ABSTRACT
Since 2008 I have carried out intermittent ethnographic research in eThekwini/Durban
(hereafter Durban) on the new middle class, across a range of racial categories; and
for the last three years one major focus has been on food provisioning and
consumption. I am interested, as are most South Africans, in the relationship between
race and class, and the possible emergence of a non-racial middle class. The growth
of a new middle class of consumers has been and still is taken as a measure of
success in transforming the country’s society and politics. If a middle class is not
made by how it spends money (consumption) but by its sources of income and
property, consumption has certainly been used to define individual members of such a
class.
