a comparative analysis of three digital narratives about food

from *The Eternal Life of the Ramen Noodle*, BBC.

“A short account of an amusing, interesting, or telling incident, whether real or fictitious; an anecdote. A narrative of imaginary or (less commonly) real events composed for the entertainment of the listener or reader; a (short) work of fiction; a tale.[1] ”

— story, in the Oxford English Dictionary

First thing’s first: What is a story?

In the definition above, the OED has stated clearly what a story is: essentially the output of the accounting of real or fictitious events. The story is the thing. In the past, we have relied on written histories and oral traditions. Recording made it possible to capture oral storytelling in a more permanent way. The result is the account, as in the OED. The Story. The End.”

Perhaps a more compete definition emerges when we consider John Barber’s assertion that a story and storytelling is “a way of making the world comprehensible”,[2] a technique for understanding the world. For Thomas King, stories not only contribute to our sense of who we are, stories are what we are.[3] The story is a thing, but also a way through possible truths, uniquely human, and can even be our very existence.

To live in the modern world, and to engage with the various technologies which provide us with information, we also need to ask, how do digital technologies communicate information to us differently? The explosion of new technologies and applications of them have provided even more ways (if you believe Barber) to understand our world. How do they change the way we digest information about a topic?

Digital media has created multiple avenues to create compelling narratives. In the past 20 years we’ve witnessed an explosion of the podcast as a new(ish) way of ingesting stories (I say newish, because they are easily recognizable as the cousin of the radio play, or audio documentary). There are interactive documentaries such as the excellent Hollow which allow the user to wander through the lives of its storytellers like a neighbour popping in for tea and a chat. The locative story places us in a specific location, such as a Black neighbourhood in Tulsa Oklahoma destroyed by whites. The interactive game, such as those created with Twine, has become familiar in scholarly discourse about what passes for a story. Even this portfolio of my work could be considered an example of what Barber refers to as future storytelling,[4] a way of documenting for the purpose of reflecting.[5] In other words, the way I have curated my body of work tells the story of my academic life, my interests, and gives those browsing my website a sense of who I am. I think Thomas King would approve.

We have looked at what a story is, and now we can tell stories in the expanded language of digital literacy – one we can connect with by utilizing various platforms. Stories are typically identified as narratives with a beginning, a middle, and an end. As the following examples will demonstrate, the tools and techniques of digital storytelling have provided a way to present narratives individually, chain them together, overlap them, or arrange them in non-linear ways.

Digital Storytelling: Stories About Food

The intersection of food, history, and storytelling makes a compelling direction to examine digital approaches. Stories about food are unique in the sense that they are not unique at all: everyone has one. The utter universality of food means that there are billions of stories corresponding to the billions of humans who cook it, eat it, waste it, share it, or don’t have enough of it. It is a topic to which we can all relate in some way.

I’ve written before about how technologies can mediate the objects and concepts by which cultures grow and evolve, including food. How do the tools of digital storytelling impact the stories they tell? And what makes a successful digital story?

Digital stories can combine all or some of the traditional storytelling elements of character arcs, plot, story structure and thematic narratives, [6] with the addition of illustration, animation, sound effects, music, video, moving text, voiceover, or mechanisms to make choices. In addition, Christina Fisanick and Robert O. Stakeley of Storycenter in Berkeley, California have identified other components of an effective digital story, including point of view, a dramatic question, emotional content, economy in choosing what to include, and pacing the story strategically.[7]

What follows is a comparative analysis of three digital food stories, and a discussion of how these theoretical and practical elements have come together in each to the success, or detriment, of the narrative. It is also valuable to add my own anecdotal evidence: did I enjoy the story? I am, after all, the reader and consumer of the story. We all seem to have the skill to know a good story when we hear one.

The Stories

1. The History of Cheesemaking (Author: Ned Palmer, English Heritage, 2017)

“Every cheese is the product of people, place and time, and so every cheese can reveal stories about the land it comes from, the culture of the people who made it, and the historical period in which it first appeared.”

— from The History of Cheesemaking

This interactive, locative[8] digital story uses a platform called Shorthand to create an interactive map and invites the user to explore different cheesemaking regions of England. Visitors can explore it a linear chronology or skip over and look for exactly the place/time period or cheese they want to explore. The map works by placing the cheeses of England within both geographical and historical contexts, and links them to the concept of terrior, or “taste of place”, and in this case, time.

The History of Cheesemaking begins in the neolithic period, and progresses through 6000 years, through Roman Britain, to the Middle Ages, the early modern period, Georgian and Victorian Eras, though to post World War Two and ending with the Great Cheese Renaissance which began in the late 1970s and is going strong today.

The plot and characters are not obvious, but implied: it is a timeline through history of people and civilizations throughout England, their landmarks, eating and drink habits and material culture. The places we encounter ground us geographically and can be used to trace the etymology of the various cheese types. The perfect networking of place, social context, and resulting food culture creates the story.

Blocks of text which appear as your move your mouse over the map, introduce each historical theme. Visual media such as embedded YouTube videos incorporate real people in historical settings and help to articulate individual topics.

from *The History of Cheesemaking*, EnglishHeritage.org

Some of Fisaneck and Stakeley’s key elements of effective storytelling are here. Our point of view is England and its cheesemaking history and culture. A question is asked and answered, though not a particularly dramatic one, and that is, how can we tell the story of England through the history of cheese? The video component makes the story relatable by placing contemporary historians in the settings where humans would have made cheese, and their dialogue gives a voice to the people of the past. England lays claim to hundreds of cheese varieties, however the piece is a manageable experience because it tells the story of just a few and neatly fits them into the context of history. The mix of textual and video elements are kept short, allowing the user to move quickly through, while linked prose to allows further reading and scholarship, and provides the locations of primary source documents, such as records from Whitby Abbey in Yorkshire showing purchases of rennet – a key ingredient in cheesemaking.

2. The Hungry Month of March (Author/Producer: Rosemary House, and NFB, 2017)

““When winter came, you only ate what you had got so you better figure it out. Otherwise, you’re dead.””

— from The Hungry Month of March

This interactive story and video anthology from Rosemary House and the National Film Board of Canada tells how Newfoundlanders feed themselves year-round by embracing the unique properties of their Maritime lands, fields, and waters. The story takes a year to tell, and as we scroll through the seasons, we learn how a remote place can one of both scarcity and bounty. The end of the story is also the beginning of a movement, known as New Newfoundland Cuisine. Its history is embedded in the food gathering practices passed down through generations of Newfoundlanders. For them, it wasn’t about gastronomy, but survival.

Scrolling through each section, one discovers topics which correspond with the seasons, and a button to view a corresponding video mini-story. It’s part how-to manual for procuring enough food for survival, but also a story about a people’s resilience and the unique challenges of living one of the remotest parts of Canada.

The project begins with an account of project author Rosemary House’s Aunt, and it begins this way:

“My Aunt Marion told stories. Like that one about the long and hungry month of March. Winter was six months where nothing grows, she’d say. By March you’re staring hunger in the face.

A few potatoes, a bit of salt fish. That might be it. Then, soon as spring came around, you’d immediately have to start saving again, for winter.”

Once we’ve scrolled through all the video chapters, and end with the fall season, there is an epilogue where Aunt Marion’s story is intermingled with interpretation and additional contextual material by the author.

The interactive digital components are easy to navigate and effectively lead us through the story, directed in a linear fashion through the chronology of the growing year. The first-person narratives from Newfoundlanders themselves provide our character sketches, and users navigating the story will soon learn how they are all connected. There is an overarching dramatic question: how has eating for survival shaped the modern foodways of Newfoundland? These are very personal, and emotional stories of finding food, learning from the past, and keeping the Newfoundland that people love, and which shaped them, alive.

A simple soundtrack of one striking piece of music by Joshua Stevenson links the stories together, reminding us that each story is part of a larger thematic narrative. We can see economy at play, in the very short videos chosen to enlighten and educate about local food, seasonality, and traditional Newfoundland ways of hunting, gathering, fishing, cooking, and preserving food. Each video includes a brief written background paragraph and biography of the featured storyteller to place them in the landscape of the story. The scrolling feature allows visitors to go at their own pace, while a visual gauge measures the seasons passing.

Forager Lori Butler McCarthy, from The Hungry Month of
March, NFB.

Much of The Hungry Month of March works very well. Each seasonal theme draws you in, while the short length of each video keeps you there. One effective technique is how the collected stories of each season are told in short, 2-3 minute videos from the perspectives of individual storytellers, and contribute to the main theme. This gives the effect of a somewhat open narrative, whereby the watcher/reader has some freedom to decide on their interpretation of the story, and its meaning, in various contexts. Watching it myself, I was able to place the stories within various contexts, such as the endurance of a way of life, the local food landscape of Newfoundland, and how networks of producers can work together to maintain sustainable communities.

As we move through the stories, we learn that the people are linked together by shared experiences, for example, the chef who makes the salt, buys the mushrooms and seaweed from the forager; the sheep graze on the pasture that is touched by mists of ocean salt water, and the salt goes on to season the plate with the lamb and the mushrooms.

The element of food is key, in that there is a reciprocity in the way food shapes the culture of a place, and the place shapes the food culture. The Hungry Month of March effectively captures this phenomenon, both in the way it is structured around the relationships between stakeholders, and the choice of the stories themselves as case studies.

The piece is engaging, perhaps to its detriment: the stories mostly seemed too short and I felt my engagement was interrupted. At times the topics repeat themselves over several videos. As a whole it is successful, but it came across as only a very thin slice of the food culture story in Newfoundland and left me with lingering questions, such as whether New Newfoundland Food has the legs to save the island’s traditional foodways.

3. The Eternal Life of the Instant Noodle
(Author: Celia Hatton for the BBC, 2018)

“I used to sell drugs on this corner,” he says breezily as we walk across the street to a grocery store. He grabs items off the shelves. Doritos, instant noodles – the processed food favourites he used to rely on in prison.He pauses, staring at the packs of noodles. “This really is survival food in prison.”

— from The Eternal Life of the Instant Noodle

Starving civilians at the end of World War Two, students, and Rikers Island prisoners have all had a part in securing the historical and culinary significance of the humble instant ramen noodle. The Eternal Life of the Instant Noodle is a multi-part installation that includes a multi-media story, accompanying radio documentary, fact-sheet, and a digital animation focusing on the most successful industrialized food in history.

It may be a challenge to view this piece as storytelling. It seems to straddle several genres, including at its most basic, an informational piece on the web. Where it succeeds in becoming a story is the inclusion of anecdotes about the ramen noodle. The thing is not the story, but it becomes one when the topic is grounded in the everyday lives of real people. It’s important to note that an object of material, or in this case, food culture, acquires meanings over time, ones that can shift and change. What was once a simple meal to nourish underfed people after the war has become currency for incarcerated people, and a signifier and symbol of student life. Within the life of an industrial foodstuff, the authors of this piece have also accurately identified the existence of a good story.

The initial digital piece utilizes the Shorthand platform, a code-free application for creating interactive, multimedia digital stories.

The multimedia story begins with the placement of ramen noodles within the bartering culture of the American prison, and its place in the life of one prisoner, Coss Marte.

It goes on to tell the story of its inventor, Momofuku Ando, and his unlikely success story. These and other narratives link together; connected by ramen, one man uses them as currency while incarcerated, the other also struggles to find his place in the world, and ramen frees him from poverty and failure.

Ramen is one of the few processed foods that is enjoyed in different cultures and countries throughout the world, and one of the key themes of the story is this universality. The ramen itself functions as a character. The combination of history and personal narrative grounds the story in human experience, inviting the reader/watcher to consider how ramen has been a character in their own story.

from *The Eternal Life of the Instant Noodle*, BBC.

Each component of the various pieces is accessible and relatively short, allowing the viewer to engage a little or a lot. The different elements of the digital exhibit allow for different modes of engagement, at the users discretion, and at their own pace. The sound elements, in this case the video voiceovers, are not innovative, but provide another medium for the story of ramen to be told. The visual components are especially effective, combining digital animation, illustration, fixed photography, scroll effects, collage, and GIFs.

Summary

Each of these three stories have a different appeal. All three are interesting and engaging, for different reasons. The History of Cheese was a simple and effective method of telling the story of England through its cheesemaking culture. Despite being a very simple design, it was dense with information and provided lots of room to explore the subject more deeply. further scholarship. The Hungry Month of March does an excellent job of evoking a people, place, and culture through dramatic illustrations, the drone of vaguely Celtic music and the videos of real people engaging with the land. The mix of mediums and linear storyline worked well, though I would have liked the story to be fleshed out in more detail. The Eternal Life of the Instant Noodle was a fun and immersive experience. The mix of stories from different perspectives captured the full story of ramen as a food, business success story, and cultural marker.

Coda

An element of this project which I found curious was how difficult it was to locate digital stories about food: there were very few, which is interesting, given that food stories and digital stories seem to be perfect partners. I’d like to see more digital food stories, and plan on making some myself.

The wealth and diversity of digital stories on the web show that it is only the beginning of what could be viewed as the modern age of storytelling. However much our world, our societies and our culture change, one thing that endures is our desire as people to share what we have learned, to pass it on, to tell our stories. Technology aside, the telling of stories is and will always be a uniquely human practice.

[1] Oxford English Dictionary, “story, n.”. (Oxford University Press %C, n.d.), https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/190981?rskey=74ttSZ&result=2&isAdvanced=false.

[2] John F. Barber, “Digital Storytelling: New Opportunities for Humanities Scholarship and Pedagogy,” ed. Ray Siemens, Cogent Arts & Humanities 3, no. 1 (December 31, 2016): 1, https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2016.1181037.

[3] Thomas King, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative, Indigenous Americas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 122.

[4] Barber, “Digital Storytelling,” 10.

[5] Matthew Kearney, “Investigating Digital Storytelling and Portfolios in Teacher Education,” 2009, 2.

[6] The Art of Storytelling | Pixar in a Box | Computing,” Khan Academy, accessed October 11, 2022, https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar/storytelling.

[7] Christina Fisanick and Robert O. Stakeley, Digital Storytelling as Public History: A Guidebook for Educators (New York: Routledge, 2020), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003125723.

[8] Barber, “Digital Storytelling.” 5. Barber defines a locative narrative as one based on a particular location, and often using GPS technology. Hear, Here is another good example of locative digital storytelling. clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Feed me a story