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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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moviNg FooD 85

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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moviNg FooD 87

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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moviNg FooD 89

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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moviNg FooD 91

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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moviNg FooD 93

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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moviNg FooD 95

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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moviNg FooD 97

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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moviNg FooD 99

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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moviNg FooD 101

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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moviNg FooD 103

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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moviNg FooD 105

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.

moving food proofs

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