Thresholds of Experience: Food, Embodiment, and Artificial Simulation in Popular Culture

Experiencing popular culture involves more than detached spectatorship. In contemporary media environments, culture is encountered through bodies, senses, and technologies, leaving impressions that are at once physical, emotional, and collective. To watch a television drama over dinner, to attend a themed screening in costume, or to follow a TikTok recipe inspired by a favourite film is not just to consume culture but to engage in practices that inscribe themselves into appetite, routine, and identity. Experience is not incidental to popular culture; it is its medium expressed through gestures, textures, tastes, and affects that go beyond narrative.Recent scholarship has framed experience as a critical category for understanding media. Studies in design and technology emphasise the structuring of interaction through frameworks such as User Experience (UX) and Experience Design (XD), which highlight how systems are crafted for immersion and engagement (Norman; Hassenzahl). Yet these models remain limited, as they centre on designed interfaces rather than on lived experience. In popular culture, experience extends far beyond engineered usability: it emerges through embodiment and through the ways people inhabit, repeat, and rework cultural texts in everyday life. Food provides a particularly sharp way to think this through. As Barthes notes, food is “a system of communication” through which social meaning is organised and shared (24), while Counihan argues that eating is a prism refracting gender, power, and identity (8). Food is at once symbolic and material, code and calories: something represented and something tasted. Popular culture continually mobilises this duality. Meals, snacks, hunger, and feasts as experiences mark class, intimacy, crisis, and aspiration. Even when audiences cannot literally taste what they see, culinary media activates gustatory imagination: the capacity to recall flavours, anticipate textures, or feel bodily responses such as hunger, desire, or disgust.