Precarious digital mothering: creativity, entrepreneurship and hidden labor within digital foodscapes

ABSTRACT Digital foodscapes not only transform our everyday relationships with food but offer creative and entrepreneurial opportunities. This paper works to expand the Anglo-American focus of digital foodscapes scholarship in analysis of Japanese Instagram food influencers and their relationship to gendered social reproduction. Japan’s most prominent influencers are mothers documenting the bentos (boxed lunches) they prepare for their children, a meal suffused with socio-cultural meaning about good food and good mothering. I develop the concept of precarious digital mothering to examine the hidden, gendered labor created and magnified through Instagram bento accounts. I argue that the creative and entrepreneurial opportunities offered to women though Instagram are inseparable from the cultural meaning of bento as a judgment on good mothering and create a bind where digital success cannot occur without taking on additional domestic food work. Precarity is created both for the mothers who take on unpaid and unrecognized labor in the pursuit of Instagram success, and those who consume their content and the problematic narratives of food and motherhood it normalizes in its idealized and mediated performance.


Introduction
Digital foodscapes have had transformational effects on the "worlds of food" (Morgan Kevin, Terry, and Jonathan 2008) that we inhabit, shaping what we eat, how we relate to food, and how and by whom food knowledge is produced and circulated.Though contestations around the meanings of food have always existed, digital food media offers new configurations of food knowledge, produces new food actors, and expands the horizons of food capitalism across digital space.Through the click of a mouse or swipe across a screen we can be connected with this ever-expanding world of digital food.The geographies of food that are revealed and contested across digital space straddle the online and offline world with both imagined and material spatial effects.
One of the most compelling promises of digital foodscapes has been the democratization of food knowledge, expanding and making freely available a vast array of food information from recipes, shopping and budgeting tips, product reviews, nutrition and diet information, and food lifestyle advice.Yet research has shown that digital foodscapes are dominated by small numbers of privileged voices and narratives (Goodman and Jaworska 2020).At the same time digital foodscapes have provided new opportunities for capitalist expansion across digital space, blurring the line between good food advice and good marketing in complex ways (Johnston and Goodman 2015).The political economy of digital food media embeds capitalist interests that rely on exploitative relations of labor, creativity and power to ensure a boundless supply of engaging content, blurring the boundaries between labor and leisure, production and consumption in problematic ways (Fuchs 2014).
Social media users are defined as "prosumers" -simultaneously producers and consumers of digital user-led content.Web 2.0 prosumers are active, specialized, and creative with the creation of tightly bound communities with shared interests and audiences (Bruns 2009).Within this landscape exist influencers, a form of bottom-up micro-celebrity characterized by a large audience following, high levels of engagement, strong personal branding and ultimately an ability to influence purchasing decisions (Usher 2020).In the contemporary foodscape this small group of digital media actors are significant in their ability to shape, mediate and circulate discourses and practices around "good food."Though these extend well beyond the celebrity chefs who long dominated traditional food media spaces, it is privileged bodies and ways of eating that have so far marked digital food discourses (O'Neill 2021).
Though social media is a relatively recent and rapidly changing space, the digital foodscape has been well conceptualized by scholars in Geography, Food Studies and Cultural and Media Studies.This has begun the important task of examining the interventions and impacts of digital food influencers (see Abbots 2015;Barnes 2017;Goodman and Jaworska 2020;Lupton 2020;Rowe and Grady 2020;Rousseau 2012).Digital foodscape research has also been marked by a focus on Western contexts, specifically the UK and North America -logical sites of focus given the prevalence of both social media use and food media in these countries.Little attention has yet been granted to non-Anglophone and non-Western contexts.In this paper I aim to contribute to the broadening of scope of digital foodscapes scholarship though a focus on Japanese Instagram food narratives.Like the US and UK, Japan has a long history of traditional food media (Higashiyotsuyanagi 2010) but it's uptake of social media had been slower and its digital foodscape still in its infancy, giving an important opportunity to examine the emergence of fledgling influencers and the distinct narratives circulating.
This paper maps the dominant narratives and actors within Japan's Instagram foodscape, before examining accounts dedicated to bento lunchboxes, one of the most popular digital food discourses.Popular bento accounts tend to be run by mothers and have a close associating with blogging communities where content and audience have migrated from blog to Instagram.The shift from text-based blogs to photo-based content on Instagram requires a recalibration of content and creative skills in order to serve up visually appealing images that attract growing audiences and define their self-brand of food content.In developing creative skills and online opportunities additional but hidden gendered food work is created for mothers pursuing digital success.In this paper I develop the concept of precarious digital motherhood to examine the gendered forms of social reproduction bound within domestic food work which are both magnified and hidden in the digital foodscape.Instagram bento accounts reveals starkly the tension between the promises of creative female entrepreneurship through digital food media and the unpaid labor involved in establishing and maintaining their position as digital food influencers.

Precarious caring & motherhood
Food is closely associated with identity, relations of care, and a complex range of emotions including joy, guilt, comfort, anxiety.Despite changes in women's relations to food over the past 70 years food remains a distinctly gendered space with the emotional and physical work of planning, budgeting, shopping, and preparing meals disproportionality falling to women (Cairns and Johnston 2015).Food is still very much a site of "doing gender," intersected with the dynamics of race, class and sexuality (Cairns, Johnston, and Baumann 2010).Food acts as a touchstone through which systemic and embodied relations to food are shaped in ways that affect our bodies, health, social, cultural and environmental relations at scales from the individual to the populations (Carolan 2011).Food is used as a lens through which societal pressures to prepare healthy meals for our families, make ethically sound consumption choices, manage incomes, support healthy sized and functioning bodies, and demonstrate our skills as good friends and hosts are manifested.Magnified through food media, these pressures encourage us to be "better" in ways that are slippery and hard to define yet give us the distinct impression that they ways that our current food relations are in some way inadequate (Rousseau 2012).
Domestic spaces are key sites of gendered food relations.The food work involved, particularly in the domestic responsibilities of feeding a family, are central to social reproduction.Acknowledging domestic food work as work helps understandings of its role within social reproduction.Importantly, domestic food relations can be simultaneously a space of care and a site of unpaid gendered labor (Parsons, Harman, and Cappellini 2021) and that doing both places the burden of food work disproportionately at the feet of women and mothers.Cairns and Johnston (2015) highlight the role of mothers as "guardians of health and taste," ensuring their children eat nutritionally balanced diets and open to trying new foods.Eating well is classed and racialized in distinct ways, as seen in the ways that fast-food and sugary treats are demonized by the middle classes, with food's cultural capital reaching far beyond our plates (Piper 2015).Feminist food scholars have identified tensions between the aspirational organic diets pursued by white, middle-class mothers, and the necessity to rely on fast and convenience foods for those working-class mothers with low incomes, little time, or resources to cook at home (Cairns and Johnston 2015;Parsons, Harman, and Cappellini 2021;Parsons 2015).For working class mothers, the social expectations around being a good mother have to be balanced and compromised in relation to the immediate precarity and food insecurity created by poverty and low incomes (Chen 2016).
The literature examined so far has had an empirical focus on North America, and I now turn to consider some of the specific ways that gendered social reproduction is experienced in Japan.Bento is at its simplest a meal served in a box, traditionally a thin lacquered box, with a meal made up of small constituent parts typically with rice as a core component.It is a meal designed to be transportable, and though its cultural significance is embedded in the cultural, culinary and artistic history of Japan is it most commonly associated with the lunchbox meals prepared for children by mothers (Occhi 2016).Bento plays a particularly important role for nursery aged children where it functions as both a daily test of good behavior and an early education in good citizenship.The concept of shudan seikatsu highlights this: meaning group life, this notion illustrates the way that children are taught that the collective interests of the group are more important than individual desires.Such collectivized mentality is core to the socio-cultural organization of Japanese society.The selfish desire to have things your own way (wagamama) is not tolerated (Peak 1989).In relation to food, the class are not allowed to play until all children have finished their bento conditioning children to finish their meals for the good of the group.Allison (1991) argues that ideological state apparatus enacted through education institutions governs both the child and the mother through bento: mothers must make a bento that the child will eat thereby demonstrating they are a good mother, while the child must eat it demonstrating that they are a good classmate and citizen-inthe-making.
Japanese society continues to be shaped by patriarchal traditions and systems that entrench gendered roles and inequalities.In 2021, Japan was ranked 120 out of 156 countries in terms of gender parity in the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Report, falling 40 places since 2006 (Oi 2021).Despite national legislation to increase gender equality and increases in women going to university and entering paid employment, deep gender inequality persists.Ie, the Japanese patriarchal family system with households consisting of grandparents, their son, his wife and children, lies at the core of Japanese social values and defines the responsibilities of women and justifying this enduring gender inequality (North 2009;Marshall 2017).Gender inequality is experienced most strongly within domestic spaces and childcare, with women doing 3.6 times more housework than men according to a 2020 government national survey (Oi 2021).Food work forms a significant part of Japanese gendered labor and places responsibility for domestic life on women, specifically wives and mothers (Seddon 2011).Preparing bento for her children (as well as her husband) is seen as an essential skill for Japanese women to hold and as a marker of a good wife and mother it perpetuates gendered social reproduction.Allison (1991) describes the way bento are used as a tool of surveillance by nursery schools (and indeed other mothers) to police the behavior of the child and judge the quality of parenting and care by the mother.The social and cultural significance of bento within the lives of women not only maintain deeply gendered divisions of labor within Japanese families but also reveal forms of precarious motherhood, heightened as they are performed across digital space.

Methodology
The data collection aimed to firstly map key voices within Japanese digital foodscapes on Instagram, and secondly to identify key food themes or narratives present on Instagram in Japan.The methodological approach follows closely that set out by Goodman and Jaworska (2020) in adopting a two-tier approach, combining quantitative and qualitative data to identify key actors and narratives within the digital foodscape.
Social media uptake in Japan has been slower than in other industrialized countries, though the rates are now increasing.In 2018, Instagram overtook Facebook as the fastest growing social media platform in Japan, with 22.9 million active users, 60% of whom are under 30, with food as the second most followed topic on Instagram (Facebook for Business 2018).The growth of Instagram as a platform in Japan and prominence of food content make it an ideal entry point through which to examine the fledgling digital foodscape and influencer landscape.The photography-based format of Instagram is particularly well suited to food and its visual nature, continuing and magnifying the discourse of food porn already well established across traditional food media (Pennell 2018;McBride 2010;Walsh and Baker 2020;Rowe and Grady 2020).
I compiled a list of top food Instagrammers through combining and cross-referencing media articles listing top Japanese food accounts including Time Out Tokyo, Medium, SavvyTokyo, and Starnage.From this, I produced a list of the ten most followed accounts (Table 1).Accounts had to be for a Japanese audience and in Japanese language, have food as their principal focus, and have over 75,000 followers.Within the top accounts I selected the most liked posts from a two-week period (1 st to August 14, 2019) to give a snapshot of the images produced across top accounts.To identify the most popular food themes on Instagram in Japan I created a list of top food hashtags from searching top Instagram food themes identified in the media and searching the hashtags used in post by top accounts during the period of data collection (July -September 2019).This served as a check that the content produced by top accounts is indeed reflective of and capturing the main food narratives and trends on Instagram in Japan.Hashtags offer a common structural feature that allows researchers to collect and index Instagram posts thematically and are employed here as a means to identify key discourses (Highfield and Leaver 2015;Hu, Manikonda, and Kambhampati 2014;Ye et al. 2018).

Mapping digital food influencers in Japan
The list of the ten most followed Japanese Instagram food accounts is shown in Table 1.Despite smaller numbers of followers and therefore influence than their British counterparts, these are nonetheless the key food voices currently working across Instagram in Japan and can be categorized as what Goodman and Jaworska (2020) have termed digital food influencers.Their production of food content in some of the most popular Instagram food themes -bento and home cooking -circulate and mediate discourses around not only what is good to eat but also what good care and mothering through food looks like.Japan's top food influencers are predominantly female and mothers, reflected in the frequency of bento accounts.
Seven of the top ten accounts also have an active blog, and five have published cookbooks indicating the circulation of their good food narratives across the digital foodscapes as well as traditional food media.Working across different digital platforms including Instagram, YouTube, blogs, and websites allows for creation of a strong personal brand and extends the circulation of good food knowledge (Rodney et al.The most popular food hashtags (Table 2) are informative descriptions, largely categorizations of meals or individual foods e.g., bento or breakfast, with only one emotional or descriptive hashtag of delicious or tasty (おいしい, oishii).Informative hashtags are non-emotional descriptors that provide thematic categorization for a topic and are the most commonly occurring hashtag.Using broad, informative descriptors increases the visibility of posts and reaches the widest audience (Ye et al. 2018).Food is particularly well suited to the visual medium of Instagram, with a richer sensory experience offered compared to text-based mediums of, for example, Twitter (Hu, Manikonda, and Kambhampati 2014).Photo content offers an emotional expression, sense of intimacy and social presence that text-based platforms cannot emulate (Pittman and Reich 2016).
Mapping digital food voices and narratives has revealed a small but active set of influencers working across Instagram in Japan.Most of the top accounts are run by mothers, reflected in bento as a dominant theme across their content.Their content is completely food focused -there is no wider engagement with lifestyle or fitness advice, commercial ventures, or advertising observed in the UK (Goodman and Jaworska 2020; O'Neill 2021).Having identified the prominence of bento within current Instagram food narratives, and the socio-cultural relationship between bento and motherhood, I now turn to consider the way that Instagram and bento offer unique and gendered opportunities for creativity and entrepreneurship.

Instagram, entrepreneurship and digital creativity
Across digital foodscapes female entrepreneurship has thrived, shaping food culture in distinct and gendered ways.This is most strongly captured within clean eating discourses where female food influencers have found success through advocating diets centered on plant-based eating, lifestyle and wellness advice (O'Neill 2021).Though clean eating has been widely criticized for its questionable diet advice there is no doubt that the movement, and the group of women who have led its charge, have created fundamental shifts is the ways we eat (Wilson 2017).The aesthetic appeal of Instagrammable food, meals and bodies not only encapsulate the semiotic values of "good food" and "eating well" but also provide the digital spaces through which self-branded food content is commodified by these female entrepreneurs.Women are highly trusted as food content producers across blogs and social media and this gives female food entrepreneurs particular business opportunities (Lepkowska-White and Kortright 2018).Female food entrepreneurs have had significant impacts on food cultures with business success anchored firmly in spaces of the domestic.The self-brands of female food influencers play on their ordinary expertise and insights into their everyday domestic food lives, yet also require a professional appearance to ensure trust and authority in their content (Lepkowska-White and Kortright 2018; Lewis 2010).Digital eating is a visual and sensory experience -we want to eat what looks good -so the culinary capital of female entrepreneurs relies on being able to produce food content that is professional and aesthetically appealing.This demands a set of creative skills and digital literacy from food influencers in photography, food styling, and editing in order to produce professional food content.Food is notoriously difficult to photograph well, and top food Instagrammers must be highly skilled both in preparing delicious food but more importantly being able to capture and represent meals in high quality, aesthetically pleasing photographs.Taking, sharing, and looking at photos of food is a key way that digital foodscapes are embedded within our everyday food lives.Lewis (2018, 214) argues that the food photographs shared on social media "represent both a kind of conspicuous consumption and a performance of artisanal craft labour."I argue here that "craft labour" is as much about the performance of creative skills that distinguish between amateur food Instagrammer and professional digital food influencer as it is about the food on display.
Popular Instagram food accounts in Japan are marked by professional standards in both the culinary creations and the photos shared, confirming established trends to professionalization across digital food content (Lewis 2018).Several top accounts refer to the cameras they shoot on, making explicit their interest and skills as photographers as well as food content producers: @watao.nbio lists Fujifilm X-T3, @tami_73 uses a Nikon D5600, while @hiuccini switches between shooting on their iPhone and Fujifilm X-T3. Figure 1 collates the six most liked posts during the research period (1 st -August 14, 2019) and illustrates the professional standards in both the presentation of the food and the photography, as well as highlighting the popularity of bento content.The creative and technical upskilling of digital food influencers blurs the boundaries between the forms of ordinary expert and amateur home cook, and the professional digital content (Instagram images, blog pages, YouTube videos, etc.) demanded to gain and keep a large following.These posts demonstrate attention to food styling, lighting and photography in images that would not be out of place in a food magazine or cookbook.
A closer look at individual accounts reveals how digital food creative skills are also used to develop a strong self-brand that distinguishes between accounts and their food content.A week of posts by @tmtysm are shown in Figure 2 showing a clear and distinct stylistic form across their content.Using the same crockery and backdrops, and consistency in the styling of food gives the images a cohesive brand identity unique to this account.Strong self-brands are crucial for influencers in establishing trust and credibility in their content, and mediating ideas about what is good to eat (Walsh and Baker 2020).Japanese digital food influencers follow similar patterns observed elsewhere (see Goodman and Jaworska 2020; Lepkowska-White and Kortright 2018), that women are both the predominant producers and consumers of digital food media.Eight of the top ten accounts are run by women, and many accounts having both blogs and published cookbooks that extent their audience reach and circulation of their branded food narratives across both digital and traditional food media.The cultural mediation of good food seen through the lens of Instagram is thus distinctly gendered in both the entrepreneurial and creative opportunities it provides, and in the good food discourses produced through it.
Beyond the digital and entrepreneurial skills successful Instagrammers can accrue, food itself is also a key site of creativity.Indeed, food's aesthetic and sensory qualities are one of the main reasons that it has become such a popular theme on Instagram.Bento lends itself particularly well to the creative and visual forms popular on Instagram and its aesthetic form is steeped in cultural meaning and practices.Allison (1991) argues that the preparation of bento can provide a source of "play" and creative expression for women, with a whole industry of bento accessories available to organize and decorate their boxed lunches.Bento blogs, the predecessor to social media food content, have served as an important space to bring together communities of mothers and share recipes and tips for fun and creative bento (Seddon 2011).As social media has grown in popularity and bento content has migrated across to Instagram, the focus on the visual and finished bento product (rather than the process of making it) has resulted in bento that are increasingly creative, elaborate and most of all aesthetically pleasing.

Performance, labor and precarious digital mothering
Instagram bento accounts bring together the entangled and emotionally complex relationship between food and motherhood in highly performative ways.Narratives around both food and motherhood are distilled into single images, mediating the messy realities of everyday food relations and labor into glossy edited photos.As I have argued, Instagram and its digital food influencers are powerful cultural intermediaries shaping Clockwise from top left: @tmtsym (9,986 likes), @heavydrinker (8,183 likes), @watao.n(9,232 likes), @heavydrinker (7,848 likes), @tami_73 (5,877 likes), @akiko.0301(5,545 likes).
how we understand what is good to eat and determining the food we consume both digitally and physically and offer entrepreneurial opportunities for the most popular and followed accounts.Yet despite the entrepreneurial and creative draw of Instagram, the gendered labor that goes into the producing and maintaining successful bento accounts are entirely hidden from view.In this section, I consider how the performance of good food and mothering through Instagram can entrench gendered social reproduction and develop the concept of precarious digital motherhood.
For mothers facing precarity, entrepreneurial strategies form part of the daily toolkit used to provide food for their families and digital technology can provided valuable resources and employment to help cope during hard times.Wilson and Yochim (2015) highlight the variety of approaches undertaken by mothers during financial hardship including couponing, flexible working, and digital enterprise.Entrepreneurial opportunities often occur across digital space taking up flexible online work that can fit around unpaid childcare and domestic duties, as well as offer platforms to demonstrate family and entrepreneurial successes (Wilson and Yochim 2017).It is clear in the examples from Wilson andYochim (2015, 2017) work that precarity, digital foodscapes and motherhood overlap in mitigating and coping with financial precarity.Though there may seem little common ground between mothers facing immediate financial hardship and women running bento Instagram accounts I argue that both are experiencing precarious motherhood that is intimately connected with digital foodscapes.
There is no doubt that digital foodscapes have resulted in a huge upswell of content, and a shift in power away from traditional food media players such as celebrity chefs, publishers, commissioners and broadcasters.Across the wealth of new food voices that have emerged exists a specific discourse of female entrepreneurship rooted in idealized notions of domesticity, lifestyle, and food.This is powerfully captured in the narrative of the domestic goddess, perfectly captured by celebrity chefs Nigella Lawson and Martha Stewart.The fantasy of the domestic goddess offers a romanticized imagination of effortless, delicious home-cooked meals, served within beautiful homes.However, the domestic goddess raises contradictory ideas around gender equality in domestic spaces and valorizes the housewife, hiding the labor that goes into shopping and cooking for a family (Hollows 2003;Rodney et al. 2017).Yet despite aspirational discourses that the modern female food entrepreneur can have it all these are, as Salvio argues, spaces that "celebrate women's place in the kitchen as home cooks, mothers and weekend hosts" (2012: 32).In framing women's domestic food work as an aspirational lifestyle, the physical and emotional labor that is involved is hidden and contributes to gendered social reproduction.
Across Japanese Instagram the domestic goddess narrative focuses more on food and its cultural value than on the women preparing it.Images of finished bento highlight the creative skills of the women who have prepared them both as a cook and as a content creator, whilst simultaneously hiding the work that has gone into shopping, cooking, preparing, and photographing it.Precarious digital mothering is revealed in the hidden work involved in performing good food and motherhood across digital space, and the idealized, unrealistic expectations these narratives set audiences.In the context of bento this is compounded, as hidden gendered food work is entangled within the socio-cultural meanings bento reflect on mothers.In seeking creative opportunities and recognition for domestic success online, women take up additional, unpaid and unseen domestic food work that perpetuates gendered social reproduction.Exaggerated notions of idealized motherhood and good food are circulated through images on Instagram, normalizing expectations of food labor involved in being a good mother.Precarity is created for both the women who take on this gendered labor in seeking creative digital success, and those who consume and circulate their content.Bento performed through the mediated lens of Instagram retains the cultural values of bento, embedding gendered roles in it it's production, but at the same time allowing a public outlet for creative food work.In her work on Japanese bento blogs Seddon argues that the communicative structure of blogging allows women and expressive outlet through which domestic duties and responsibilities are performed.Rather than challenging prescribed gender roles they instead create "a visual narrative for the socially approved ideal woman's role as mother, conditioned by domesticity" (2017: 315).The domestic goddess narrative embedded within these Instagram accounts is also explicitly tied to domestic space, but the idealized forms of femininity articulated are as a caregiver and mother and are performed through almost exclusively through the bento itself.This differs from the findings by Rodney et al. (2017) where domestic goddess discourses are reliant, at least in part, on the presence of the women herself.
Taking a closer look at one account reveals the implicit and explicit ways that ideas of good motherhood are interwoven with those of good food.The account @heavydrinker is run by mother of three Maya.Her posts focused entirely on food and she is completely absent from her own content, other than as its producer (Figure 3).Meaning is drawn from established cultural understandings of bento and her performance of high-quality bento.Her post therefore performs idealized standards of bento whilst at the same time demonstrating her success as a mother.Captions on posts signal that bento are being prepared for her children.In a post on August 1, 2019 Maya posts: Summer vacation children's lunch, fried chicken, sweet omelette, salad spaghetti with dried bonito flakes ---☞ ---☞ ---☞ ⋆⋆ In the middle of summer vacation!Children are collecting lunch.Everyone loves fried chicken.I'm addicted to making bento.(@heavydrinker 2019) Most comments offer only brief descriptions of the bento content such as a post by @tmytsm on August 6, 2019 with the caption "Onigiri with umeboshi, kombu and okra," or "Kimchi and broccoli manul, leftover vegetables" posted by @watao.n on July 31, 2019.Such brief comments provide little information about either the recipe or the family for whom there are prepared for, focusing attention on the posted photo and heightening the socio-cultural meanings and values bound within it.No reference is made in the posts examined to the labor involved in preparing bento.
Written into bento's cultural value is the role of maternal care through food, and this is performed in idealized ways through Instagram with the highly skilled and professionally photographed bentos on accounts such as Maya's.Instagram may well offer opportunities for entrepreneurialism and creative expression but in focusing these on bento they are always bound to domestic and maternal responsibilities, embedding gendered social reproduction within their discourse.The bio on Maya's latest recipe book "A lifetime of delicious bentos" highlights her Instagram profile in signaling her credibility.More importantly it demonstrates her commitment to childrearing and running the family home: A popular Instagrammer (@heavydrinker) with about 190,000 followers.Mother to three children.With the goal of "making meals that make her family happy", she is active in cooking-related media while working, doing household chores, and raising children.(Amazon Japan 2021).
It is clear from both the post caption and book bio that Maya's online personae is characterized by being a good mother and domestic caregiver through the food she provides first and foremost, with digital success as secondary.
The emotional and physical labor hidden in popular bento content signifies what I have termed precarious digital mothering, the gendered labor produced and hidden in the performances of good food and motherhood across the digital foodscape.In pursuing the aspirational influencer dream the creative opportunities Instagram affords become a double-edged sword where success comes at the price of additional, often unrecognized and unpaid, food labor.Bento accounts offer a creative expression of maternal commitment and culinary skill but might also be read as a form of virtue signaling.Performing idealized mothering and domestic success comes at considerable costs to mothers.Nowhere is this more keenly expressed than within the sub-theme of kyaraben, combined from the word "kyara" for character and "ben" for bento, decorative character bento depicting kawaii (cute) images or animated characters (Figure 3).Like bento's function as "ideological state apparatus" regulating both mother and child, kyaraben encourages the consumption and reproduction of character culture (Allison 1991;Occhi 2016).Japanese characters including Hello Kitty, Pokemon, Totoro and Anpanman as well as Disney characters frequently occur in Instagram bento (see Figure 3).These change the aesthetic of bento away from representations of nature to commercial kawaii characters, but also the foods bento are made of.Homemade bento traditionally provides a way to use up leftovers -dinner is repackaged for a child's lunch the next day thereby reducing food waste and training young children to eat a broad range of foods -but many foods are not suitable to use in kyaraben leading to new food being prepared.Processed foods are particularly well suited to the shaping and decoration of elaborate character bento and so the creative endeavors of kyaraben have nutritional implications for children (Occhi 2016).Frankfurters, sliced ham, processed cheese slices and quail's eggs are particularly well suited to kyaraben creation, aided with the range of decorative tools and accessories available to buy.
Of all the Instagram food narratives it is kyaraben that most strongly captures the forms of precarious motherhood within the digital foodscape.In food practices that are distinctly gendered and contribute directly to gendered social reproduction, kyaraben trends amplify the hidden -and unpaid -domestic labor involved.As an expression of good motherhood, the performance of elaborate bento on Instagram becomes a way of seeking validation for domestic duties but this has in some instances spiraled into competitive and narcissistic practices with women striving to outdo one another and show they can make the best bento and are therefore the most caring mother.Unger (2016) describes this as the dark side of bento culture, particularly as it plays out online.She describes mothers getting up in the middle of the night to cut seaweed to decorate their characters.The time and skill investment in kyaraben is considerable taking upwards of 90 minutes, with individual characters taking 20 mins or more to craft (Hu 2016).Though kyaraben are not usually made for children every day, their ubiquity on Instagram normalizes elaborate bento and the work that goes into them setting high expectations for women for what they are expected to do for their children.
Within the set of top Instagram accounts kyaraben are present, though tend to occur infrequently and are simple in their design and construction.Two examples shown in Figure 4 illustrate such simple, yet effective, kyaraben efforts by @akiko.0301and @watao.n.Seaweed features, pickled plum rosy cheeks and tempura prawn hair create lively, expressive faces, while carefully cut frankfurters give the impression of octopus escaping from the bento.Though these fall within the trends for cute kawaii bento they are not really representative of the dark or problematic practices described above.One account, does however fall into this category -that of @yuko.makotsu.A selection of posts from August 2019 are shown in Figure 5.
The unique selling point of @yuko.matsuko'saccount is in creating intricate bento creations that replicate a range of food and household items in lifelike detail, as shown in figure 5 and 6.This is an extreme form of kyaraben which moves away from the character focus, but nonetheless conforms to the food "cutesification" trends identified by Occhi (2016) and the (re)production of consumption culture through these representations.@yuko.matsuko'saccount faithfully represents edible versions of well-known characters, food items, alcoholic drinks, cleaning products and even medicines.The Game Boy bento in Figure 7 exemplifies the craftsmanship involved in these bento; rice is dyed Game Boy gray, processed cheese slices are painted green to replicate the screen, slivers of seaweed pick out the details on the rice device including intricate lettering.Key kyaraben features are present including decorative branded picks, quails eggs (dyed candy colors to represent Yoshi eggs from the Nintendo's Super Mario), highly processed frankfurters and cheese slices.Seddon (2011) has argued that kyaraben offers women an expressive  outlet that allows the communication and celebration of everyday and mundane domestic food accomplishments but this celebration of creativity I argue hides the labor involved in their production, both of the bento itself and its digital presentation.
Unlike any other top Instagram account, an accompanying YouTube channel shows time-lapse video of the bento assembly giving audiences insights into the skills and work that go into such Instgrammable creations.Yet even this gives only a partial insight into the real time and labor cost of making elaborate bento; only the assembly is shown so audiences get no sense of the work to shop for, cook and prepare food items for the bento, and the time-lapse gives no sense of how long the assembly of the bento takes nor how long the whole process of making the bento takes.From both the YouTube and Instagram accounts of @yuko.matsuko it is clear that her bento are highly performative, produced more for digital consumers than the family who eat these, and draw together consumer culture and kawaii bento in highly unusual ways that appear more akin to clever advertising that creative kids meals.Though such ornate boxed lunches are detached from the everyday meaning and mother-child relations of bento, they most strongly capture the forms of precarious digital mothering that the digital foodscape has created for Japanese mothers.Achieving recognition on Instagram for domestic success and good mothering through the creative expression of kyaraben and bento comes at the cost of increased domestic food work which is highly gendered, whilst the images that circulate normalize unrealistic ideals of the food work good mothering entails and further embed gender inequalities and social reproduction.

Conclusion
Instagram is in its fledgling stages in Japan, but despite its smaller footprint the forms of digital food influence alighn closely with existing research; dominated by women and intersected with creative and entrepreneurial opportunities, Instagram holds aspirational promise for those pursuing large followings and the micro-celebrity status it affords (Lepkowska-White and Kortright 2018; O'Neill 2021).Scholarship on digital food influencers, and female produced content specifically, highlight two significant trends.Firstly, the professionalization of digital food content blurs the boundaries between amateur and professional, marking new frontiers for the commodification of ordinary expertise and the technical and food upskilling among the most successful content creators (Lewis 2018).Secondly, women are highly trusted and credible food voices, but their expertise tends to be restricted to spaces of everyday, mundane domestic food practices.Domestic goddess narratives have dominated traditional and digital female food discourses and problematically valorize women's place as in the home and kitchen, while the aspirational "have-it-all" food lifestyles performed privilege the experiences of particular women along lines of race, class and body-size (Goodman and Jaworska 2020; Rodney et al. 2017; Salvio 2012).The narratives across top Instagram food accounts in Japan align with these two themes but also reveal new insights in their configurations with good mothering.
Mapping the top food Instagram accounts in Japan highlights the prominence of female run accounts as well as bento as the most common form of food content.Bento is embedded with gendered food relations that reflect both the cultural traditions of bento and the broader societal gender inequities in contemporary Japan.A meal prepared by women for their children, bento acts a socio-cultural marker through which female domestic duties and mothering are judged (Allison 1991).Digital platforms including Instagram present new spaces through which Japanese mothers can share their domestic successes through food, seeing gendered domestic work mediated though the lens of social media.Previous work examining bento blogging has considered the opportunities for creative expression digital bento content offers, providing space to celebrate mundane food and domestic work (Occhi 2016;Seddon 2011).In this paper I have argued that the impacts of Instagram are not as straightforwardly positive as may appear, and the creative and professionalized food content production both masks and exacerbates gendered domestic labor and entrenches gendered social reproduction in what I have termed precarious digital mothering.
Precarious digital mothering articulates the unpaid and unrecognized labor encountered by mothers pursuing digital success, and the distorted ideals of mothering they perform.Bento is loaded with cultural meaning around good food and good mothering, but it takes huge work to produce Instagrammable bento, work that is typically unrecognized.Even for those who do not use Instagram, the aesthetics and narratives create a visual culture by which the rest of society is judged.Successful bento accounts require creative and technological skills as a chef, food stylist, photographer, and editor and though these are valuable creative skills that can result in entrepreneurial opportunity they come at substantial time and labor costs for individuals and must be fitted in around their existing domestic and child-rearing responsibilities.Instagram as a photo sharing platform focus only on the finished bento product and renders hidden the work that has gone into its production.Divorcing the gendered food labor from the professional bento images that are presented across top Instagram accounts creates a version of the domestic goddess narrative that is interwoven with idealized notions of good mothering that are deeply performative.Though the particular meanings around motherhood bound within bento are unique to Japan, the gendered food labor and forms of ordinary and domestic expertise performed through digital food narratives are not.Ensuring continued success as a digital food influencer demands the continuous production of new, engaging and visually appealing content that both shape our everyday food relations online and offline, but such content hides the gendered labor involved in its production and demands greater critical scrutiny from both audiences and researchers.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3.A week of posts by @heavydrinker.

Table 1 .
Top Instagram food accounts in Japan.That this takes places in different content formats, image based on Instagram to long form recipes and lifestyle advice on blogs, offers multiple ways for audiences to engage and opportunities for influencers to develop digital creative skills.