“Swiggy it!”

Bibliographic Data

ID21739166
AuthorsTulasi Srinivas (0000-0001-5908-805X, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume21
Issue4
Pages17-30
Publication date2021-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGastronomica The Journal of Food and Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1529-3262 • E-ISSN: 1533-8622
PublisherUniversity of California Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1525/gfc.2021.21.4.17
OpenAlexW3212200697
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited18

This article is a critical inquiry into the shifting nature of the local and the proximate during the COVID-19 pandemic, through the ubiquitous usage of food delivery software applications, or “gastro apps,” in Bangalore, India. I invite a new way to think about the local—both the lived experience of locality and its mapping in techno-location—in the face of the expanding virtual terrain of the global political economy and the foreclosing social worlds of the pandemic, to interrogate the growing disjuncture between local territory and subjectivity and the increasing conjuncture between locality and consumption. Through innovative methodologies using social media platforms, I trace the complex interactions on the popular Swiggy gastro app between migrant deliverymen and middle-class consumers in Bangalore in order to map social worlds of residency, immutability, and nearness, as well as migrancy, precarity, and distance, upon one another, which I argue form an “emergent gastro geography,” where critical interventions in taste, place, and want meet and in which the concepts of the local, the dislocated, and the locational take on new meanings

Epistemology · Geography · Locality · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Precarity · Social distance · Sociology · Subjectivity · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Food Waste Reduction and Sustainability · Gender Studies · Organic Food and Agriculture

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