Review on Impact of Digital Food Contents on Visual Hunger and its Consequences on Food Consumption and Waste

Food content creation has been analyzed in this research as a trend improving dining experiences, while at the same time involving other people’s attention. Nevertheless, despite these positive considerations, the digital culture may potentially contribute to food waste, considering that food photos are mainly shared merely for a matter of visual aesthetics (and this practice is gaining much popularity among the youngest). This research, starting from the idea of an evident digital content explosion (as Herman pointed out in 2017), aims to analyze, through a multi - steps process, the impact of this practice among social media users aged above 18 years old. The first step was a survey aimed at investigating the causes of food-related behaviours and food waste. Then, a self-administered questionnaire has been disseminated through social media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc), followed in the end by a non-probability judgmental sampling with a snowballing technique (in order to recruit the participants). Also, those who completed the survey were also invited to forward the link to their peers who actively shared food images on their social media profiles. All the hypotheses made by the authors have been also analysed through the use of the SmartPLS 4.0 software tool, considered suitable because of its capacity to analyse complicated research models, as several scholars pointed out. This paper, therefore, wish to examine the antecedents of digital food cultures, to understand all the possible and already existing consequences of digital food cultures among young generations but not only. In addition, an investigation of the controlling effects of Fear Of Missing Out (also known as FOMO) on food-visual addiction has been realized, coming to the conclusion that FOMO only moderated self-expression and nostalgic memory archiving of people. In the end, this work - encompassing 612 individuals -comprising 399 women (65.2%) and 213 men (34.8%)- seems to underline how modern digital culture has revolutionized communication and business practices, taking into consideration all the positive aspects of it. But, despite all the positive attributes of digital cultures, it appears impossible to ignore that digital food-related behaviors have also contributed to accidental negative consequences of the global hunger for food visual and food waste (contributing for example to the culture of overconsumption). In general, the limits of this research that should be explored in further studies concern the impossibility to generalize the findings of the analysis which has been specifically conducted in Malaysia and also the difficulties and possible bias which can derive from the use of a self-administered test.