Creative food practice and performing food online

: The affordances of digital food media and discourses of food sustainability in the UK

Abstract

This thesis examines creative food practice as a means of navigating and negotiating understandings of ‘food sustainability’ in the UK. Focusing on how digital food media shapes dominant food discourse and everyday eating practices, it explores the interplay between emerging creative food practices and the performative affordances of digital food media. By combining practice-based research with critical analysis of online food performance and practitioner-led work, the study generates new insights into how creative food practice fosters more inclusive, relational understandings of sustainability-related food issues.
Situated within the overlapping crises of Brexit, the climate crisis and the COVID-19pandemic, the thesis responds to the volatile, shape-shifting nature of food sustainability as an ‘empty signifier’, a term without fixed meaning yet central to food discourse. It argues that creative food practice provides a productive way of engaging with the social, cultural, and embodied dimensions of food sustainability.
The research makes three key contributions. First, it positions creative food practice as a mode of enquiry and research-creation that provides embodied, sensory and materially grounded ways of engaging with food sustainability as an empty signifier. Drawing from food art and food design, it demonstrates how cooking and eating can function as critical, knowledge-generating processes.
Second, it reconceptualises food performances in digital food media, reframing the work of Jamie Oliver, Ella Mills, and Joe Wicks as culturally charged forms of creative food practice. By highlighting the ontological affordances of online food performance, it shows how digital media becomes a site where narratives of food sustainability are negotiated and reshaped through the values and identities articulated by food-media figures.
Third, the study develops a crisis-responsive methodology based on embodied, experimental forms of research-creation. Supported by theories of ontological design, it uses digital artefacts, such as Instagram reels, cooking demonstrations, and ASMR videos, to examine how online food performances transform our perceptions and practices of food. By considering these performances as both method and subject, the study demonstrates how iterative, materially grounded practice can produce forms of knowledge capable of responding to rapidly shifting cultural, political and ecological contexts.
Collectively, these contributions affirm creative food practice as a flexible and relational approach to researching food sustainability. It provides a means of making food sustainability tangible and therefore meaningful, especially in moments of crisis when dominant discourses become more contradictory. This thesis encourages further exploration of food sustainability as an evolving field influenced by the practices and performances of food online. As digital platforms and food systems continue to change, this study promotes practice-led methods that focus on the everyday realities of cooking, eating, and imagining sustainable food futures.

Date of Award	May 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton
Supervisor	Tom Ainsworth (Supervisor) & Tim Wharton (Supervisor)