Original title: Sri Lankan ethnic cuisine on YouTube: a computational netnographic study of food-neophobic and food-neophilic audience reactions and the digital transmission of culinary heritage
The researchers studied comments on YouTube videos about Sri Lankan cuisine. They used text-analysis tools to sort comments by sentiment, recurring topics, and signs of liking or disliking unfamiliar food. Positive markers appeared about seven times as often as negative ones, and negative reactions appeared across all eight topics. Commenters also explained unfamiliar dishes using familiar food references, which the researchers interpret as a modern form of oral tradition.
Imagine bringing a dish to a shared meal where nobody has tried it before. People may hesitate, but someone who knows the dish can explain it by comparing its ingredients or taste with foods the others already recognize. In this paper, those comparisons in YouTube comments help viewers make sense of unfamiliar Sri Lankan food and may pass culinary knowledge between people.
For people encountering Sri Lankan food through YouTube, other viewers’ explanations can make unfamiliar dishes easier to understand. The study suggests that comments may help pass culinary heritage across cultures, though it analyses online discussion rather than heritage transmission itself.
The analysis covers comments on 45 YouTube videos, mostly in English, so it does not establish how all viewers or Sri Lankan communities respond. Comments, not individual commenters, are the unit of analysis; co-occurring markers therefore do not show a person's lasting attitude. The study identifies cultural translation as associated with mitigation, but the abstract does not establish that it causes reduced reluctance or that comments preserve heritage in practice.
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Sri Lankan ethnic cuisine on YouTube: a computational netnographic study of food-neophobic and food-neophilic audience reactions and the digital transmission of culinary heritage — W. M. Rohan Laksiri — Journal of Ethnic Foods — doi:10.1186/s42779-026-00333-6
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.