Abstract:
Sri Lankan cuisine is a layered ethnic food heritage shaped by tropical agriculture and by centuries of Arab, Portuguese,
Dutch, and British contact atop a South Indian rice-and-curry foundation, and it is increasingly encountered
by global audiences not at the destination but on digital platforms. This paper analyses 21,984 predominantly
English-language comments posted on 45 YouTube videos about Sri Lankan ethnic cuisine, using VADER sentiment
analysis, LDA topic modelling, and a purpose-built keyword lexicon for phobic and philic markers. The findings challenge
two conventions of the survey literature. First, philic markers outnumber phobic markers by about seven to one
(13.1 vs 1.9%), and where both appear in the same comment (1.5% of the sample) the sentiment reads positive,
not negative; because the unit of analysis is the comment rather than the commenter, this co-occurrence is reported
as a discursive rather than a dispositional phenomenon. Second, phobic response is not concentrated in a single
kind of content but spreads across every one of the eight topics recovered by the LDA. The strongest interpretive
contribution of the analysis is the identification of peer-to-peer cultural translation as a discursive mechanism associated
with the mitigation of neophobic framing: commenters writing from insider-like discursive positions routinely
convert unfamiliar Sri Lankan dishes into familiar reference points for outsider viewers, performing what this paper
argues is a contemporary form of oral tradition through which Sri Lankan ethnic food heritage is transmitted to global
audiences. Long-form videos polarise audience response more sharply than Shorts do. Implications for ethnic food
heritage preservation, cross-cuisine transmission, and destination practice follow.
