Overlapping Archives of Culinary Experience: Media Materialities and Post-Digital Food Blogging

Abstract

This dissertation theorizes the food blog as an instance of “habitual new media” (Chun, Habitual New Media). A familiar Web 2.0 genre, food blogs have played a prominent role in rendering the Internet as a source of always-available culinary know-how. At the same time, they have long been and continue to be components of a broader “food-related media convergence” (Lofgren), as bloggers engage with other media formats and industries—cookbooks, television, photography, journalism—and rework their content to meet the demands of a “platformized creative economy” (Duffy et al. 1). Engaging with food blogging’s simultaneous persistence and transformation within a post-digital and post-foodie media landscape, I consider how the unfolding relationality of home cooking is “stabilized” (Kember and Zylinska 75) into demonstrable, shareable, and archivable food knowledges—a process I term culinary experience. While digital modalities provide an important “automedial” (Smith and Watson 168) venue for putting home cooking “on the record” (Couser 181), food blogs are never ‘just’ digital but instead speak to the entanglement of digital technologies, platforms, and discourses with legacy media forms, food and plant matter, and the agential ‘stuff’ and spaces of everyday life. I argue that culinary experience is enacted with, and complexified by, these overlapping materialities. My analysis is organized into three substantial chapters, which trace the materialization of culinary experience throughout the photographic practices of the blogging studio-kitchen, the blog-to-(cook)book pipeline of the 2010s, and the everyday soundscapes of short-form recipe videos. Calling for a deeper dialogue between food studies and feminist media studies in the wake of the material turn, I demonstrate that an attention to food blogging assemblages opens up questions about how certain food stories, and certain culinary agencies, come to “matter” (Poletti, Stories 7)—and explore how we might reorient the workings of culinary experience toward more equitable digital food futures.