon 2025). Only speaker intention counts, and any further inference is cast as illusion (Gershon 2025). This form of gaslighting (Ibid) reflects a semiotic ideology of containment, empowering bad-faith speakers and listeners to dictate what something is “just” about.
Dogwhistles as canaries in coal mines
Liberal outlets such as the New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Cut, and Vulture ran op-eds framing the controversy as misunderstanding or trivial (Andrew, Scottie et al. 2025). In this architecture of false equivalences, the dogwhistle is reduced to a failure to communicate across party lines or “read the room” (Battle 2025). Writers urged readers to “not be weird” and stop making Sweeney a proxy for broader debates, arguing that too much context is problematic and “Sometimes a pun is just a pun” (Jones 2025). Others lamented that “the discourse is broken,” with both sides only discharging outrage (Warzel 2025). Many blamed the Internet or social media for polarization.
The “discourse” is indeed shaped by algorithmic media that mines attention through ragebait and infinite scrolls. But the Internet did not break the discourse. Racist dogwhistles long predate it; there has never been a good faith bipartisan conversation (Slotta 2020). Reasoned dialogue with white supremacists is neither desirable nor possible. The metadiscourse is broken too: if bad-faith speakers mobilize semiotic ideologies of containment, then talking past one another is not a failure but an achievement. And semiotic containment will only increasingly normalize dangerous rhetoric and admit it into respectable discourse.
This dynamic extends beyond the American Eagle ad, which condenses broader cultural movements. A “leftist meltdown” is overstated; most leftists didn’t care. MAGA media amplified faint signals (Warzel 2025) to occasion the celebration of the death of “woke” and rebirth of “normal.” The same pattern followed Dylan Mulvaney (Holmes 2025).
A select few spoke of dogwhistles, others of canaries in coal mines. On Breaking Points, the host read the ad as carrying white supremacist and eugenicist overtones; the guest scoffed, calling it “just an ad, not a canary in the coal mine for the rise of fascism.” Others insisted it was exactly that: for critical savvy listeners,it was an early warning of danger.
A “canary in a coal mine” once referred to bringing canaries underground to warn of toxic gases. As a metaphor, it’s a signal of imminent threat. Yet the canary is not a signal but a sensitive receiver, like a savvy listener who can reconstruct the discursive milieu and anticipate construals.
Listening is political work. The pragmatics of reception, who listens, to whom, how, and why (Slotta 2023), are further complicated by algorithmic mediation which creates micro-publics. As linguistic anthropologists, we cultivate sensitive listening within and beyond field sites and across publics. So when we hear the cry “woke is dead!” as the military-industrial complex ramps up domestically and abroad, we should continue to ask what that cry presupposes and entails. Such listening may provide early warnings or perhaps reminders of dangers long present.
Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha M. 2020. “The Jungle Academy: Molding White Supremacy in American Police Recruits.” American Anthropologist 122 (1): 143–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13357.
Dénigot, Quentin, and Heather Burnett. 2020. “Dogwhistles as Identity-Based Interpretative Variation.” Proceedings of the Probability and Meaning Conference.
Dick, Hilary Parsons, and Kristina Wirtz. 2011. “Racializing Discourses.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21 (s1): E2–10.
Hall, Kira, Donna M. Goldstein, and Matthew Bruce Ingram. 2016. “The Hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, Gesture, Spectacle.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 71–100.
Haney-López, Ian. 2014. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hodges, Adam. 2020. “Plausible Deniability.” In Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887410.009.
Lempert, Michael. 2024. From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McIntosh, Janet. 2020. “Crybabies and Snowflakes.” In Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887410.005.
Mendelberg, Tali. 2001. The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2020. “Part I Introduction: ‘Ask the Gays’: How to Use Language to Fragment and Redefine the Public Sphere.” In Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887410.002.
Resnick, Elana. 2024. “The Determined Indeterminacy of White Supremacy.” American Ethnologist 51 (3): 433–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13311.
———. 2025. “Absurdities of Indeterminacy: Swastikas and Playing with the Token-Type Relationship.” Signs and Society 13 (1): 60–77. https://doi.org/10.1017/sas.2024.8.
Slotta, James. 2020. “The Significance of Trump’s Incoherence.” In Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887410.003.
———. 2023. Anarchy and the Art of Listening: The Politics and Pragmatics of Reception in Papua New Guinea. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501770029.
Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2025. “Revisiting the Strategically Deployable Shifter: Manipulating Indeterminacy for Semiotic Power and Profit.” Signs and Society 13 (1): 9–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/sas.2024.3.
Until recently, if you perused the scholarship on Instagram, the app might have appeared to be a relatively benign, homogenous stepchild to its social media forebears. More visual, more commercial, less political, less weighty. Instagram was a place for diet fads and celebrity selfies, not a site for important developments like the obsessively analyzed Facebook or Twitter. While its status has begun to shift and be rendered more complex, the first book devoted to the platform, Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures (Leaver, Highfield and Abidin) was only published in 2020, a couple of years after the platform had reached one billion monthly active users. Meanwhile, those users relentlessly cultivated new media practices and relations on the platform through endogenous aesthetic conventions, emergent subjectivities, and political contestations.
Our new edited collection, Food Instagram: Identity, Influence and Negotiation (University of Illinois Press, May 31, 2022) opens up new lines of questioning about Instagram practices and relations through the medium of food. Food offers varied and delightfully visual points of entry for exploring social media practices across diverse geographies, coalescing around the central category of “food Instagram.” We identify food Instagram as not just a common subject, but a quasi-genre on the platform distinguished by a shared focus on representations of food, eating, and food-related phenomena circulated by both everyday users and industry professionals.
Reflecting the heterogeneous content of food Instagram, the book brings interdisciplinary lenses to the platform’s food images and processes of image-making, drawing on media studies, food studies, gender and sexuality studies, sociology, anthropology, art theory, political theory, and other fields. The book brokers conversations beyond academia, too, including chapters from a food journalist, feminist artists, and a food influencer, KC Hysmith, who baked, styled, and shot the cover photo. Carefully positioned, basked in natural light, shot from above, and purposefully colorful, the photo replicates the food Instagram aesthetic as it critiques it. A knife slices through a photo of “Instagrammable” cake, rendered in pink frosting upon a phone made itself of cake, visually representing the layered and deconstructionist work of the volume. In this way, the book contributes to our digital food culture as it comments on it, considering both food in media and food as medium.
When we composed our call for abstracts in 2019, we were delighted to see it travel far and wide across social media and listservs. From the dozens of submissions that we received, we crafted a collection of essays that draws together an international community of scholars, opening up conversations far beyond the US focus of much research on Instagram. Contributions feature food influencers in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, and the US. Chefs and restaurateurs in France, Denmark, and Thailand appear in the book, while other chapters examine how Canadian and Australian farmers use the platform. Overtly political representations of food are explored in an Israeli nation-building project and in the posts of populist politicians in Brazil and Italy. Several chapters focus on regional food identities in North America, from biscuit restaurants in the US South to organic farmers in the cross-border Pacific Northwest. Food Instagram is thoroughly emplaced, rooted in locally evolving food cultures and taste politics with global implications.
As these chapters show, Instagram has become an important site for producing our mediated food system through its visual economy. From producers’ photogenic narratives about our food origins, like compassionately raised “happy meat,” to the stylings of brightly layered, extravagant “freakshakes”
in an Australian café bought by some customers only to photograph, not eat—food is consumed as much by the camera as by the mouth. As Gaby David and Laurence Allard recount in their chapter on food porn, when asking after dessert recommendations at a Parisian restaurant, the waiter replied, “Well, one is served warm and is very tasty, but the other one is more Instagrammable.” Food has always been valued for its visuality, and food porn long predates digital media. However, as a digitally networked commodity, food-related content can travel further and faster, and reach different, often broader audiences than previous food media. Everyday media users also become food content producers outside of professional spheres much more than before, altering the dynamics of food systems. Suddenly any point along the food chain could become a socially networked object accessible anywhere via the platform.
The spaces of food consumption have likewise been adapted for the camera lens, as restaurants, shops, farmers markets, and kitchens are redesigned to produce a grammable experience. By 2019, an estimated 78% of restaurants in the US used the platform, and both dishes and restaurants themselves have been redesigned to conform to Instagram aesthetics. Public appetite for continuous visual content as an extension of these spaces can lead to a convergence in aesthetic styles, as Fabio Parasecoli and Mateusz Halawa show in their edited volume, Global Brooklyn (2021), which traces the reproduction of the New York borough’s industrial hipster style across food hotspots around the world. Hashtags and geotags are additional place-making technologies on Instagram, creating meaning by both locating images geographically and linking content across space. In the world of food, they can serve to both localize and globalize food-related images, which can be seen, for example, in the use of the hashtag #foodporn. David and Allard note that although 80 percent of Instagram food posts in France are in French, the majority of hashtags are in English to intentionally engage with global users. These citational practices fuse digital and physical places, as food images index local identities while plugging into transnational networks.
Food subjects are also produced in this visual economy, and Food Instagram offers rich and provocative examples from not just the influencers and celebrities for which the app is most closely identified, but also restaurateurs alongside everyday cooks and food photographers. Representing a kind of networked star system held together by the density of their connections and followings, the influencer economy commodifies corners of food culture by driving attention and selling lifestyles. Contributor Mimi Okabe looks at how Japanese diet product companies mobilize influencers and everyday users to reproduce a hyperfeminine girl culture privileging thinness, while Tara Schuwerk and Sarah Cramer explore how wellness influencers rely on highly gendered visual conventions and questionable claims of expertise while prescribing healthy eating choices. Influence can also stir up bonds of community, such as digital practices of hospitality and communal cooking fostered during the pandemic by Black women linked by such hashtags and accounts as #blackgirlcooking and Vegan Soul Food, as examined by Robin Caldwell. Similarly, Alex Ketchum shows feminist restaurateurs adeptly blending a longer history of analog media, such as cookbooks and newsletters, with social media content like Instagram stories as a means to sustain their communities’ political commitments amidst food offerings, recipes, and event listings.
The volume also shows how food subjectivities exceed familiar categories of cooks and eaters, for example by looking to farmers carefully curating their feeds to depict the idyllic origin of crops and livestock, and populist politicians connecting with their publics using posts of what contributor Sara Garcia calls “food puritanism,” identified as ostensibly authentic (traditional or comfort) foods shared without embellishment or editing. Digital platforms like Instagram thus mediate food and identity through visibility, storytelling, and networked communities in ways that can deepen connections or fragment them.
In our introduction we offer up a framework for analyzing these and other themes that locate the book at the crossroads of a number of conversations in media studies and food studies. Proposing a “feed supply chain” analysis of food Instagram, we suggest that one of the aesthetic appeals of the platform is its ability to offer the illusion of frictionless access to beautiful images, including food. We write, “The platform helps to foster the fantasy of shortened food (and image) supply chains through its aesthetics of liveness, intimacy, and authenticity” (p. 13). By examining how the platform supports a visual food ecosystem all the way from raw inputs—including everything from attractive food and photographic labor to celebrity appeal and user attention—to distribution, consumption, and waste along the feed supply chain, we push fellow scholars of media and food to integrate image analysis into broader engagement with the politics and economics of constantly feeding the feed.
For the fields of media studies and food studies, this approach provides new access points for familiar topics like celebrity, influencers, food porn, virality, identity, digital and culinary labor, and the cultures of connectivity, among others. It also invites us to bring food Instagram into other emerging interdisciplinary conversations, such as the role of social media in increasing food waste through excess consumption; the often-hidden forms of labor supporting food Instagram such as farm workers, delivery people, and content moderators whose exploitation may be exacerbated by their relative invisibility; the carbon footprint of food tourism and the vast archives of unused photographs stored in the cloud; and social media’s role in the changing political economy of both our food system and platform capitalism. Instagram has significantly shaped what, how, and why we eat. As editors, we sincerely hope that Food Instagram documents how food also shaped Instagram, as the volume charts the myriad aspects of this transformation still left open to explore.
Ariana Gunderson: You write that “cooking involves a code and its instantiations,” (Sutton 2021, 15). Do you consider the code of cooking to be analogous to linguistic codes? If so, how?
David Sutton: This question is really at the heart of what I was trying to do in this book. Because when I started studying cooking, I was very far from a structuralist perspective, and was much more drawn to approaches to cooking as embodied sociomaterial practice. Much of my work on cooking that was based on my video ethnography, especially in Secrets from the Greek Kitchen, focused on skill, tool use, the kitchen as environment, and other concepts that I adopted from people like Tim Ingold and Jean Lave. But what kept nagging at me was that cooking clearly wasn’t just emergent. We don’t just start out with a random set of ingredients and see what bubbles up; we set out to make something. So the whole dialectic between structure and practice that was so much of my graduate training seemed relevant again, and especially in the form that Sahlins writes about, since his approach is all about understanding the riskiness of all practice. And of course he was drawing from and modifying the linguistic-derived approach Lévi-Strauss. And then of course there was Mary Douglas’s work on food categories. So I think that at first I believed that these new approaches were what I needed to understand cooking, but the book is really about reconciling a dynamic structuralism with a more embodied phenomenology.
Ariana Gunderson: Might we consider recipe-writing a process of entextualization? Is the moment of recipe inscription a risky one?
David Sutton: On the one hand I have long felt that the moment of entextualization of recipes has tended to be problematic, a claiming of authorship that has often privileged male chefs over “anonymous” female cooks, a point made by Luce Giard, among others. And this appropriation of power often occurs in the process of inscription, whereas oral transmission is still controlled by ordinary women. So it’s risky from the point of view of who gets credit and who gets forgotten. It’s also risky in the sense that a recipe is always a “moment in time,” as Jacques Pepin puts it, the freezing of a process, which is the opposite of an approach attuned to contingency. So inscription is also translation, a translation of an assemblage of experiences; it is doubly risky. Perhaps triply so because in many culinary memoirs the moment of writing down the recipe from an older relative almost always presages impending death. At the same time, I think that the written recipe has a function, at least as a memory jog. Although the more I think about it, I realize that on Kalymnos this function is served by other people, mostly women that share the matrilocal kitchen space, and who constantly remind each other of the ingredients, proportions, and tricks that are involved in each dish.
Ariana Gunderson: Your research has been rooted in Kalymnos for decades, enabling you to examine long-term change and continuity in this new book. What do you see as the connection between an extended period of study and paying attention to small scale change?
David Sutton: I’ve always admired long-term fieldwork and the insights that come from it; I think it provides insight into continuity and change, or “changing continuities” as my mother, Constance Sutton, described it based on her long-term engagement with Barbados. Given that my initial fieldwork on Kalymnos was about historical consciousness, it’s also been interesting to see how ideas about the past change over time, and especially how small-scale change can lead to bigger changes. But small-scale change is important in other ways, in that you can see it happening ethnographically much more clearly than you can see a change, let’s say, from so-called traditional to modern world views. So I’m suggesting that focusing on something like cooking allows us to see the process of change (and continuity) in action, rather than comparing how things were at two points in time and making assumptions about what happened in between.
I’ve noticed how many social theorists use the metaphor of recipes to talk about various social processes, though as with my comments above, I think the idea of the recipe can be problematic. On the other hand, I like to think about how much of the activity of cooking is similar to anthropology: attention to detail, participant sensing, focus on parts and wholes. Making cooking more explicit as part of our research can illuminate a lot of the social processes that we are interested in.
Ariana Gunderson: In an autoethnographic interlude, you describe recreating your late father’s spinach casserole in search of his voice. This calls up Annie Hauck-Lawson’s use of the concept of food voice to assert agency and the real-world impact of non-verbal, edible communication. Can you speak to how you find the concept of food voice useful in your ethnographic work?
David Sutton: I’ve always liked Hauck-Lawson’s concept of food voice because it can both extend and stand in for other ways that people express themselves. In Greece food voice is expressed at least in part through smell as neighbors pay attention to, and comment upon, the smell of what’s cooking next door. But I think I was most directly influenced by Carole Counihan’s slightly modified use of food voice, or what she calls “food centered life histories.” Especially in her book A Tortilla is Like Life, she uses the concept to get at the very distinct personalities, and distinct life trajectories, of the Mexicana women in southern Colorado that she was studying. I tried to do a bit of that in my previous book Secrets from the Greek Kitchen. In a way I feel like food voice does some of the work for me at the micro-level that gustemology does at the collective level. Both are about exploring peoples’—individual and collective—food-centered world views. I feel that the best ethnography moves between these two levels.
Ariana Gunderson: Did writing Bigger Fish to Fry change how you cook? Do you hope it will change the way readers cook?
David Sutton: I think it did and I hope it does. One of my targets in the book is the idea of culinary perfectionism, what John Finn calls “culinary fascism.” It’s the idea that there is one right way to do some kitchen task, or one best recipe for any dish. I think there are a lot of lingering problematic assumptions in this approach to cooking, which can lead to things like molecular gastronomists claiming to separate old wives’ tales from scientific truths about cooking. My focus on risk and contingency, I hope, challenges the idea of perfection: in other words, I suggest that, like the Kalymnians, we should imagine good cooking as managing contingencies (material, sensory and social), rather than achieving perfection. Also, I think that the idea that I develop from Sahlins that every reproduction is also a transformation suggests a greater willingness to accept and enjoy the differences and similarities when we cook a familiar dish. I think that if we think about what makes cooking cooking in terms not of a product but of a process of confronting all the contingencies that arise both in and out of the space of the kitchen, and developing our own tricks to deal with these contingencies, to improvise, we might develop a healthier, more equanimous attitude, rather than the more dichotomous one of success versus failure, which can lead to stress and frustration.
Re-reading page 99 of my dissertation, I’m snapped back to the mosque in Milan, Italy that I came to know so well. Where public school children convened to learn about Islam, and a first grader asked if he was no longer a Muslim because he accidentally ate pork. Where, almost every Friday, I sat in the back with my hair covered, surrounded by other women, who expertly moved their bodies to the rhythm of worship. Where I walked, day in and day out in order to enter the offices of Halal Italia.
Page 99 sits towards the end of a chapter about the community running Halal Italia. I’m drinking tea and eating pastries with an Algerian friend who mentions that the group I work with is “not really Muslim”. What my friend was alluding to is that labeling food is powerful and can create legitimate actors and legible worlds. This is especially relevant in Italy for two conceptual reasons that have empirical effects. Italy has a global reputation for “good” food, and Muslims outside of Muslim majority countries play the leading role in determining what is certifiable as halal. Through my entanglement in daily work life, I found that the established culture of made in Italy products was a powerful force in shaping values within the Italian halal industry today.
This notion of value itself is complex. And perhaps it is due to this complexity, and the limits of the ethnographic written form, that I end my dissertation with a passage from Italo Calvino’s (1972) Invisible Cities. In the book, the emperor Kublai Khan tells Marco Polo that he can describe real cities he has never seen, his cities are based on elements in which all cities should possess. However, the Khan is unable to describe any of the cities Polo has encountered. Polo responds, “I have also thought of a model city from which I derive all others… It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions… But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would arrive at cities too probable to be real” (Calvino 1972:32).
Similarly, I show that the project of the certifier is to operate within a world that is empirically true but is also one of discourse, and like Polo’s cities, their projects are limited by, and shaped within, the food worlds they inhabit.
Calvino, Italo. 1972. Le Citta Invisibili. Turin: Einaudi.
Lauren Crossland-Marr. 2020. Consuming Local, Thinking Global: Building a Halal Industry in a World of Made in Italy. Washington University in St. Louis, Phd.
My dissertation explores media networks within the Chicago culinary industry. At three fieldwork sites I conducted participant observation and employee ethnography with media producers, chefs, and software app developers at the intersections of food and media. My main theoretical focus is on how different actors experience and adapt to digital media’s impact on culinary culture. Using the concepts of hypermediacy, authenticity, and immediacy, I demonstrate the struggle emerging between these networks and highlight the very real barriers to successful collaboration prosumerism is breeding across production cultures.
Page 99, just shy of the conclusions drawn from my first ethnographic research site, is set during a food-focused audio competition. It opens with an intern commenting on the user-submitted short documentaries she remixed into a teaser for the competition’s main event, an “Audio Feast” announcing the winners:
I really respect and admire each person that submitted a piece, I feel like they put so much thought and effort into each second…that you may not know listening, but when you’re producing or editing them you discover all these things, like taking out a little silence to make the story tighter…
The Audio Feast brought in five famous chefs to represent the winning documentaries in a food event focused on dialogue rather than degustation. The awkward premise shined a light on the highly divergent perspectives, processes, and products of the participant groups. Audio producers use scripted material and careful production to simulate the authentic through hypermediation. Chefs, on the other hand, deliver authenticity through the immediacy of production, distribution, and consumption.
As the event organizers, the media experts dictated logistics, creating a counterfeit culinary environment in which the media novices, the chefs, were required to perform. The chefs found it challenging to adapt their production culture and largely defaulted to the immediacy-focused taste, temperature, and timing of their milieu, even though the audience would not eat their food. When chefs were able to sublimate their own ethos and embrace the hallmarks of new media, crafting (inedible) Instagrammable food and sharing emotionally compelling narratives, they achieved some level of audience connection. But the collaboration, on the whole, was fraught with conflict and consternation and showcased the lengths to which media novices will go to avoid media production—even at the cost of their own authenticity. Ultimately, the Audio Feast exchanged participation for exposure, allowing the chefs to sidestep media creation and prosumption while shining a light on the spoils prosumerism promises to deliver.
My dissertation draws from this example as I move through the interconnected web of the culinary community, further exposing the trajectory of a culture growing increasingly more reliant on hypermediation to discover, feel, and claim tangible human experiences. How will this change the way we eat? We can only anticipate the #flavorofthefuture.
Leigh Bush. Slow Food and Fast Fast Flows: Chefs, Cuisine, and Convergence. Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University, Bloomington, 2017.
Leigh Bush earned her PhD from Indiana University’s Food Studies program where she researched the effects of new media on the culinary industry. She studied and worked in wine, dairy and meat production in Europe and the United States before doing her ethnographic research on food, media, and tech startups in Chicago. She has been a fellow at the IU Food Institute and at the travel and exploration digital media company, Atlas Obscura/Gastro Obscura. She has been host of the wine documentary Hoosier Hospitality: Wine, and guest-host of WFIU’s syndicated food radio program Earth Eats. Currently, she works in the tech industry in Colorado, writes freelance for the publication, Westword, and teaches adjunct at Johnson and Wales University, Denver. You can reach her at leigh.bush@gmail.com.
“Local” has emerged as one of the hottest food and cultural concepts in the United States in the past 25 years. Many people choose to buy local, read books written or published or bound locally, wear clothing made from homespun fiber or fashioned nearby, ride locally made bicycles, recreate locally, and build homes with locally sourced materials. Three-quarters of Americans say that they are highly influenced by labels that indicate food is “locally grown.” Food industry giants that regularly source from around the world, such as members of the National Restaurant Association, the largest food service trade organization, and Walmart, the largest US grocer, identify “locally grown” as a top food trend in recent years. The term’s ubiquity alone begs examination.
we report on our research over two decades that includes hundreds of interviews and site visits and thousands of surveys to understand why local matters to the people involved and how they live it. Our focus is on people associated with farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture (CSA) in the Midwest and in the central Appalachian regions, but we also range far beyond. Here is a brief glimpse.
What Counts as Local?
Research and experience point to many appeals to local food—social, economic, and environmental factors. But the definition remains elusive.
On the surface, localism seems to be all about proximity–what is sourced nearby has more appeal than what is transported from far away. But defining local in terms of distance turns out not to be very definitive, even among its advocates: 400 miles, within state lines, within a day’s drive? Proximity, it turns out, is only part of how people define local. A passionate statement by a ten-year local grower, market vendor, and CSA provider we will call Sage Goodell helps open up many of the values that define local.
We call this thing that we are doing farmer. We are working hard to create a new definition for farmer. We are working hard to replace the image of big tractors and acres of corn with an image of farm diversity, creative thinker, healthy people, healthy land, life not death, vibrant nutritious living food, good land steward, responsible caretaker of this earth. Rather than a worn-out, sick “farmer” sitting in an air-conditioned tractor spraying toxic chemicals on a field, you see a robust, energetic, inspired, loving farmer on her hands and knees hand-weeding the carrots. Rather than going to Kroger and buying lifeless, tasteless, chemical-laden produce, you go to the farmers’ market and shake hands with the person who grew your vegetables, harvesting them the day before and sharing with you the latest news on the farm. You develop a relationship with this farmer. She thinks of you as she harvests produce each week. She thinks of you at supper on market day, knowing you have gratitude as you nourish yourself with her produce. You have a relationship with the farmer that grows your food. This is the new definition of farmer.
In the process of defining her profession, Goodell articulates seven notable facets of the ideology of local.
Local Is Temporal
Freshness is frequently cited as one of the most desirable qualities of local food, and Goodell references “vibrant, nutritious living food.” Picked so recently, it may still be alive. She mentions “harvesting [produce] the day before and sharing with you the latest news on the farm.” The food she grows, like news, loses an essential quality over time. In addition, she references generational time, agricultural practices dying away with the conventional farmers while the “robust, energetic, inspired loving” next-generation farmers flourish.
Local Is Healthful
Goodell describe a generational trajectory of improvement in healthfulness and sets local in opposition to conventional agriculture. She describes a shift away from conventional agricultural methods that involve “spraying toxic chemicals” for “lifeless, tasteless, chemical-laden produce” and toward intensive methods that produce healthful food, “life not death.”
Local Implicates Scale
She sets the scale of “big tractors and acres of corn” and rote, straight-line work against “an image of farm diversity, creative thinker . . . on her hands and knees hand-weeding the carrots.” The artisanal, or “small batch,” scale of local conveys desirable qualities beyond proximity or nutritional content. Indeed, food grown nearby but processed at large scale can lose the value it might gain from its proximity to origin, according to the ideology of local.
Local Means Accountability
Goodell contrasts the traditional supermarket experience with going “to the farmers’ market to shake hands with the person who grew your vegetables.” That tangibility, an actual touch, enacts a “relationship,” a bond of exchange, a shaking of hands that may perform a greeting, a thank-you, or a contract.
Local Implies Environmental Stewardship
Goodell describes her goal of being a “responsible caretaker of this earth,” caring for it “down in the soil on my hands and knees, in the dirt.” Local food offers practical solutions to the environmental impact of agriculture in shorter transport distances, less fuel consumption, and less pollution, and many local food farmers strive to live with a small environmental footprint.
Local Fosters Systems Thinking
In another conversation, Goodell described her work as “growing nutritious food the smart way” to benefit all, because “we are all in this thing together.” Her approach to land stewardship constitutes an “intimate relationship,” a “marriage” of sorts. The integrative nature of local informs “the new definition of farmer.”
Local Is Oppositional
Goodell defines her work against capitalistic norms, setting corporate agriculture with its productivity ideal to “feed the world” against localism’s values of small-scale accountability and performative competence. The rich farmer with air-conditioned tractors is demoted, and the poor one on her hands and knees is elevated. The flawless and bountiful are toxic while the small and laborious are vibrant.
Local remains rhetorically ambiguous. It’s a fiddly notion that must be puzzled out differently by different people according to the contexts in which they find themselves. Freed from a strict spatial definition that only reductively renders the spirit of the movement, local food in its many dimensions can become an activist tool for change–it’s not just about space but also about time, health, human scale, accountability, stewardship of environmental systems, and progress. It puts people inside a system with many actors who each play an important part. As people and goods become more far-flung from their roots, the longing for connectedness and community become more intense. Local rehumanizes.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Sage for sharing her brilliance. And thanks, too, to the many other farmers and customers of local food who generously shared their worlds with us.
Thanks to Indiana University Press for their faith in the project.
Jennifer Meta Robinson, PhD, is professor of practice in the Indiana University Department of Anthropology where she studies food, communication, and pedagogy. She lives on a 40-year local food farm in scenic Greene County, Indiana.
CaMP Anthropology 