Digital Edible Literacies: Ephemeral and Highly Affective

Abstract

Digital edible literacies (DEL) are a new media phenomenon that has recently surfaced in social media but has not been examined in scholarly literature before. I exemplify the entanglements of food, media, and children’s stories in three DEL exemplars shared on a private blog, Instagram, and connected Meta channels. Drawing on a genre analysis, I position DEL within affective theories and connect them to the concept of ephemeral and material affect. I argue that the ephemeral materiality of DEL expands children’s literacies with new temporal relationships that exemplify the sensory dimensions of affect in literacy. This theoretical expansion is important to facilitate under-standings of the complex affective qualities of new literacy ecologies