Eating Big, Performing Bigger: The Discursive World of Carnivalesque Consumption Online

Food-related content is abundant in the digital sphere, ranging from restaurant reviews and culinary forums to recipes and pictures in social media posts. Online, food has truly transcended its role as nourishment and become a source of entertainment across platforms. While some formats focus on the competitive nature of cooking or instructional value, a distinct subset centers on excessive consumption - what can be termed 'feasts of spectacle'. These include eating shows (mukbang), cheat day vlogs, food challenges, and excessive cooking shows.

This talk explores the discursive dimensions of English-language food videos that celebrate overindulgence. Drawing on corpus-based discourse analysis and digital linguistic ethnography of 400 videos from YouTube, I examine how 'carnivalesque food videos' construct eating as entertainment and food as a spectacle. In this presentation, I highlight how language (e.g., pronouns, extreme case formulations), physical eating processes (e.g., chewing and swallowing), and visuals (e.g., arrangement of food items, use of utensils) are deployed to create narratives of indulgence, negotiate identities, and foster online communities. I place particular emphasis on identity construction, food portrayal, and community building and, finally, reflect on how these insights deepen our understanding of food performances in computer-mediated interaction and digitally mediated publics and intimacy.

Sofia Rüdiger is Guest Professor of Applied English Linguistics at the Institute for English Language and Literature at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. She has a PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Bayreuth, Germany, and her academic work has taken her to the University of Basel (Switzerland), the University of Helsinki (Finland), RMIT (Australia), and Tampere University (Finland). Her research interests revolve around World Englishes, pragmatics, digital communication, and the intersection of language and

Sofia has been running the German Research Foundation-funded project The Discursive Construction of
Eating as Entertainment: Carnivalesque Consumption in the Digital Sphere since 2023 and is co-founder of the Bayreuth-(Berlin) Food and Language digital lecture series. Her work on mukbang/eating shows has been published in Internet Pragmatics and Anglistik. Together with Susanne Mühleisen from the University of Bayreuth, she edited the volume Talking About Food: The Social and the Global in Eating Communities (John Benjamins, 2020) and the special issue Language and Food (Anglistik, 2025). She recently organized a conference on digital culinary phenomena - Digital P(a)lates: The Language of Online Food Practices - in Berlin. Sofia loves dumplings and all things potato.