Affective practices in asynchronous eating shows

This study examines the pragmatics of affect and emotion in asynchronous eating shows, a genre of digital food discourse in which hosts record and share videos of themselves eating, with viewer interaction occurring through deferred comments. While previous research has explored food evaluation as a linguistic and multimodal practice, we argue that in eating shows, taste assessment is also an affective practice that fosters intimacy, engagement, and participation. Through a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of five YouTube eating shows, we investigate how hosts perform affective stances toward food using linguistic, embodied, and audiovisual resources. We also analyze how viewers, despite the asynchronous format, contribute to the co-construction of affect through patterns of evaluative commentary. Our findings show that food assessment in eating shows is not only about describing taste but also about performing and eliciting affective alignment, shaping digital food identities such as expert eaters and lay reviewers.