Social Sciences and Humanities
“Every Meal Must Be Green”: The Discursive Construction of Vegetable-Related Health Anxiety on Social Media
Advice to eat vegetables is usually framed as flexible, long-term guidance. On social media, however, it can be narrowed to a question asked at every meal about whether there is enough green on the plate. This article examines “green-vegetable anxiety” (qingcai jiaolü,青菜焦虑), a Chinese-language expression used in platform discourse to frame a meal or day without green vegetables as a source of unease. Drawing on a purposive search-card headline corpus (N = 50), a neutral comparison dataset (N = 30), and selected pos …