Food in contemporary migration experiences between Britain and Australia: A duoethnographic exploration

Abstract

In this paper we use duoethnography (collaborative autoethnography) to explore food in our migration experiences between Australia and Scotland. In doing so we highlight how autoethnography is underutilized in food scholarship. Previous research on food and migration highlights how migrants maintain and adapt homeland foodways. By contrast, we show how young migrants from high-income countries embed themselves in new food settings: through local food shopping, new recipes, cooking practices, and eating out. We demonstrate the importance to migrants’ food experiences of family relationships, ideas of home, processes of home-making, and changing individual identities. We argue that scholars should attend further to food in voluntary migrations amongst English-speaking nations in the contemporary globalized era. Further, we conclude that duoethnography amongst trusted friends who are also scholars offers a particularly valuable and appropriate method to probe emotional, sensory, and embodied aspects of food experience.