Eating a home: food,imaginary selves and Study Abroad testimonials

Discourses around Study Abroad (SA) consistently portray a transformational experience for participants who return home forever changed. This article investigates how such change is inscribed in texts addressed to Australian tertiary students considering SA. Acknowledging the significant role of the non-study component of SA in triggering change, this paper focuses on the non-academic domain of food, recurrent in the corpus, 102 SA testimonials from returnees from French-speaking environments of Canada, France and Switzerland, posted on an Australian Group of Eight university website. It investigates the templates provided to shape the imaginary of the readers as to their ideal selves and to legitimize and ascribe value to particular foods and related practices. Are students guided towards the perpetuation of their habits, or in these ‘foreign fields’, is there an opportunity to shift habitus, with food contributing to the reconstructed self? Drawing on Bourdieu and on theories of motivation and of the ideal self, the article proposes a reading that resolves the tension between the integrative use of food, and the future exploitation of the SA experience as a mark of distinction.