Chen Zheng, Zeng Guojun, Zhong Shuru, Wang Longjie
School of Tourism Management, Sun Yat-Sen University, China.
School of Management, Zhejiang University, China.
Appetite. 2023 Jan 1;180:106362. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2022.106362. Epub 2022 Nov 8.
With the globalization of food sales and consumption, exotic foods are now regularly crossing geographical and cultural borders and moving into local areas. This process is attracting ever-increasing attention from academics. Taking avocado consumption presented on Sina Weibo as an example, this research analyzes avocado related user-generated content on Sina Weibo over three years- 2013, 2015, and 2017- and employs topic modeling and semantic network methods to obtain the mechanism by which exotic food cross borders to appear in local consumers' daily food choices. Two specific links are explored: online information dissemination and offline daily consumption. The result indicates that a selective geographical narrative and framework for avocado information influence local consumers' choice of exotic foods according to three aspects: edibility, accessibility, and acceptability. For local consumers, the avocado is now connected with local objects and spaces, gradually transforming from a novelty to functional daily food and from low to high-frequency consumption to high-frequency consumption, escaping the marginal and penetrating into the core cultural context and completing the process of embedment into the everyday. This study refutes the assertion that "globalized diets bring about homogenized diets," explores the mechanism of influence by which information dissemination in cyberspace affects cultural borders, complements the study of food consumption in Southern countries, and provides new thoughts on the theoretical and practical exploration of food globalization from the perspective of food geography.
随着食品销售和消费的全球化，外来食品如今正频繁跨越地理和文化边界，进入当地市场。这一过程正吸引着学术界越来越多的关注。以新浪微博上的牛油果消费为例，本研究分析了2013年、2015年和2017年这三年间新浪微博上与牛油果相关的用户生成内容，并采用主题建模和语义网络方法，以探究外来食品跨越边界出现在当地消费者日常食物选择中的机制。具体探讨了两个环节：线上信息传播和线下日常消费。结果表明，牛油果信息的选择性地理叙事和框架从可食用性、可获取性和可接受性三个方面影响着当地消费者对外来食品的选择。对于当地消费者而言，牛油果如今已与当地的事物和空间相联系，正逐渐从一种新奇事物转变为功能性日常食品，消费频率从低到高，摆脱了边缘地位，渗透到核心文化语境中，完成了融入日常生活的过程。本研究反驳了“全球化饮食导致同质化饮食”这一观点，探究了网络空间信息传播影响文化边界的作用机制，补充了南方国家食品消费的研究，并从食品地理学角度为食品全球化的理论和实践探索提供了新思路。
