The rhetoric of recipes in motion: neoliberal multiculturalism in early digital discourse about food

Despite an appearance as just guides for making food, recipes function in several important ways as markers of people’s religion, class, ethnicity, and race. They provide records of families across generations, establish common ideas about food, and hold possibilities for envisioning how new food practices could yield a better life. My project investigates the cultural influence of exchanging recipes through digital technologies in the 1980s and 1990s. I examine the USENET Cookbook, essentially a discussion board for swapping recipes, plus Food Network’s and Allrecipes’ websites to uncover practices and values developed as people traded recipes through computers. Digital exchanges shaped broad ideas about taste, a concept for describing the social negotiation of food’s meanings and values, by enabling people to send and find recipes for ethnic cuisines. Communication on these exchanges celebrated including Chinese, Mexican, Creole, Thai, and Indian food but often with errors, misattribution, and stereotypes. These texts flattened culture and converted food’s cultural connections into possibilities for profit. Because the exchanges escalated from a few hundred to a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of people, I argue that the movement of recipes with flattened portraits of food influenced taste by broadly making it seem desirable to have a worldly appetite without offering a means for people to do so. This project contributes to food studies, rhetorical studies, and digital humanities by documenting the importance of early digital communication on cultural ideas about taste in the United States and modeling an approach for examining digital history.