You are what you Instagram

Abstract

This chapter explores how ‘clean eating’ communities present themselves online. Instagram is a social network app designed to share photos and videos from a mobile smartphone or device. The relationship between food and morality has an established history. In many major religions, food is of profound theological significance. In Christianity, the apple is a symbol of temptation and original sin, bread and wine the means by which the believer exercises communion with Christ. Dieting theology assigns a moral value to food by constructing a dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways of living. In the case of Instagram, the act of liking and commenting on posts can be conceived as affirmation rituals staged in a digital domain. For example, clean eating top posts on Instagram tend to represent specific types of foods, namely, raw produce in its unprocessed form and those so-called ‘super-foods’ associated with the clean eating movement.

Topics & Concepts