An evaluation of recommendation algorithms for online recipe portals

Better models of food preferences are required to realise the oft touted potential of food recommenders to aid with the obesity crisis. Many of the food recommender evaluations in the literature have been performed with small convenience samples, which limits our conidence in the generalisability of the results. In this work we test a range of collaborative iltering (CF) and content-based (CB) recommenders on a large dataset crawled from the web consisting of naturalistic user interaction data over a 15 year period. The results reveal strengths and limitations of diferent approaches. While CF approaches consistently outperform CB approaches when testing on the complete dataset, our experiments show that to improve on CF methods require a large number of users (> 637 when sampling randomly). Moreover the results show diferent facets of recipe content to ofer utility. In particular one of the strongest content related features was a measure of health derived from guidelines from the UK Food Safety Agency. This inding underlines the challenges we face as a community to develop recommender algorithms, which improve the healthfulness of the food people choose to eat.publishedVersio

Tradition, authenticity and expertise in and through Cypriot Easter flaounes

Flaounes are festive cheese pies that are widely produced and consumed at Eastertime in Cyprus. This article explores how preparing, consuming and evaluating flaounes is interactionally constructed in everyday practices and naturally occurring interactions, written accounts and ethnographic interviews with Greek Cypriot participants residing in various regions of Cyprus and in the UK diaspora. An ethnomethodological perspective to identities, culture and society is employed to provide analyses of the participants’ local understandings of themselves and their social world and of categorizations of authenticity, tradition and change in relation to flaounes. It is shown that members, even when addressing the cultural and historical significance of flaounes, problematize categorizations of authenticity, while they construct tradition as compatible with innovation and change. For participants, however, the categorizations that have more relevance and importance relate to the taste and quality of the flaounes and the expertise of the maker. Practices around flaounes offer a prime site for positive self-presentation, where performance of culinary expertise intersects with gendered roles and Cypriotness

Context-aware food recommendation system

Recommendation systems are commonly used in websites with large datasets, frequently used in e-commerce or multimedia streaming services. These systems effectively help users in the task of finding items of their interest, while also being helpful from the perspective of the service or product provider. However, successful applications to other domains are less common, and the number of personalized food recommendation systems is surprisingly small although this particular domain could benefit significantly from recommendation knowledge. This work proposes a contextaware food recommendation system for well-being care applications, using mobile devices, beacons, medical records and a recommender engine. Users passing near a food place receives food recommendation based on available offers order by appropriate foods for everyone’s health at the table in real time. We also use a new robust recipe recommendation method based on matrix factorization and feature engineering, both supported by contextual information and statistical aggregation of information from users and items. The results got from the application of this method to three heterogeneous datasets of recipe’s user ratings, showed that gains are achieved regarding recommendation performance independently of the dataset size, the items textual properties or even the rating values distribution.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Food Porn and the Invitation to Gaze

In the digital world, notions of intimacy, communion and sharing are increasingly enacted through new media technologies and social practices which emerge around them. These technologies with the ability to upload, download and disseminate content to select audiences or to a wider public provide opportunities for the creation of new forms of rituals which authenticate and diarise everyday experiences. Consumption cultures in many ways celebrate the notion of the exhibit and the spectacle inviting gaze through everyday objects and rituals. Food as a vital part of culture, identity, belonging, and meaning making celebrates both the everyday and the invitation to renew connections through food as a universal subject of appeal. Food imagery as a form of transacted materiality online offers familiarity, comfort, co-presence but above all a common elemental literacy where food transcends cultural barriers, offering a universal pull towards a commodity which is ephemeral yet preserved through the click economy. Food is symbolic of human solidarity, sociality and sharing and equally of difference creating a spectacle and platform for conversations, conventions, connections, and vicarious consumption. Food images symbolise connection at a distance through everyday material culture and practices.</p

Social Acceleration in the Marketplace: Three Essays Exploring the Intersection of Culture and Consumption

Consumer culture is fast. Goods, services, people, ideas, and values – the material and nonmaterial aspects of culture – are moving more quickly throughout the marketing system than ever before. Such acceleration effects diverse stakeholders: people, public, and planet. This dissertation explores the phenomenon of ‘social acceleration’, and specifically, the ‘acceleration of the pace of life’ which examines the feeling that time is going faster in modern societies as a result of “the increase of action episodes per unit of time” (Rosa 2013, 80). This project develops an understanding of how meanings in marketing are socially constructed in relation to this phenomenon, focusing on the following research question: How do consumers experience and personalize the cultural meanings of social acceleration in their everyday life?” This question requires an examination of the phenomenon from both a macro (cultural meaning) and micro (individual experience and personalization) perspective in order to create meso-level theoretical and market insights. Essay 1, “The Intermingling of Meanings in Marketing: Semiology and Phenomenology in Consumer Culture Theory”, provides a theoretical framework explaining how macro, cultural meanings and micro, individual meanings combine in order to discover how meanings in consumer culture come to constitute a sense of “normalcy” in society. Essay 2, “How Fast Became Normal: Temporal Rhetoric in Consumer Culture”, examines the macro cultural and ideological meanings associated with time and social acceleration in the context of the United States market environment. Essay 3, “Consumer Deceleration Through Market-Mediated Cultural Reflection”, serves as an exploration of micro, individualized consumer meanings created as a response to the phenomenon of social acceleration in the context of the marketization of Danish hygge in the United States. This dissertation expands both marketing literature and theories. The findings will improve marketers’ understanding of social acceleration in both the marketplace and in the everyday life of consumers so that the meanings surrounding this phenomenon may be better managed

Hearth and Homefluencers: Aesthetics of Digital and Domestic Labor in #SlowLiving Content

Slow Living is a philosophy that has grown in popularity as a social media “aesthetic” in recent years due to the growth of TikTok as a global platform and the increase of home-based content during the Covid-19 pandemic. Female creators following the trend, which promotes the rejection of high-speed capitalist life in favor of a slow, minimalist lifestyle, have documented their transition from career to homestead through highly aestheticized and romanticized content. This paper analyzes the slow living trend with focus on the gendered dynamics of both digital and domestic labor. It observes the ways in which “feminine” labor is recasted as both beautiful and pleasurable, a narrative that is bolstered by the trend’s aspirational qualities and is often weaponized to promote traditional conservative ideology