Food Senses And The City

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.

The papers collected in this volume discuss the sensory dimension of cityscapes, with focus on touch and smell. Both have been traditionally considered "lower senses" and thus unworthy of being cultivated - objects of social prohibitions and targets of suppressing strategies in modern architecture and city planning. The book brings together approaches from anthropology, aesthetics, the theory of architecture, art and design research, psychophysiology, ethology, analytic chemistry, etc. (Series: Austria: Forschung und Wissenschaft - Interdisziplinar - Vol. 4)

In this book, Alex Rhys-Taylor offers a ground-breaking sensory ethnography of East London. Drawing on the multicultural context of London, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, he explores concepts such as gentrification, class antagonism, new ethnicities and globalization. Rhys-Taylor shows how London is characterized by its rich history of socioeconomic change and multiculture, exploring how its smells and food are integral to understanding both its history and the reality of London’s urban present. From the fiery chillies sold by street grocers which are linked to years of cultural exchange, through ‘cuisines of origin’ like jellied eels to hybridized dishes such as the chicken katsu wrap, sensory experiences are key to understanding the complex cultural genealogies of the city and its social life.Each of the eight chapters combines micro histories of ingredients such as fried chicken, bush-meat and curry sauce, featuring narratives from individuals that provide a unique, engaging account of the evolution of taste and culture through time and space.With its innovative methodology, this is a highly original contribution to the fields of sensory studies, food studies, urban studies and cultural studies.

This book elevates the senses to a central role in the study of food history as the traditional focus upon food types, quantities, and nutritional values is incomplete without some recognition of smell, touch, sight, hearing, and taste. It is ideal for scholars of food history, studies and culture, as well as social and cultural historians.

Illustrated with a wide range of examples, this book presents sensory cultures and practices in and of Asia.

Making Taste Public takes an ethnographic approach to show how social relations shape - and are shaped by - the taste of food. Recognizing that different cultures have different taste preferences and flavour principles embedded in cuisine, editors Carole Counihan and Susanne Højlund ask how these differences are generated. The editors have compiled 14 chapters to show how specific influences become a part of our sensorial apparatus and identity through shared experiences of making, eating, and talking about food. Using case studies from Asia, Europe and America, the book presents a theory of how taste is made public through everyday practices. The authors are exploring how place, production methods and cooking techniques create tastes. They discuss the criteria determining good and bad tastes, and how tastes and memories evolve over time. Subjects such as how values can be embedded in taste, and the role of taste education in food movements, homes, and schools are explored. The different chapters examine definitions and mobilizations of taste in different institutions, public places, and regions around the world to reveal ethnographic understandings of how people learn, experience, and share taste. With contributions spanning the Solomon Islands, Denmark, Japan, Canada, France, the USA, and Italy, Making Taste Public is a fascinating account of how our sense of taste is continuously shaped and re-shaped in relation to social and cultural context, societal and environmental premises. The book will interest anyone studying anthropology, sociology, food studies, sensory studies and human geography.

Urban landscapes are usually thought of first and foremost as engineered formations designed for functionality. It is quite clear, however, that cities and towns are sites of social structure, scenes of diversity, and hotbeds of transgressions. They are also sources of satisfying social relationships, settings for actions negotiated on an everyday basis, and opportunities for kinesthetic and aesthetic experiences. Within these processes, the senses mediate engagement with the optimism of urban growth, the comfort of urban traditions, and a consciousness of the diverse relationships that embellish urban living, but also with the repellent sights and sounds that invade zones of comfort. This book examines how qualities of place and their sensuous reorganisation elucidate particular sociocultural expressions and practices in urban life. The collection illuminates how urban environments are distinguished, valued, or reconfigured with the senses as media for evaluating authentic spaces and places that endure and change over time.

Taste, perhaps the most intimate of the five senses, has traditionally been considered beneath the concern of philosophy, too bound to the body, too personal and idiosyncratic. Yet, in addition to providing physical pleasure, eating and drinking bear symbolic and aesthetic value in human experience, and they continually inspire writers and artists. Carolyn Korsmeyer explains how taste came to occupy so low a place in the hierarchy of senses and why it is deserving of greater philosophical respect and attention. Korsmeyer begins with the Greek thinkers who classified taste as an inferior, bodily sense; she then traces the parallels between notions of aesthetic and gustatory taste that were explored in the formation of modern aesthetic theories. She presents scientific views of how taste actually works and identifies multiple components of taste experiences. Turning to taste's objects—food and drink—she looks at the different meanings they convey in art and literature as well as in ordinary human life and proposes an approach to the aesthetic value of taste that recognizes the representational and expressive roles of food. Korsmeyer's consideration of art encompasses works that employ food in contexts sacred and profane, that seek to whet the appetite and to keep it at bay; her selection of literary vignettes ranges from narratives of macabre devouring to stories of communities forged by shared eating.