#LOCALFOOD: A MULTIMETHOD ANALYSIS ON THE PROMOTION OF LOCAL FOOD IN SCOTLAND BY SCOTTISH INFLUENCERS ON INSTAGRAM

Abstract

This research aims to analyse the role Scottish Foodie Influencers as producers play in promoting local food in Scotland through their everyday lifestyle presentations on Instagram, as well as considering how they use Instagram as a tool to facilitate this communicative practice. This research utilises two methods of data collection to analyse how Influencers promote local food on Instagram: Qualitative semi-structured interviews and a content analysis of their promotional content on Instagram. This research demonstrates how Influencers reproduce social norms about local food through their lifestyle presentation by portraying local food as a distinctive consumer practice that they encourage their followers to emulate. Despite also being motivated by a desire to support local food businesses in Scotland based on their connection to their local area, Influencers still promoted a perception of locality in Scotland that they acknowledged was financially and culturally inaccessible to many. Influencers also adhered to the aesthetic norms of Instagram by constructing an imagined local on Instagram that appealed to the aesthetic conventions of the platform. This style of visual representation prioritised the visual quality of local food over other markers of quality that leaves any discourse around locality as an ethical food practice to promote heritagisation and re-localisation largely absent from the promotion of local food in Scotland on Instagram. This research demonstrates the importance of analysing the effectiveness of a given social media platform in generating a space for online food discourse. These conclusions contribute to the growing scholarship around the digitalization of food and how specific social media platforms play a role in shaping online food discourses. How local food in Scotland is communicated through its aesthetic representations by Scottish Foodie Influencers on Instagram highlights how the conventions of a given social media platform can transform a food practice originally grounded in ethical consumption into a greater emphasis on the social distinction local food can provide consumers in Scotland.