You are what you eat online : the phenomenon of mediated eating practices and their underlying moral regimes in Swedish “What I eat in a day” vlogs

Abstract: In Western societies, with increasingly salient mediation processes, eating, too, has become an entanglement of offline and online practices. Food as carrier of values has never merely satisfied bodily needs, which makes it essential to investigate mediated eating practices and emerging digital foodscapes in order to understand how they change everyday life, but also culture at large. However, most existing studies emphasise nutritional features of eating and individual relations to food and thereby neglect the at least as important socio cultural aspects of food as well as underlying structures and implicit symbolic value systems. Through the use of practice theory, this case study on Swedish “What I eat in a day” vlogs balances individual agency regarding lifestyle-diet choices with structures of underlying food rules and values (regimes). Furthermore, as the food vlogs (re)present actual eating practices turned into texts, it becomes necessary to combine practice theory with structural and cultural perspectives. By investigating how the food vloggers scenically, visually and narratively perform their lifestyle diets, this study provides insight into the inner workings of the cultural field of food vlogs. Mechanisms of unspoken foodie hierarchies, internal struggles for positions and the negotiation of moral imperatives become visible. These processes, moreover, illuminate how everyday, bottom-up expertise in combination with the authority of a micro-celebrity can grant the position of cultural intermediary. As such intermediaries, the vloggers, in cooperation with their online community, define, change and spread everyday eating practices online as well as offline. In addition to illustrating the workings of food vlogs per se, this case study, thus, also provides insight into more general processes of cultural reproduction and renewal.