ABSTRACT
Food can be a powerful affective material, assembling with humans to generate forceful vitalities and intensities. In food-related domains, the affordances for reaching extremely large audiences of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat and content-sharing sites including Pinterest and YouTube, combine with the compelling force of visual media that can be uploaded, shared, curated and tagged on these platforms. Cultural scholars and researchers are only just beginning to examine and analyse the vast wealth of the images as they pertain to food cultures and foodways. Gender norms are central to assumptions about the appropriateness of certain foods and food quantities that should be consumed. Excessive food consumption has long been a carnivalesque tradition, a way of celebrating feast days and holidays and marking them as extraordinary. YouTube was launched in mid-2005 with the explicit intention of providing a platform for people to share home-made videos, or to ‘broadcast themselves’.
