Unpacking Norms, Narratives, and Nourishment: A Feminist HCI Critique on Food Tracking Technologies

Food tracking applications (apps) can provide benefits (e.g., helping diagnose food intolerances) but can also create harm (e.g., facilitating disordered eating). However, food tracking apps—viewed as a women’s health issue, and critically examined through the lens of feminist HCI—are absent from the discourse of sociocultural, ethical, and political implications of apps designed to track bodily data. We use a walkthrough method to critically analyze three commercial food tracking apps with differing marketing narratives and designs, applying a reflexive feminist lens grounded in a perspective of fat liberation. We articulate how these apps reproduce normativities of food and nutrition, health, and bodies, and how they perpetuate narratives of embodiment, simplification and quantification of health, and neoliberalism and the individualization of health. Our work exposes the normativities of bodies being propagated by food tracking apps, spotlighting how designs and interaction features are situated within prevalent anti-fat narratives.