In Australia, I cannot buy palm oil at the supermarket. The supermarket shelves are filled with bottles of liquid in varying shades from almost clear to golden yellow but none stand out with the distinct redness of palm oil. Like olive oil fifty years ago, I need to seek out palm oil in the niches of ethnicity, in this case African, scattered across the suburban landscape. I venture to a location not more than ten kilometres from the central business district and find the shelves laden with small and large bottles of vividly red oil. Not clear and runny but a dense, particulate, viscous liquid. It stains my hands and the pots in which it is used. Palm oil for general consumption, as used by industry, is bleached and sanitized, divested of its colour so it can fall into line with its pale yellow and white fatty counterparts. In this article I am interested in exploring the intersection of discourses around this single food item, palm oil. In such an exploration I seek to unpick the political act of eating and to investigate how palm oil has become a vehicle of power, disciplining bodies in particular ways and promoting certain ideas about the self and what is 'good'. According to some discourses, palm oil is on the edge of edibility and yet in other contexts its edibility is central--bringing meaning to a sense of 'home' for an African diaspora. The physicality of eating (or, in fact, in deliberately not eating) 'connects together the distant site of production, the domestic site of eating and the site of the stomach'. (1) Creating an identity, asking the question, 'who it is I am?' has become one of the central tasks of the modern era. We can no longer rely on the normative practices of divisions such as ethnicity, age and gender; nor can we rely on signposts such as tradition, religion and politics. These have been redefined and displaced by 'individual citizen consciousness', a reflexive process of constructing and realising self-identity. (2) Foods, as cultural objects, are by their very definition subject to appropriation. In the process of appropriation, food takes on a range of meanings and associations which not only serve to construct 'who I am' but also function to define my relationship with the 'other'. Food, however, is unlike most other cultural forms. If art, music, architecture, gardens, literature, sport, fashion, television, cinema were to cease to exist, life would be poorer and less interesting but there would still be life. If food were no longer available, life would eventually stop. It can be pared down to the barest essentials and indeed it can be willingly surrendered, but even these acts carry meaning and communicate something about the individual and/or the collective. Palm oil as a cultural object is therefore, by definition, appropriable. This is not to say that it has been appropriated but that it has the capacity or the potential to be appropriated. In this context, it is hybridity-in-action such that hybridity is no longer a special case but rather a condition that is a prerequisite for the notion of a cultural object. As McHoul goes on to indicate: Cultural objects are marked by the essentiality of their possible dis-ownership (both emphases are equally important)--by the fact that they can always come to mean things, be recognised, to be used, to be known, to be governed, and cared for in at least two (frequently more) different cultural systems, different assemblages of production and recognition. (3) Palm oil has multivalent meanings and as such produces fluid identities. Palm oil in the developed, industrialised world has been colonised by nutrition and environmental discourses. These discourses are potentially at odds with its work in different contexts in authenticating identity and in the (re)creation of home by African refugees and migrants in Australia and elsewhere. Such discourses and their disjuncture raise questions about the production and circulation of who constitutes 'expert', the fluidity of what is 'good' for the self, and the duality of taste in (re)creating distinction. …