Beyond Hedonic Disconfirmation: How Ethical Appraisal Stabilizes Platform-Mediated Sustainability Meanings in Heritage Food Tourism

Sustainability meanings in platform-mediated food tourism circulate through digital infrastructure, yet how they stabilize when sensory experience contradicts hedonic expectations remains theoretically underspecified. Expectation Disconfirmation Theory (EDT) predicts dissatisfaction when performance falls short of expectations, but this logic does not account for sustainability-driven consumption, where restraint is ethically valorized rather than treated as deficient. This study introduces the Ethical–Visual Feedback Loop (EVFL) as a process-level extension of EDT, explaining how ethical priming modifies satisfaction formation under conditions of sensory disconfirmation. Drawing on 900 multilingual reviews, 300 user-generated images, and expert interviews with institutional practitioners of Korean Buddhist Temple Food across Western, Korean, and Chinese visitor markets, the study integrates visual semiotic analysis, reflexive thematic analysis, and institutional triangulation. The findings reveal that sustainability meanings are mobile yet fragile: portable across platforms through visual aesthetics but culturally contingent at ethical appraisal. Western reviewers stabilize satisfaction through secular environmental narratives, Korean reviewers through somatic trust and sincerity, and Chinese reviewers through disciplined participation in moral economies. By specifying how ethical appraisal resolves disconfirmation across cultural contexts, the EVFL extends EDT’s appraisal logic into sustainability-oriented consumption and offers governance implications for sustaining ethical legitimacy and sufficiency-oriented tourism practices in platform-mediated heritage tourism.