Sri Lankan ethnic cuisine on YouTube: a computational netnographic study of food‑neophobic and food‑neophilic audience reactions and the digital transmission of culinary heritage.

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.