Community-Building

Ethnic food shops are often the centre of their respective ethnic communities and, especially in the case of newly-arrived migrants, the first point of contact with the local urban surroundings. They become embedded in their local communities and reach out to them or support them in numerous tangible and intangible ways. Positioning an ethnic culinary culture in a visible way, ethnic food shops project and stabilise cultural identities around food and the act of eating together, but they also mould cultural identities by adopting new practices and products.

How these social processes of community building and inclusion work and how the cultural practices of food and culinary identities are deployed are questions explored in this dimension of the project.