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home / papers / 2026 / “Oat Milk Vegan Chocolate Taste Great!”: Monitoring the Food Transition Debate in Reddit

“Oat Milk Vegan Chocolate Taste Great!”: Monitoring the Food Transition Debate in Reddit

Summary

The paper asks whether language can reveal a dietary shift away from animal protein toward plant-based foods before that shift appears in sales or consumption data. The authors built DRiFT, a corpus of about 17.5M Reddit comments from 2010–2022. The comments come from 29 subreddits split into two speaker groups: SUSTAINABLE (likely early adopters) and GENERIC (a stand-in for the wider public).

They propose three linguistic indicators:

  • Awareness: frequency of neonyms and retronyms.
  • Reconceptualization: lexical semantic change, measured with PPMI, SGNS and BERT-substitution methods.
  • Attitude: an embedding-based connotation hyperplane that tracks polarity shifts for selected terms.

SUSTAINABLE users use innovation-related vocabulary more often and frame core food words in ethical or environmental terms. GENERIC users show fast relative growth in neologism use and growing positive connotations for some plant-based products. Shifts in denotational meaning over time are weak, which points to limits of embedding methods for subtle change. The work matters because it presents language as an early, sensitive gauge of attitude change in the protein transition.

Key points

  • Corpus construction:
    • The authors searched 21 policy-derived keywords (e.g., beef, cheese, milk, tofu, yogurt/yoghurt) across subreddits with at least 10,000 members, yielding 662 candidates.
    • Manual filtering reduced these to 29 subreddits: 16 GENERIC and 13 SUSTAINABLE.
  • Data collection and cleaning:
    • The Pushshift API returned 18,266,145 comments.
    • Preprocessing converted emojis to text and replaced emails, usernames and URLs with placeholders. It also stripped HTML and digits and dropped comments of three words or fewer.
    • Two annotators reviewed a 500-comment sample to identify noisy keyword uses (sexual, figurative, spam), and comments containing them were removed.
  • Methods: neonym/retronym frequency analysis, and PPMI, SGNS and BERT-substitution LSC detection. Connotation analysis extends the method of Basile et al. (2022).
  • Findings: clear diastratic differences between communities; emerging positive valence toward plant-based items in GENERIC; weak diachronic semantic change.
  • Availability: code is public on GitHub (gretazella/DRiFT). The data require a Data Sharing Agreement.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/3botxmxbq64i

@inproceedings{zella2026oat,
  title = {{“Oat Milk Vegan Chocolate Taste Great!”: Monitoring the Food Transition Debate in Reddit}},
  author = {Zella, Greta and Bolderdijk, Jan Willem and Peels, Saskia and Wakker, Gerry and Caselli, Tommaso},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/3botxmxbq64i},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3botxmxbq64i}
}

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