Yucky worms or yummy treats?

When I arrived in the UK from Poland in 2004, I did not know that prawns even existed. During our first dubious encounter, I categorized the not-so-aesthetically-pleasing crustaceans as ‘worms’ and refused to look at them, let alone consider eating them. Today, I devour these ‘worms’, and when I do, it is an occasion for my British husband to remind me that, over the years he, my ‘culinary superior’ from Western Europe, has raised my ‘impoverished’ Eastern-European palate to a totally new level. Squid, scallops, mussels, avocado, pomegranate, seaweed, lamb, haggis, sushi, Indian, Thai are some of the foods I encountered only in my adulthood thanks to my migration to Britain and my transnational coupledom that followed.

Like all couples, transnational couples like to talk. Food, as an ethnic marker and thus fertile ground for stereotyping, is one of their favorite topics, as I discovered in my research with Polish-British couples.

Food talk allows transnational couples to negotiate their divergent socio-cultural practices and customs. Ingrid Piller, who extensively researched transnational families, observes that in any relationship partners always bring in their own habits stemming from their individual preferences or family traditions. This is also true of endogamous couples but in the case of partners raised in different countries, the potential for difference talk is greater.

This is not to say that transnational partners endlessly draw divisions between themselves, experiencing what is known as a ‘cultural clash’. Rather, difference talk in transnational relationships has been shown in a considerable body of research as a positive phenomenon, entailing skillful negotiation strategies. Piller (2002), for instance, demonstrates how partners in English-German couples tend to downplay their socio-cultural differences by directly negating them, drawing out similarities or appealing to shared cosmopolitan identities. In a similar fashion, Kellie Gonçalves’s (2012) study shows how Anglophone and Swiss German partners portray themselves as harmoniously combining their divergent socio-cultural repertoires, from which they derive shared hybrid identities.

Can you imagine anyone calling this Christmas carp an “ugly-looking fish”? (Image credit: mdr.de)

In my recent publication in the Journal of Sociolinguistics (Wilczek-Watson, 2018), I build on this research by discussing other forms of difference talk in transnational families, specifically in relation to food, both in everyday and celebratory contexts. The interactive practices listed above are also present in the data the article is based on – video-recorded meal-time conversations in five UK-based Polish-British families and audio-recorded interviews with them. However, this particular paper focuses on another recurrent discursive strategy emerging across these transnational families, namely ‘culinary othering’ – the family members’ acts of representing the food habits of their partner as different, somewhat strange, or even abnormal.

Drawing an imaginary division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, othering constitutes a form of social distancing from a given individual or a group. This practice can entail stereotyping, derogatory evaluations, and mockery of the Other, often in an attempt to achieve a positive self-presentation. Despite its undeniable negative potential, othering has also been examined as a form of bonding, for instance, in the context of gossiping interactions (Jaworski and Coupland, 2005), when the gossiping parties derive solidarity from their joint mockery aimed at third, absent parties. What if the target of othering is present and is also a member of your family?

In the food-related talk of Polish-British families in my study acts of othering seemed to function in a similar, unifying way. While the othered party was physically present and directly faced culinary mockery, both sides seemed to skillfully navigate through their difference talk, displaying a cooperative spirit. This was exhibited for example by indicating in various ways that a given comment should not be taken as stigmatising: by exaggerating stereotypical evaluations to the point of caricature, or by mitigating them, through joint laughter, reciprocated othering or even through provocation of further othering by the targeted side.

To illustrate, when comparing hospitality practices in Poland and Britain, a British partner stereotyped Polish hosts as over-hospitable and mocked their pretentious hosting with an imaginary quote:

‘Here’s the entire quantity of our cupboards on our table, that’s how great a host we are!’ (Extract 1, p.553).

Using this hypothetical utterance of the Other (Polish hosts) with a hyperbolic expression (entire), and additional stress (entire; great), the partner signaled to his Polish wife (and the Polish interviewer, myself) that his statement was exaggerated, and while it could be received as discriminatory, we (the target) accepted its humorous undertone. Moreover, the Polish partner reciprocated this othering, showing an uptake of the strategy adopted by her British husband. The conversation continued and othering occurred multiple times between the partners throughout the interview, for instance, in relation to:

• the aesthetics of certain dishes (‘Oh God, that’s an ugly-looking fish.’ – about a traditional Polish Christmas Eve dish, carp, Extract 4, p.560);
• the quality of Polish wedding reception foods (‘they were good they were nice but …, the focus was on volume, wasn’t it?’, Extract 5, p.562);

Polish Easter breakfast (Image credit: wikimedia.org)

In cases such as these, neither side seems to take offence. Similar instances of mutual mockery and stereotyping in relation to food habits of the other recur across the participating Polish-British families. Arguably, othering comes more frequently from British partners (perhaps due to the fact the couples reside in the UK and thus Polish cuisine being ‘foreign’, becomes exoticised), some of whom also mock:

• Polish Easter dishes as monotonous (‘everything with gherkin’, Extract 2, p.555);
• everyday eating habits of their Polish spouses (‘all my family find it absolutely astonishing that Kuba will get all that milk, fill it right to the brim and sprinkle cereal on top’, Extract 3, p.557).

Nevertheless, the Polish partners likewise stereotype British culinary practices, as in this example about British Easter traditions: ‘the only English tradition we have is chocolate isn’t it? chocolate Easter eggs’, Extract 2, p.555).

These interactions demonstrate the families’ well-developed skills in manoeuvring through sensitive difference talk. The partners’ communicative collaboration reflects and further shapes their common ground, showing how othering resembles ritual mockery, which can in fact neutralise potential tensions in these transnational relationships and foster the couples’ bonding.

The above findings are limited to the Polish-British families I studied. However, culinary othering and its unifying potential is not exclusive to these relationships. As food acts as a salient indicator of class, status, wealth, and individuality, culinary othering is likely to be common enough. Can you share your own examples?

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References

Gonçalves, K. (2013). ‘Cooking lunch, that’s Swiss’: Constructing hybrid identities based on socio-cultural practices. Multilingua, 32: 527–547.
Jaworski, A. and J. Coupland. (2005). Othering in gossip: ‘You go out you have a laugh and you can pull yeah okay but like. . .’ Language in Society, 34: 667–694.
Piller, I. (2002). Bilingual Couples Talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wilczek-Watson, M. (2018). ‘Oh God, that’s an ugly looking fish’ – negotiating sociocultural distance in transnational families through culinary othering. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 22: 5: 545–569.