ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the process of home-based consumption of food and food-related things. It aims to build a geography of making 'ideal' homes through an analysis of domestic food cultures. The chapter provides an antidote to such orthodoxies and offers insight into domestic food practice from a Chinese perspective. It highlights processes of domestic accommodation of culinary cultures that contribute to the understanding of the meanings of modernity in urban China. The imaginations of the 'ideal home' are 'not just trivial fantasies about a perceived aesthetic style or associated social aspiration, rather they offer an idealised notion of 'quality of life' and an idealised form of sociality'. Food are highlighted as key aspects of domestic life, implicated in both imaginations of ideal homes and in the practices that perform and reshape these ideals in the material making of real homes.
