ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the themes and concerns facing food citizens, producers and activists. It outlines the growth of lifestyle and consumer-related forms of participatory politics online, and looks at the affordances of online platforms for enabling connected forms of personal consumption. The chapter explores the role of platforms in bringing together food communities. It presents the limitations of connectivity and the hegemony of corporate food politics in social media spaces. The chapter describes the limits of data sharing around food and so-called informational transparency in an era of data monitoring and 'Big Data'. It demonstrates that the digital realm offers a wide range of potential political affordances that cannot necessarily be pre-empted in advance as progressive, conservative or otherwise. The digitisation of food through commercial apps like whatscook, can change relationship to food in ways that are often hidden from view to the average person, embedded in an increasingly invisible algorithmic logic and culture.
