ABSTRACT

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.

chapter 1|26 pages

The ‘food, senses, and the city’ nexus

ByFerne Edwards, Roos Gerritsen, Grit Wesser

part Part I|65 pages

The city and its other

chapter 2|11 pages

Digging into soil, the senses, and society in Utrecht

ByVincent Walstra

chapter 3|14 pages

Food activism and sensuous human activity in Cagliari, Italy

ByCarole Counihan

chapter 4|13 pages

Humming along

Heightening the senses between urban honeybees and humans
ByFerne Edwards

chapter 5|25 pages

Sensing vernacular Chennai, not Madras – a photo-essay

ByRoos Gerritsen

part Part II|74 pages

Past in the present

chapter 6|13 pages

The sensorial life of amba

Taste, smell, and culinary nostalgia for Iraqi Jews in London and Israel
ByJoel R. Hart, Daniel Monterescu

chapter 7|14 pages

Thuringian festive cakes

Women’s labour of love and the taste of Heimat
ByGrit Wesser

chapter 8|21 pages

The taste of home

Migrant foodscapes in marketplaces in Shantou, China
ByShuhua Chen

chapter 9|12 pages

Sourcing, sensing, and sharing Bengali cuisine on the Gold Coast

ByDiti Bhattacharya

chapter 10|12 pages

Transmitting traditions

Digital food haunts of Nepalis in the UK
ByPremila van Ommen

part Part III|73 pages

Disrupting and re-imagining

chapter 11|10 pages

A taste for tapatío things

Changing city, changing palate
ByMelissa S. Biggs

chapter 13|12 pages

Michelin stars and pintxo bars in Donostia

Taste, touch, and food tourism in contemporary urban Basque Country
ByAitzpea Leizaola

chapter 14|13 pages

Source and supply

Situating food and cultural capital in rural–urban interactions in Vietnam
ByCatherine Earl

chapter 15|12 pages

Preparing Uchu Jaku

The politics of care in a traditional Andean recipe
ByPaz Saavedra, J. Guillermo Gómez-Urrego, José David Gómez-Urrego

chapter 16|11 pages

Future directions for food, senses, and the city

ByFerne Edwards