‘Who Wants to See Someone Eating Salad?’ Teenage Girls Discuss Representations of Food and Health on Social Media

ABSTRACT This article examines how teenage girls in Sweden interpret and negotiate food‐ and health‐related content on social media, paying particular attention to the intersections between eating practices, health, body ideals and femininity. It takes inspiration from feminist theoretical perspectives and is based on eight group interviews with 18 participants. The study explores how teenage girls interpret and negotiate such content and how they perceive its intended purposes. Although the interviews explicitly focused on food, discussions repeatedly shifted towards body ideals. The participants' discussions highlighted a tension between anti‐dieting discourses and the continued valorisation of slim bodies: influencers are expected to verbally distance themselves from thinness ideals, yet their visual representations frequently reinforce them. Messages about ‘healthy eating’ were often interpreted as implicit endorsements of slimness, obscuring distinctions between health promotion and dieting culture. Representations of ‘junk food’ consumption in social media content was valued for counterbalancing restrictive discourses and for signalling authenticity, yet it was also viewed with suspicion when perceived as staged or inauthentic. The kind of content that participants described as most reassuring—content depicting ordinary, everyday eating without an explicit health or aesthetic framing—was rare. Across the interviews, participants demonstrated considerable media literacy, recognising the commercial logics shaping influencers' practices while simultaneously acknowledging that they were affected by the sheer volume of food‐ and body‐related messages in their social media feeds.