Eating into multiculturalism: hospice staff and service users talk food,‘race’,ethnicity,culture and identity

Abstract

Using an innovative analysis, this article concocts an imagined ‘dialogue’ between hospice staff and minoritized service users. It mixes together narrative extracts about food from separate qualitative interviews, enabling staff and service users to ‘talk’ to each other against a context of the multicultural provision of food within an English hospice. The dialogue is put to work through an analysis that explores the connections, exchange and contradictions between speakers. This analysis also theorizes the implications of the dialogue for the implementation and effectiveness of multicultural policies, procedures and practices, while also examining its relation to varied, embodied and racialized power relations at times of ill-health.