Fieldwork in online foodscapes: How to bring an ethnographic approach to studies of digital food and digital eating

Digital technologies increasingly mediate how producers and consumers seek, share and interpret food and food-related information and eating practices. This has led to a burgeoning research interest in the digitalisation and datafication of food and eating and the implications of these processes (Lewis and Phillipov, 2018; Lupton, 2018; Schneider et al., 2018). In this chapter, we offer a review of recent studies, including our own past and on-going research, which have examined food and eating in the digital sphere. Building on this review, we delineate a research agenda, informed by social anthropology and science and technology studies (STS), that draws on ethnographic sensibilities to explore ‘the digital’ in digital food studies. Such an ethnographic approach, we argue, can problematise reductionist understandings of ‘the digital’, capture the porous boundaries between ‘digital’ and ‘analogue’ food and eating, and reveal the complex ‘symbiotic agency’ (Neff and Nagy, 2018) of people, food and platforms.