CPD article: Puppy nutrition: weaning and beyond

In 2019 and 2020, and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of households owning dogs increased considerably, and many of these pets were new puppies acquired during the lockdowns in the UK. With such a rise in puppy ownership, it has never been more important to ensure that these puppies receive adequate nutrition throughout their weaning and growth periods, and beyond. In this article, the nutritional considerations of growing puppies will be discussed, along with current pet food trends and how to ensure puppies are receiving a complete and balanced diet.

Veganism 2.0: Gastromania, nutrition, and digital communication

The vegan population has risen significantly over the past decade, and is expected to continue increasing. Social media are believed to have played a major role in such a rise. According to a Google study (2018), veganism started to spread markedly in 2012, the same year that Instagram became popular, and has then grown in correlation with the expansion of the social network (with over 88 million #vegan posts out of a billion monthly active users and more than 500 million people using the platform daily today). Since 2016 conversations around veganism have increased also on Twitter, reaching nearly 20 million Tweets in 2018 and registering a further growth of 70% in 2019. Moreover, the number of Google searches for veganism has spiked from a popularity rating of just 17 out of 100 in 2008 to 88 in 2018. Functioning both as platforms for sharing and commenting on information and as effective channels for proselytizing, these and other social media have evidently extended the boundaries of the vegan movement, making it become one of the biggest contemporary food trends. This paper aims at identifying and describing the main cultural transformations and forms of life promoted by “veganism 2.0”, based on a semiotic approach particularly attentive to the analysis of the narrative level and the patemic dimension. To this purpose, the intersections between the so-called “gastromania” and other trends characterising contemporary foodspheres, such as “gastro-anomy” and the “ideology of nutritionism” are taken into account, paying particular attention to the gastronomic discourse in present-day digital mediascapes and the complex dynamics characterising them.

Co-constructing the Fashionable Eater

This chapter, which focuses on 83 “throwback Thursday” (#tbt) posts from the @nytfood account, departs slightly from the discourse of elite authenticity. Instead, Mapes identifies three orders of elitist stancetaking which collectively paint the decades-old food trends pictured in the #tbt posts as derisible and inferior—in direct contrast with “progress”-oriented notions of sustainability or simplicity in contemporary food discourse. While much of this work is institutionally produced, @nytfood Instagram followers are also complicit in elitist stance acts. In their various comments, participants demonstrate how putatively inclusive, democratic digital platforms can be spaces of/for social hierarchy, and how the elitist performances of #tbt produce privileged standards of good taste and fashionable eating.

Neue Sorten und Limited Editions greifen Food Trends auf

Hamburg. Die starke Präsenz des Irish Cream-Likörs im TV, auf Social Media und Plakaten zahlt sich aus. Mit modernen Varianten will der Marktführer am Puls der Zeit bleiben.

Using Twitter to explore consumers' sentiments and their social representations towards new food trends

PurposeThis paper investigates the use of Twitter for studying the social representations of different regions across the world towards new food trends.Design/methodology/approachA density-based clustering algorithm was applied to 7,014 tweets to identify regions of consumers sharing content about food trends. The attitude of their social representations was addressed with the sentiment analysis, and grid maps were used to explore subregional differences.FindingsTwitter users have a weak, positive attitude towards food trends, and significant differences were found across regions identified, which suggests that factors at the regional level such as cultural context determine users' attitude towards food innovations. The subregional analysis showed differences at the local level, which reinforces the evidence that context matters in consumers' attitude expressed in social media.Research limitations/implicationsThe social media content is sensitive to spatio-temporal events. Therefore, research should take into account content, location and contextual information to understand consumers' perceptions. The methodology proposed here serves to identify consumers' regions and to characterize their attitude towards specific topics. It considers not only administrative but also cognitive boundaries in order to analyse subsequent contextual influences on consumers' social representations.Practical implicationsThe approach presented allows marketers to identify regions of interest and localize consumers' attitudes towards their products using social media data, providing real-time information to contrast with their strategies in different areas and adapt them to consumers' feelings.Originality/valueThis study presents a research methodology to analyse food consumers' understanding and perceptions using not only content but also geographical information of social media data, which provides a means to extract more information than the content analysis applied in the literature.