I see your expertise and raise you mine: Social media foodscapes and the rise of the celebrity chef

Food has always been a site of contestation, and the increasing digitisation of information-sharing practices has created new opportunities for more varied forms of food activism. ‘Foodscapes’ are urban food environments in which consumers acquire, prepare, talk about and gather meaning from food. The concept covers both the cultural and material dimensions of food, while highlighting the dialectical relationship between food culture and food materiality. The increased media coverage of celebrity chefs has played a key role in their emergence as new contemporary food experts. The rapid expansion of social media has supported the rise of celebrity chefs, giving them platforms to share and promote their individual causes/interests. Media-savvy celebrity chefs may benefit from this publicity, even when the mainstream media coverage of their cause and activism is negative. The key concern is that, enabled particularly by the rapid expansion of social media, celebrity chefs have become experts in their own right rather than relaying information from other expert sources.