Food, Senses and the City

Ferne Edwards, Roos Gerritsen, Grit Wesser, Ferne Edwards, Roos Gerritsen, Grit Wesser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000360707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

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.

1 The ‘food, senses, and the city’ nexus

Ferne Edwards, Roos Gerritsen, and Grit Wesser

Food enters, moves through, settles into, disrupts, and redesigns cities in novel ways: as community, school and allotment 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. Food may be grown, processed, cooked, consumed, and shared. Each engagement produces tactile, affective, visceral, and embodied relationships between people, places, 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, fostering the potential to bring people either together or apart, to connect or repel people from having a connection to place. Acknowledging the senses through urban food practices thus serves as an essential means by which to both link people to each other and to where they live.

Through our senses, we make sense of ourselves and the world. A palpable moment of nostalgia evoked by hearing a song from our youth or by encountering a smell that recalls a place where you used to hear the chai wallah (tea seller) from afar, revealing their presence and almost making you smell the sticky, milky tea that they sell. The smell of the pizza restaurant downstairs irritates us, but as soon as the new owner gives us a pizza occasionally, the greasy aroma lingering in the air is suddenly less disturbing. Think of walking through a city to absorb its atmospheres of colourful murals; of the passing by of tourists slurping iced chai lattes in the summer heat; of tasting fresh produce on the tip of a wooden spoon at a farmers’ market; of ordering a treat from a food truck or a drink from a street bar; of eating in the city’s darkness, perhaps in one of its nearby parks; or of dining in the brightness in one of its fancy Michelin star restaurants.

Such examples already indicate that how we sense and make sense of the world around us is not merely an individual but also a socio-cultural act (Howes and Classen 2014). In this book, we position ourselves between a phenomenological and a cultural approach to the study of the senses. We do not see experience as merely embodied, nor do we see the senses as solely a cultural construct. We are not studying the senses per se, but we are consciously studying with the senses, allowing a focus on the senses to give us a deeper understanding of the food, city, and the senses nexus. Moreover, the senses can be both an object of study and a means of inquiry (Howes 2019: 18), and in this work, we are mostly concerned with the latter.

This approach raises multifarious questions. What role do the senses play in the production, preparation, and consumption of food? How do urban food practices conjure up memories of home for new arrivals or provide a means for understanding those who remain? How are social relations and distinctions reproduced and reshaped through introduced and diverse preparation styles? How do people embody and remember transformations – social, economic, cultural, historical, political – and their materialisation in their everyday lives? Does sensing food materialise vulnerability, uncertainty, the unreliable, the risky, the fragile, or the improvised?

In this volume, we explore how the study of the senses can provide a more holistic, thick description of urban experiences. A sensory ethnography is not necessarily an ethnography that investigates how the senses are used but rather looks at the ways in which sensory experiencing and knowing make sense of people’s everyday lives (Pink 2009). We examine everyday life and the various contexts in which culturally shaped sensory properties and sensory experiences of food are invested with meaning, emotion, memory, and value (Sutton 2010).

This volume expands the increasingly popular field of urban food studies to include the senses; we explore understandings of how people live in cities and how we can understand cities through food. It brings together social science research grounded in rich ethnographic accounts from diverse urban centres around the world to ask how the city and food co-produce each other. Drawing mainly from anthropological accounts informed by related disciplines, this volume asks how the senses can provide unique insights into city life.

Food and its production, preparation, consumption, and mediatisation move through time and space, creating new forms of conviviality, commensality, and sociality. Diverse cultural interpretations, based on both uniting and separating forces of food practices, allow cities to be reconceptualised as ‘many places within one’, revealing new worlds of dynamic cultural engagements that can benefit richer understandings for present and future forms of urban sociabilities. 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 senses can generate new understandings of how people live together or create boundaries in cities. This new direction in both theory and practice extends beyond the dominant focus on larger Euro-American cities to include cities, places within cities, and references to the city in Central and South America, Australia, and Asia.

In this introduction, we explore the nexus of ‘food, senses, and the city’ in theory and practice. We start with a literature review of the ‘sensory turn’ in the social sciences, to acknowledge key debates and concepts in food and urban studies that, in turn, influence this volume’s approach. David Howes (1991: 8) reminds us that there are many ‘ways of sensing the world’; in order to capture the senses, new methodologies need to be developed. This book brings to the fore research methodologies that go beyond the written word applied through grounded case study material. Finally, this chapter summarises chapters in the sections; ‘The city and its other’, ‘The past in the present: memory and food’, and ‘Disrupting and re-imagining’.

The sensory turn in the social sciences

A brief history

Howes’s early work explores ‘how the patterning of sense experience varies from one culture to the next in accordance with the meaning and emphasis attached to each of the modalities of perception’ (1991: 3). This approach later shifted to a form of ‘sensorial fieldwork’ (Robben and Sluka 2007), in which an anthropologist’s sharing the senses of a culture to make sense of it extended traditional interpretations of participant observation. This focus on sensation transformed into a new focus on interpretation introduced by Clifford Geertz (1973), to shift once more to a focus on representation in the 1980s with Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (1986). Marcus regrets that the later discussion focused largely on the textual and ethnographic authority; while he concentrated more on the sensorial and aesthetic concerns in his work with Calzadilla on a Venezuelan market (Calzadilla and Marcus in Cox et al. 2016). Other methodologies and sensorial explorations further aided this shift (Taylor 1996; Grimshaw 2007; MacDougall 2005), in which both sound (termed ‘acoustemology’ by Feld 1991; Feld and Brenneis 2004) and taste (‘gustemology’ per Sutton 2001, 2010) joined the visual in sensory research. Paul Stoller (1997) took the opportunity of the writing debate as a moment to argue for a ‘sensuous scholarship’ in which the researcher’s embodied presence and modes of representation evoke a kind of sensuality instead of treating the senses as an object of study, an approach reflected in several chapters (see Battacharya, Edwards, Gerritsen, and Stroe, this volume). Cultural extensions of what in Western tradition is considered to be the senses were further expanded by Kathryn Geurts (2003), who explored ‘attention’ through recognising a range of indigenous senses. In her detailed study of the Anlo Ewe in Southeastern Ghana, Geurts goes beyond arguing that sensoria vary cross-culturally. Rather, she succeeds in demonstrating the significance of the Anlo Ewe sensorium – including ‘balance’ – for shaping every aspect of social life: moral codes, sense of place, socialisation, and personhood.

Since the 1980s, the senses in the social sciences have begun to receive considerable attention, aptly labelled ‘the sensory turn’ (Howes 2019). From first studying each of the five senses to later developing into an anthropology of the senses (Howes 1991), through to the meshwork of experience (Ingold 2008) and sensory anthropology as a way of conducting research (Pink 2009), ways to work with the senses vary greatly.

Key methodological debates in sensory anthropology

A key debate between anthropologists Sarah Pink, David Howes, and Tim Ingold in Social Anthropology lays bare questions of understanding sensory perception and how culture is understood through the senses (Pink and Howes 2010; Ingold 2011). This section describes three aspects of this debate: challenging an ontogenetic phenomenology, individual versus multi-sensorial perspectives, and singular versus trans-disciplinary approaches for studying the senses in the social sciences.

Beyond a phenomenological perspective

Ingold’s work became the focus of criticism by Pink and Howes; Howes accused Ingold of staying within a limited phenomenological understanding of the sensual qualities of experience that tended ‘to ignore how shared meanings shape the most “natural” of human actions and perceptions in dance and in life, slighting the cultural content inherently implied by physical and cultural experience [Bull 2018 (1997): p. 263]’ (Howes 2019: 20). According to Howes, Ingold did not take into account the way in which perception is a cultural construct and left out some of the lower-ranked senses.

Ingold (2011), in turn, criticised Howes’s approach, calling for a refocussing of sensory anthropology based on experience and perception drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) and James Jerome Gibson’s ecological psychology (1979). Ingold suggests that separating out the senses, as proposed by Howes, situates them within a disembodied ‘culture’ that is incompatible with anthropology’s stance on situated and embodied knowledge (Pink 2010). Furthermore, Ingold accused Howes of his own limited claims of seeing neuroscience within a historical and cultural paradigm, therefore undermining his own claim about indigenous sensory systems. In other words, by claiming that neuroscience is also part of a certain paradigm, one would actually not be able to use notions out of this paradigm to understand other paradigms. While we are not interested in taking a stance in this debate, we describe it at some length because we do see merit in its key points. In this book, we are neither merely following Howes in his cultural approach nor taking a purely phenomenological approach. Instead, we see a study of the senses in both, where individual experience is made by its environment, and this environment is made by socio-cultural and individual contexts and experiences. The ways in which the sensoria create and are created by experi...