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Eating at the Borders: Culinary Journeys

In this paper I examine intersections of food, identity, and place within the imagined ‘regions’ of everyday practices, stories, and memories. As such, I continue traditions of writing in cultural geography exemplified by David Bell and Gill Valentine's [1997 Consuming Geographies (Routledge, London)] focus on connecting cultures of food and place, Jon May's (1996a, “‘A little taste of something more exotic’” Geography 81 57–64; 1996b, “Globalization and the politics of place” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 21 194–215) nuanced explorations of ‘exotic’ eating in North London, and by Ian Cook, Phil Crang, and Mark Thorpe's [1999, “Eating into Britishness”, in Practising Identities Eds S Roseneil, J Seymour (Macmillan, London) pp 223–248] reflections on British culinary imaginaries and their ‘multicultural’ inscriptions. Specifically, this paper is concerned with ways that conceptions of ethnicity delineate and divide everyday spaces: how meanings of Britishness and Australianness, based in the primacy of ‘tradition’, ‘the West’, and Anglo-Celtic belongings, permeate everyday life in London and Sydney and shape their food cultures. The paper traces moments in the culinary biographies of two women, one English and one Australian of British descent, living in London and Sydney, respectively, and close to shopping streets known for the diversity of their ‘ethnic’ communities. The women's narratives are instructive in their continuities, as much as in their disjunctions. The argument follows some of these, including unexpected engagements with ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’ and ‘cosmopolitan identity’. Resonances from these engagements contribute to a more complex and ambivalent sense of belonging than first supposed. This is still the region of ‘mainstream’, ‘Anglo’-identity, yet it is one marked by constant spatial redefinition and by occasional porosity of boundary.