When Is a Kebab Not Just a Kebab ?
This article analyzes a case of « gastronomic racism » in the northern Italian town of Bergamo. Drawing on long-term ongoing ethnographic field work, it looks specifically at how participants in a Facebook group founded to protest the presence of a kebab stand in the historic Upper City used particular semiotic and linguistic resources, such as food, place, language and bodily experience, to draw boundaries between insiders and outsiders. In doing so, the article contributes to discussions about the meaning of food and its place within local and global communities and networks. It treats food as a heavily marked and potent signifier of the local and the global, embedded within ongoing regional, national and global debates about the value of people, things, practices, and values on the move.