Eighth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Ireland’s food culture has experienced a profound grassroots revolution in recent decades with local producers, chefs, writers and consumers celebrating Irish food with unprecedented confidence. A primary agent of change has been the parallel emergence of a digital culture and the related food communities that the internet and social media have helped to foster both online and offline. Visual representations of food experiences have become powerful social signifiers in a global context; in an Irish context, they have also helped to reshape a modern national identity and provide positive expressions of local culture in the wake of a devastating global recession. Ireland’s pub culture, conversely, has been slower to respond to these opportunities for digital communication and community-building, in part because embodied communication and community as Oldenberg’s Third Place have long been at the heart of the Irish pub experience. Furthermore, unlike Ireland’s nascent food culture, Irish pub culture is well-established, deeply embedded within national identity and evolving at a significantly slower pace. This paper will explore the lessons that Irish publicans can learn from digital-literate food and drink cultures. It will also suggest further attributes inherent in Irish pub culture, such as its role as an incubator of the national flair for storytelling and a disseminator of Irish literary arts, and examine how these might be reframed and better exploited for a digital age.