Algorithmic Taste: How Platforms Shape What We Eat
The decision of "what's for dinner" is increasingly mediated by digital platforms. Recipe apps like Tasty use engagement data to optimize for visually striking, short-form videos, influencing global home cooking trends. Meal-kit services employ algorithms to customize boxes based on inferred dietary preferences and past selections, creating personalized culinary pathways. Social media, particularly Instagram and TikTok, has turned food into a highly aestheticized performance, where the shareability of a dish can be as important as its taste. At the Institute of Digital Anthropology, we study how these algorithmic systems act as cultural intermediaries, standardizing certain flavors and presentations while marginalizing others, and ultimately shaping collective palates and cooking practices.
Transparency and Obfuscation in Digital Supply Chains
Digital technology promises radical transparency in food supply chains through blockchain tracking, QR codes on packaging, and farm-to-table apps. This responds to consumer demand for ethical and sustainable sourcing. However, our ethnographic research with farmers, distributors, and consumers reveals a more complex reality. The data presented is often selectively curated, telling a marketing story rather than providing full transparency. Meanwhile, the labor of platform-based delivery drivers remains largely invisible and precarious. We trace these digital supply chains from end to end, analyzing the gaps between the promise of information and the lived reality of food production and delivery work.
Virtual Commensality and the Social Life of Digital Food
Eating is a fundamentally social act, and digital tools are creating new forms of virtual commensality (eating together). During the pandemic, "Zoom dinners" became a lifeline. Live-streaming platforms host "mukbang" broadcasts, where performers eat enormous quantities of food for an online audience, creating a peculiar intimacy around consumption. Gaming communities share virtual feasts in games like Final Fantasy or share recipes inspired by game lore. We study these practices to understand how social bonding and cultural norms around eating are adapting when physical co-presence is impossible or augmented by digital mediation.
Food Justice and Digital Inequity
The digitization of food systems also risks exacerbating existing inequalities. "Food deserts" can become "digital food deserts" where lack of connectivity or digital literacy limits access to online grocery delivery or budgeting apps. Algorithmic pricing in ride-share delivery services can make healthy food prohibitively expensive in low-income neighborhoods. Conversely, digital tools can also empower food justice movements. We document community-led initiatives using social media to organize urban gardens, apps to map and share surplus food, and platforms to advocate for agricultural workers' rights. The digital food landscape is a site of struggle where corporate platform power and grassroots community resilience are in constant tension.
- Areas of Investigation:
- The ethnography of dark kitchens (ghost kitchens) and the platformization of restaurant labor.
- The rise of dietary identities (vegan, keto, etc.) as reinforced and performed through online communities.
- The cultural politics of authenticity in the era of globally viral "fusion" recipes.
- The environmental footprint of the digital infrastructure underlying modern food systems.
The future of food is being written in code as much as in soil. By applying an anthropological lens to these digital transformations, we can better understand the emerging cultures of consumption, the changing political economy of nourishment, and the pathways toward a more equitable and sustainable food system for the digital age.