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This chapter explores the idea of contextualizing immigrant identities through the naming and labelling of food in the process of eating it, not just as a cultural marker but as an identity marker. It takes its lead from the semiotics of Ronald Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mary Douglas. According to Lévi-Strauss, human identification with food involves a complex cognitive process as food; to identify a food, one has to "think" it, to understand its place in the world—and, therefore, understand the world—and in particular, to name it, order, and classify its elements. A culinary system provides criteria that can be used in these mental operations; it provides, as it were, a matrix. The implications of globalization and transnationalism on such food markers are explored in a specific multicultural context, that of the Oman where the flow of migrant communities have historically seen diverse groups of culinary influences transform the way in which food is viewed and labelled.

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-10-8468-3_6

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