Food Blogs

This paper focuses on four popular UK based, desi food blogs by Anjali Pathak, Hari Ghotra, Mallika Basu, and Chintal Kakaya, who are ambassadors of the global justice charity Find Your Feet's (FYF) ‘Curry for Change’ (CFC) campaign. Reconfiguring and challenging geographical parameters and national boundaries, the bloggers team up with FYF to help fight hunger in African and Asian rural communities. Using the Internet as a platform to create awareness about the charity, the blogs share recipes and meal plans for dinner parties hosted in honour of the charity and invite the public to fundraising events. Concerned with human rights, these bloggers affect social change by empowering individuals and communities to participate in civic engagement, and occasionally to even challenge unfair government policies/practices. The blogs’ efficacy can also be measured through the funds raised, the public attention they receive from channels such as Indian food network and London Live, local/regional newspapers such as the London Evening Standard, and magazines like India's Complete Wellbeing Magazine. Food blogs that actively contribute to global justice movements cannot be seen as domestic reflections or exercises in nostalgia anymore. Referring to Habermas's notion of the public sphere and Nancy Fraser's concept of the transnational public sphere, I examine these food blogs as transnational public spheres. Based on textual analysis of blog entries related specifically to the CFC campaign and an examination of FYF's annual reviews, this paper examines how these food blogs have expanded in form and function by engaging in cyberactivism.

This volume adopts a multidisciplinary perspective in analyzing and understanding the rich communicative resources and dynamics at work in digital communication about food. Drawing on data from a small corpus of food blogs, the book implements a range of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches to unpack the complexity of food blogs as a genre of computer-mediated communication. This wide-ranging framework allows for food blogs’ many layered components, including recipes, photographs, narration in posts, and social media tie-ins, to be unpacked and understood at the structural, visual, verbal, and discourse level in a unified way. The book seeks to provide a comprehensive account of this popular and growing genre and contribute to our understandings of digital communication more generally, making this key reading for students and scholars in computer-mediated communication, multimodality, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and pragmatics.

This paper deals with food blogs as new category of niche blogs. It outlines definition of mentioned phenomenon, refers to its basic aspects and determinants. The article brings concept of categorization according to focus and it also presents division according to blog function.

Chapter 1 What Are Reviews? Chapter 2 Toward a Theory of Credible Rating Systems Chapter 3 Connoisseurial Reviews: Restaurants Chapter 4 Procedural Reviews: Statistical Software Chapter 5 The Production of Reviews Chapter 6 Audiences, Credibility, and the Social Construction of Reviews Chapter 7 "Dining Is My Sport": Reception and Hierarchies Chapter 8 Reviews and the Status Culture