Digital eating

This special issue examines how digitalisation is transforming the conditions under which eating is organised, valued, and contested in everyday life, focusing on the reconfiguration of expertise, choice, and care. While existing scholarship often treats the platformisation of culinary labour, the datafication of food production, and the digital mediation of food culture as separate, this special issue conceptualises them as interlinked through the activity of eating. It advances digital eating as a framework for analysing how labour, culture, and knowledge production interweave with technologies and infrastructures of food exchange, consumption, and evaluation. The contributions highlight how new forms of expertise emerge through digital platforms, how consumer choice is shaped and apportioned as economic value, and how care is redistributed across infrastructures and actors. In tracing these dynamics, the articles contribute to this special issue's broader concern with the ethico-political economies of food, showing how digital eating processes configure new forms of knowledge, responsibility, and connection. In digitalised societies, what and how people eat increasingly depends upon which digital assemblages eating is enacted through, and which forms of expertise, choice, and care these assemblages sustain.