Tracing Complexity in Food Blogging Entries

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how complexity and health considerations are represented in food blogging tweets, revealing that ease and speed dominate, while taste and enjoyment are rarely emphasized, impacting healthy consumer behavior insights.

Contribution

It introduces a text analysis approach to examine complexity in food blogging, highlighting the dominance of ease over health and hedonic factors in healthy food discourse.

Findings

Healthy food tweets emphasize easiness and speed.

Tastiness and enjoyment are rarely mentioned.

Complexity is underrepresented in food blogging entries.

Abstract

Within this paper, we focus on the concept of complexity and how it is represented in food blogging entries on Twitter. We turn specific attention to complexity capture when looking at healthy foods, focusing on food blogging entries that entail the notions of health/healthiness/healthy. We do so because we consider that complexity manifests hedonism - that is the irrational determinant of food choice above rational considerations of nutrition and healthiness. Using text as a platform for our analysis, we derive bigrams and topic models that illustrate the frequencies of words and bi-grams, thus, pointing our attention to current discourse in food blogging entries on Twitter. The results show that, contrary to complexity, that the dominating characteristics in healthy food domain are easiness and speed of preparation, however, rational and health related considerations may not always take precedence when the choice is determined. Food blogging entries show surprisingly little account of healthy food as being tasty and enjoyable. With this we aim to contribute to the knowledge of how to shape more healthy consumer behaviors. Having discovered the scarcity of hedonic connotations, this work invites for further research in text-based information about food.