Conflating class, culture and ethnicity: Casual and culinary forms of racism in Alice Pung’s Laurinda

Literature can function as a lens through which social values are mediated. This characteristic acquires particular relevance in the case of children’s and young adult literatures as the world-view of the young readership is especially susceptible to the ideologies articulated in literary works. This article investigates the critical depiction of Australian multicultural society in Alice Pung’s novel Laurinda (2014). By analysing the role of food in both the novel’s plot and its figurative language, the article explores the novel’s illustration of the alienation of Asian minorities that is triggered by instances of overt and casual racism. The tangibility of foodways enables the illustration of how a lack of interaction between distinct social classes and ethnic groups is conducive to an absence of cross-group understanding that contributes towards the conflation of class, cultural and racial differences and prevents the achievement of the multicultural dream.