The taste of homemade: trusting ‘healthy’ food on app-based delivery services in Hyderabad, India

Public and biomedical discourses blame changing spatio-temporal rhythms, traffic, pollution, and stressful work timings for the rise in metabolic illnesses in privileged urban Indian, white-collar households. In these households, homemade food is seen as ‘safe' and ‘healthy,' while outside food is considered ‘dangerous' and linked to increasing metabolic ill-health. Despite this, app-based food ordering has surged in the last nine years, disrupting this binary. This paper uses ethnographic and qualitative data from fieldwork in Hyderabad, India, to explore how IT-employed households with type 2 diabetes determine which foods are good to trust online. They do this through ‘embodied knowing,' a visceral sensibility to gauge the quality of food and the intentions of its maker. Trusted foods are made by figures ‘like your mother,' who embody this knowing. Apps capitalise on classed, gendered and relational forms of trust by evoking motherly figures to market ‘homely' and ‘home-style' food as ‘safe' and ‘healthy.' In doing so, they disrupt taken-for-granted understandings of the outside-home boundary, making mothers virtually visible in the marketplace and allowing ‘outside’ foods to be accepted through the embodied knowing of the food and its maker.