This book explores the trajectories taken by digital food activism in South Asia, addressing the convergences that emerge at the juncture of social and culinary reformation. It focuses on self-led online campaigns from South Asia, centered around food de-corporatization, revival of foodways, and foregrounding of local and regional food knowledge and heritages — interrogating how the public utilizes digitality’s pace and reach to rectify a dysfunctional food system. The volume highlights the potential of digital food activism as ‘public pedagogy’ in mobilizing collective awareness and action against rapid commercialization of food and in favor of right to better consumption practices. The authors here conceptualize the term ‘digital public food pedagogies’, in which the publicness embedded in digital spaces is reoriented around practices of ‘understanding’ the food system, placing diverse yet co-constitutive food epistemologies at the center. This book, then, approaches digital and social media as sites that actors utilize to impact the ‘gastronomic’ — a cultural field otherwise plagued by commercialization and its endorsement of misinformation.

Dishari Chattaraj is an Assistant Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, India, where she leads the Education and Critical Food Studies Lab. She has one monograph and two edited volumes to her credit, and her work in Education and Food Studies has been funded by various international and national organizations.

Aayushi Chatterjee is a doctoral research scholar specializing in Critical Food Studies and Cultural Studies at IIT Indore, India. She works with communities in Eastern and Central India, and her research explores indigenous cultures of food, allied folk practices, and contemporary digital transformations. She has published in leading journals and presented at national and international conferences.