The Future of Eating Together: Exploring the Promises and Challenges of Digital Commensality in the Metaverse

In this talk, we review our evolving relationship with food in the digital world, with a focus on digital commensality, which describes the sharing of food and drink experiences through digital technologies, such as social media, video conferencing, and virtual reality. With the rise of social media and the promises of the metaverse, there has been a growing interest in digital commensality as a way to maintain social connections and a sense of community through food. On the one hand, the metaverse helps us elevate, reconnect with others and with our food practices and create new culinary experiences together. However, the metaverse also presents various challenges from transforming our relationship with food and with the physical world to data collection, integration and processing, privacy and data security. Here, we will examine the opportunities and challenges associated with the development of a food metaverse.