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Instagram and intermodal congurations of
value
Ideology, aesthetics, and attitudinal stance in
avotoast posts
Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. Ross
University of New South Wales |University of Sydney
This paper explores how ideological positions associated with food are con-
strued multimodally in Instagram posts produced by everyday social media
users. Discourse about food choices is an important site for revealing syn-
dromes of values that characterise the ideological positions that are embed-
ded in everyday life. An example of a highly valued food is the avocado
which is an important bonding icon in semantic domains from veganism,
clean eating, keto/low-carb eating, ethical/sustainable eating to tness. We
explore how values associated with avocado toast are enacted intermodally
through the interplay of meanings made in the images, captions, and tags in
a corpus of , Instagram posts tagged avotoast. The study draws on
previous social semiotic work on visual intersubjectivity and everyday aes-
thetics in social photography (Zhao and Zappavigna a) to interpret the
visual meanings made in these posts. It also draws on research into inter-
modal coupling (image-text relations) and ambient aliation (online social
bonding) (Zappavigna ) to understand how dierent values are con-
strued in these texts. A modied grounded theory approach is used to iso-
late and exemplify the visual and textual features at stake, and then to
explore ideological positionings through close multimodal analysis. A par-
ticularly interesting pattern in the corpus is the interaction of aesthetic and
moralising discourses. For instance, a regulative metadiscourse realised
through hashtags is used to project an instructional discourse about how to
eat and what is considered ethical, sustainable, and nutritious food con-
sumption. Rather than being directly encoded as judgement of behaviour
these assessments tended to be expressed as appreciation of food items and
their aesthetics or worth (e.g., clean, healthy, etc.).
Keywords: social media discourse, Instagram, ideology, multimodal
discourse analysis, ambient aliation, social media photography
https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00068.rap |Published online: 15 February 2021
Internet Pragmatics issn 2542-3851 |e‑issn 2542-386x © John Benjamins Publishing Company
. Introduction
The ideological power of food discourse permeates our social lives. Appreciating
ne food, criticising the food choices of others, expressing various political orien-
tations through food consumption and purchasing decisions, and countless other
social practices are central to food discourse. All of these practices are implicated
in how ideology is manifest and maintained in everyday discursive practices since
“ideologies live through the common everyday actions,” both verbal and non-
verbal, of language users (Hasan :). Social media is an important site for
investigating how such everyday semiotic practices are enacted digitally. Social
media platforms are resplendent with examples of users creating alignments by
bonding around aspects of banal, quotidian life. For instance social bonding
occurs around daily habits such as consuming a morning coee through practices
of ‘ambient aliation’ (Zappavigna , a, b), that is, the creation (and
contestation) of attitudinal alignments via digital platforms. Images of food and
beverages are an important domain within what has been termed ‘social photog-
raphy’ (Zappavigna ; Zhao and Zappavigna a, b, c; Zappavigna
and Zhao ). This is a domain of online photographic practice where social
media users regularly negotiate intersubjective relations (relations between per-
spectives), enact identities, and forge community. Instagram in particular is a
platform where images of food are regularly shared through recurrent choices in
visual structure and genres (e.g., atlay images) that are connected to visual gen-
res seen in magazines and cookbooks. These patterns in visual choices also func-
tion to engrain the aective and “aspirational” appeal of images within digital
visual cultures (Leaver, Higheld and Abidin :).
This paper adopts a social semiotic perspective toward considering the role
of multiple semiotic modes, such as image and language, in the establishment
and maintenance of ideologies. It explores the discourse of everyday social media
users in terms of the values that they construe in Instagram posts about avocado
toast. This is a popular breakfast or brunch item which, as this paper will show, is
highly valued in a range of diets, from vegan to paleo eating, and which appears
to be an intersection point of discourses about clean, healthy, sustainable and
authentic eating practices on social media platforms. A central concern of this
paper is stance-taking, which we explore using the Appraisal framework (Martin
and White ), a social semiotic framework which has been used to explore
evaluation across wide range of discursive domains. Stance is a key issue in
pragmatics research into social media (Homan ; Zappavigna a) and is
beginning to be explored in relation to visual as well as linguistic resources on
platforms such as Instagram (Matley ), and in conjunction with considera-
tion of the metadiscursive function of social tagging resources such as hashtags
[] Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. Ross
(Lee and Chau ; Matley ; Scott ; Zappavigna ). Indeed, Lee and
Chau (:) argue that “regardless of the primary function of hashtags, user-
generated contents in social media are rich in stance, opinions and evaluation.”
The multimodal dimension of the study focuses on the ideological implica-
tions of the aesthetic practices manifest in Instagram images. Aestheticization is
a persuasive resource for proliferating values, as suggested by Mapes (). This
is particularly the case if we consider how opinion and sentiment in captions and
hashtags couple intermodally with the visual features of social media images of
food. In order to explore the aestheticisation of quotidian experiences of food
in the images in our dataset we drew inspiration from Zhao and Zappavigna’s
(b:) concept of “amplied ordinariness.” This concept is grounded in
work such as Leddy’s () exploration of how everyday aesthetics make ordi-
nary experience extraordinary, to consider the particular visual strategies that are
used to “amplify our gaze on the small and mundane” in social media images. It
also develops this work on amplied ordinariness in images to explore how the
visual meanings coordinate intermodally with values construed in the captions
and metadata in the Instagram posts in the dataset.
The paper begins by reviewing previous work on the ideological dimensions
of digital food discourse and suggesting the need for further detailed multimodal
studies of specic textual practices. It then introduces the analytical method
that incorporates both a framework for exploring how attitudinal positions are
adopted in language, and a framework for interpreting the aestheticization of the
ordinary in social media images. Aer introducing the parameters of the Insta-
gram dataset, the method section details the ideation-attitude coupling analysis,
used to explore how values are realised in the language and metadata of the Insta-
gram captions, and the approach to considering amplied ordinariness in the
Instagram images, used to explore the role of aestheticization in the construal of
values. The analysis sections explore the specic patterns of meanings that were
identied in the linguistic and visual analysis, considering in particular the rela-
tionship between moralising and aesthetic discourses in the dataset.
. Enacting ideologies in digital food discourse
Many scholars have argued that both food and language “are intertwined with
processes of producing, reproducing, maintaining, and at times contesting and
changing symbolic capital” (Riley and Cavanaugh :). Because food dis-
course permeates so many discursive registers, there has been research exploring
its role in marketing, advertising, restaurant reviewing, and social sharing and
dietary tracking (c.f. Rousseau ; Coary and Poor ; Lewis ; Lupton
Instagram and intermodal congurations of value []
; Baker and Walsh ). As Adami (:) has noted, multimodal mean-
ings about food are “linguistically, culturally and symbolically constructed
through texts and discourses, across places and times, in order to convey ideolo-
gies and perspectives.” A relationship between food and ideology has been well
established across many elds focused on issues of gender, sociality, and ethics,
and with dimensions such as authenticity (Pichler and Williams ; Mapes
), consumption politics and practices (Paddock ), identity (Cronin,
McCarthy and Collins ), class (Cotter and Valentinsson ; Mapes ),
neoliberalism (Mapes and Ross ), politics (Lewis ), sustainability
(Ehgartner ), nationalism (Järlehed and Moriarty ; Andersson ),
modernity (McDonagh and Prothero ) and aesthetics (Zappavigna and Zhao
).
Many of these issues intersect with broader concerns of consumerism and
various types of activism (see Schneider et al. () for an edited collection ded-
icated to this). With notions of good health becoming increasingly distinct from
merely not being unhealthy, food discourse has also become much more moral-
istic and politicised. For example, Shugart () discusses the various possibil-
ities of what “good” food might actually mean, foregrounding the characteristics
of organic, local, and nutritious as showcasing an attentiveness to food traditions,
production and preparation. This focus secures admittance to various elements
of a “foodie” culture that is arguably not as concerned with food per se as it is
with various ethical issues and other related moral and political discourses such
as climate change (e.g., Ross and Mapes ). Such characteristics of food dis-
course are realised rhetorically in various ways, but social media has emerged as
a prominent avenue for discussion around these issues and the projection of one’s
own food-related ideologies. Thus, it can be said that the rationale for healthy
food choices has extended far beyond nutritional benets and into values, ethics,
politics, fashion and social activism (Schaefer et al. ). In recent years, avo-
cado toast has regularly featured in food-related social media posts, and never
more so than on Instagram. It has been argued that its popularity comes from
being healthy, but not too healthy – in fact, Orenstein () points out is it even
slightly indulgent. Of relevance to the current study, it is considered highly Insta-
grammable, as attested to by the millions of posts using avocadotoast, avotoast,
smashedavo and numerous other variations, and this positions it as a food of
choice for many young people active on social media. Furthermore, it is typically
organic, which places the eater on the ‘right’ side of ethical consumption in rela-
tion to food. As a dish, it has been endorsed by celebrities such as Gwyneth Pal-
trow and Oprah Winfrey for its simplicity and nutritional value, at the same time
as ensuring it is seen as a ‘trendy’ food choice, shiing perceptions of avocado
[] Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. Ross
toast as a food choice away from something rather mundane towards what could
be considered a contemporary display of conspicuous consumption.
While the above studies have provided valuable insight into the ideological
dimensions of food discourse, less research has addressed the role that social
media have played in the proliferation of food-related ideologies and worldviews.
Some initial work has been undertaken on digital discourse (broadly dened),
and has considered, for instance, technology in relation to food activism (Lupton
and Turner ) and digital sociality in relation to food (Lewis ). There,
however, remains space for close analysis of how ideological patterns play out in
specic textual instances on social media. As Matwick and Matwick (, ) sug-
gest, the advent of social media platforms has established a new site where “the
language of food is a particularly ripe topic to be ground, boiled, and brewed
together for research.” Social media platforms provide an environment where
users can take on, or project, various kinds of “foodie selves” (De Solier : ) –
identities formed around ideologically-driven beliefs related to, for example, sus-
tainability, health, or animal welfare, where “what we eat inextricably reects who
we are” (Mapes : ). A program of work on social media food discourse has
begun with a recently edited volume, Identity and Ideology in Digital Food Dis-
course: Social Media Interactions Across Cultural Contexts (Tovares and Gordon
). This volume features contributions that engage in close discourse analysis
of social media communication to understand how “ideologies of health, nutri-
tion and (good) taste” are enacted, as well how forms of online activism, political
engagement and social conviviality are construed.
Because social media discourse incorporates a range of semiotic modes such
as language and image, research into social media food discourse also needs
to engage with approaches that consider how meanings are constructed inter-
modally, a primary concern within Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis
(Djonov and Zhao ). The Instagram posts explored in this paper are multi-
modal texts that incorporate text, images and various kind of metadata, and thus
any account of how values are proliferated and negotiated needs to consider how
they are realised in each semiotic mode as well as intermodally. A key dimen-
sion of this intermodal meaning-making is the aestheticization of the everyday in
social media discourse, which we will explore further in Section ., and which
“involves a complex interplay of what Bakhtin () refers to as ‘artistic’ gen-
res, that work in the service of aesthetic function, and ‘extra-artistic’ genres,
that are grounded in particular, oen domestic and banal, contexts” (Zappavigna
:). Mapes and Ross () further specify that aestheticisation can itself
render certain positions or worldviews more “palatable” for audiences, and it is
this tendency in social media images that will explore in the present research.
Instagram and intermodal congurations of value []
. Method
The aim of the analysis undertaken in this paper was to show how the everyday
social media posts in the corpus use particular visual and linguistic resources to
construe dierent socio-political ideologies and value systems through a focus on
food. This section explains the sampling and data collection procedure, and then
the visual and linguistic resources investigated. It introduces the Appraisal frame-
work (Martin and White ), which is used to explore how ideation-attitude
couplings construe values in texts. It then details the visual analysis approach for
analysing amplied ordinariness and the aestheticisation of the everyday in the
sampled Instagram images.
. Dataset and sampling
The dataset comprises a corpus of , Instagram posts with the hashtag avo-
toast scraped from Instagram on February using the open source com-
mand line tool Instaloader (). An example is shown Figure . The corpus
included the image, the caption in ‘.txt’ format, and associated metadata (such as
timestamps and geolocation information) as a Json le. Avocado toast was chosen
because of its enduring position as a cultural icon in the domain of food, which is
evidenced by the large number of posts and the ubiquitousness of the dish in the
international food scene, and the fact that it has been frequently positioned as an
overly indulgent food of choice of millennials.
Figure . An example of an Instagram post including avotoast in the caption1
. See https://www.instagram.com/p/BSUbLAFm/ (accessed March ). Permission
has been obtained from all the users whose Instagram posts are included in this paper.
[] Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. Ross
There are currently more than , posts tagged avotoast and . million
posts tagged avocadotoast so the scraped dataset represents only a small snap-
shot of the discourse and is used as a starting point for more elaborate exploration
beyond the parameters of the corpus. Thus, the paper integrates methods from
Corpus Linguistics, Multimodal Discourse Analysis, and Grounded Theory sam-
pling strategies to approach the problem of undertaking qualitative analysis of
large datasets. This approach involved exploration of prominent or pertinent
visual patterns in the corpus, iterating until a particular visual pattern appeared to
have been saturated. The investigation of linguistic patterns was initially guided by
inspection of word frequency and n-grams to obtain an overview of some of the
most common quantitative patterns in the corpus of Instagram captions before
inspecting concordance lines to undertake more detailed qualitative analysis of
the values construed in these captions. This more detailed analysis also involved
a grounded theory approach to through inspecting concordance lines until sat-
uration of relevant features was achieved. The particular features at stake were
couplings of ideation and attitude, as detailed in the next section. Throughout
the analysis section the patterns identied with the approach just detailed will be
exemplied using concordance lines. The intent here is to undertake a qualitative
description of the discourse and these examples should only be taken as represen-
tative of the discourse to the extent that the iterated manual analysis informed by
grounded theory is able to provide a way of managing the complexity of the kind
of high dimensional data which human semiosis can be said to constitute.
. Linguistic analysis: The Appraisal framework and ideation-attitude
couplings
A key dimension of ideology is the kinds of stances that are construed within par-
ticular social contexts and situations, in other words how experiences are posi-
tively or negatively evaluated. Within the domain of food discourse, the attitude
associated with food references can be said to reect adherence to a particular
worldview, or a socio-political ideology (e.g., veganism/sustainable eating). In
order to explore how values are discursively realised as opinion and sentiment in
Instagram posts we draw on Appraisal (Martin and White ), a social semiotic
framework for analysing evaluative language.
Appraisal aims to account for the domain of interpersonal meaning where
language is used to express attitudes and to adopt stances about other texts. The
framework models choices in evaluative meaning using system networks. System
networks are networks of interrelated options that are organized paradigmatically,
in terms of ‘what could go instead of what,’ rather than syntagmatically in terms
of structure (Halliday and Matthiessen :). Fundamental to this framework
Instagram and intermodal congurations of value []
is the discourse semantic system termed which is modelled as a choice
between (expressing emotion, e.g., love, disgust, fear, etc.),
(assessing behaviour, e.g., evil, ethical, trustworthy, etc.) and (esti-
mating value, e.g., beautiful, treasured, noteworthy, etc.) (Figure ).
Figure . The system of , with example realisations for each feature from the
corpus
Each system may be approached at ever-increasing levels of delicacy depend-
ing on the analytical task at hand. For example, , the most frequent
type of appraisal in the dataset considered in this paper, may be specied as -
(shown in bold in example Instagram caption ), in the sense of something
being appealing or attention-grabbing:
() … I also ordered the classic avocado toast with soy pumpkin seeds, sprouts,
chilli and a poached egg on top . It was very tasty, especially the combina-
tion of avocado and soy pumpkin seeds…
It may also be categorised as , for instance, the extent to which
something is cohesive or complex:
() …i love my intricate meals with toppings but sometimes, nothing beats the
simple avo on toast combo…
[] Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. Ross
also may be detailed as , indicating the extent to which
something is valued or considered worthwhile:
() …I will never get bored of Aussie brunch life but I think soon it’s time for a
more authentic Balinese breakfast…
Appraisal also acknowledges that much evaluative meaning is not realised directly
or explicitly in evaluative lexis but may be implied in various ways.
.. Ideation-attitude couplings for exploring values in texts
While appraisal is a useful interpersonal lens on how evaluative language func-
tions, we “don’t aer all simply aliate with feelings; we aliate with feelings
about people, places and things, and the activities they participate in, however
abstract or concrete” (Martin and Rose : ). Thus, in order to understand
how values are shared and negotiated, we need to explore how interpersonal
and ideational meanings are associated in discourse. A key idea of aliation is
that social alignments are negotiated through ‘couplings’ of ideation and attitude
that can be communed around, laughed o, or condemned in direct interactions
(Martin ; Knight ). The following annotation convention was adopted
for coding couplings (following the format proposed by Martin et al. ):
[ ideation / attitude: +/− ]
The coupling is demarcated by the square brackets and the forward slash indicates
the fusion of ideational and attitudinal meaning to form a value that can be nego-
tiated by language users as a whole. The plus (+) or minus (−) signs denote the
polarity of attitudinal resources. An example of an ideation-attitude coupling is
the following:
() Avocado toast is delicious!
[ideation: avocado toast / attitude: + positive : ]
This strategy for annotating couplings was used to analyse how values were
realised in the Instagram captions and any embedded hashtags in sampled con-
cordance lines (see previous section). Commonly occurring values were explored
in more detail by investigating how they were negotiated in exchanges occurring
in the comments feed of sampled posts.
. Visual analysis of everyday aesthetics – amplied ordinariness
The visual analysis was conducted in tandem with the linguistic analysis, again
relying on an iterative sampling method. It applied Zhao and Zappavigna’s
(b) concept of the amplied ordinariness introduce in the introduction. Our
Instagram and intermodal congurations of value []
approach extends this work to consider how the aestheticisation dimensions iden-
tied by Zhao and Zappavigna (b) in images (the imagined subject, intimate
object and poignant present) functioned intermodally to support the values con-
strued in the image captions and hashtags. There are three main visual strategies
at stake: the imagined subject (inferred seles that include a part of the photogra-
pher’s body in the image rather than a face), the intimate object (an aerial or ‘at-
lay’ angle on arranged objects) and the poignant present (lters reducing everyday
banality). These three dimensions amplify the aesthetic value of a social media
image. The imagined subject includes seles that “create an intensive gaze of a
self, or a subjective gaze” (Zhao and Zappavigna b:) whereby the com-
positional choices invoke the perspective of the photographer on the represented
objects. In terms of images of food, these “food seles” (Middha ) typically
take the form of inferred seles where the photographer’s face is not included
in the image, but a complex intersubjectivity is expressed through the photogra-
pher’s body part (e.g., a hand holding a fork) suggesting the perspective of ‘a self ’
(Zhao and Zappavigna a). They also take the form of ‘still life self images’
(Zappavigna and Zhao ) where the perspective of a potential self is repre-
sented through the arrangement of food. An example is Figure where the accom-
panying caption echoes the intersubjective perspective construed in the image
(i.e., a self ’s gaze on a personal object).
Figure . An example of a still life self image2
. See https://www.instagram.com/p/BYkvYpQc-/ (accessed March ).
[] Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. Ross
The angle from which the intimate object is shot also contributes to this inter-
subjectivity. Personal objects such as food or the contents of a handbag reoccur in
social media discourse (e.g., see Zappavigna b on coee) and are oen shot
from an aerial angle (e.g., ‘atlay’ Instagram images). This aerial angle implies the
focused gaze of the imagined subject enhancing the intimacy of the image as well
as its aesthetic impact:
…as its provenance is aerial landscape shots, which have traditionally been used
to capture the beauty and vastness of landscapes from an angle that a human can-
not usually witness without the assistance of aerial technology. An aerial shot of
daily mundane objects such as coee also implies the focused gaze of an imagined
subject, as we have to sit up straight and bend our neck to be able to observe our
food or coee from this kind of angle. Through this attentive gaze, we form an
intimate relation with the object which is then captured and this intimacy is
amplied through the digital photograph.
(Zhao and Zappavigna b:–)
Another dimension contributing to this amplication is that of the ‘poignant pre-
sent’ where digital lters are used to reduce the banality of an everyday image, for
example through invoking retro aesthetics associated with analogue photography,
sometimes paradoxically creating a sense of “universality or atemporality” (Zhao
and Zappavigna b: ).
. Analysis and discussion
. Still life self images and amplied ordinariness
The avocado toast images in the dataset can be interpreted as still-life self images,
a form of sele constructed with objects. As introduced in Section ., this visual
structure is part of construing an imagined subject in the service of enacting an
aesthetic of amplied ordinariness that renders an everyday image more aestheti-
cally pleasing, noteworthy, and hence more likely to attract attention and produce
a rhetorical impact within the social media stream. The impact is potentially sig-
nicant as it can be a conduit for the communication of ideology and worldview
that maybe embedded in the textual component of the posts. The images employ
several compositional choices to produce an aesthetically pleasing image such as
isolating the avocado toast in the centre of the image singularly or in a pair (see
Caple ), and shooting the image from an aerial or downward angle to invite
an imagined subject perspective (Figure ). The combination of these choices is
a part of the aestheticisation of the avocado as an iconised object to which is
attached values that will be explored in the next section. This is signicant as it is
Instagram and intermodal congurations of value []
these attached values that act as the vehicle for the expression of ideology in such
posts.
Figure . An example of aerial (le) and downward (right) angle images3
Figure is an example of a still life self image in which the Instagrammer
presents the perspective of ‘a self ’ through the atlay composition and the aes-
theticising gaze of the aerial angle introduced in Section .. The identity associ-
ated with this subjectivity is marked through the activating function of the social
media prole “indicating that the posts in the unfolding social stream are the pro-
jected meaning-making of the prole author” (Zappavigna b:). The cap-
tion of the image tables a self-deprecation bond as a self-referential joke centering
on invoked negative agged through (With all the avo-
cado I consume). This is associated with a joke that has become a meme about
millennials being unable to aord their mortgage due to spending so much money
on expensive brunch items such as smashed avocado. This trope has featured
frequently in media coverage about millennials (e.g., in articles with titles such
as ‘Millionaire tells millennials: if you want a house, stop buying avocado toast’
(Levin ). This meme has proliferated on social media platforms and was visi-
ble in the corpus in hashtag clusters such as:
() …avotoast millenial thisiswhywecantaordhouses…
() …avocadotoastmillenialcantaordahouse…
() …millenialscantaordhouses millenials avocadotoast…
. For the le image, see https://www.instagram.com/p/CACLZwWAOE/ (accessed June
); for the right image, see https://www.instagram.com/p/BysdbgUWC/ (accessed June
).
[] Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. Ross
as well as concordance lines such as the following which feature humorous meta-
responses to the idea of avocado toast as a barrier to home ownership:
() An expert once said the reason millennials can’t aord homes or to pay down
their debts is because we spend “too much” money on avocado toast.
() Every time I eat avocado toast(which is pretty rare) I think “suck it! old white
dude, I can have my avocado toast AND own a home!” Don’t let anyone else
tell you what you can or can’t do. As millennials, we’re a resilient group
() Would you rather be able to aord a house or eat avocado toast?
This avocado toast versus nancial security dichotomy has been taken to the point
that a satirical online ‘Avocado Toast House Deposit Calculator’4has been gen-
erated to further highlight as well as make fun of the misalignment between this
food choice and an ability to achieve nancial security.
Figure . An example of an avocado toast still life sele5
An important persona repeatedly at stake in the corpus was the millennial,
both in terms of which kinds of choices and preferences dene millennial expe-
rience, and the kind of worth these choices accrue. The millennial persona was
characterised by self-deprecating jokes targeted at the self for example the follow-
ing caption to Figure :
. See https://datasaurus-rex.com/gallery/avocado-toast-house-deposit-calculator (accessed
March ).
. See https://www.instagram.com/p/ByMMZOvBoa-/ (accessed March ).
Instagram and intermodal congurations of value []
() With all the avocado I consume it’s a wonder I can aord University.
avocadotoast millenialavocadotoast millenials
Further examples of this pattern include the following:
() Since all I can aord now is avocado’s anyway…
() Say what you want about avocado toasts (Apparently it prevents millenials
from buying a house, together with coee. I know, shocking! ) but they
won’t stop being tasty! So simple and indulgent and lling. Topped with egg,
it’s almost the perfect meal.
() Ain’t never gonna be buying me a house
() Thinking about how I’m going to aord this month’s mortgage replayment
What do you guys think about this shirt I designed at @printalloverme ?
As examples , , and suggest, this kind of self-targeted discourse can be
signalled as humorous through the use of laughter tokens realised as emoji (e.g.,
). The emoji sometimes concurs intermodally with the verbal ideation (avo-
cado) and perhaps also functions as a playful reinstantiation of the avocado in the
image.
The hashtags in the corpus incorporating ‘millennial’ in the tag give an
overview of some of the key dimensions regarding how millennials are repre-
sented in the dataset. The most frequent uses of the generational marker ‘millen-
nial’ in the examples serve to associate millennials with avocado toast and, for the
most part, these are self-referentially in terms of targeting the Instagrammer in a
self-deprecating manner, rather than targeting other users in a critical way. How-
ever, the link is also sometimes reinforced through uses of negation. For example,
the use of ‘notamillenial,’ ‘notmillenials,’ and ‘notevenamillenial’ allow the user
to, on the one hand, distance themselves from the label of millennial, while on the
other conrming that the bond between millennials and avocado toast actually
exists.
The most common functions of millennial in these hashtags were as a marker
of identity demarcating avocado toast as millennial food choice, for example (fre-
quencies shown in brackets hereon): millenial (), millenials (), eldermil-
lenial (), typicalmillenial (), notamillenial (). The tags could also function
as a classier dening some aspect of the represented activity, objects, or situ-
ation as a type of millennial experience: millenialbill (), millenialfood (),
millenialbreakfast (), millenialproblems (), milleniallife (). The identity
being marked could be graduated in the tag through intensication of both
and , for example: millenialaf () somillenial (), tresmillenial () or
[] Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. Ross
peakmillenial () The millennial tags could also be realised as a more extended
evaluative metacomment functioning as an observational about an aspect of mil-
lennial behaviour or preferences: yesimamillenial (), whatmillenialseat (),
millenialsbelike (), howmillenialsdobrunch (), poormillenialeatsavotoast (),
millenialsloveavocadotoasthaha ().
This kind of metadiscourse about millennials explicitly marks avocado toast
as a food choice that invokes assessments of the relative worth of dierent genera-
tional groups, and as we will see in Section . operates as a kind of regulative dis-
course orienting the ambient audience to the values being articulated or implied.
It is a particularly interesting example of both cultural tension and frivolity
around the economic status and moral tenacity of youth. Indeed, Black and Walsh
(:) have pointed out recently that the very term ‘smashed avo’ acts as a
meme that “captures the despair of a generation of young people being bueted by
‘economic headwinds’ that have seen the cost of housing in major cities increase
by up to a year.” Thus, ideologically-speaking, the popularity of this food
choice and related depiction on social media could be interpreted as a voicing of
resistance against the intergenerational socio-economic disparity that they exist
within.
. Hashtagged values
Sharing and contesting values is a key dimension of social media communication
(Zappavigna ) and hashtags play an important role in proliferating values
within and across communities (Zappavigna ). Consider for example the fol-
lowing Instagram caption solely rendered in hashtags:
() TGIF ️@goodplanscafe riseandshine avotoast veganbananabread
goodplanscafe montclairnj montclair bestofessex essexcounty tat-
toos vegan veganfoodfeed vegantravel veganinspo vegansog vegan-
sonstagram vegansofnewjersey veganrecipe happycow vegantreats
govegan vegansofnj veganlifestyle sustainablefood veganforlife vegan-
club vgang njvegan quinoa
A series of hashtags such as this is not uncommon on Instagram, and the hashtags
themselves serve multiple functions. Firstly, the more that are used, the more vis-
ible the post becomes within the broader discourse, thus potentially attracting
more likes and followers. Of greater pertinence to the current study, however,
is the manner in which they facilitate or enact the social relation of “Search for
me and aliate with my value!” (Zappavigna :). The values expressed in
the post above relate primarily to veganism, which can be classed as a particular
lifestyle choice. In combination with the ‘vegan’ hashtags, the hashtag tattoos
Instagram and intermodal congurations of value []
indexes the specic social identity that is commonly termed ‘hipster,’ both
through the display of progressive, le-leaning politics of veganism and sustain-
ability, and through nuanced fashion trends as agged by tattoos.6Similar argu-
ments can be made about the following set of hashtags from another post in our
dataset:
() avotoast avacadotoast toast breakfast choosetoreuse plasticisscary
refusesingleuse reusablebottle zerowastelifestyle plasticfreeliving plas-
ticfree zerowaste zerowaste ecofriendly plasticfree sustainableliving sus-
tainable sustainability environment reuse recycle savetheplanet nature
gogreen green zerowasteliving reducereuserecycle ocean
zerowastelifestyle
Along with avocado toast, frequent references are made alluding to the user’s val-
ues in relation to environmental conservation, particularly through a focus on
reducing waste and engaging in recycling. Such a concern with environmental
sustainability typically reects a progressive political mindset.
A relevant process associated with how ideologies proliferate across social
media through hashtag use in recontextualization. Recontextualisation, a concept
developed by Bernstein (), is the notion that one discourse can be embedded
inside another. In our dataset both the use of hashtags in the captions and the
prominent visual structure of the still life self image supported recontextual-
ization. As Zappavigna and Zhao (: ) have shown, the intersubjectivity
enacted in still life self images renders them more open to recontextualization
across domains of social life. For instance, the visual structures of seles allow
a discourse of the self to be inserted into other discourses on social media such
as commercial discourse, autobiographic self-curation, digital parenting etc.
(Zappavigna and Zhao ). In the avotoast dataset, a discourse of self, ren-
dered through the still life self image compositional structure, is recontextualised
across a range of food-related domains such as healthy/clean eating, veganism,
food commercialisation and production, dieting, and many other areas. In many
cases these domains are explicitly marked through hashtags, both as experiential
regions (e.g., coeeshop) and through associated attitudinal values (e.g., sus-
tainableliving). This is in keeping with the dual function of hashtags of topic
marking and evaluative metacommentary (Page ; Zappavigna ). The
hashtags appended to social media posts provide insight into this kind of recon-
textualization and the associated values that are reconstrued. For instance, con-
. As a way of foregrounding this indexical link, Cronin, McCarthy and Collins () high-
light that within the US, the city of Austin, Texas is renowned as a ‘hipster haven’ due to its large
numbers of tattoo parlours, vegan eateries, coee shops, and liberal arts festival such as SXSW.
[] Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. Ross
sider the post in Figure with the following hashtags that both locate the post
within the domain of commercial coee shop experience and associate particular
aesthetic values with that experience:
() food yegfood yeg yegcoee coeeshop coeeshopvibes cafe coee
coeetime delicious avocado avocadotoast breakfast foodpics food-
share foodlovers instafood foodstagram foodpost foodblog foodblogger
millenial sonya sigmammf
Figure . An example of an avocado still life sele with associated hashtags7
Most ideational tags in the corpus can be interpreted using Zhao’s ()
contention that ideational image-verbiage couplings are organised by principles
of abstraction (e.g., naming), generalisation (e.g., classication where the image
exemplies the members of a class), and specication (e.g., indicating circum-
stance such as location). The most common hashtags with an ideational function
generalised objects either in the image or within the situational context (e.g.,
a meal at a café), for instance: avocado (freq.=,), toast (,), food
(,), avo (,), coee (,), etc. They also specied circumstantial infor-
mation about time or location, e.g., breakfast (,), brunch (,), cof-
feeshop (,), etc. Some ideational tags were more abstract indicating broader
semantic domains to be associated with the image, e.g., nutrition (,), t-
ness (,), health (,), lifestyle (), which as we will see encapsulate
. See https://www.instagram.com/p/BvhidgooS/ (accessed March ).
Instagram and intermodal congurations of value []
some of the general areas in which socio-political ideologies are represented
through food choices. Other tags referred to the act of food photography or
social media communication about food, e.g., foodporn (,), foodphotogra-
phy (,), foodtagram (,) etc. It should be noted, however, that the exact
function of a hashtag can only be determined by inspecting concordance lines
for language in context, which we will undertake for some examples later. Some
tags with an apparently ideational function can be used to invoked attitudinal
meanings, for example, homemade (,) can be considered to invoke positive
appreciation of home cooked food, beyond experientially indicating where the
food has been produced.
Of greater interest to the current study were hashtags indicating types of diet
and personae (Table ). While these tags have the function of ideational classica-
tion, they invoke congurations of values. These are accrued in particular situa-
tional or cultural contexts, and can be associated with either positive or negative
semantic prosodies. For example, while on the one hand veganism can be inter-
preted as merely a diet type, crucially it can also be considered a personae, and
here we reiterate Mapes’ () position that individual identity is strongly con-
nected with what one eats, and thus is related to one’s worldviews and ideologi-
cal beliefs in the sociopolitical sphere. Further, a hashtag such as organic invokes
a worldview that encompasses environmental sustainability at the same time as
reecting desire to forge a resistance to both anonymous corporate culture and
mass production (Eriksson and Machin ).
Table . Hashtags marking types of diet and personae in the top most frequent
hashtags. *can function as a classier of food or persona
Type of diet Personae
plantbased (,) paleo (,) foodie (,) vegansofig (,)
veganfood (,) feedfeedvegan
(,)
vegan* (,) vegano (,)
glutenfree (,) letscookvegan
(,)
vegetarian* (,) veganfoodlovers
()
whatveganseat (,) homemade (,) avocadolover
(,)
foodies ()
veganbreakfast
(,)
hautecuisines () foodblogger (,)
veganfoodshare
(,)
organic () foodlover (,)
[] Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. Ross
Many hashtags had a more direct interpersonal function, either indicating
attitude to be associated with the image, or tabling an ideation-attitude coupling
as a potential value to be shared in relation to the image. The hashtags marking
attitude tended to be focused on targeted at the food in the image,
for instance healthy, yummy, delicious, etc. (Table ) and this tendency was
echoed in the tags containing ideation-attitude couplings, such as healthyfood,
#healthyeating, #healthybreakfast, etc. These tags also have the ideational function
of generalisation, indicating that the image is an instance of a member of a class,
for instance that the avocado toast is an example of healthy eating (or the entity
consumed in the eating process).
Table . Most frequent hashtags incorporating an attitude or an ideation-attitude
coupling
Attitude Ideation-attitude coupling
healthy (,) healthyfood (,) gloobyfood (,)
yummy (,) healthyeating (,) healthyeats (,)
delicious (,) healthybreakfast (,) healthyrecipes (,)
yum (,) healthylifestyle (,) cleaneats ()
love (,) cleaneating (,) beautifulcuisines ()
foodgasm (,) fitfood (,) fitspo ()
instagood (,) realfood (,) wholefoods ()
tasty(,) bestofvegan (,) healthyliving ()
healthyfoodshare (,) avocadolove (,)
Eating local was a value frequently expressed in the corpus both in the ver-
biage and in hashtags such as eatlocal. It featured as a nominal group in very fre-
quently used hashtags with imperatives such as shoplocal (,), supportlocal
(), and eatlocal (). In the body of a post it could categorise the food by
acting as a classier within the nominal group:
() … Bread topped with / avocado and half a local organic Lebanese cucumber
…
() The Local Beet for the perfect brunch. I tried their vegan mushroom pizza …
() With avocado, baby tomatoes, local salad greens, creamy vegan cashew …
() OMG the local grown avocado and lemon were perfection and the added
farmers..
Instagram and intermodal congurations of value []
() … wheat bread topped with fresh avocado, served with local greens and
poached eggs…
and eating establishments:
() …I cycled to my local cafe for a green juice,eggs and avocado on toast…
() … Avo Toast for dinner a local restaurant and night club…
() Grabbed brunch at my favorite little local eatery today…
() …Do Millennials really need to hit up the Local Cafe for Avocado Toast?…
() The Hippie Toast from Local Public Eatery in South Lake Union …
From the perspective of ideation, ‘Local’ functions as a classier of the various
nominal groups relating to food and eateries. However, it also invokes positive
and is associated with a prosody of positive about both
aesthetic and moral dimensions of food, a discursive tendency. A similar pattern
has been suggested by Blum (: ) who has noted that “the indexicality of local
exceeds its semantic meaning of location and indexes moral and aesthetic quali-
ties as well.” The idea of ‘local’ is very powerful in its indexical meaning in that,
as explained by Mapes (: ), locality can position the user as an ethical and
‘right’ kind of consumer, while also positioning those who do not eat local as “at
best, uneducated, and at worst, irresponsible.” When the focus of ‘local’ shis to
eateries and dining establishments, the user can be seen to be tying their identity
to their own local community.
. Aesthetic discourse invoking a moralising discourse
Aestheticisation is a dominant discursive pattern on Instagram, as suggested by
the high frequency of in the corpus (e.g., in the hashtags in Tables
and ) and also the visual patterns of amplied ordinariness that we have explored
earlier in this paper. However, this aestheticisation does not function only to pro-
liferate aesthetic values such as [ideation: avocado toast / attitude: positive -
: ]. A recurrent pattern across the examples considered so far
is a moralising discourse of adhering to particular food ideologies reconstituted
as an aesthetic discourse. In other words, the ‘right’ kind of eating choices tend
to be expressed via of entities rather than of humans
or behaviours directly. These ideologies are agged in the hashtags identied in
the previous section and co-occur with appreciation in the body of the caption.
For instance, they include ideologies such as clean eating as shown in the follow-
ing example which combines the hashtag cleaneating with instances of -
shown in bold:
[] Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. Ross
() Attractive and very inviting, what do you need more ? . toast avacado eggs
wentforlooks sourdough breakfast inviting drool worthy cleaneating
chefmode onmytable avotoast avacadoaddict avacadolover
looksyummy wallstreet blackfox coee haveagreatday
Similarly, this post contains a prosody of positive concurrent with
hashtags about veganism:
() So stoked to come across this little gem of a cafe here in San Sebastián; check
out this delicious vegan “poke” bowl with tofu, avo toast, and green juice!
Damn it was good!! @cafealabama 🇪🇸 morethanjustkale vegano
veganoption vegantravel plantbased poweredbyplants plantpower
spain sansebastian vegan veganaf veganos veganlife veganfood veg-
aneats veganismo vegansog veganfortheanimals veganfoodie vegan-
pokebowl avotoast veganpower veganshare veganlunch yum
veganinspain
This pattern is born out again in relation to ideologies of sustainable eating explic-
itly marked with a hashtag, with concurrent alongside hashtags
containing imperatives instructing the social media audience about what to eat:
() vegan veganmeals veganrecipes vegetarian meatfree eggfree dairyfree
sustainableeating whatveganseat veganmcr veganuk veganfoodshare
veganfood foodpics ditchdairy ditchmeat meatlessmadness tryveg-
aneating eatvegan myfoodisgrownnotborn veganbreakfast avotoast
Little throwback to this heavenly avotoast . With cranberrie, cumin and
popped quinoa
Healthy eating and ethical eating are also associated with aesthetic :
() Yummy brekkie this morning, smashed avo and fried eggs on a toasted brown
thin with a drizzle of sriracha for sp ☀️
breakfast brunch sunday avotoast mealideas fooddiary healthyeating
healthyfood healthylifestyle foodstagram zeroheroes wwfreestyle
wwsupport wwfriends wwmaguk mywwkitchen wwuk wwukonline
wwukonlinemember wellnessthatworks weareww
() veganuary vegan avocado avotoast plantbased love food nutrition
nutritionist balance eatingdisorderrecovery happy blogger foodblooger
dietician equality ethical ethicalliving
Now that I know how delicious organic cage-free eggs taste, how can I ever go
back?
The aesthetic discourse shown above through the bolded functions
didactically in tandem with the regulative discourse realised by hashtags. The
Instagram and intermodal congurations of value []
hashtags project the instructional eld (i.e., the knowledge to be broadcast to the
ambient audience about how to eat). In using the term ‘projection’ we are inu-
enced by Christie’s () work in the area of educational discourse, that was
in turn inspired by Bernstein’s () idea of one discourse embedding another.
According to this view, a regulative discourse embeds/projects the particular
knowledge of the discipline being taught:
A clause that projects in some sense takes something said or thought before and
reinstates it. Hence the notion of projection is used metaphorically to refer to the
relationship of the two registers in the pedagogic discourse. A eld of knowledge
and its associated activity is taken, relocated and in some sense therefore ‘pro-
(Christie :)jected’ for another purpose and another site.
This idea has been used in work on restorative justice to explore how a regulative
discourse can project a discourse of social integration (Zappavigna and Martin
). In the present case, the eld of knowledge at stake is about the right kinds
of eating practices, food production, ethical supply chains, etc.
One key way that such projection can occur is via metadiscourse. Hashtags
can function both as metadata “in the sense that a particular instance of a tag is
associated with all other instances of the same tag in the social stream” and as
metadiscourse “in the sense that it encapsulates, at a higher order of abstraction,
the interpersonal meaning being made,” particularly in the domain of evaluation
(Zappavigna :). While education and practices of restorative justice occur
in institutionalised settings, social media is not as tightly controlled in terms of
tenor relationships, and thus the regulative metadiscourse aorded by hashtags is
less strictly organised. Hashtags do, however, have the added regulative function
that they tend to proliferate the perspectives that they embed across social media
platforms. Thus, hashtags can both project an instructional discourse about how
to eat and proliferate this perspective across millions of posts consumed by large
numbers of audiences. Following the simple representation of one discourse pro-
jecting another adopted in Zappavigna and Martin (: ) we can present the
essential idea as in Figure .
This metacommenary about how to eat is also oen packaged as apprecia-
tions of entities, in other words as invoking . For exam-
ple, consider the following caption with shown in bold:
() yummy fresh foodie cleaneating clean tness tfood tfam
cleaneating cleaneats fuel health healthy healthybreakfast
healthybreakfastrecipes healthybreakfastideas glutenfree dairyfree toast
toasttuesday avocado avotoast chiajam
[] Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. Ross
Figure . Regulative discourse project instructional discourse about eating practices on
Instagram
This type of pattern was also apparent in posts that reference the popular ideology
of sustainable eating, for example:
() Avo-toastin’ for lunch ?! Yes please!! @delirio_freshco oers great
fresh to order yummy bites for lunch . I tried them out for the rst time a
couple weeks back with @yourgreenmermaid for a conscious &sustainable
lunch date and they did not disappoint .
In addition to positively appreciating food, this post tables the coupling [ideation:
lunch date / attitude: positive : ]. The positive -
“conscious & sustainable” invokes ( ). What
is seemingly a relatively mundane post about the oerings at a particular eatery
becomes political, with the ideology or worldview – the values – of the poster
being revealed through the of “conscious and sustainable.” At the
same time as deliberately positioning themselves as having progressive views
towards environmental conservation and awareness, Mapes and Ross ()
would argue that this ‘conscious’, ideologically based post serves a status-
producing function.
‘Clean eating’ was a pervasive motif throughout the corpus that draws upon
this tendency in evaluation of appreciation being used to evoke judgement. It was
most oen realised through the cleaneating (,) or eatclean (,) hashtags,
for example:
() Sunday morning avocado toast. Eat clean. Be well. lovegrownwellness yoga
mtnlife eatclean foodisfuel avotoast bewell eatwell intentionalliving
travel
☀️
Instagram and intermodal congurations of value []
‘Clean’ is an of the act of eating that invokes positive
about the people doing the eating in terms of their ethics. Clean eating is a
dietary movement that restricts food choices by excluding processed food. This
movement has very pervasive presence on social media sites which have become
sources of nutritional information for many groups of people (Allen, Dickinson
and Prichard ). Discourses of clean eating tend to moralistically dichotomise
ingredients, with avocados typically being appraised as virtuous food and even
“sanctied to the point that some clean food writers refer to it as ‘God’s butter’”
(Smith :), which is a somewhat ironic analogy as foods generally considered
‘clean’ are dairy-free and gluten-free. A study by Cairns and Johnston ()
argues that consumers who consider themselves ‘responsible’ and knowing tend
to maintain their health without the need to formally diet; thus clean eating “ts
perfectly into this as it is a lifestyle rather than just a diet” (Smith : ). Con-
nected with this idea of clean eating is that of mindfulness, with yoga and medita-
tion guidance being a frequent feature of many clean-eating books (Smith ).
This further adds to the moralising discourse in that not only does clean eating
mean being healthy, but it also helps one to become ‘pure’ in an altogether more
symbolic sense. The overall packaging of this moralism in terms of the aesthetic
dimensions of food is a rhetorical strategy that makes the instructional discourse
(how to eat) more palatable and perhaps less open to direct contest.
. Conclusion
This paper has explored Instagram discourse about avocado on toast, a relatively
banal food item that barely merits being classied as a ‘dish,’ through exploration
of a corpus of avocadotoast Instagram posts. It has shown how Instagram posts
about the everyday experience of consuming this kind of food in fact reveal
congurations of values that constitute evidence of the kind of ideological posi-
tions held by groups of Instagram users. In order to explore how these values
are realised in language we have considered how patterns of evaluative meaning,
annotated using the Appraisal framework, connect with ideational meanings
about avocado toast to form ideation-attitude couplings. These couplings consti-
tute potential bonds oered to the ambient audience. They are oen marked by
hashtags explicitly indicating certain ideological orientations such as cleaneat-
ing, ethicaleating, and sustainableeating.
Since Instagram posts are multimodal texts we have also considered how
these ideation-attitude couplings operate intermodally together with aesthetic
choices realised in the images in the Instagram posts. Drawing on Zhao and Zap-
pavigna’s (b: ) concept of “amplied ordinariness,” as a process through
[] Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. Ross
which the everyday is aestheticized in social media images, we have shown how
avocado toast images function as a form of still life self image whose visual choices
tend to construe a particular intersubjective perspective on the represented food.
This intersubjective perspective renders these kinds of still life self images more
open to recontextualisation across dierent domains of food production and con-
sumption, and in turn makes them more open to accommodating the kinds of val-
ues that are expressed as ideation-attitude couplings in the captions and attendant
hashtags.
A particularly interesting dimension of the dataset was the intersection of
aesthetic and moralising discourses in the social media communication about
avocadotoast. Instagram captions and comments, particularly those attached to
images of food, contain a high degree of of the food, however,
rather than simply functioning to align users around reaction or assessment of
food, the realisation of this verbiage as metadiscourse, for instance in the form
of hashtags, acts as a regulative discourse. This regulative discourse projects an
instructional discourse about food values such as ethical, sustainable and clean/
healthy food consumption. This adds a new dimension to the literature around
food discourse by exploring the minutiae of indexical links to authenticity and
identity. It presents a new, more nuanced approach to language and ideology in
food discourse with the contemporary engagement with hashtags and their inter-
modal links with image. This has given rise to new ways to project certain ideolo-
gies and worldviews as core elements of a socio-cultural or socio-political identity.
The account that we have made of various food values in the ideation-attitude
couplings annotated throughout this paper has prioritised the particular values
that the Instagrammer has construed in their post, since our dataset did not
include the comments feed of each post due to limitations in scope. It thus only
gives only a partial description of how these stances might be taken up in the turns
and exchanges that may occur in these feeds. While we have agged that most
comments seem to involve some degree of rallying around shared appreciation of
food, we have not undertaken a detailed ‘bond-by-bond’ analysis of the ambient
aliation involved and what else this might reveal about how social media users
negotiate food values interactively. Future work might, for instance, consider the
complexities of aliation, including both humour (laughing o controversial val-
ues) and condemnation (out-grouping certain values) might play posts in posts
that include comment or commentary about over-eating and dieting. This will
provide insight into the kinds of aliation that play out when these kinds of dis-
course interact with posts about clean or healthy eating practices.
Instagram and intermodal congurations of value []
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Instagram and intermodal congurations of value []
Address for correspondence
Michele Zappavigna
School of the Arts and Media
Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture
The University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW
Australia
m.zappavigna@unsw.edu.au
Biographical notes
Michele Zappavigna is an Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. Her major
research interest is the discourse of social media and ambient aliation. Recent books in this
area include: Searchable Talk: Hashtags and Social Media Metadiscourse (Bloomsbury, ),
Discourse of Twitter and Social Media (Bloomsbury, ), and Researching the Language of
Social Media (Routledge, ; nd edition forthcoming with Ruth Page, Johann Unger and
Carmen Lee).
Andrew S. Ross is a senior lecturer in the School of Education and Social Work at the Univer-
sity of Sydney, Australia. His research interests are interdisciplinary and include (critical) dis-
course analysis, sociolinguistics, political communication and new media. His work has been
published in such venues as Discourse, Context & Media; Communication and Sport; Environ-
mental Communication; Journal of Pragmatics; and New Media & Society.
Publication history
Date received: October
Date accepted: December
Published online: February
[] Michele Zappavigna and Andrew S. Ross
