This dissertation theorizes the food blog as an instance of “habitual new media” (Chun, Habitual New Media). A familiar Web 2.0 genre, food blogs have played a prominent role in rendering the Internet as a source of always-available culinary know-how. At the same time, they have long been and continue to be components of a broader “food-related media convergence” (Lofgren), as bloggers engage with other media formats and industries—cookbooks, television, photography, journalism—and rework their content to meet the demands of a “platformized creative economy” (Duffy et al. 1). Engaging with food blogging’s simultaneous persistence and transformation within a post-digital and post-foodie media landscape, I consider how the unfolding relationality of home cooking is “stabilized” (Kember and Zylinska 75) into demonstrable, shareable, and archivable food knowledges—a process I term culinary experience. While digital modalities provide an important “automedial” (Smith and Watson 168) venue for putting home cooking “on the record” (Couser 181), food blogs are never ‘just’ digital but instead speak to the entanglement of digital technologies, platforms, and discourses with legacy media forms, food and plant matter, and the agential ‘stuff’ and spaces of everyday life. I argue that culinary experience is enacted with, and complexified by, these overlapping materialities. My analysis is organized into three substantial chapters, which trace the materialization of culinary experience throughout the photographic practices of the blogging studio-kitchen, the blog-to-(cook)book pipeline of the 2010s, and the everyday soundscapes of short-form recipe videos. Calling for a deeper dialogue between food studies and feminist media studies in the wake of the material turn, I demonstrate that an attention to food blogging assemblages opens up questions about how certain food stories, and certain culinary agencies, come to “matter” (Poletti, Stories 7)—and explore how we might reorient the workings of culinary experience toward more equitable digital food futures. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / First emerging in the early Internet cultures of the new millennium, food blogs have developed into a familiar online genre and a reliable source of culinary knowledge. This dissertation argues that, to understand the food blog’s embeddedness in everyday digital food cultures, we must account for the manifold technical and material agencies with which food stories and recipes are shared, circulated, and stored. Turning my attention to bloggers’ home photography studios, the relationship between blogs and cookbooks, and the soundscapes of recipe videos found across social media platforms, I position food blogs as a key mechanism by which culinary experiences are formed and understood, but also reformed and contested. In their dual function as autobiographical and archival media, food blogs contribute to a culinary public record which, I argue, is as shaped by analogue media and ‘IRL’ kitchens as it is by digital norms and infrastructures.

This dissertation examines how women’s food writing, from blogs to cookbooks to novels, demonstrate a desire to articulate themselves as people within communities rather than accept a dehumanized identity as a consumer or set of credit-card numbers. I argue that through an emphasis on connection with one another via a discourse of scratch cooking and locally sourced foods, women are able to push back against the hegemony of corporate food and industrial agriculture. Working from a case study model, each of my chapters examines the distinct ways in which women assert their personhood apart from the homogenizing influences of mainstream food culture. As a means of articulating this woman’s culinary culture, predicated on a foundation of scratch cooking and local ingredients and relationships, I examine the food blog Fed Up With Lunch and the author’s use of an anonymous persona to interrogate the federal school lunch program; feminist vegetarian and vegan cookbooks authored by collectives of women who rely on oppositional identities in order to push back against what they view as hegemony; how diasporic Indian women use scratch cooking as a means of self-expression within the context of migration; and the novel cookbook as an example of injecting a feminist discourse of food into a traditional fictional narrative. Read together, these discrete case studies make an argument for women’s power to effect meaningful change from within the circumscribed space of the kitchen. / text

Though casual readers may often assume cookbooks are primarily reference materials,cookbooks actually offer readers a type of autobiography; I examine cookbooks as literary autobiographical acts by analyzing three celebrity chefs' cookbooks and the recent film, Julie and Julia. Julie and Julia, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, illustrates several key autobiographical ideas, specifically Barthes' ideas of readerly and writerly texts and the distinction between an author and a persona. The film acts as a visual representation of the way a reader engages with a text and makes it a writerly text while successfully distinguishing between an author and a persona/narrator. After a brief review of autobiography theory through Julie and Julia, the three selected authors' work further magnifies the ideas. The first celebrity chef, David Lebovitz, uses a highly narrative style and incorporates numerous autobiographical details into his books. The second, Ina Garten, utilizes different methods of creating a persona, including photography. The third chef, Dorie Greenspan, uses the same methods used by Lebovitz and Garten, but has been replicated extensively in online baking groups, making her texts ideal for understanding the role of the reader in an autobiography. The work of these three authors illustrates well how autobiographies function and how readers can reiterate their own autobiographies through the books and food they consume.

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