Food, Senses and the City

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).

"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.

• 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