My “kind” of food: how ethnic food categories were changed in Local mainstream media from the case study of Boston Magazine

This paper aims to understand how the local mainstream media frames ethnic food and delivers different cultural implications. By tracing how the categorization of food shifts over time, this study illustrates how the local mainstream media shapes and reshapes the concept of cultural identity. Since what and how we eat profoundly influences the way we construct our worldview, the “mundane” realm of food culture paradoxically brings meaningful political implications. Yet, the topic of food from a social science perspective has not received much attention in the existing literature. Considering that the current food scene in the United States is highly segmented according to arbitrary criteria, the intersection of food and identity politics can be a fruitful avenue to understand our pigeonholed perception of society. By relying on the original dataset from the Boston Magazine’s “Best of Boston” Awards from 1975 to 2022 and employing text mining and semantic network techniques, we primarily focus on how authenticity has played a role in the persistent yet dynamically evolving the paradigm of multiculturalism that continues to touch on the issue of identity politics.