Digital Food Activism

This book explores and deciphers the trajectories taken on by digital food activism in South Asia, addressing the convergences between digital and food activism that take shape at the juncture of social and culinary reformation. It specifically focuses on case studies of self-led online campaigns emerging from South Asia, centered around food de-corporatization, revival of foodways, and foregrounding of local and regional food knowledge and heritages. Through such an explorative focus, the authors interrogate the ways in which the public utilizes the pace and reach of digitality to rectify a dysfunctional system of food by encouraging a ‘critical reading’ of what is eaten and, by default, the world that is lived in. In doing so, the volume highlights the potential of digital food activism as ‘public pedagogy’ in mobilizing collective awareness and action against the rapid commercialization of food and in favor of the right to better consumption practices. The authors further conceptualize and propose the term ‘digital public food pedagogies’, in which the publicness embedded in digital spaces is reoriented around practices of  ‘understanding’ and interpreting the food system, placing diverse yet co-constitutive epistemologies of food at the center of the discourse. This book, then, approaches digital and social media as sites that actors utilize to impact the ‘gastronomic,’ a cultural field otherwise plagued by commercialization and its endorsement of misinformation.