Narrative constructions of British culinary culture.

This thesis aims to explore culinary culture as a process around which identity - across a range of scales - is reproduced. It examines the relation between narrative constructions of self and the material practice of food production for individuals involved in the production of culinary culture. The research explores food's relation to identity by examining the oral history life stories of 40 individuals involved in the food industry in England. By focusing on food producers the research examines how discourses of identity (such as race, class and gender) are reproduced by, through and against narratives of food production (such as multiculture, domesticity and authenticity). Neither food nor identity are examined as knowable 'things', but as negotiated processes that are mutually constituted through a range of different yet related discursive practices. Life story interviews provide a means of examining food's relation to identity as shifting, provisional, nebulous, contestable and contingent. Moreover, the life story approach makes possible an analysis of food production and consumption through narrative accounts of a person's life. By interrogating the intersections of food, sUbjectivities and histories, and commercial retail practices, the research situates the individual within the sphere of production. In so doing the thesis assesses the relation between work and home, food production and food consumption, narrative and practice, and their relation to discourses of identity and food in contemporary Britain.