Positioning the ‘Expert-Friend’ in the Digital Kitchen. A Multimodal-Pragmatic Analysis

Abstract

This contribution presents a multimodal-pragmatic analysis of BuzzFeed’s Tasty, a US-American digital food media brand, launched in 2015 and rapidly grown into a brand with a strong social media presence. Tasty can be considered as a ‘digital cookbook’ revitalising the traditional ‘recipe book’ genre through multimodal formats and multisensory content, which is a successful strategy to attract Gen-Z and Millennials (Battista 2025b). Considering a sample of videos posted in 2023 on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, this study examines how Tasty orchestrates verbal and non-verbal elements to construct meaning, focusing on interpersonal pragmatics to explore the ‘expert-friend’ persona (Battista 2025a). The methodology adopts a cross-platform perspective (Brunner and Diemer 2022) and integrates multimodality (Kress and van Leeuwen 2020), (im)politeness strategies (Culpeper et al.2017), stancetaking (Kiesling 2022), and speech act theory (Austin 1962). Findings reveal that Tasty creators construct an ‘expert-friend’ persona blending expertise and relatability through humour, softened directives, self-disclosure and self-mockery. The cross-platform approach shows that Facebook videos foreground narrative empathy and playfulness, Instagram videos rely on concise and visually driven instructions, while TikTok prioritises personal storytelling and cultural/traditional references. Across all platforms, multimodal cues reinforce clarity and engagement, pragmatically intensifying instruction and affiliation, thus shaping user engagement and trust in digital food discourse.