Food, Senses and the City (Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment)

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.

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).