Anais do Simpósio Latino Americano de Ciências de Alimentos
Actas del 14 SLACA - Simposio Latinoamericano de Ciencia de los Alimentos

Social media has been used to share food habits and new trends, contributing to their dissemination and persistence. The spontaneous discourse of users on networks is a valuable source of consumer habits and motivations. This paper set out to investigate user dialogue about Unconventional Food Plants (PANC) on the social platform Instagram through discourse analysis. This paper set out to investigate user dialogue about Unconventional Food Plants on the social platform Instagram through discourse analysis. Through webscraping, a compilation of public posts was carried out from August 18, 2020 to August 18, 2021. As a search criterion the hashtag #pancs was chosen to retrieve the posts. Out of the collected posts only the captions in Portuguese were kept for frequency analysis of terms, hashtags, and emojis used. A total of 14,439 public posts over 366 days were obtained. The average frequency of daily posts in this topic is 39.45 ± 11.17, indicating that it is a relevant topic. The number of unique hashtags identified was 26,787, and of these the 5 most used (#panc, #agroecology, #nature, #sustainability, #agroforestry) concentrate a total frequency higher than 2,000. These subject descriptors add environmental values to the theme. Meanwhile, the most used terms follow the thematic of nature (“plants”, “panc”, “leaves”, “pancs”, “plant”, “flowers”, “health”, “conventional”, “food”, “flavor”), adding the health and sensory thematic. Corroborating with the findings of verbal terms, non-verbal elements such as emojis add up to 1,157 unique emojis, of which the 5 most frequent have usage above 1,500 (deciduous tree, seedling, herb, green heart, leaf fluttering). With the data collected it is possible to see a thematic trend of association with elements of nature and sustainability. It was also possible to identify the use of terms related to health, food, and sensory aspects in the discourse of publications using #pancs.