Emerging logics of digital eating: choice, care, or careful choice?

In this conceptual paper, we interrogate logics that underlie emerging practices of digital eating. Digitalisation is increasingly affecting how food is produced, prepared, distributed and consumed. Operating through large networks of people, foodstuffs, software and digital devices, digital eating practices are laden with multiple, sometimes-conflicting values. From speed to sustainability, taste to transparency, individual convenience to sharing and sociality, the values carried and performed by digital eating are underpinned by logics that speak to wider processes and networks of digitalisation. To unpack these logics, we explore how food is ontologically respecified in the entanglements of diverse human and non-human actors, including digital technologies, platforms and devices. Drawing on Mol (2008), we divide these entanglements into two broad groups: one informed by logics of choice and another informed by logics of care. Using case studies from our research on digital food activism, we investigate how these logics operate in digital eating practices, and propose a third category in which the two logics overlap to create a logic of careful choice. We conclude by exploring the implications that a logic of careful choice might have for the constitution of publics, issues and expertise in/through practices of digital eating.