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moviNg FooD 83
Racial Discrimination Commissioner. In a controversial 2005 speech, Phillips
argued that Britain was sleepwalking into segregation. This he viewed as
contributing to recent race riots and ethnic conflicts because we have allowed
tolerance for diversity to harden into effective isolation of communities.5 In
his analysis of race-based riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham, influential
policy thinkers like Ted Cantle responded to Phillips concerns with calls for
more mixing across race and ethnic difference in a bid to build community
cohesion.6 Consequently, the more mixing discourse is now firmly embedded
within public policy in the UK, Europe, Australia and elsewhere.7 And these
policies are clearly oriented towards working class forms of mixing of the
everyday variety. Implicit within these mixing discourses is an assumption
that quotidian contact with the Other will loosen identities, produce affective
ties across difference, and produce more cosmopolitan dispositions amongst
those involved in the mix.
Putting aside some of the obvious problems with Philips and Cantles
reading of the extent, causes, and outcomes of segregation, it remains thatmixing continues to be a key aspect of contemporary community cohesion
policies. However, to some extent the outcomes of mixing are typically
presumed to be positive while more difficult aspects are often glossed over.8
This poses the question then, under what conditions does intercultural
mixing change dispositions and orientations to the other? Food is frequently
at the centre of much intercultural contact, figuring prominently in the
deeply contested terrain of race, ethnicity and cultural diversity. Food travels
diasporic and migratory routes, reproducing and recreating identities abroad;
it can interweave with other foodways, creatinghybrid or transversal identities, or reinforce the
boundaries of old ones. It can be the subject of both
disgust and desire, mediating cultural difference in
multicultural settings. This all occurs in everyday
settings; eating in an ethnic restaurant, partaking
in a multicultural feast, or eating at a multicultural
festival. Because it is at once everyday, deeply
embodied, and yet so symbolic of difference, food
also appears regularly in community cohesionmixing interventions to bring people together
and foster intercultural conviviality.9 However,
such initiatives often simply assume that eating the
food of the other in intercultural situations will
have positive outcomes for race and interethnic
Fig 1:Poster for Taste of Harmony initiative, a
campaign run in 2010 as part of the Australian
Harmony Day festivities held annually on the UNs
International Day for the Elimination of RacialDiscrimination
7. In Britain,see for examplethe resourceson the Institutefor CommunityCohesion website:; in
Australia, see theprogrammes fundedunder the CoalitiongovernmentsLiving in Harmonyprogramme, andfrom 2008 onwards,the DiverseAustralia Program:
8. For a gooddiscussion ofthis contactdiscourse, see GillValentine, Livingwith Difference:Reflections onGeographies ofEncounter,Progressin Human Geography,32, 3, (2008): 321-335.
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84 New FormatioNs
relations. At the discursive and symbolic level too, the desire and embrace
of diverse foodways is promoted in many western nations as characteristic of
an emergent cosmopolitanism at the national level, and functions as a form
of cultural capital for the cosmopolitan middle classes.
Given the prominence of food in discourses and policies around
community cohesion, mixing and becoming cosmopolitan, this essay takes
food as an everyday lens into these contested debates. The essay reflects
upon the question of food and gustatory commensality and disjuncture via
material gathered in three research projects carried out between 2002 and
2007, each focused in different ways on the phenomenology of everyday
diversity. It asks, under what conditions does inter-cultural food consumption,
contact, and sharing produce positive connections across difference? The
first study, Contact Zones, explored everyday affinities and disjunctures in
an old Sydney neighbourhood, Ashfield, recently transformed by Chinese
migration to the area. The focus of that project was how Anglo-Celtic10 and
long time residents from other backgrounds such as Italians, Greeks and
Indians were coping with the changes brought about by the transformation of
the local shopping high street where approximately eighty percent of shops
are now Chinese-owned, and it targeted businesses such as restaurants and
Asian grocery markets. The second study focused on exploring everyday
relationships between Muslim and non-Muslim Australians in Sydney. This
included exploring what underpins experiences of everyday racism as well as
friendships and positive encounters between groups. The third study centred
on a regional town in a fruit growing area of country in New South Wales,
Australia. A town of about 50,000, Griffith has a long history of successfulmigration and settlement of diverse groups, beginning with Italians and
Punjabi Sikhs in the 1950s and 1960s. More recently, groups settling there
have included communities from Turkey, Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, The Cook
Islands, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Vietnam, Taiwan and China. Food was a
common thread through each of these studies, playing a role in reflecting
and indeed producing inter-ethnic commensalities and disjunctures.
LIVERPOOL ROAD
Food and diversity have often been written from the point of view, or via a
critique of, middle-class cosmopolitan elites and their multicultural eating
habits. Popular discourse about the value of cultural diversity in the West
very often focuses on the enrichment of Anglo food with multicultural
cuisines. A familiar trope in the scholarly literature on diversity and food
critiques views this as a form of neo-colonial, Orientalist appropriation
and consumption of ethnic difference, requiring little in the way of real
engagement with the Other. Cook cites bell hooks work as exemplary of
this tradition.11 She argues that, through food, ethnic difference is simplyconsumed in such a way that the Others difference is eradicated and
9. Paul Gilroy,AfterEmpire: Melancholiaor Convivial Culture?,London, Routledge,2004.
10. Anglo-Celticis used in theAustralian contextto denote thedominant whitemajority community.Anglo-Celtic
signals the broadlyintermeshed cultureof white descendantsof English, Irish andScottish immigrantsto Australia, whomade up themajority populationin Australia until the1970s.
11. Ian Cook etal, Geographiesof Food: Mixing,
Progress in HumanGeography, 32, 6,(2008): 1-13.
12. Sneja Gunew,Introduction:MulticulturalTranslations ofFood, Bodies,Language,Journal ofIntercultural Studies,21, 3, (2000): 227.
13. Ghassan Hage,At Home in theEntrails of the West,inHome/World:Space, Communityand Marginalityin Sydneys West,Helen Grace etal, (eds), Sydney,Pluto Press, 1997;Benedict Anderson,The Spectre ofComparisons:Nationalism, Southeast
Asia and the World, New York, Verso,1998.
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decontextualised. Gunew laments that
food has become the most benign version
of accommodating cultural difference,
leaving deep-seated race-based power
differentials untouched.12 Thus, eating
ethnic food often manifests as a form
of celebratory multiculturalism where
a middle class cosmo-multicultural
elite appreciate and consume cultural
difference as exotica from a disengaged
standpoint, while remaining at the
centre with the power to decide who
and what to tolerate.13 Writers such as
Buettner point out the (apparent) irony
that while there has been a phenomenal
increase in ethnic eating exemplified,
for example, by the White British notion
of going for a curry,14 this kind of multicultural consumption has occurred
at the same time (and often by the same actors) as an increase in White
racism. That is to say, she sees no evidence of any link between ethnic
eating and a reduction in racism.15
While not irrelevant, this article argues that there are other windows
through which we might view the role of food in constructing, reconstructing
and mediating cultural differences in multicultural settings. It asks,
under what conditions do experiences of otherness through food makecosmopolitans or contribute to positive relationships across difference?
The stereotypical cosmo-multiculturalist figured only very lightly in my
fieldwork. Instead, what became apparent was that there were multiple,
situational dimensions to how food mediates inter-ethnic relations in diverse
urban settings. For example, it matters who is doing the consuming, in what
kind of social setting, where food is eaten: as a consumer in a restaurant;
demonstrating ones cultural capital at a dinner party; or in a more convivial
feast of commensality; appreciating ethnic food at a multicultural festival;
sharing food at a Friday afternoon BBQ on the factory floor amongst diverseworkers; swapping vegetables with ethnically different neighbours; or gifts
of food during a religious or cultural festival; eating in the shopping centre
food court; or on the street in an ethnic neighbourhood. In each setting
- the spaces of consumption, the social rituals involved, the actual food
consumed, and the prevailing political and cultural winds - all mediate how,
and in what way, food matters in intercultural settings, and whether, and to what
extent identities are ascribed, reinscribed, traversed or reworked.16 Further, the
sensuous qualities of food thread through all of these encounters, invoking,
evoking, knitting together, incorporating, pushing apart, and re-habituatingbodies along the way.
14. In Australia,this would be goingfor Thai, or goingfor Chinese. Other
Western nationsobviously have theirown versions.
15. ElizabethBuettner, Going foran Indian: SouthAsian Restaurantsand the Limits ofMulticulturalism inBritain, The Journalof Modern History,80, 2008.
Fig 2: Ashfield
high street
16. David Bell andGill Valentine,ConsumingGeographies: We
Are Where We Eat,London, Routledge,1997.
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86 New FormatioNs
SPACES OF CONSUMPTION
Much of the literature on food and consumption of Other cuisines takes
the actual site of consumption for granted. It is often assumed that the
consumption of ethnic food takes place in restaurants in a commercial
transaction. However, I want to argue that the actual spaces of consumption
(that is, the very materiality of the spaces, as well as the cultural and social
relations they foster and or embody) matter immensely in how food mediates
inter-ethnic intermingling. Reflecting on my own city, what became readily
clear was that the space where the most regular contact takes place with
ethnic Others is not actually on the street in ethnic neighbourhoods but in
suburban shopping malls, large and small. And within these malls, it is the
centre food courts where the most intimate encounters with diversity occur.
This poses a number of questions. What is the difference between eating
in the food court, and eating authentically in an ethnic restaurant on the
high street? What is the difference between a small suburban non-regulated
food court, and a big super-mall chain such as Westfield? What is the
difference when one involves social interaction between regular customers and
shopkeepers? How do these situations of commercial transaction differ from
consuming food of the Other in a situation of conviviality and commensality?
How does the presence, absence, or underplaying of cultural scent matter?
Does it matter with whom you are eating: side by side with strangers in a food
court, or interacting around a dinner table?
SCENTED AND NON-SCENTED SPACES (FOOD COURT VSHIGH STREET)
It readily became apparent during the four studies upon which this essay is
based, that the food court in the neighbourhood and regional mall is a site
par excellence for encounters with everyday cultural difference and theprosaic
consumption of ethnic food. The Ashfield study involved some months of
participant observation in various spaces of food consumption. Food courts
are typically characterised as anonymous non-places of Disneyland-like
hyper-consumption and regulation.17 Eating ethnic food in such spaces iscontrasted unfavourably with the more authentic experience of eating on an
ethnic street in an ethnic neighbourhood. Independently owned restaurants
run by ethnic entrepreneurs are seen to offer some level of organic, rather
than manufactured difference, and, for the cosmo-multiculturalist, represent
a sense of touristic adventure, and a space to acquire cosmopolitan cultural
capital.18
Ashfield Mall is a small suburban shopping mall (as against a larger
regional shopping mall). It spans only two floors, houses three supermarkets,
four or five clothing stores, a newsagent, post office, a couple of shoe stores,photo processing store, and a couple of chemists. The mall sits in the middle
17. Marc Aug,Non-Places: Introductionto an Anthropologyof Supermodernity,London, Verso,1992; George Ritzer,The Mcdonaldizationof Society, NewburyPark CA, Pine Forge,1993; John Manzo,Social Control andthe ManagementOf Personal Spacein Shopping Malls,Space & Culture 8, 1,(2005): 83-97.
18. Lu Shun andGary Alan Fine,The Presentation ofEthnic Authenticity:Chinese Foodas a SocialAccomplishment,
Sociological Quarterly36, 3, (2005): 535-553.
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of the Liverpool Road high street stretch, and is the main draw card for the
area. The food court is the hub of the mall and very much a stop off point for
most who shop there. More than seventy languages are spoken in Ashfield,
and on a typical day, a good portion of those can be heard in the food court.
The food stalls include Evelyns Coffee Shop, run by a Chinese couple, and
Sindhoor, an Indian place run by Tamil speakers from South India. They
have modified their menu to encompass more North Indian dishes in the
last year to serve the mostly Punjabi Indian international students who study
and work in the area. Any leftover curry and rice is packaged up at the end
of each day and discounted into $5 meal boxes. Enough to feed two, the
international students (mainly young men) have cottoned onto this bargain
hour, and flock there after classes to purchase their evening meals. Next door
is a Thai place, popular with everyone, and next to them a Chinese buffet, a
sandwich shop owned by Chinese, a Turkish kebab house, and a KFC outlet.
There is a distinct temporal rhythm to the space. On weekday mornings, one
length of tables are occupied by a group of ten or so Italian men who meet to
drink coffee, talk, debate, play cards, and generally while away the time. They
buy their coffee from the Italian-themed coffee shop owned and run by local
Chinese immigrants. Large-screen TVs hanging above hum with the sound
of Oprah or the news. The tables in the middle are occupied by a few elderly
white men (I suspect widowers living alone), usually with a cup of coffee and
a newspaper. Typically theyll be sitting alone but apparently enjoying the
light-touch company of others occupying this public space. There is a soup
kitchen up the road so there are often homeless men occupying tables near
the TVs and weve seen the Chinese couple who run Evelyns coffee shopgive free coffee and cake to a couple of them who come regularly. They always
make an effort to remember the names and typical order for their frequent
customers and have a pin board where they display photos of babies of their
regulars.
Cleaning the tables are Filipinas, Indian (female this time) international
students, and our Greek neighbour who stops by our table for a chat as she
cleans - typically to say hello to my baby, and sometimes with some gossip
about our (Tamil, Anglo and Italian) neighbours to share. Iraqi and Sudanese
refugees (and increasingly, Indian international students) collect runawayshopping trolleys for the big supermarket chains, pushing trains of them
through the food court on the way from the car park, stopping to collect
abandoned ones along the way. Serving alongside local youths from various
backgrounds at the KFC counter are more international students, from
China and India, working part-time to support their studies. After school,
Indian, Pacific Islander, Sri Lankan, Filipina, Portuguese, Polish, Lebanese,
Korean, Italian, Anglo and Chinese mums, grandparents and kids stop in
for a bite to eat and there are as many culturally and racially mixed families,
as single ethnicity ones. Wednesday is old-age pension day and the Angloladies come out en-masse dressed in their best to treat themselves to lunch.
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88 New FormatioNs
Weekday lunchtimes see crowds of public servants (Anglo, and non-Anglo
middle-classes) who drop in from their nearby office building.
During my many interviews and outings with Anglo senior citizens in
Ashfield, I slowly became aware that, despite its size, Ashfield Mall was
somehow invisible to them in the context of discussions on diversity andtheir negative feelings about cultural difference and place change. Moreover,
the space where they spent most of their time eating in Ashfield - the mall
food court - was in fact the most culturally diverse space in the suburb, in
terms of the consumers eating there, and the variety of food on offer.
Food courts, at least in the popular cosmo-multiculturalist imagination,
represent a safe way of consuming cuisines of the Other. This is a discourse
which sees the suburban malls international food court as a space of safe
approximation where cuisines of the Other are watered down, and made
bland for a popular (white bread) palate. It is seen as a space where the PadThai, Chicken Korma, kebab and fried rice become fast food which no longer
resemble their authentic ethnic culinary origins. Setting the quality of the
food aside for a moment (always a subjective issue in any case), I suggest that
food courts are spaces where being around difference and diversity becomes
inhabited and habituated precisely because they slide beneath the Otherness
radar of the average suburban consumer (of whatever ethnicity).
Writing about Japanese technology, Iwabuchi proposes the concept of
cultural odour. He describes cultural fragrance as the way in which cultural
features of a country of origin and images and ideas of its national, in mostcases stereotyped, way of life are associatedpositively with a particular cultural
Fig 3:Ashfield Food court on a weekday lunchtime, January 2010
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product in the consumption process.19 Cultural odour becomes a fragrance
when the smell becomes culturally and socially acceptable. Iwabuchi
argues that Japanese audio-visual consumer technologies (DVD players,
televisions and the like) are culturally odourless, designed not to specifically
invoke ideas of Japan, in order to make inroads into international markets.
Carrying little in the way of Japanese cultural imprint, Iwabuchi argues that
transnationally circulated commodities such as audio-visual technologies
become culturally odourless in the sense that their origins are subsumed by
the local transculturation process.20
To borrow Iwabuchis concept, Other cuisines in the suburban
international food court carry, I suggest, only the lightest fragrance
compared to that encountered on the typical ethnic high street. And this is
not so much a characteristic of abridged menu offerings, and in-authentic
watered down tastes, but of the very aesthetic and social qualities of the space.
Thomas has explored changing taste cultures among Vietnamese youth in
Australia and found that food courts had become important places for these
diasporic youth to gather with peers away from the gaze of their elders, and
their strict codes of behaviour.21 Ritzers McDonaldisation thesis suggests
that a key part of the appeal of food courts is the lack of cutlery, tableware,
surveillance of waiters, and the disapproval of other customers. These features
reduce the sense of anxiety experienced in more formal spaces such as cafes
and restaurants where more ritualised and codified boundaries of behaviour
are demanded. Thomas suggests it is this very absence of formality and ritual
that Vietnamese youth are drawn to as it offers a zone to carve out a sense of
belonging to a global youth culture, culturally diverse friendship networksand to wider society, through spatial distancing from what they may perceive
as the boundedness of ethnicity lived at home through eating traditional
Vietnamese food.22
In Iwabuchis model, what determines whether a commodity is odourless
or culturally fragrant is, thus, not just the commodity itself, but its packaging
and design. Extending this to the question of food, I argue that the cultural
odour becomes more obvious if consumed in a place characterised by
aesthetics of difference such as an ethnic restaurant on a high street in an
ethnic neighbourhood. Things like the dcor, the signage and menu style, thesurrounding shops and the signage (for example in Chinese script) increase
the odour. In some cases the rituals of restaurant eating induce a level of
anxiety that increases awareness of the presence of difference (e.g. Chinese
wait staff or customers). Conversely, the lack of such rituals combined with the
aesthetic and material non-place character of mall food court spaces induces,
instead, a sense of light cultural fragrance and eating thus becomes less about
consuming otherness. This is despite the fact that the service staff and other
customers are ethnically different (from the Anglo seniors Im describing). I
suggest lightly fragranced rather than odourless because difference is notentirely absent. Rather, it exists at a lower order of consciousness and is not
19. Koichi Iwabuchi,RecenteringGlobalization: PopularCulture and JapaneseTransnationalism,Durham andLondon, DukeUniversity Press,2002, p27.
20. Ibid., p94.
21. Mandy Thomas,Transitions inTaste in Vietnamand the Diaspora,Australian Journal ofAnthropology 15, 1,(2004): 54-67.
22. Ibid., p64.
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90 New FormatioNs
the primary frame of reference for the experience.
It is precisely due to the lightly fragrant nature of the presence of cultural
otherness that difference slides below the radar, operating at the sub-
conscious level. As Thomas suggests, the informality of the food court means
it is a relatively anxiety free space. Spaces such as Ashfield Malls food court
are where everyday multiculturalism is inhabited rather than appropriated
as a form of cultural capital. The Other is present, not just behind the
counters, but at the next table. The fact that there is little requirement to step
out of ones comfort zone - in terms of cuisine, and other aesthetic and social
rituals - means that difference in a sense becomes part of the wallpaper,
and that culinary and cultural experimentation can occur without feeling
too threatening. This under the radar capacity of food courts contrasts
with the narratives of loss and competition that authors such as Hageand
and Sandercock recount.23 In this view a desire to reassert control over ones
spatial territory, ones spatial habitus, is a result of a deep sense of loss and
displacement for those residents unable to adapt to the changes brought
about by diversity.24 Highmore suggests that spaces of cross-cultural food
consumption are places where new not me worlds are encountered, and the
affective registers (such as joy, aggression, fear) permeating these encounters
offer, on the one hand, a kind of barometer for the wider sense of everyday
multiculturalism, and on the other, represent transformative negotiations in
themselves.25 Rather than strong affects such as disgust or desire, what I want
to suggest is that lightly fragrant food courts could be said to evoke a sense
of difference more akin to an affective register of banality, representing the
fact that most encounters with and perceptions of difference are in fact dayto day mundane forms of rubbing along.26
Uma Narayan has argued that gustatory relish can stand in for an absence
of real relationships and contact with those different from ourselves. She
suggests that gustatory relish for the food of others may help contribute to
an appreciation of their presence in the national community27 on the basis
that it produces some level of embodied connection, rather than privileging
knowledge of culture in an intellectual sense. Although focused on explicit
desire for the food of the Other, this point can extend to consumption of
Other foods in situations of more mundane intermingling such as food courts.Here, the lightly fragranced banality of Otherness produces only the vaguest
sense of incorporation of difference, slipping below the anxiety radar such
that rubbing along with the Other and their food becomes embodied as part
of the material and social landscape, where Pad Thai or Chicken Korma in a
sense become white bread, and come to embody a taken for granted ethnic and
racial landscape. That is, rather than fierce relish or desire, we are talking of a
banal, low level, hum of positive affect engendered with lightly fragranced
difference, because it is consumed in a non-place, in the sense of aesthetic
form (tables, dcor and the like), and in a situation absent of formal socialrituals, where difference is there, without being too present.
23. GhassanHage, WhiteNation: Fantasiesof White Supremacyin a Multicultural
Society, Sydney,Pluto Press, 1998;Leonie Sandercock,Cosmopolis II:Mongrel Cities inthe Twenty-FirstCentury, London,Continuum, 2003.
24. Sandercock,Cosmopolis II, op. cit.,p113.
25. Ben Highmore,Alimentary Agents:Food, CulturalTheory andMulticulturalism,Journal ofIntercultural Studies,29, 4, (2008): 396.
26. Sophie Watson,City Publics: The(Dis)Enchantments ofUrban Encounters,London, Routledge,2006; SophieWatson, The Magicof the Marketplace:Sociality in aNeglected PublicSpace, UrbanStudies, 46, 8, (2009):1589.
27. Uma Narayan,Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions,and Third-World
Feminism, London,Routledge, 1997,p184.
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Earlier I posed the question, what is the difference between a food court
in a large regional shopping mall, and a small suburban one such as Ashfield
Mall? Small neighbourhood malls such as these tend to be less regulated.
The smaller, more human scale of the food court, coupled with the fact that
many of the food stalls are owner-operated mean that social interactions
between shop staff and regular customers is more likely. On any given day
in Ashfields food court, the Chinese owners of the Italian coffee shop are
chatting with their regular clientele, and nearly always remember your regular
coffee order. They give a free coffee to the Tamil owners of Sindhoor at the
tired end of a long afternoon cooking. The Tamil boys will stop for a chat
with the Chinese owners before returning to their posts.
While the coffee shop chain Gloria Jeans28 chases away homeless men
from their more formal and enclosed caf at the other end of the mall, as
already mentioned the owners of Evelyns Coffee Shop in the food court
regularly give free coffee to a homeless man who then blends back into the
casual seating area. A large number of Anglo seniors are also regular customers.
Those I spoke to said they were drawn there by the personal attention and
informal chat with the friendly Chinese owners who remembered them and
even greet them if they walked by without buying.
Henry: The strange thing, in the Mall youve got a food court, youve got
a donner kebab, run by Lebanese, youve got a Vietnamese shop, a Thai
food shop, then youve got Dans Chinese shop, then youve got a sandwich
shop. Im just taking these four shops, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Chinese and
the other one is half Chinese and half . Served, maintained, kept up,all the communication is there, and they are all of different nationalities,
but theyre like you and me. They speak beautiful English. Their service
is good, clean and as a result people shop at those little shops. Theres
a little coffee kiosk there, run by a couple of Chinese, one girl is Jan, the
other is Danielle, and her husband, and there are two assistants, Chinese,
beautiful English. If they find that youre old, theyll come and serve you
at your table, even though its a food court.
Research suggests that older people often lack adequate social networks, and asa result many increasingly rely on non-traditional social networks with people
such as retail employees for support.29 These are, in Lofland terms, intimate
secondary relationships, in that they are emotionally infused relationships that
take place in the public sphere.30 It is not inconsequential that the people serving
food in Ashfields food court are extremely culturally diverse. Coupled with the
positive feelings of social belonging that emerge from customer-shopkeeper
relationships in the smaller food courts, it is possible to see evidence of a
mundane, yet positive relation to difference emerge.
Ashfields Anglo seniors all spoke of the Mall as a much more comfortablespace of belonging than the high street. Here, encounters with cultural
28. Gloria Jeansis the Australianversion of StarBucks which is setup as an enclosedcaf at the other endof the mall to thefood court.
29. Mark S.Rosenbaum,Exploring the SocialSupportive Roleof Third Places inConsumers Lives,Journal of ServiceResearch, 9,1, (2006):60.
30. Lyn H. Lofland,The Public Realm:Exploring the CitysQuintessentialSocial Territory,
New Brunswhich,TransactionPublishers, 1998.
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who can mostly find their familiar varieties there. The produce on sale ranges
from the familiar Anglo varieties of apples, oranges and carrots, to a world
of Chinese greens, and the most exotic of Asian vegetables such as Durian,
dragon fruit, or bitter melon.32
Green Grocers are further examples of low fragrance sites of food
provisioning. This is so in the sense that there is a certain familiarity with
the material form of fruit and vegetables, even taking into account the sheer
variety of produce on offer in this multicultural suburb. Low fragrance in
this sense creates an interpretive space free from, or low in, anxiety for elderly
Anglo shoppers, where the lack of packaging, the ability to touch and feel
the produce, the English tags, the diversity of the customers, and the English
speaking staff, all combined to make this a navigable space, provisioning food
that required little in the way of translation or stepping too far beyond ones
comfort zone.
Victor:.. theyve got a lot of Eastern vegetables, which we all use, bok
choy and things like that. They cater for a very diverse clientele and
their assistants are also of many nationalities. But the common language
is English, the the vegetables belong to two or three different types
of countries, maybe more. But everybody buys every kind of food that is
over there and using one language, which is English.
It is here that Gabaccias point about the importance of the role of commercial
exchange resonates. She argues that much of the fear of ethnically different
food in America has been overcome due to the predominance of thecommercial exchange as the main context for food crossing. She suggests that
the impersonal rules of the marketplace help ease fears of cultural difference,
because buying and selling are limited, public, and highly ritualised forms of
social interaction.33 In some cases, this produces a positive sense of conviviality
and inter-cultural propinquity in a low anxiety setting. In others, such as
Victor, above, the sense of multicultural belonging this produces is somewhat
ambivalent as he hints at the fact that his comfort in this space has to do with
factors such as English language as the medium of communication, which
in a sense becomes a metonym for him of how diversity should function inhis ideal national order of things.
COMPETITION OVER SPACES
The national order of things also flows down to meanings made of situations
where a sense of competition over claims to spaces of food consumption
and food-related sociality emerge. A couple of the elderly Anglo ladies fussed
and grumbled about the Italian men who gathered daily in the food court.
The Anglo ladies perceived their regular gathering as an inappropriatecolonisation of the long table in the food court, mainly in regards to
32. This greengrocer wentbankrupt in August2010.
33. Donna Gabaccia,We Are What We Eat:Ethnic Food and theMaking of Americans,Cambridge, HarvardUniversity Press,1998, p230.
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94 New FormatioNs
overstaying their rightful time when others were struggling to find a seat
during busy periods. Two women also commented on the fact that they had
observed the men purchase only one coffee in the morning, then staying for
several hours after, without further food or drink purchased or consumed.
What is interesting about this however is that most of the Anglo seniors I spoke
with knew about these men, and even those who grumbled about them had
spent enough time in the food court to have observed their regular habits,
right down to the nature and frequency of coffee purchase.
Another space of competition is the bistro in the Ashfield Returned
Servicemens League (RSL) Club. RSL and similar registered clubs are
regular haunts for Ashfields senior citizens - both Anglo and non-Anglo.
The RSL clubs in particular are long standing traditional third places34 for
Anglo seniors, particularly retired war veterans and their families. Typical
facilities include poker machines, bingo and raffles, dancing and eveningentertainment, a bar, and usually a buffet style bistro. Food is an important
aspect of club life. Many of the raffle and bingo prizes are food provisions.
For example, a typical club calendar would have a meat raffle one day, a surf
n turf (seafood & steak) prize the following day, and a grocery hamper the
next. Many club users are old aged pensioners who enthusiastically participate
in this form of entertainment on a regular basis, rationalising it as helping
them with their limited budgets. There are a good number of prizes on offer
each time, and most of the seniors I spoke to reported having had a win in
the last month. As others have found, many pensioners can only afford cheapcuts of meat such as beef mince or sausages, so prizes of good quality steak
34. RamonOldenburg andDennis Brissett,
The Third Place,Qualitative Sociology,5, 4, (1982): 265-284.
Fig 5:Italian men who meet at this food court each morning for coffee. Their Chinese-
owned caf is the stall directly behind them.
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or seafood are highly valued as a means of acquiring the ingredients to cook
a decent meal such as a Sunday roast.35
These types of clubs also traditionally provided subsidised meals,
usually of typical Anglo fare, such as Roast Lamb, fish and chips, and
versions of food such as pasta, crumbed chicken, apricot chicken and the
like. Many Anglo seniors would treat themselves for a cheap club roast, a
meal typically available in the clubs for around $12, when a similar dish at
an outside restaurant would cost $25-30. Anglo seniors interviewed for my
study expressed a clear preference and expectation for good quality homely
food, of the type that becomes increasingly challenging to prepare at home
as people age. As Simpson-Young and Russell report, seniors tend to prefer
service areas of clubs serving straightforward food of the meat and three
vegetable variety, over those serving caf style or exotic food.
Many clubs have tried to go up scale since the 1990s, engaging in
expensive renovations, and expanding their premises, particularly gambling
facilities. Formerly, these clubs ran on a not for profit basis, subsidising
things such as meals and entertainment. Modern managerial cultures
have increasingly influenced the running of clubs today, and most have a
greater focus on profits margins. Consequently, there has been a growing
trend across the state for clubs to outsource the operation of club bistros
to external, independent operators as a means of rationalising operating
costs. Interestingly, many Chinese entrepreneurs have become aware of these
opportunities and a large number of club bistros in the Sydney region are
now operated by Chinese family businesses.
Such is the case in the Ashfield RSL, unsurprising given Ashfields status as
Sydneys Little Shanghai. In 2003 a Chinese family took over operations of
the bistro there, which was during the period of my initial fieldwork. Renaming
it Lucky Buffet, they advertise as offering Chinese and Australian cuisine.
The new buffet space is now predominantly Chinese fast food, with a small
selection of Australian food offered in one corner. Couched in nostalgic
narratives of decline and loss, many of the Anglo seniors interviewed would
grumble about the declining quality of the food. It needs to be born in mind
however that the Anglo food traditionally available wasnt (perhaps with the
exception of the roasts) of particularly high standard either. The quality of
the food seems to ebb and wane in tune with the broader sense of belonging
to the setting.
Mary: I have watched a tremendous change there. We have, we actually
wrote a petition, about the food. Suddenly it was no longer Australian
food. Now the situation down there is that theyll tell you that theres
Australian food on the menu, but
Bill: You cant find it.Mary: Yeah.
35. VirginiaSimpson-Young andCherry Russell, TheLicensed SocialClub: A Resourcefor Independencein Later Life,Aging
International, 34, 4,(2009): 216-236.
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96 New FormatioNs
Amanda: I think Ive seen the sign that says Chinese and Australian
restaurant, but are you saying its not really?
Mary: No, no, its a Chinese restaurant, and they bring all the coach
tours in.
Bill and Mary, in their mid 70s and living in public housing, repeated a storyI heard several times, and subsequently viewed myself on several occasions.
Ashfield is full of extremely entrepreneurial Chinese business people. One
recent trend has been a rise in the number of small Chinese travel tour
operators, who run low cost coach trips for mainland Chinese tourists. Ashfield
has become a key stopping off point for meals, and the Chinese operators of
the Ashfield RSL bistro have established a roaring trade - mainly due to the
seating capacity - catering to coach loads of Chinese tourists most days, with
discounted meals, and a free lunch to the driver. While an innovative and
mutually beneficial business opportunity for the parties involved, one sideproblem has been seating capacity, where other club users are unable to find
tables, or are confined to a couple of the less favourable tables at the side of the
bistro. In turn, this has caused a sense of resentment where food spaces Anglo
seniors used to see as a kind of second living room are perceived to be under
colonisation by Chinese users of the space. Complaints over competition
for tables and a lack of familiar food become racialised. This needs to be
set within the context of the Anglo seniors feelings of displacement in the
broader suburb, with the change in the high street shops.
As previously suggested, the traditional club fare of a good roast mealprovides a sense of the club being an extended home, akin to what Oldenburg
Fig 6: The Ashfield RSL and advertising for its Lucky Club Australian &
Chinese Restaurant
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terms third places. Third places are places such as pubs, coffee houses and
the like which are accessible to their inhabitants and appropriated by them
as their own.36 The fact that this sense of being taken over occurs in a food
provisioning space that is experienced as homely is important. Amin suggests
that in the threadbare city, feelings about difference are permeated by a
sense of loss and lack, where crumbling public infrastructure, spaces and
utilities form the material base where a sense of competition over scarce
resources creates an affective register, or urban unconscious, permeated
by mistrust, suspicion, and competition.37 This reading of scarcity resonates
with Hages arguments about paranoid nationalism, which evolves when
the state abrogates its responsibilities to care for its people and perpetuates
the unequal distribution of societal hope. Those who have a sense of
superior claim to the nation, develop a paranoid attachment characterised
by worrying about the nation.38 These Anglo seniors, whose physical selves
are beginning to decline, exist within a broader national setting where the old
age pension ceased long ago to be anywhere close to a living wage, where
the public health system is struggling to provide for their needs, materially
and also emotionally - health professionals are far too busy to stop for a
chat and a bit of care. They exist within the urban space of a crumbling
neighbourhood, busy, noisy and never still, and where local places of sociality
have almost disappeared. And in a national media culture which casts the
ethnic Other as the chief competitor for the scarce resources of the nation:
everything from discourses surrounding over-population and climate change,
to demands on the welfare state, crime and neighbourhood safety, and access
to affordable housing. In such a context, the food provisioning third spaceof the club is experienced as my home, where I have been materially, and
symbolically displaced, right down to feelings about not being able to get a
good meal anymore.
EVERYDAY RECOGNITION:RECIPROCITY, HOSPITALITY & FOOD
Taking a slightly different tack, there is a long, and indeed growing, literature
on questions of reciprocity, hospitality and solidarity. It is surprising, however,
how little empirical work there is looking at these issues from the point ofview of cultural diversity in contemporary western society. In my various
forays into the field, stories of food, reciprocity and hospitality were the
most prominent way individuals of all backgrounds wished to talk about
their experience of cultural difference. Whether or not a community was
considered hospitable often underscored evaluations of racial and cultural
others. In a recent book chapter I discussed a situation of intense inter-ethnic
neighbourly exchange of backyard grown vegetables.39 These exchanges of
tomatoes, figs, chillies and curry leaves between Lebanese, Italian, Indian
and Anglo neighbours I characterised as a moral economy of gifted surplusand argued that the material and sensuous qualities of these food gifts,
36. Oldenburg andBrissett, The ThirdPlace, op. cit., p274.
37. Ash Amin,Cities and theEthic of Careamong Strangers,in Seminar presentedat the Centre forResearch on SocialInclusion, MacquarieUniversity 2010.
38. Ghassan Hage,Against ParanoidNationalism:Searching for Hope ina Shrinking Society,Annandale, Pluto,2003, p31.
39. AmandaWise, EverydayMulticulturalism:TransversalCrossings andWorking ClassCosmopolitans,inEverydayMulticulturalism,Amanda Wise and
Selvaraj Velayutham(eds), London,Palgrave, 2009.
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98 New FormatioNs
and the stories they embodied (where the food comes from, how you might
cook it) interwove, in a deeply embodied way, diasporic and local modes of
belonging. Likewise, in Singapore, where my Indian in-laws live in a high-rise
public housing block, gifts of food and sweets flow regularly up and down the
shared corridor between Indian, Malay and Chinese neighbours, following
the smells of cooking that waft out of doors left open to beat the tropical
heat. At Chinese New Year, the Chinese neighbour will bring jars of sweets
and cakes to my Indian in-laws. At Hindu Deepavali my in-laws bring Indian
sweets and savoury nibbles to the Chinese and Malay neighbours. Great care
is taken to select varieties they think will be palatable for their culturally
different neighbours. So the very hot muruku Indian nibbles are left out of
the offering. Meanwhile, the cultural exchange flows beyond the immediate
parties involved. My Indian in-laws (who are working class and share only
a very minimal street Malay as the lingua franca to communicate with the
neighbours) will sometimes purchase gifts of Chinese biscuits to gift to Indian
relatives. And my father-in-laws brother, who runs a busy hawker stall, does a
roaring trade supplying Indian food to adventurous Chinese wanting to cater
with something different for their Chinese New Year family reunion feast.
Such exchanges can be characterised as a moral-economy of place-sharing
and what is important about them is how the people, objects and social
relations involved are made and remade, understood and re-understood in
everyday transactions.40 The reciprocities just described also create what I call
local and diasporic intersections. As Mauss has argued, gifts are inalienable
and to some extent part of persons.41 And as material culture scholars such
as Miller have demonstrated objects (in this context, gifts of food) carry withthem both general cultural meanings, and cultural biographies, and also
take on meanings within specific personal relationships.42 This intersection
of the cultural biography of the object and its giver, with the inters-subjective
relations produced in the giving, produces narrative, embodied, material and
emplaced intersections.
Unlike the more problematic notion of the cosmo-multiculturalists,
contrasted to the white bread, closed white suburbanite, these exchanges
are not overly conscious intercultural engagements with ethnic food that
becomes a form of acquisition of cultural capital. What I found was in facta world of everyday middle- and working-class cosmopolitans who were
doing community across difference at work, between neighbours, in their
sports teams, or in their kids schools.43 Most importantly, stories of food and
hospitality permeated just about every positive thing my various research
participants had to say about cultural difference.
For example, a group of Anglo women volunteers were involved in a
welcoming committee in Griffith for refugees who arrived in town. They
helped with settling into the neighbourhood, learning English, and accessing
employment and education opportunities. Food-related forms of hospitalitywere important.
40. James Carrier,Gifts, Commodities,and Social Relations:A Maussian Viewof Exchange,Sociological Forum, 6,1, (1991): 121.
41. Marcel Mauss,
The Gift, London,Routledge & KeganPaul, 1969, p11.
42. cf Daniel Miller(ed),MaterialCultures: Why SomeThings Matter,London, UniversityCollege LondonPress,1998.
43. Pnina Werbner,
Global Pathways:Working ClassCosmopolitansand the Creationof TransnationalWorlds, SocialAnthropology, 7,1, (1999): [PAGENUMBER];Noble, EverydayCosmopolitanismand the Labourof InterculturalCommunity, op.
cit., http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0964028299000026
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The Afghani ladies have come to my house probably once a month, and
that has been wonderful Id show them all the Australian food like
pavlovas and lamingtons, sandwiches Jatz biscuits I mean, the first
time one of the Afghanis was having a sandwich, she tried to eat it with a
knife and fork. I said, No, no. Hand, hand! You know, so we just got to
know each other, even though we still dont speak each others language.
A farm manager in Griffith talked about the importance of the afternoon
BBQ for their culturally diverse fruit pickers - who come from a myriad of
different backgrounds, and many of whom are refugees:
There are always cup of tea, coffee, and a biscuit, maybe some free
morning, fifteen minutes, and afternoon they have afternoon tea. They
have half an hour or hour lunch, and thats it. And they always make
barbecue when they finish. We always have a table there, and talk, and
so on. Theres talk about family, sometimes sport, sometimes people go
for wedding, or whats happening, about cooking, and a lot of fun with
a lot of girls are from Taiwan and Timor, and always happy little girls,
and laughing, and bring something. They have lunch, they give us to try
what they do, I bake a cake, I always give somebody too, some. You know,
biscuits or cake, then we share (Italian (2nd Generation) farmers wife
speaking about her culturally diverse farm workers).
These relations of exchange and hospitality produce new forms of solidarity
through ritualised sharing of food and meals. As Berking argues:
it is the identity of what is consumed, the symbolic quality of what is
incorporated, which produces the identity of the group. The meaning
shifts and symbolic inventions impelled by ritualization open the horizon
for transference and associative linking, which are able to externalise
what must then be incorporated in the common meal as the substance
of community.44
Thus, gestures of crossing (such as making an effort to accommodate onesguests tastes, or bringing food along to represent ones culture) can be seen
as symbolic means of incorporating the other into a situation of conviviality
which, momentarily, broadens the notion of my community to incorporate
the Other.
An example of this was evident in the project I conducted on everyday
relations between Muslim and non-Muslim Australians. A Lebanese Muslim
boilermaker remarked that his Anglo boss had approached him one day to ask
why he did not join in the regular Friday afternoon BBQ held at the back of
the factory. The Lebanese worker explained to his boss that he didnt want tomake a fuss, but that he felt he couldnt attend because the meat served was
44. HelmuthBerking, Sociologyof Giving, London,
Sage, 1999, p96.
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100 New FormatioNs
not halal. His boss had not heard of halal before, but once it was explained to
him, he asked where such meat could be bought, and subsequently sourced
the BBQ meat from the local halal butcher. The worker took this as a great
gesture of inclusion and hospitality on the part of his boss and was held up
as an example to prove that not all white Australians are against Muslims.
In some cases there are built-in acts of everyday recognition45 such as the
Anglo boss buying in Halal meat, hosts ensuring vegetarian options are
available, or at a typical Singaporean (pork loving) Chinese or Indian Hindu
wedding, where there will often be a separate side table for halal food for
Muslim guests.
Many of these occasions of hospitality involve guests bringing a plate.46
In Australia and New Zealand bringing a plate is a tradition associated with
older generation white women who would bring a plate of home cooked food
- such as sandwiches, a home baked cake, lamingtons or biscuits - to ladies
gatherings, church socials and the like. It is a deeply gendered social code,
but also one steeped in notions of reciprocity, egalitarianism, and ideas of
giving ones labour (and thus, a little bit of me) to the group. It evens out,
or makes more ambiguous, the guest-host divide. Home-cooked food brought
to such gatherings creates opportunities for discussion about recipes - how
something was made, the history of the recipe (for example, handed down
from my grandmother, or adapted from one my neighbour makes). And it
provides an occasion for mutual admiration of one anothers cooking skills
(and no doubt, a bit of behind the back criticism too).
There are numerous stories in my various projects of Anglo women
commenting good humouredly (and sometimes patronisingly) about a newmigrant or refugee woman they had invited who, having been invited to a
gathering and asked to bring a plate, turned up, literally, with an empty
plate. But once this particular cultural peculiarity of Anglos is understood,
these gatherings typically become forums for diverse others, mostly women,
to bring some home-cooked food representing their own ethnic cuisine. They
thus provide an opportunity for some discussion of where this or that dish
originates and stories of women relatives and family gatherings back in the
home country, and comparisons over similarities and differences with cuisines
of the other cultural groups present.Mary Douglass famous reading of Hebrew feast argues that Jewish food
taboos revolve around creatures such as pigs or shellfish, considered too
hybrid and incomplete members of their class.47 Eating complete creatures
symbolises the wholeness and completeness of those doing the eating, and
eating of proper food then comes to represent complete membership of the
group.48 Sharing these food laws binds members of a family together, and
to those members of the wider community also subscribing to these laws.
Acceptance of the guest at the Hebrew feast, who must conform to their hosts
food laws and ritual codes, momentarily affirms a common identity.49
Thinking back to the examples posed above begs the question, is there
45. Greg Noble,
The Texturesof Recognition:Ethnicity and thePermission to BeHuman, SeminarPaper, presentedat MacquarieUniversityDepartmentof SociologyColloquium, 8 May,2008.
46. Phyllis Herda,Ladies a Plate:Women and Food,inLadies a Plate.Change and Continuityin the Lives of NewZealand Women,Julie Park (ed),Auckland, AucklandUniversity Press,1991, pp144-172. InNew Zealand, olderwhite women will usethe phrase ladies,a plate; see as well
Juliana Mansvelt,Working at Leisure:Critical Geographiesof Ageing,Area, 29,4, (1997): 289-298.
47. Mary Douglas,Deciphering aMeal,Daedalus, 101,
1, (1972): 61-81 andPurity and Danger,London, Routledge,2002.
48. In ConradLashley and AlisonMorrison (eds),InSearch of Hospitality:Theoretical Perspectivesand Debates,Oxford,Butterworth-Heinemann, 2001,p27.
49. Ibid., p28.
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a qualitative difference between everyday acts of hospitality involving a
dominant culture representative inviting a guest from another background
to partake in a feast of food representative of the dominant culture (such as
the woman giving the Afghan women lamingtons and other Australian food),
and those where guests and hosts (and where the guest/host line is blurred)
bring a plate - typically involving food that represents them in some way?
I would argue there is indeed a difference. This is not to argue that there
is anything necessarily wrong with presenting the complete feast of ones
culture, but that something slightly different emerges out of a convivial
situation involving diverse individuals bringing a plate. Food brought to
such events is typically scented, in the sense that they are often crafted to
represent the identity of the cook and their culture. As Miller has argued,
in the modern, secular world, a sense of everyday ritual and aesthetic order,
embedded through repetition of form, orders the universe and cosmology.50
Unlike unregulated contact with Other food in urban space (such as in the
ethnic restaurant in an ethnic neighbourhood), highly fragrant ethnic
goods brought to the shared table51 as a gift of otherness, a gift of me, is
nonetheless received as an act of giving (and thus entreating reciprocity) and
circumscribed by the rules and orderings of the setting of the feast. There
is usually someone to welcome new guests and a table to put their plate
alongside others, conventions around sharing and admiring one anothers
dishes, and built in translators (the giver, most obviously) who can describe
what the food is and how it is to be eaten. Food that is scented can be more
scented in a situation of ritualised hospitality. It is order, ritual, hospitality,
and reciprocity which makes it safe, or at least reduces the ambiguity andanxiety that can sometimes come with encounters with difference.
Further, bring a plate allows different food preferences to be discretely
incorporated into a shared gathering. One is free to try other cuisines on offer,
but it is also possible to discretely bring ones own plate and eat from that.
Moreover, very often bring a plate also involves sweet foods such as cakes and
biscuits which circumvent restrictions which typically associate with meat.
Fatima: They different culture, they different people. now I learn, I dont
like to share with another people food or drink... because another peoplemay eat pork or dog. Chinese eat dog, Vietnamese eat dog, or drink. I cant
feel like that, I dont know. Im share my food. Im bringing some plate
or dish or something like that, but I dont like to eat from another dish,
because I dont know whats in there (Afghani refugee woman, mid 40s).
Simmel argues that communal eating and drinking can transform a
mortal enemy into a friend unleashes an immense socialising power that
gives rise to the primitive notion that one is thereby creating common
flesh and blood.52 I want to suggest that it is the shared meal, in a situation ofordered reciprocity and hospitality that incorporates hybrid others in a bodily
50. Daniel Miller,The Comfort of Things,Cambridge, Polity,2008, p293.
51. Michael Symons,The Shared Table,Canberra, AustralianGovernmentPublishing Service,1993. Thanks toMarion Maddoxfor introducing thisterm to me.
52. David Frisby andMike Featherstone,Simmel on Culture:Selected Writings
by Georg Simmel,London, Sage, 1997,p131.
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102 New FormatioNs
way, through the consumption of the Others food, in turn establishing, at
least for the duration of the meal, a sense of we-ness in difference. That is,
a sense of commensality that embodies difference. Common understandings
of hospitality are closer to what Derrida calls conditional hospitality, which
relies upon a sense of sovereignty on the part of the host, a sense of mastery
and ownership of ones place in the world.53 Bring a plate makes one both
guest and host, complicating the power differentials of the traditional guest
host relation.
While coded orders of hospitality and reciprocity permeate these
encounters, there is a surplus of conviviality produced. As Lashley and
Morrison point out, hospitality is very much associated with the convivial
pleasures of excess, poised between morality and transgression, duty and
pleasure.54 This pleasurable, and marginally transgressive surplus anchored
in a base of reciprocity and hospitality holds in it the possibility of incremental
openings of identity, where the food, bodies, and narratives of the other seep
across identity boundaries. As Gilroy suggests, once exposure to otherness can
involve more than jeopardy, conviviality has taken hold and he speculates that
a society that embraces everyday intercultural conviviality is better equipped
to take on and deal with racism and discrimination without lapsing into
unproductive guilt and narcissistic anguish.55
FOOD TABOOS: FROM CONVIVIALITY TO DANGER
It is because food is taken into the body that social faux pas involving food
are sometimes experienced as bodily threat or transgression. Misplacedassumptions of shared codes and rituals render hospitality dangerous, or at the
very least shot through with ambivalence. This begins to make sense of many
of the narratives of ambivalence uncovered in my various field researches.
Elderly white congregation members of the local Ashfield Catholic Church
raised with me an example of hospitality declined as emblematic of a wider
malaise of multiculturalism. A group of about fifteen Chinese had joined their
church, and after some months the two groups more or less existed separately.
The Anglo congregation discussed the matter and decided to hold a Sunday
afternoon luncheon to welcome them officially and as an opportunity forthe two groups to get to know one another informally. Unfortunately, on
the appointed day, the Chinese group did not turn up, and two days later,
a letter of thanks arrived, explaining that they had established their own
Church in disused premises a couple of suburbs away, and that this had been
in the planning for some time. Oddly, had it not been for the failed gesture of
hospitality, the Anglo congregation would probably have been quite happy to
hear the news of their moving on. Instead, it became fodder for complaints of
ungrateful migrants who choose not to integrate, despite our best efforts.
Most of the difficult stories in these research projects were tales ofdashed hopes, failed encounters, quiet withdrawal, and social unease.
53. Jacques Derrida,
Of Hospitality: AnneDufourmantelle InvitesJacques Derrida toRespond, R. Bolby(trans), Stanford,Stanford UniversityPress, 2000.
54. Lashley andMorrison,InSearch of Hospitality:Theoretical Perspectives
and Debates,p34.
55. Paul Gilroy,Multiculture,DoubleConsciousnessand the War onTerror,Patternsof Prejudice, 39, 4,(2005): 439.
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Incorporating hybridity is easier in some contexts than in others, and there
are incommensurabilities surrounding differing food cultures and taboos.
The inherent sense of danger in gestures of hospitality, and the threatened
breakdown in the moral economies that lubricate social life, sometimes means
that coming together around food and drink is anxious territory.
For example it was not well known among non-Muslims interviewed in one
of my studies that it is forbidden in Islam to drink alcohol and the concept of
Halal was little understood. This seemed to be a key barrier to greater levels
of intermingling between Muslim and non-Muslims. This was particularly so
for Anglo-Australians for whom alcohol is a key part of socialising, especially
among men who use alcohol as a social lubricant to bond with other males.56
A particular challenge is the social discomfort this can cause, especially when
well-meaning gestures of hospitality need to be declined.
Mubarak: To be honest, with the non-Muslims, when you get to know each
other there is no problem, but when youre meeting a new non-Muslim
person in the beginning, I wonder how Im going to get along with that
person because whatever he drinks or whatever he or she wants to eat and
what I want is probably different, and most of the time it has happened
that because of the difference in eating and drinking, that can block the
talking and we actually dont get along very much.
Some of these food-based religious differences can create a feeling of burden
and in turn a tendency to try to avoid situations where such invitations might
be extended so as to avoid social embarrassment. There are occasions thenon-Muslim hosts are willing to provide Halal food. However, many Anglo
hosts feel that alcohol is an essential part of the shared meal and say they
feel unreasonably constrained to have to avoid alcohol themselves at these
gatherings, despite not expecting their Muslim guests to drink. These are
vexed issues and seem to be one of the most predominant barriers (particularly
alcohol) to mixing between the two groups. These differences can cause
discomfort, and sometimes irritation even among the most well-intended
individuals, and offence can sometimes be taken when a well-meaning social
invitation is declined.Taboos and codes around eating are not confined to those stemming from
religious belief. As writers such as Elias have shown us,57 Western civilisation
is shot through with food related etiquette which symbolises, and reproduces,
given social orders. Yet as anthropologists such as Douglas and a myriad of
others have shown, ideas embodied in the feast, and the social orders it
produces and reproduces, are to be found in every culture. In the country town
of Griffith, this became obvious when discussing with the Samoan Reverend
of the local Methodist church why his attempts to get the Anglo and Pacific
Islander members of his congregation to mix together had failed, despitenumerous attempts.
56. Stephen Tomsen,A Top Night: SocialProtest, Masculinityand the Culture ofDrinking Violence,British Journal ofCriminology 37, 1:
90-102.
57. Norbert Elias,The Civilizing Process,London, Blackwell,2000.
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104 New FormatioNs
Reverend Abera: The Anglo will only bring a sandwich, a sandwich for
any function, but if its Pacific Islanders they want to have a big feast. So
we have them here in the church, and (Anglos) say, Well okay, well help
well have supper down there, and when the supper arrives, we have
sandwiches on one side, and we have pork and chicken [huge dishes that
the Islanders bring] yeah, so yeah, sometimes, the Anglo people say
theres just too much, you know? Too much, and its going to be a waste
of food, and then the Pacific Islander will say, No. This is what we have.
This is what we are, or who we are. If we bring that much, its how we feel.
Each culture (and indeed classed and gendered sub-cultures) has ideas about
what the feast symbolises. As Douglas has argued, the meaning of a meal is
found in a system of repeated analogies.58 Many Pacific Islanders in Griffith59
are first generation immigrants from village-based subsistence societies. The
feast, for these communities, represents hospitality, communality, prosperity,
happiness, excess, and, traditionally, a bountiful harvest. The food symbolises
a sensual feeling of fullness, and having more than enough produces
embodied, somatic affects infused with feelings of joyful surplus. However,
among elderly Anglo women, the feast, at least in the context of a Sunday
church gathering, is structured by codes of restraint, reserved manners and
dainty food. Many of these women would have grown up in Depression and
WWII era times of scarcity where it was a matter of pride to be spare, and to
prepare food without excess or waste. The ideas about too much food and
waste are culturally framed ideas embedded in specific histories.
Likewise, manners and notions of what is a polite way to eat, frameexperiences of discomfort and anxiety in intercultural food encounters. Here,
the Reverend talks about the social unease caused by the coming together of
different food cultures - not so much the food itself, but the codes and rituals
of eating, and the level of excess symbolised by the two ways of eating.
Rev Abera: because Anglo eat with little things, with forks and knives and
then the Islanders, well its very hard for them to come and eat beside
an Anglo without the fork, and the procedures like eating, the Islanders
want to fill up their plate, and then they will go to [sit next to] an Anglo,and they only want to have a cup of tea, so you dont want to go there...
Despite best intentions, it is simply uncomfortable for an Islander with a large
plate of feast food traditionally eating with the hands to sit down next to an
Anglo lady with a small dainty plate of sandwiches, or who eats cold cuts of
meat or quiche with a knife and fork.
These snippets highlight the precariousness of hospitality. As Lashley
and Morrison argue60 the danger lies, precisely, in the possibility that the
opportunity and promise of a relationship will simply not be taken up, thatthe stranger remains a stranger, and that the transformative processes which
58. Douglas,Deciphering aMeal, op. cit., p69.
59. Pasifikacommunities, asthey are known,include Samoan,Tongan, Fijians,Cook Islanders, andMaoris from NewZealand.
60. Lashley andMorrison,InSearch of Hospitality:
Theoretical Perspectivesand Debates,[YEAR]p33.
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acts of hospitality put in motion will simply wither away before they have been
given a chance to take root. Thus, manufactured (or otherwise) situations
of hospitality are always shot through with some level of risk, ambivalence
and anxiety - and these fears are all the more grounded when they involve
intercultural food encounters.
The disjunctures that sometimes occur when different cultural foodways
and their meanings conflict have real material and emotional effects.
However, as Douglas has also highlighted, food is also a field of action
and food choices support political alignments and social opportunities.61
For this reason, she argues ethnic food is a cultural category, not a material
thing, and persists only insofar as ethnic boundaries continue to exist, and
disappears as a category when those boundaries no longer remain salient.
This suggests an element of natural change resulting from changing social
(inter)actions; of symbolic shift and emergent hybridities. It also suggests
intention can come into play, in as much as the parties involved in an act of
hospitality design and present the feast to symbolise something; for example,
incorporating meanings and elements of inter-culturality. In other words,
the white parishioners potentially had the capacity to modify the food they
brought to the luncheon to incorporate the tastes of both communities and
thus symbolise a sense of togetherness, rather than reinforce an old identity.
Nonetheless, the cultural capital (and associated habitus) that imbues such a
capacity to create a situation of intercultural hospitality is unevenly distributed,
and these capacities need to be learnt. It is questionable whether the Anglo
women at the luncheon (or their Islander counterparts) had such a capacity
and deliberately chose not to enact it, or whether they were simply unawareand needed some guidance on how to do it better.
***
As Parker and Karner have pointed out, neither proponents of the community
cohesion agenda, nor its critics, have adequately explored the qualities of
everyday associational life and its affective consequences.62 In Australia,
a myriad of community harmony, anti-racist and community cohesion
programs have sprung up in recent years, a very large proportion of whichinvolve intercultural contact-type activities centred around food. Some are
multicultural food festivals, food tours of ethnic neighbourhoods, others
involving more sustained contact such as interfaith Iftar (breaking the fast
after Ramadan) feasts or intercultural luncheon encounters among community
and church groups as just described.
Cooking shows featuring the multicultural cuisines of Australia are amongst
the most popular, while a succession of government ministers representing the
migration and multiculturalism portfolio have highlighted food in speeches
and press releases as among the more positive outcomes of multiculturalism.63In Britain, Robin Cook told the House of Commons in 2001 that Chicken
61. Mary Douglas,Food in the SocialOrder: Studies ofFood and Festivitiesin Three AmericanCommunities,London, Routledge,2002, p30.
62. David Parker andChristian Karner,ReputationalGeographies andUrban SocialCohesion,Ethnic andRacial Studies, 33, 8,(2010): 1454.
63. For exampleMeave OMarasFood Safari serieson SBS whichfeatures her touringethnic restaurantsaround Australia andvisiting the kitchensof various immigrantAustralians. Otherseries include MyFamily Feast, Food
Lovers Guide toAustralia, andVasilis Garden.
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106 New FormatioNs
Tikka Massala is now a true British national dish, not only because it is the
most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs
and adapts external influences. Reflecting on this in 2008, the Times Higher
Education subtitled a book review with the words: If we are what we eat, then
the UK is a mutable feast of cultural diversity.64 The inevitable hybridisation
of food through intercultural food consumption is frequently appropriated as
a metaphor for how successful multicultural communities form. For example
Parekh, the esteemed theorist of multiculturalism suggested that;
The twofold process in which each cuisine gets multiculturalized and a
new multicultural cuisine develops occurs in other areas of life as well,
such as the arts and life- styles, and to a lesser extent even in such
highly traditional and culturally resistant areas as religion, moral values
and ways of thought. In each case different cultural traditions influence
each other, acquire a multicultural dimension, and cope with its more or
less unsettling influence in their own different ways.65
As Buettner has argued there is no automatic relationship between a reduction
in racism and an increase in multicultural eating.66 In fact food racism is
as present as ever - as evident in the episodic rise of moral panics around
hygiene in ethnic food establishments, White resentments over state provisions
for religious dietary requirements such as Halal or Kosher food, and food
establishments targeted in racial attacks such as recent fire bombings of
Chinese restaurants in Perth, or attacks on Turkish Kebab houses, as occurred
in Griffith during my research there.Yet food is at the heart of many attempts to bring people together, to
bridge differences, to build new communities and cement social ties. It is
at the heart of fantasies of becoming cosmopolitan, and represented as
emblematic of cosmopolitan nationhood. While its symbolic and discursive
functions have been explored the extent to which food actually does bridge
difference or create new forms of community or connection is less obvious
and the practices and contexts that underpin positive changes have been
relatively taken for granted. What I hope this essay has shown is that food
has no meaning, in and of itself, yet plays a fundamentally important role inmediating both commensalities and disjunctures in everyday multiculturalism.
There is nothing implicitly communal or disjunctural about food as it crosses
cultures. Food can produce both borders and commensalities, and although I
have only hinted at it here, I have argued elsewhere that the somatic, sensual
nature of food also matters deeply.67 As Highmore points out, food has far
more than a symbolic, discursive role in mediating relations between self and
other.68 It has the capacity to re-orient bodies in both positive and negative
ways. It is because food is taken into our bodies through the gut, the palate,
through aroma, and visual invocations of visceral feelings, making us porous,that it is experienced and responded to so intensely, and has such power in
64. JeremyMacClancy, in
Spicing up Britain:The MulticulturalHistory of BritishFood, Times HigherEducation Supplement,19 June 2008.
65. BhikhuParekh, CommonCitizenship ina MulticulturalSociety, The RoundTable, 88, 351,(1999): 455.
66. Buettner,Going for anIndian, op. cit.
67. AmandaWise, SensuousMulticulturalism:EmotionalLandscapes ofInterethnic Living inAustralian Suburbia,Journal of Ethnic &Migration Studies, 36,6, (2010): 917-937.
68. Highmore,Alimentary Agents,op. cit., pp386-88.
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moviNg FooD 107
re-orienting ones sensual habitus. Sometimes this orientation is away from
the Other, at others it can help transcend or bridge difference. Duruz stresses
how important it is not to assume eating the cuisine of the other is simply
another expression of racism or colonialism as this misses the ambivalence
of encounter and the fluidity of identity.69
Thus, I have argued that the material, ritual and social settings in which
food is consumed cross-culturally matter immensely. The consumption of
food always needs to be understood in relation to the settings in which it is
consumed, the affective or dispositional nature of each gustatory experience
- as an adventure in otherness, as identity grazing,70 consumed in a safe
setting such as a food court, in a situation full of anxiety, or one underpinned
by an ethic of care and hospitality - and understood in relation to the very
material qualities of the urban environment itself. In short, it matters who is
doing the consuming, where, and among whom. Ethnicity matters, as does
class, and gender, as well as the individual food histories of those doing the
eating.In situations of good faith, ritual gestures of food-based commensality
at the shared table can play a part in producing positive relations across
difference, and indeed, help to knit together new intercommunal identities.
On the other hand, it is important to remember there are always wider forces
at work. For example ignorance, mutual or otherwise, of one anothers food
taboos, or in situations of competition for scarce resources of belonging,
food can have the effect of solidifying and calcifying borders. Layered over
all of these situational, interactional encounters is the larger discursive and
ideological terrain on which they occur.As Highmore has argued, these embodied, sensual negotiations that occur
through inter-cultural eating are also transformative negotiations, and spaces
of potential.71 They are spaces of hopeful encounter,72 in the Spinozan sense
ofaffectus - moments of encounter leading to an increased or diminished
capacity to act and become.73 However, this does not imply a hierarchy of
places where high (positive) or low (negative) intensities of difference are
encountered and negotiated.74 Instead I want to see these different spaces -
food courts, situations of hospitality, sharing plate and so forth - as resources
where capacities and affective dispositions positive towards difference can beslowly built up. As Watson has argued, situations of minimal engagement in
diverse public spaces can help to reduce anxieties towards difference.75 This
is not to idealise such spaces, but it does suggest a need to differentiate and
explore the import of the kinds of spaces I describe as lightly fragranced
- where competition over belonging and identity is not part of everyday
background hum, or affective ambiance. These are spaces characterised not
so much by great leaps forward in appreciating difference, but more about
incremental changes in disposition and the opening up of boundaries.76
69. In RachelSlocum, Race in
the Study of Food,Progress in HumanGeography, 35, 3,(2011): 303-327.
70. Jean Duruz,A Nice BakedDinner ... Or TwoRoast Ducks fromChinatown?: IdentityGrazing, Continuum,14, 3, (2000): 289-301.
71. Highmore,Alimentary Agents,op. cit., p396.
72. AmandaWise, Hope andBelonging in aMulticulturalSuburb,Journal ofIntercultural Studies,26, 1, (2005): 171-186.
73. Nigel Thrift,Non-RepresentationalTheory: Space, Politics,Affect, London,
Routledge, 2008,p178.
74. Duruz, A NiceBaked Dinner ... ,op. cit.
75. Watson, CityPublics, op. cit.,p158.
76. Wise, Hope
and Belongingin a MulticulturalSuburb, op. cit.