By Leyi Wang
Contemporarily, there is a growing trend for people to take pictures or record the eating experience of the food they purchased and post them on social media. Under this trend, food is granted as a new mean for people to express themselves and deliberately leave a designed figure to others. Therefore, in this exhibit, I use three recorded videos depicting people consuming Mapo Tofu and argue that consumers use food to deliberately express their character traits.
In my exhibit, I will show you three videos about people’s reactions and food interactions and try to interpret how they want the audience to recognize them. The versions of Mapo Tofu that appeared in the videos are different, and so do the messages people want to convey. However, it is interesting to discover that there are some shared elements people wish others to identify through their consumption, for example, their characters. As Bergadaa suggests, “consumption is an act that goes beyond the mere desire to possess an object since it encapsulates a process of projecting a consumer’s own personality in an attempt to find themselves or who they would like to be” [1]. It seems that people are also interested in expressing their attitudes toward lifestyle and globalization. Adopting the concept of the extended self first coined by Belk [2], consumers with a positive attitude toward globalism pursue specific ideals by means of consumption, such as global citizenship [3], shared consciousness and values [4], and the desire to participate in the “global village” [5].
[1] Bergadaà, Michelle. “L’artisanat D’un Métier D’art: L’expérience De L’authenticité Et Sa Réalisation Dans Les Lieux De Rencontre Entre Artisan Et Amateur Éclairé.” Recherche et Applications en Marketing (French Edition) 23, no. 3 (2008): 5–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/076737010802300306.
[2] Belk, Russell W. “Possessions and the Extended Self.” Journal of Consumer Research 15, no. 2 (1988): 139–68. https://doi.org/10.1086/209154.
[3] Steenkamp, Jan-Benedict E.M., and Martijn G. de Jong. “A Global Investigation into the Constellation of Consumer Attitudes toward Global and Local Products.” Journal of Marketing 74, no. 6 (2010): 18–40. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.74.6.18.
[4] Holton, Robert. “Globalization’s Cultural Consequences.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 570, no. 1 (2000): 140–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/000271620057000111.
[5] Strizhakova, Yuliya, Robin A. Coulter, and Linda L. Price. “Branded Products as a Passport to Global Citizenship: Perspectives from Developed and Developing Countries.” Journal of International Marketing 16, no. 4 (2008): 57– 85. https://doi.org/10.1509/jimk.16.4.57.
