Popular discourses and current government policy focus on the need for individuals and families to make healthy food choices, without acknowledging the social and cultural milieu in which these are embedded. A neo-liberal focus on responsible individualism is part of a middle class habitus that ensures foodwork and foodplay are located within distinct heteronormative cultural fields. In my thesis I explore narratives from seventy-five mainly middle class respondents who engaged in a series of asynchronous online interviews over nine months beginning in November 2010. The themes that emerged aligned with public policy debates on the family, healthy eating, eating disorders, ‘fat’ bodies and elite foodways. Hence, feeding the family ‘healthy’ meals ‘prepared from scratch’ was considered a means of acquiring social, symbolic and cultural capital. ‘Fat’ talk and ‘lipoliteracy’ or learning to read the body were ways of performing femininity, whilst elite foodways were utilised as forms of hegemonic masculinities. Hence, in a challenge to the individualisation thesis my research demonstrates the complexity of food relationships beyond individual consumer choice. Throughout I adopt an auto/biographical approach that stresses the interconnectedness of biography and autobiography, focuses on researcher reflexivity and is sensitive to respondent subjectivities. Respondents used a common vocabulary of individuality, whilst simultaneously embedding themselves in family and kinship relations. Indeed, family, gender, and class, were the means of anchorage in a sea of remembering that engendered a sense of ontological security. Foodways are, thus, part of a habitus that is gendered, classed, temporal and historical. Women in the study conformed to cultural scripts of heteronormative femininity, whilst men resorted to hegemonic masculinities to distance themselves from feminised foodways and care work. These identities were not part of a negotiated family model, but located in cultural fields that reinforced and naturalised gendered divisions, they were bound by gender and class.

“Eating German, the American Way” explores how and why the mayonnaise-based potato salad came to be a staple of American culinary tradition. It examines how native-born Americans and German immigrants in the nineteenth century identified themselves based on their culinary traditions and what they ate and how the interactions between, and accessibility of, those traditions created a new identity based on the sharing of recipes as the two groups mingled and assimilated to each other. It uses food as a way to understand the processes of assimilation by defining the distinctions between the two groups based on their separate repertoire of recipes, looking at the obstacles to the adoption of ingredients or techniques, and engaging with the primary sites of contact that facilitated the mixing of the cuisines to create a shared culinary identity. Cookbooks are used to establish the boundaries which defined German and American cuisine and introduce the first obstacle to be overcome, the language barrier. Magazines removed the language barrier and created the opportunity for more direct interaction between readers from both traditions, but also introduced another obstacle in the perceptions and preconceptions each group had regarding the other. Changes in the understanding of diet and nutrition in the closing decades of the century introduced another obstacle as attempts to standardize and control what Americans ate limited or excluded the contributions of immigrant groups and the language of control and standardizations reinforced preconceptions and the effects of “othering.” Restaurants and ethnic groceries functioned as the sites of direct contact, exposing native-born Americans to the food offerings of German immigrants, and providing direct access to both complete dishes and the ingredients needed to recreate them at home. As native-born Americans and German immigrants interacted and overcame these obstacles, they shared the recipes that defined them and created a new definition of what it meant to eat American food and a new identity as American eaters.