Food, Senses and the City by Edwards, Ferne; Gerritsen, Roos; Wesser, Grit;

Short description:

This work explores diverse cultural understandings of food practices in cities through the senses, drawing on case studies in North and South America, Asia and Europe.

Long description:

This work explores diverse cultural understandings of food practices in cities through the senses, drawing on case studies in the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe.

The volume includes the senses within the popular field of urban food studies to explore new understandings of how people live in cities and how we can understand cities through food. It reveals how the senses can provide unique insight into how the city and its dwellers are being reshaped and understood. Recognising cities as diverse and dynamic places, the book provides a wide range of case studies from food production to preparation and mediatisation through to consumption. These relationships are interrogated through themes of belonging and homemaking to discuss how food, memory, and materiality connect and disrupt past, present, and future imaginaries. As cities become larger, busier, and more crowded, this volume contributes to actual and potential ways that the senses can generate new understandings of how people live together in cities.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical food studies, urban studies, and socio-cultural anthropology.

"This collection, rich in nuance, offers both visceral and intellectual pleasures. Shaped by diverse and sensitive ethnographies, Food, Senses and the City provides insights into the challenges of our times. Questions of belonging, gentrification, sustainability, humanity and authenticity, for example, emerge through the less usual prism of sensing knowledge in city spaces. Often the approach is vested in "entangled objects" – "the damp vegetal smell" of steamed tamales in Mexico, the deliciousness of greasy meat in a Romanian market. Such objects, similar to Seremetakis’ iconic disappearing peach, allow reflections on how we live and eat together, now and in the future."
Jean Duruz, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre, University of South Australia; Affiliated Professor, Culinaria Research Centre, University of Toronto.

"Given a tendency in urban design to privilege the visual and in social science to focus on process, this fascinating book is a timely reminder that sensory approaches to food and place offer rich territories to consider cultural understandings of food and townscape. By exploring smell, taste, touch and hearing as ways of comprehending the interplay of food and cities, the authors establish a new nexus between food, urban space and the senses. This sensory exploration of food practices in diverse domains – ‘tactile, affective, visceral, and embodied’ – offers a fantastic read for anyone interested in understanding more about food and urbanism and is highly recommended."
Susan Parham, Associate Professor, Director of University of Hertfordshire Urbanism Unit; Academic Director International Garden Cities Institute.

Table of Contents:

1. The ‘food, senses, and the city’ nexus  PART I The city and its other  2. Digging into soil, the senses, and society in Utrecht  3. Food activism and sensuous human activity in Cagliari, Italy  4. Humming along: heightening the senses between urban honeybees and humans  5. Sensing vernacular Chennai, not Madras – a photo-essay  PART II Past in the present: memory and food  6. The sensorial life of amba: taste, smell, and culinary nostalgia for Iraqi Jews in London and Israel  7. Thuringian festive cakes: women’s labour of love and the taste of Heimat  8. The taste of home: migrant foodscapes in marketplaces in Shantou, China  9. Sourcing, sensing, and sharing Bengali cuisine on the Gold Coast  10. Transmitting traditions: digital food haunts of Nepalis in the UK PART III Disrupting and re-imagining  11. A taste for tapatío things: changing city, changing palate  12. The foodie flâneur and the periphery of taste in Bucharest’s street food scene  13. Michelin stars and pintxo bars in Donostia: taste, touch, and food tourism in contemporary urban Basque Country  14. Source and supply: situating food and cultural capital in rural–urban interactions in Vietnam  15. Preparing Uchu Jaku: the politics of care in a traditional Andean recipe  16. Future directions for food, senses, and the city