As transnational social networks expand, people increasingly form intimate relationships with partners from a different sociocultural background. While intercultural intimate relationships are not a new phenomenon, they have attracted research only recently due to their global proliferation. Scholars are particularly interested in how such mixed relationships communicate and how their interculturality impacts on partners' (and their offspring's) identities. Some studies have been criticized for overemphasizing cultural differences and identification problems of intercultural partners. This depiction of intercultural coupledom as problematic in early research echoed initial societal perceptions of it. Contrastingly, recent works explore how intercultural partners can effectively communicate and negotiate their complex sociocultural repertoires. The hybrid cultural forms and meanings that intercultural couples create are shown as empowering rather than debilitating. This new approach is also reflected in society and the media, which increasingly represent intercultural families in a positive light, gradually normatizing or even endorsing them.

This paper presents a qualitative discourse analysis of food‐related interactions in four U.K.‐based Polish–British families. The data include the families’ video‐recorded celebratory meals and audio‐recorded interviews. The analysis explores how food talk projects ‘stance’ (Du Bois ) – that is, how it indexes the speakers’ positioning towards their sociocultural field, thus shaping their identities. The data reveal that, as the speakers negotiate their stances in the culinary context, they recurrently ‘other’ their interlocutors’ foodscapes – represent them as different, abnormal and/or inferior. This othering could be interpreted as distancing from other speakers. However, the analysis shows that by humorously highlighting differences between their culinaro‐celebratory repertoires, the family members also reaffirm their sharedness. The speakers’ discursive collaboration during their difference talk demonstrates how othering can be unifying in these transnational families, the potential of which is understudied in face‐to‐face interactions and in the context of food.