Tyler Snelling

Graduate Student
University of Iowa
Description of Work:
I engage rhetorical theory, food studies, and digital culture to understand the consequences of digital food media on subjectivities, identities, habits, and social structures. Historically, food media profoundly shape culinary rituals by changing how people shop, cook, and eat. With web-based technologies, we can choose from millions of recipes, find new sub-cultures, rapidly share what we ate, and track food. The creation of these digital tools has expanded and changed the ways people learn about their bodies, communities, and cultures. My research contributes to scholarship on rhetoric of health and medicine because we need to learn more about how people seek food media that teaches/shapes how to cook or how much to eat. For instance, the paper workshopped at this symposium studies MyFitnessPal as a form of bodily sensemaking which constructs users’ understanding of what food does when eaten. This application allows users to log each meal and pulls data from wearables which provide an estimate of the total calories one gained and spent. Although food studies and fat studies have dispelled the power of diets and challenged the efficacy of MyFitnessPal, millions of people use these apps to generate a set of markers about their health. My work seeks to understand how these practices become rituals that animate what it means to have a fit, healthy body.
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