Negotiating cultural boundaries: Food, travel and consumer identities

Abstract

This study addresses the role of food in boundary crossing and maintenance processes in the context of short‐term mobility. We utilize an identity and practice theory approach to understand the ways travelers relate to food in the encounter with the cultural different Other. The study was conducted through interviews with 28 American consumers after a 10‐day trip to China. A semiotic data interpretation revealed the ways the informants made sense of their cultural experience in China through a continuous process of categorization of foods. Counter to the expectations of food consumption as the site of boundary crossing, we find that consumption of food abroad becomes a symbolic project of maintaining boundaries with the Other and sustaining a sense of home. The encounter with the Other through food caused anxiety and alienation, which consumers dealt with by consuming familiar, western foods that enabled the maintenance of an embodied sense of comfort and a familiar sense of home. We further suggest that lack of local cultural capital and marketplace mythologies about the Other as factors that shaped and elevated the negative experience during travel.

Keywords:

• consumer identity
• cultural capital
• food
• global consumer culture
• tourism
• travel

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Athinodoros Chronis and Giana Eckhardt for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this work.