Food, Senses and the City

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.

Preface Acknowledgements List of figures List of abbreviations List of contributors 1 The ‘food, senses, and the city’ nexus Ferne Edwards, Roos Gerritsen, and Grit Wesser PART I The city and its other 2 Digging into soil, the senses, and society in Utrecht Vincent Walstra 3 Food activism and sensuous human activity in Cagliari, Italy 40 Carole Counihan 4 Humming along: heightening the senses between urban honeybees and humans Ferne Edwards 5 Sensing vernacular Chennai, not Madras – a photo-essay Roos Gerritsen 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 Joel R. Hart and Daniel Monterescu 7 Thuringian festive cakes: women’s labour of love and the taste of Heimat Grit Wesser 8 The taste of home: migrant foodscapes in marketplaces in Shantou, China Shuhua Chen 9 Sourcing, sensing, and sharing Bengali cuisine on the Gold Coast Diti Bhattacharya 10 Transmitting traditions: digital food haunts of Nepalis in the UK Premila Van Ommen PART III Disrupting and re-imagining 11 A taste for tapatío things: changing city, changing palate Melissa S. Biggs 12 The foodie flâneur and the periphery of taste in Bucharest’s street food scene Monica Stroe 13 Michelin stars and pintxo bars in Donostia: taste, touch, and food tourism in contemporary urban Basque Country Aitzpea Leizaola 14 Source and supply: situating food and cultural capital in rural–urban interactions in Vietnam Catherine Earl 15 Preparing Uchu Jaku: the politics of care in a traditional Andean recipe Paz Saavedra, J. Guillermo Gómez-Urrego, and José David Gómez-Urrego 16 Future directions for food, senses, and the city Ferne Edwards Index

Ferne Edwards is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Socially and Environmentally Just Transitions, Department of Design, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, and was previously Research Fellow, RMIT University Centre for Urban Research, Melbourne, Australia, and Work Package Lead of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 EdiCitNet project at RMIT Europe, Barcelona, Spain. Ferne is a cultural anthropologist researching edible cities, food waste, urban beekeeping, non-monetary food economies, and food sharing. Roos Gerritsen is an anthropologist who works in social innovation and design. In her work she tries to bring science outside its academic bubble. She also works for an organisation that enables exchange through cooking. She worked previously at Heidelberg University and holds a PhD in cultural anthropology and development sociology from Leiden University, the Netherlands. Roos is the author of Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India (2019). Grit Wesser is a social anthropologist currently working on the AHRC-funded collaborative research project ‘Knowing the Secret Police: Secrecy and Knowledge in East German Society’ (2018–2021) at Newcastle University, UK. Previously, she taught social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, UK, where she also earned her PhD in social anthropology (2016).