ABSTRACT
Food practices enter, move through, settle into, disrupt and redesign cities in novel ways: as community gardens and foraging sites, as health food stores and farmers’ markets, as freegan and vegan forms of protest and dietary reformation, as social treatise at the shared table, and by passing through as food trucks and as new forms of food delivery. Each engagement produces tactile, affective, visceral, and embodied relationships between people, place, and products that can instigate and uphold social relationships whilst embodying shifting values, meanings, and politics. Peoples’ engagement with food in turn influences the shape and feel of the city. Acknowledging the senses through urban food practices thus serves as an essential means by which to link people to each other and to where they live. This chapter explores the nexus of ‘food, senses, and the city’ in theory and practice. It reviews the ‘sensory turn’ in the social sciences to acknowledge key debates and concepts and to recognise research methodologies that go beyond the written word. This chapter ends with a summary of the volume’s sections that engage with themes of migration, memory, home, inclusion, politics, and care.
