Thank you Ingrid! Yes, that recurs in my data too, the Polish equivalent is ‘kapusta kiszona’, which is used to make one of ‘Polish’ traditional dishes – bigos (hunter’s stew). I will always remember how I made my first ever bigos in the UK in 2004 to impress my British husband (than boyfriend) just as we started dating each other. At that time Polish ingredients were not easily accessible in the UK so I had to use normal cabbage… I think he will never forget it either…

Hilarious! Thank you for sharing this, Alexandra 🙂

Thank you for your comment Alexandra and sharing your examples – sounds like food is a major topic in your family!

You mention self-othering, which is another prominent strategy across the Polish-British families I studied, and I’m hoping to write about it soon. While performed by both sides in these relationships, arguably it comes more frequently from the Polish partners, perhaps as a consequence of them being recurrently ‘othered’?

As part of my data included video-recordings of mealtime conversations during various celebratory events, it allowed me to also examine the families’ talk around food preparation and food sharing, which you mention. In my doctoral thesis I talked a lot about various processes of ‘metaculture’ proposed by Urban (2001) – how these celebratory occasions in these transnational families were metacultural in that they constituted ‘culture about culture’, a metacommentary on what the families perceived as their respective culinary-celebratory codes and also how they propelled the motion of culture through the process of reproduction (the reproduced food practices, artefacts, of course always with some micromodification) and through the speakers’ reflexivity on them as well as dissemination (passing on those food practices, in this case in the immediate family but also transnationally, to other family members visiting from abroad).

What I found particularly interesting is how the partners perceived the concept of ‘authenticity’, how they referred to it (directly or indirectly), and how this all related to the above metacultural processes, leading to the question: where does ‘authenticity’ begin and where does it end? I guess the notion of authenticity would be very pertinent to the study of food marketisation, in the context that you propose – what a great idea by the way! (I’m in, if you need me 🙂

Fun and fascinating! I married into a foodie Hong Kongese/Cantonese family so we talk all the time about food. There’s a running mild joke about my non-HK father-in-law getting a fishbone stuck in his throat while travelling on a multi-day train in the PRC and the ensuing, ever-escalating efforts to help him. Running jokes (the fish-bone one, anyway) seem to include the target as a complicit joke-maker. Recently we all had a hands-on dessert peeling and eating a jackfruit, and we all joked about embodying foreign stereotypes, but in all these joking conversations I notice that I don’t have the social position to initiate the joke. During my stints in China, I’ve found people love talking about how foreign their food must seem to me, to the extent that it can deflate the ambiance if I have already tried the food, but paradoxically people are also very happy if I already know their cuisine. This is because they construct it as absolutely central to cultural identity, so much so that it is difficult to explain that food is not so central in Australian cultural identity and that migrant countries have mixed food cultural practices, even within one home. Many of my Chinese students’ favourite TV shows was a food tour of China through which viewers (via the host) could enjoy learning about regional food culture. (As Gegentuul’s comment notes, regional-to-region foreignness is socially salient, often lovingly joked about.) By far the most popular university English lesson I taught was about varied foreign foods and the cultures and agricultural conditions they come out of, but the jokes the students made were about themselves eating foreign foods (especially during our in-class cheese-tasting activity). The point is that not only (self-)stereotyping but sharing food, food knowledge including food lexicon are common strategies for approaching and then bridging social distance, and also for maintaining culture in diaspora conditions (with humour as the metaphoric MSG!), making your research focus a great choice!
PS – Personally, I think the commodification of this language-food-culture-affinity nexus is interesting but I hypothesise that foreign food humour is much more ambivalent once you take it from the dining table to the market. If I had endless time, I would do a study about language & food marketisation with data from my family-in-law’s work making ‘Westerners’ know, buy, and cook Chinese foods, as they run a food import business and have run various supermarket & foodie campaigns and events.

Thank you for your example of culinary othering on the regional level, Gegentuul, very interesting! Indeed, the context is highly important here and I talk about it in more depth in the article. As you note, in certain situations more stigmatising undertones could be lurking behind such seemingly innocent food mockery.

Your comment reminded me of the talk by Seungku Park (Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania), which I had the
pleasure to listen to during the Culinary Linguistics conference at Hofstra University, NY in 2015. Seungku discussed two controversial coinages in Korea used since the mid 2000s by young Korean males to refer to young Korean females: ‘doenjang-nyeo’ and ‘kimchi-nyeo’, formed by adding a Korean suffix ‘nyeo’ (girl/woman) to two food names – doenjang (soy bean paste) and kimchi. The former was used first to mean ‘young Korean (single) women who show over-consuming propensity for conspicuous life style’, which meaning then changed in the late 2000s to focus on their consumption of Western lifestyle specifically. The latter, ‘kimchi-nyeo’ appeared in the early 2010s to replace ‘doenjang-nyeo’, and then in the mid 2010s another meaning change occurred – ‘kimchi-nyeo’ started to be used to mean a ‘gold digger’. Seungku explained how these linguistic changes reflected the complex sociopolitical conflicts between genders and social classes in Korea, which again links to what you said about the potential of culinary othering to reveal (and likely foster) more serious tensions in certain contexts.