Browsing by Author "Hoffrén, Noora"

Based on previous studies, there are many kinds of food talk and food takes on many different meanings, which partially overlap. There are tensions in food talk that challenge the attitude towards food and affect the choice of food. Consumers struggle in the cross-wave of food-related information, because a lot of information is available on different platforms and from different sources. In addition, the media plays a large role in today's everyday life, which is why it is necessary and also natural to study the discourses formed by food precisely on the social media platform. The purpose of the study was to find out what discourses are formed in the food-related publications of Instagram influencers. The research task is therefore to describe, analyze and interpret food talk in the captions of the publications of welfare and food influencers. The perspective and approach to the subject is socio-constructionist. The thesis aims to find out how influencers try to create or unknowingly create different meanings and references about food talk on social media platforms. The material was collected in the spring of 2022 from the Instagram photo service. Data collection time was one and a half years, 08/2021–03/2022. The research group consisted of five well-being and five food influencers. The captions of 65 food-related publications from their accounts were selected for review. The material was analyzed using discourse analysis. The research material contained ways of speaking that were identified as discourses. In food talk, four different discourses appeared on the influencers' user accounts; pleasure, ease, responsibility and normativity. The discourses of normativity and effortlessness were formed from the captions of both groups of influencers. The discourse of pleasure, on the other hand, was formed only in the captions of well-being influencers, and the discourse of responsibility only in the captions of food influencers. For food influencers, the discourses included, for example, atmosphere, utilization of services, avoiding food waste and climate issues. For well-being influencers health served as a strong guideline for everything they do. The main meanings behind the discourses were the healthfulness of food and food as a source of pleasure, the ease of cooking, the responsibility of purchasing and using food, and confronting assumptions about what kind of eating is used to and what is considered accepted and worth striving for. The results of the work could be used in educational, organizational and research work around the topic of food.