Digital food practices hold immense sociocultural, political, and economic power because they implicate core aspects of everyday life – for instance, work, identity, health, and the environment. This hands-on workshop explores what it means to study digital food practices, why this work matters, and the ways in which ethnographic techniques can help foreground the stakes of food-technology interaction. Using a head-to-tail approach to research design, the session will guide participants through the process of developing a robust, ethnographically-informed project situated within digital food studies.

To begin, we collectively define the contours of ‘digital food studies’ – an interdisciplinary field that traverses a remarkably broad range of research traditions and literatures. We determine what practices of culinary production, consumption, and representation help constitute the field, and move to locating the digital field itself: the platforms, apps, interfaces, and services that serve as our primary institutions of study (e.g., recipe sharing platforms, delivery apps, generative AI tools).

Participants will then be introduced to digital ethnography as a highly adaptive methodology for ‘doing’ digital food studies. This form of inquiry is distinct from traditional ethnography in its focus and its instruments, enabling unique insights into phenomena as disparate as algorithmic governance, culture formation and ephemerality, and the complexities of hybrid online/offline interactions. We unpack the benefits, blindspots, norms, and assumptions of digital ethnography, and the specific sorts of knowledge it helps generate in its process of ‘making sense.’

Through small group activities, workshop participants will draft preliminary research plans, formulating research questions, selecting appropriate objects of study, determining data collection and analysis strategies, and identifying ethical considerations. Participants will leave the session with a concrete framework with which to begin their digital food studies project.

"It is all a matter of taste’ – or so the saying goes. ‘Taste’ is a complex concept, individually assessed and conceived, but also communicated both nonverbally (*smiles and nods*) and verbally (‘yuck!’). Taste is imposed, refused, negotiated, displayed, advertised, debated. It is a high-stakes conversational bomb disguised as a low-stakes small talk staple. ‘It is all a matter of taste’ – harmless comment, withering repartee or famous last words before a conversational breakdown (or divorce). It may just be one of the most subtle, yet efficient performative speech acts around. How To Do Things With Taste, indeed. At its most immediate, taste is expressed over food, in person, while eating. Like Chuck Goodwin’s geologists, eaters (can you say gustators?) prod and inspect, smell and manipulate food in an interactive ballet. Food is sampled, facial expressions and gustatory noises deployed, stance established through body language, descriptive, and evaluative terms, circling the dinner table in the age-old negotiation dance. Common ground is found and lost, rapport established, saturation achieved. Food scientists look aghast at the thousands of metaphors used to describe taste beyond the measly five terms the English language has in store – what is ‘crunchy’, what is ‘crispy’? Tasting panels attempt, in vain, to standardize evaluation and create the perfect taste, struggling with messy parole interference such as politeness (‘If I were very hungry, this would not be so bad’) and paralanguage (*polite silence*).

But how do you express taste online, with so many of the interactive possibilities lost through the limitations of the medium – not least the interactive focus of the food itself? A gustatory journey, indeed. Remember the very early days of online food discourse? Robbed of everything but the verbal layer, early food bloggers create elaborate pieces, like a New Yorker column, deploying the sensuous vocabulary of food and lifestyle literature, “the nutty cheese which plays off the slick of honey and faint crunch of sea salt” – taste poetry. Soon, the nonverbal peeks through again, “nom nom nom, mhhhh”. The web turns multimodal, and online taste with it – Jamie Oliver’s stream-of-consciousness cooking shows flash by, “let’s get some steaks on, let’s get cooking, this is screaming hot by now…”. Social media arrive, one-to-many becomes many-to(or against?)-many. Skype joins eaters around a world-spanning virtual dinner table. Food is vicariously enjoyed by millions. Instagram’s posh and rich esthetics give way to TikTok’s fresh and messy micro-tastes. Virtual tastings sustain gourmands and lonely eaters through the pandemic and beyond, working to overcome the digital barrier. YouTube raises its paywall, paid taste influencing and carnivalesque consumption flourish. Taste is, again, a matter of display and debate, interaction and negotiation, in posts, comments, threads, stories, reels. Binging with Babish, Tasty, Epic Meal Time, Hot Ones – you can almost taste it! And the future? All of the above, and more. Enjoy!

In vegan recipes, not only animal products are omitted, but a variety of other substances or food items are often left out: examples include gluten, refined sugar, or soy. In the comment sections of food blogs, reasons given for replacements include allergies, intolerances, ecological concerns, ethical reasons, personal food choices, or (pseudo)-scientific reasons. These accounts normalize the substitution of items, socially construct what I call ‘exgredients’—ingredients to be omitted—and frame requests for alternative preparations as acceptable behavior. Exgredients are constructed as ‘the better choice’ in a variety of present-day food discourses, (vegan) food blogs, packaging, or signs on restaurant windows.

These positively charged exgredients mirror the value systems of the food community producing this discourse. People can be held morally accountable for their food choices, including exgredients. While vegan discourse does not (in the data studied) include taste or religion as accounts for leaving something out, other discourses do. This illustrates that vegans value ethical choices constructing an identity as caring and self-empowering. Importantly, not every food item that is left out has this kind of social significance. For instance, in medieval recipes for lent or other fasting days, meat and dairy are left out, but these recipes are not discursively constructed as somehow better, healthier, or ethically more valued than the ones for regular non-fasting periods.

When looking at packaging, it soon becomes clear that exgredients have an antonymic sister: addgredients. For instance regarding protein, we find expressions such as protein-boosted or contains added protein. Other addgredients include vitamins, minerals, probiotics, fats such as Omega-3 acids, amino acids, antioxidants, but also caffeine. Addgredients are especially common for functional foods that are designed not only to satisfy hunger but also to provide specific health benefits.

This paper explores requests for exgredients, using examples from the comment sections of an Anglo-Canadian, a German, and a French vegan food blog. This is enriched with selected examples from Italian and observations of addgredients.

There is a long history of foods and drinks that appear in science fiction being made real and consumable by fans. Star Trek, a nearly 60-year-old American science fiction media franchise, provides ample examples of this phenomenon: Star Trek fans famously aim to replicate gagh, a dish enjoyed by Klingon warriors that resembles a pile of worms; fans post their own invented recipes online and seek out recipes in official and unofficial Star Trek cookbooks in order to make foods such as Cardassian yamok sauce; and an online company currently sells Star-Trek branded wines such as United Federation of Planets Andorian Blue. In other words, the foods and drinks of outer space and of alien species that are ‘consumed’ by onscreen Star Trek characters on television (and film) are also consumable by fans who prepare, buy, and presumably eat or drink them. In this paper, I explore how alcoholic drinks from Star Trek are made real and consumable in the context of a popular American comedic Star Trek review podcast and its fandom. Specifically, I show how alcoholic beverages that appear in episodes of the first three Star Trek television series that the podcast reviewed – Star Trek: The Next Generation (1988-1994), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999), and Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) – are moved across contexts (what Kristeva 1980 calls intertextuality) and modes (what Kress 2010 calls transduction) to become real and consumable by the podcasters and their listeners alike, contributing to the construction of the podcast’s Star Trek sub-fandom community.

The podcast, called The Greatest Generation, features hosts Adam Pranica and Ben Harrison, who have been roasting, reviewing, and discussing Star Trek episodes together since 2016. They regularly enjoy and talk about alcoholic beverages while recording and even have a term for alcohol-themed episodes – ‘drunkisodes’ (a blend of ‘drunk’ and ‘episodes’). My analysis focuses on three fictional Star Trek alcoholic drinks that figure prominently in the podcast – the coco no-no, Cardassian kanar,and Talaxian champagne. These drinks, which were first ingested and talked about by characters in the three aforementioned Star Trek television series, are talked about and consumed by the podcasters, who drink versions of them. The drinks also appear in text and image in online materials produced by and about the podcast. These include a fan-invented online ‘boardgame’ that the hosts play in order to determine how each podcast will be recorded (e.g., while drinking a specific beverage, or without using notes to structure their discussion), as well as the podcast’s fan-produced wiki and its Reddit forum. In addition, coco no-no images appear on items for sale in the podcast’s online shop, and are thus consumable in the sense of being purchasable by fans. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis and interactional sociolinguistics, I illuminate how ‘intertextual chains’ (Fairclough 1992) and ‘webs’ (Solin 2004) of discourse make fictional alcoholic drinks drinkable, buyable, and usable in the construction of a podcast fandom community.