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“Are you seriously telling me that this hot mash of mushrooms and fruit is going to completely heal his wounds?” (Gilbert 2019)
It is summer 2020 and I, like many others, am sequestered indoors clutching my recently acquired Nintendo Switch playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH). In wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world seemed to swarm either to their handy technological devices or towards the soothing arms of nature. Luckily for me, my technological device included encounters with some virtual greenery—the trees and flowers of my beloved tropical Animal Crossing island.
Thao and Zucker having a nighttime picnic in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Screen shot by Author)
As I planted my strategically planned flower beds and traveled from mystery island to island collecting fruits which I didn’t have, I also consulted many online forums for guidance. To my surprise, I stumbled upon PETA’s Vegan Guide to Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Within, I found several suggestions on how to play the game while supporting vegan ethics. My favourite part? The commentary on what foods within the game are vegan friendly. While nowadays it’s possible to cook a variety of dishes in ACNH (even seasonal varieties!) much of the early discourse on food in ACNH was about how powerful vegan diets are. In the game, you can literally dig up entire trees with the nourishment provided after eating a singular luscious virtual fruit. Sadly, this spurred some backlash from players arguing about: (1) the boundaries of our onlife and offline selves, (2) the potential of video games as pedagogy, and (3) the politics of digital and virtual foods. But how is it possible to extract all of these insights, politics, ethics, and social tensions from a game mimicking an agricultural life on a tropical waterfront property we all secretly desire during daydreams?
In this piece I apply my concept of Digital Food Spaces (DFS) or “online communities and platforms dedicated to the sharing of food-centered ideas and media” (Dam 2023) to the realm of video-gaming. I draw from both personal experiences and the insights of fellow gamers who I recruited via Twitter. Through our conversations I apply my theory into practice by analyzing the DFS of ACNH to examine how users conceptualize and interact with food in video games. Twitter (at its peak) had the capability to house and foster dialogues of every topic without reserve—food was just one of many, and as Schneider et al. (2018) has demonstrated, contentious discussion draws activist responses in the form of digital food activism by users.
From these conversations and interdisciplinary literature review I present three arguments:
Matt’s Animal Crossing: New Horizon character chats with Franklin, the Turkey Day chef. (Screen shot by Matt Fifield)
While there are video games whose sole focus is to highlight food and related processes like cooking and eating (e.g. Overcooked and Cooking Mama), I include all games which feature some aspect of food within its play and/or landscapes. I should clarify that even though something in a game is edible by characters, I try to focus on what we can colloquially code as “food” through its relatability to offline counterparts. Basically, a food is a food within a video game if its origins can be traced back to a particular food or food idea which exists offline to some degree.[1] This tracing is rather open, considering video games also feature mockeries of offline eats for several reasons. As a result, the boundaries of onlife (Van Est et al. 2014, Floridi et al. 2015) and offline in this piece are flexibly framed because they easily flow into one another and inevitably shape each other. As Floridi et al. (2015) emphasise, because ICTS[2] shape our (1) self conceptions, (2) mutual interactions, (3) realities, and (4) our interactions with reality, there are ongoing instances of boundary blurring between reality and virtuality as well as between humans, machines, and nature. Therefore, we can easily translate insights between the different realms and apply interventions and solutions accordingly—furthering the range of intimacy that technologies have with us presently and in the future (Van Est et al. 2014).
Digital Food Spaces (DFS) are not limited to social media sites and platforms, considering discussions about food take place almost everywhere online. Given that gaming (in practice and interest) continues to grow in popularity across age groups, it is essential that we include video games in our examinations of onlives and their capabilities of shaping the offline. Such insights are crucial for identifying and charting the transformations of how people are perceiving, understanding, and engaging with different foods—most especially when they allude to offline counterparts and processes.
A common feature which links many games together is the association of life/health points being replenished by consumable items in-game, much of which are stylized as food items. Gone are the days of only red health-boosting and blue mana-boosting potions—we’ve got entire menus of gourmet foods to fill player stats and inventories now.
This has led to much reactionary discussions and creations both online and offline. Entire online communities dedicate themselves to the recreation of these edibles in their own kitchens. Whether it’s a Reddit thread, a Facebook post, or a multi-video series on YouTube, gamers are experimenting with ways to bring the fantastical foods they encounter in their favorite games into their offline lives. Several dining establishments have also launched with these sentiments, but take a more reflexive approach through creating dishes inspired by in-game characters, locations, and items—for example the (unofficial) League of Legends restaurant “Challenger” based in China. However, for those of us who wish to capture the magic at home, there is also a growing video game cookbook collection which can teach you how to make foods from games like Destiny, The Elder Scrolls, World of Warcraft, the Fallout franchise, Sims, Minecraft, Street Fighter, and more.
Some games simulate the food production and preparation processes. In the Harvest Moon series, you’re a farmer with both crops and animals which grow and transform across the seasons. In several games it is possible to hunt creatures and cook them.[3] The Cooking Mama series allows us to pick recipes, prepare them step-by-step, and receive reviews on the final dishes. Overall, video games allow players several opportunities to critically consider and connect with foods and associated activities. This inevitably spurs discussion and prompts the formation and articulation of food-related opinions and perspectives among players. Within the DFS paradigm, video games are like entrées—catalysts of inspiration to explore and engage with foods in ways that go beyond the virtual.
Video-gaming universes are seemingly infinite, in both creativity and vastness. Within, there are places for every wacky interaction and dream in between. We create our avatars from an assortment of options, and we attempt to explore the crevices of how we see (or would like to see) ourselves and the world through these choices. When given the tools (ICTs) in video games, we test the limits of what’s possible and appropriate. This logic extends to food in games as well. Think about so-called “dubious food” in the Legend of Zelda series:
“Dubious Food” from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Screen shot by Author)
“It’s too gross to even look at. A bizarre smell issues forth from this heap. Eating it won’t hurt you, though…probably” (In-game description, Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild 2017)
This food experimentation through hunting, gathering, and preparing foods often occurs in many explorational “open world” games, like The Elder Scrolls franchise and newer Pokémon games. For players, it provides a wider range of engagement and creativity with virtual foods while also providing insights into how cooking and mealtimes transform relationships between the player’s virtual body, their surroundings, and their in-game companions. VR games take this to the extreme by directly translating players’ physical movements into virtual simulations for added experiential depth. Hilariously, it is important to note that not all video game foods are helpful. Some creations also actively harm in-game health status and abilities, mirroring food poisoning experiences to some degree.
Video games easily initiate learning through vicarious consumption (Veblen 2007). As players encounter, prepare, and consume virtual foods, they increase their familiarity and knowledge around them (Staiano 2014). In turn, it sparks further curiosity and thinking around the foods and their offline cultural and historical inspirations. Often, players find this learned food-related information applicable in offline scenarios and conversations even in the cases where the foods are entirely fictional.
“Cooking foods in virtual reality has transferred over to what I apply in the kitchen. I used to bake bread but I got to know a number of pastries and deserts like tiramisu.” (personal communication, @Zay_ZYXWV)
“The Fallout games have all the disgusting foods. But also a lot of parodies of actual American snacks I guess. I don’t get all of them because I am from Germany, but I have a sense that they are versions of actual foods.” (personal communication, @PrimoRCavallo)
“I recently played the controversial Russian game Atomic Heart. One of the primary themes is the Soviet Union, and one of the main food factors which is a completely mandatory item for traversing the game is condensed milk, alongside bottles of vodka. I thought it was an odd choice for a power up item in a game, but after spending some time looking into it it seems like those two items had some high degree of value to the survival of those geographical people due to their long shelf life and stability in indeterminate situations.” (personal communication, @TheAbeg)
Considering many games have foods which are modeled after offline ones, they are useful for learning about foods outside of one’s experiential range. In the MMORPG MapleStory, many places which pay homage to real offline locations have their own special consumables that allude to local dishes, for example: satay, ramen, chili crab, unagi, bento boxes, steamed buns, dumplings, laksa, chicken rice, tacos, and curries. Several tropical fruits and snacks like durian, dragon fruit, dried squid, and dango are also available in-game.
Various food items found in MapleStory SEA. (Screen shot by Author)
Scholars across disciplines have stressed the importance of considering interlinking implications and applications of happenings online with those offline (Boellstorff 2016, Taylor and Nichter 2022). Analysing the interactions and engagements of our onlives within the DFS of gaming universes can provide information about points of interventions (e.g. cases of digital obesogenic environments) or the range of shared interests of certain groups as they pertain to food. While video-gaming only simulates life or death, the impacts of digital obesogenic environments has yet to be thoroughly explored. Video-gaming allows for people to embrace (if not overexaggerate) and explore aspects of their individual values and varied performances of self (Goffman 1959). It is of interest to those working in diplomacy, marketing, and the food industry to pay attention to the reception of foods in video game universes and players’ concerns as starting points for improvements in initiatives of gastrodiplomacy, product design, food communication, and more. Doing so would help generate more interactive and reflective national foods branding given the diversity of gaming communities (Ichijo et al. 2019, White et al. 2019, Dam 2023). Furthermore, there is immense potential to expand digital food studies’ research theories and methodologies in video games while also continuously challenging the boundaries of online and offline. If art does imitate life, how are we to ignore or deny the salience of how people play with and reimagine foods and foodscapes?
[1] An honorable mention for the “dubious food” available in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
[2] Information and communication technologies
[3] There is an exhaustive amount of games where you can hunt creatures and eat them, so to list them all would be…well, exhaustive.
Atsuko Ichijo, Venetia Johannes, and Ronald Ranta. 2019. The Emergence of National Food: The Dynamics of Food and Nationalism. Bloomsbury.
Boellstorff, Tom. 2016. “For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real.” Current Anthropology 57(4): 387-407.
Dam, Ashley T.K., 2023. “Dining with the Diaspora: Khmerican Digital Gastrodiplomacy”. Platypus Blog. https://blog.castac.org/2023/03/dining-with-the-diaspora-khmerican-digital-gastrodiplomacy/
Gayle, Latoya. 2020. “Nintendo fans mercilessly mock PETA for claiming vegans shouldn’t play Animal Crossing because it features virtual fishing and bug catching”. Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8155471/Video-game-players-mercilessly-mock-PETA-vegan-guide-Nintendos-Animal-Crossing.html
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Lynn, Lottie. 2021. “Animal Crossing Cooking: Ingredients and how to unlock cooking in New Horizons explained”. Eurogamer. https://www.eurogamer.net/animal-crossing-cooking-ingredients-how-unlock-new-horizons-8007
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA]. 2020. “PETA’s Vegan Guide to ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons”. https://www.peta.org/features/animal-crossing-new-horizons-vegan/
Schneider, T., Eli, K., Dolan, C., & Ulijaszek, S. (Eds.). (2018). Digital Food Activism (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315109930
Staiano A. E. 2014. Learning by Playing: Video Gaming in Education-A Cheat Sheet for Games for Health Designers. Games for health journal, 3(5), 319–321. https://doi.org/10.1089/g4h.2014.0069
Taylor, Nicole and Mimi Nichter. 2022. A Filtered Life: Social Media on a College Campus. New York: Routledge.
Van Est, R., Rerimassie, V., van Keulen, I. & Dorren, G. 2014. Intimate technology: The battle for Our Body and Behaviour. Rathenau Instituut.
Veblen, Thorstein. 2007. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford: Oxford UP.
White, Wajeana, Albert A. Barreda, and Stephanie Hein. (2019) “Gastrodiplomacy: Captivating a Global Audience Through Cultural Cuisine-A Systematic Review of the Literature.” Journal of Tourismology 5(2), 127-144.
During my first semester of undergrad, I began my truly independent cooking journey—a path many have taken before me, but few survive. After weeks of failing to replicate one of my mother’s simplest dishes, scrambled eggs with jasmine rice, I was devastated. Arriving home for winter break, I told her about my struggles—how I looked up many recipes online and tried making them all, adding milk, sprinkling in cheese, whisking the eggs with a particular technique. Nothing seemed to replicate the correct taste or texture. The familiar experience of the eggs was absent. She laughed at me and explained she made them “Khmer style,” to which I promptly replied, “What’s ‘Khmer Style?'” Half smirking and rolling her eyes, Ma explained that the scrambled eggs have fish sauce, green onions, and black pepper in them. “Make sure you use the good fish sauce okay? Either Three Crabs Brand or the Squid Brand. How did you not know this?”
A common Khmer breakfast of grilled pork, eggs, and pickled vegetables. (Photo by the author)
Reflecting on the scrambled eggs incident across the years, I felt a bit estranged from and confused about my identity. As both Khmer[1] and Vietnamese, and having grown up the United States, I had a lot of questions about who I was and what I was eating. What was “Khmer” and “Cambodian” food anyways? Why were there so many crossovers with things I ate with my Vietnamese family? Is that just geographical proximity or something else? How do people “just know” something is Khmer? Inevitably, these thoughts trickled into conversations with my family, as well as into my online searches.
What people are eating, how they are eating it, and why they are eating it have been debated throughout time and space. With increased engagements with food with different types and layers of technologies, online food discourse has expanded rapidly (Ilde 1990, Lewis 2018). Yet people have been forming and joining online communities to share their ideas, experiences, and perspectives around food in multi-modal ways for decades (Rhiengold 1993). I refer to these communities as digital food spaces (DFS), defining them as online communities and platforms dedicated to the sharing of food-centered ideas and media. I prefer DFS over other commonly used terms like “digital food platforms” because of its broader framing. Many of these online communities have entire infrastructures, which imbue particular authorities and responsibilities to users, including founders, moderators, and anonymous members. I have had my fair share of anonymous lurking and inactivity within DFS I am a part of, and as a result I prefer the flexibility. After all, being present in a digital community differs from being present in a non-digital one.
DFS are spaces of culture exchange and learning. It seems like for every niche food interest, there is a DFS looming somewhere on the internet. Scholars of digital food have examined these digitally captured “worlds of food,” noting their capacity to facilitate communities of users with shared interests into collective action (Schneider et al.2018). DFS allow for the demonstration of shared values among members which can take many forms: for example, digital food activism, where users engage with and critique different parts of the food system online (Schneider et al. 2018), or digital gastrodiplomacy, where ideas of food and nationalism perpetually collide.
Throughout history, food and cuisine has been crucial within diplomatic relations. Unlike “culinary diplomacy,” which involves the “expansion of relations through cuisine and the eating habits of visiting ambassadors or public figures” (White et al. 2019, 129), gastrodiplomacy is centered on generated ideas around the foods of a country. Gastrodiplomacy is often paired with nation-branding, where governments allow themselves to build distinguishable personas to bring awareness and express their democratic ideals in the global arena (Zhang 2015, White et al. 2019). As one scholar kindly explained to me, “Culinary diplomacy is governments towards other governments, gastrodiplomacy is governments towards their people.”[2]
Gastrodiplomacy is important because “national foods” expand a country’s opportunities for increased cultural acceptance with other nations and its own citizens (Nahar et al. 2018, Ichijo, Johannes, and Ranta eds. 2019, White et al. 2019.) Although it can be difficult and reductionist to decide which foods can be considered “national” across populations, the benefits of sharing how many people of a country experience and relate to food are manifold. Breaking bread, sharing tea, and exchanging fruits and other sweets are just some of the ways that people have historically bonded with one another, even in the absence of nation-states.
But how does one translate this into the digital? How can governments, or other culinary authorities, communicate to their people what kinds of foods are recognized as significant within a shared national identity? This is where the DFS come into play. As relatively accessible arenas of discussion and learning, they are integral points of intervention for gastrodiplomatic initiatives. Therefore, we can understand digital gastrodiplomacy to be the collective tinkering of perceptions relating to unified ideas around a country’s “national foods” within DFS.
Unlike in its non-digital form, in digital gastrodiplomacy, flows of power tend to shift and deviate. Authority on what foods are authentic or what dishes make up a part of a country’s “national foods” expands to include more kinds of people. However, this does not dissolve the issues of over-emphasising the significance of certain foods over others within collective, nationalist food narratives, and visions.
Through digital gastrodiplomacy, citizens and members of a diaspora are able to explore, share, and negotiate ideas about food from anywhere. As informal, yet impactful shapers, DFS members have the potential to shift narratives and perspectives about different national cuisines one social media post at a time. They have become very important non-governmental actors within food discourse. Subsequently, concentrations of knowledge and authority around “national foods” become dispersed, pixelated, and multidirectional. In comparison to non-digital gastrodiplomacy, digital gastrodiplomacy can be considered a grassroots approach. DFS members have a relatively equal say and role in contributing to what makes up “national foods” because of the fluidity of DFS in both structure and governance. From Boston-based aunties on Facebook with pictures of their pets as their avatar, to hyper-stylized Instagram foodie influencers from Long Beach, the profile for gastronomic critics and commentators continues to grow.
In my explorations to connect with my Khmerness and its foods, I took to the Internet. I joined several Facebook groups, perused Reddit, and lurked on relevant hashtags on Instagram, TikTok, Tumblr, and Twitter. I began by scanning “Subtle Asian Traits” (SAT), a Facebook group started in 2018 that calls itself “one of the largest Asian communities with members from all around the world.” Within SAT, I found many other subgroups I would classify as DFS, including “Subtle Asian Cooking.” However, after a few scrolls, I noticed that the posts were dominated by certain ethnicities and nationalities. At times, it felt as if “Asianness” exclusively centered East Asian culture. This did not help me in my search for either Khmer or Cambodian food and cuisine, but it stirred up some negative feelings about gatekeeping authorities of Asianness. Eventually I stumbled upon Subtle Cambodian Traits (SCT), an off-shoot group of SAT, which claims to “connect the greater Khmer community from all walks of life.” Observing that posts in this group were exclusively in English or Khmer, I sensed a decolonial edge permeating the space. No French posts… how interesting. Herein, I found a wide range of people from across the globe who self-identified as Cambodian and/or Khmer. They posted on a myriad of topics, interlinking these topics to both Cambodianness and Khmerness within their realms of understanding and experience—food was just one component. Through groups like SCT, there are ample opportunities to gain unfiltered insights on Cambodian and Khmer food between nationals and members of the diaspora.
Curious about what constitutes Khmer and Cambodian cuisine among the diaspora, I asked members of SCT for recommendations for Cambodian/Khmer restaurants within the United States and analysed the recommended places’ menus. After posting my question, I received 31 recommendations from 25 SCT members. Twenty-seven recommendations were for restaurants in the United States, three of them for pop-ups/mail order food businesses, and one for a restaurant in Cambodia. Two out of 31 recommendations were recommended more than once by SCT members. Eight out of ten cities on the Pew Research Center’s list of cities heavily populated by the Cambodian diaspora were represented (Pew Research Center 2019).
After collecting and analysing the menus of each recommendation, I noted the overlaps in how each understood and marketed their cuisine. To these restaurants, “real” Khmer and Cambodian cuisine could be defined by:
Restaurants interlinked ideas of “traditional,” “authentic,” and “special” Khmer/Cambodian dishes with the use of expensive/rare ingredients, high preparational labour demands, or both. Restaurants also used Khmer (script or romanisation) to label and re-orient commonly found pan-Asian dishes, like fried rice, as specifically Khmer and Cambodian on their menus. Comparatively, for highlighted “traditional,” “authentic,” and or “special” dishes, culinary points of reference were used: descriptions would relate them to other nations’ popular dishes. This practice allows for restaurant patrons who are not familiar with Khmer or Cambodian cuisines to easily explore, within their own comfort levels, the unique features of these cuisines. Through this, Khmericans are constantly forming points for culinary knowledge-sharing among informal gastrodiplomats, who may be community members or curious others. Such activities are further facilitated on DFS and other online communities, thus expanding knowledge, interest, and engagement with Khmer and Cambodian cuisines through digital gastrodiplomacy.
Such efforts directly support the Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and the National Institute of Diplomacy and International Relations’ 2020 initiative to incorporate food into their cultural diplomacy strategies through specifically gastrodiplomacy. They reflected that presently, “Cambodia has yet to fully exploit this extraordinary opportunity for nation branding.” Given that Cambodia’s rates of general tourism are considerably lower than other (southeast) Asian countries, it is crucial for both cultural and economic reasons to garner interest among travelers. Governments such as Cambodia’s have much to gain from the development of gastodiplomatic initiatives; also, they should consult DFS throughout each step. Doing so would increase the success of such endeavours by forming dynamic nation branding which is representative and considerate for as many people as possible.
[1] Khmer is the predominant ethnic group of Cambodia. I differentiate because you can be a Cambodian national and not Khmer. However, these two are often used interchangeably despite their differences.
[2] If you are the scholar who said this to me at the SOAS Food Forum seminar talk I gave in January 2023, please reach out!
Pew Research Center. (2019). “Top 10 U.S. metropolitan areas by Cambodian population, 2019”. Pew Research Center analysis of 2017-2019 American Community Survey (IPUMS). https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/chart/top-10-u-s-metropolitan-areas-by-cambodian-population-2019/
Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: MIT Press.
Schneider, T., Eli, K., Dolan, C., & Ulijaszek, S. (Eds.). (2018). Digital Food Activism (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315109930
Suntikul, W. (2019). “Gastrodiplomacy in tourism.” Current Issues in Tourism 22(9), 1076–1094.
White, Wajeana, Albert A. Barreda, and Stephanie Hein. (2019) “Gastrodiplomacy: Captivating a Global Audience Through Cultural Cuisine-A Systematic Review of the Literature.” Journal of Tourismology 5(2), 127-144.
Zhang, J. (2015). “The foods of the worlds: Mapping and comparing contemporary gastrodiplomacy campaigns.” International Journal of Communication 9, 568–591.
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