Slow violence in digital food environments: app-food-body assemblages in urban India
- This article explores how food-related apps shape consumption practices, corporeal experiences, and intersectional power relations in urban India. Drawing on data from Hyderabad, Chandigarh, and New Delhi, these interactions are addressed as app-food-body assemblages. Such assemblages give rise to slow violence - harm that is gradual, dispersed, and normalised, often even by those affected. The analysis identifies three interrelated dimensions where slow violence is (re)produced: (1) how app-mediated food choices reinforce normatively aestheticised body ideals, contributing to disordered eating; (2) how digital food practices entangle with affective food labor and intersectional inequalities in navigating urban food platform environments, contributing to obscured hierarchisations; and (3) how algorithmic infrastructures co-produce the aspirational eating and toxic embodiment of platformed ultra-processed foods. By grounding these dynamics in debates on mundane violence and digitalThis article explores how food-related apps shape consumption practices, corporeal experiences, and intersectional power relations in urban India. Drawing on data from Hyderabad, Chandigarh, and New Delhi, these interactions are addressed as app-food-body assemblages. Such assemblages give rise to slow violence - harm that is gradual, dispersed, and normalised, often even by those affected. The analysis identifies three interrelated dimensions where slow violence is (re)produced: (1) how app-mediated food choices reinforce normatively aestheticised body ideals, contributing to disordered eating; (2) how digital food practices entangle with affective food labor and intersectional inequalities in navigating urban food platform environments, contributing to obscured hierarchisations; and (3) how algorithmic infrastructures co-produce the aspirational eating and toxic embodiment of platformed ultra-processed foods. By grounding these dynamics in debates on mundane violence and digital urban food environments, this shows how uneven geographies of digital affect and exclusion emerge as everyday sites of slow violence in contemporary Indian cities, calling for urban and regionally adapted efforts that complement national and international regulation to effectively counteract these harmful dynamics.…
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