This panel aims to explore the relationship between food and the senses in urban and peri-urban contexts, with a particular focus on how these food practices and senses have been reshaped in recent years through an increasing mobility of both people and produce.
Long Abstract:
Food nourishes our bodies and minds: through sharing and shifting into different social, physical, symbolic and sensual spaces, it creates and maintains social relations and distinctions, embodying various social, cultural, and moral values. Food settles in cities in novel ways: with trends including urban gardens, health food shops and freegan movements to street food, food trucks and food delivery.
This panel aims to explore the relationship between urban food practices and the senses. Studies of food practices and the senses provide insights into how the city and its dwellers are being reshaped, and demonstrate how food, memory and materiality connect past, present, and future imaginaries. We ask how city and food practices co-produce each other? How are social relations and distinctions reproduced and reshaped through newly-introduced and diverse cooking styles? What role do the senses play in the production, preparation, and consumption of food? How do particular foods evoke memories of home or the past for new arrivals or provide a means of understanding 'the other' for people who stay put? How do sensorial aspects from community gardens, shared meals or ritual feasts foster new communities? In uncertain times, what food practices stay, go, or return revised and how are these remembered? How do smells and tastes of food accompany life transitions?
Recognising that the food/sense/space nexus can be difficult to represent, we welcome contributions using innovative and creative approaches to explore urban experiences and perceptions, such as performative papers, visual narratives, or audio papers.
This paper aims to study food trucks in Paris by asking how experiences around the food infrastructure shape the identities of city dwellers and redefine urban space. It also explores how exploring the digital space can contribute to the understanding of such phenomenon.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates the food truck phenomenon in Paris in three dimensions. First, it seeks to understand how the modern food trucks shape and reshape the identities of city dwellers. The food truck practices and the senses transform the identities and imaginaries of Paris inhabitants: they encourage non-binding sociality, liberate the locals from the strict French tradition, evoke voyage memories and serve as survival strategies for immigrants to connect to their homeland while asserting themselves into their new home. However, I argue that these experiences around the food trucks contribute not only to the process of social inclusion, but also an exclusion of certain populations in the city. Second, the paper investigates how the food trucks as a new food infrastructure redefines the meaning and use of urban spaces. While they can be considered as a tool to activate urban "dead spaces" as William H. Whyte has suggested, the study also shows how different approaches to senses by city authority and adversaries in the urban foodscape can bring barriers to such development. Finally, a mobile nature of the food trucks makes digital communication central to the phenomenon. The circulation of online images and information around the topic evokes sensory experiences beyond the physical space. I propose this as an alternative mean to explore the senses within the Parisian food truck phenomenon. Through an analysis of Instagram images and online information, the paper depicts how online users perceive the phenomenon and construct their food trucks imaginaries through the digital space.
The new cosmopolitan, burger-centred, urban foodscape is contributing to the articulation of a new class of casual gourmet consumers who use their foodie knowledge to create distinction and to make claims to a new urbanity.
Paper long abstract:
Gourmet street food and fast-casual restaurants are quickly becoming mainstays of Eastern European urban food culture. The new cosmopolitan, burger-centred, urban foodscape is contributing to the articulation of a new class of casual gourmet consumers who use their foodie knowledge to create distinction and to make claims to a new urbanity. Street food provides a terrain for the public articulation of taste and the reshaping of the city's geography and eating out practices. The research looks at food as a material boundary of class and seeks to describe a segment of Bucharest's professional middle class who invest in food practices as one of the main means of self-actualisation. My research interest is centred on the localisation of foodie taste and on the local geography of spaces of consumption that cater for these tastes, in an attempt to describe a foodie consumer portfolio informed by aspirations to minimalism and authenticity. Is street food a means to democratise the urban foodscape? Does it bring about urban revitalisation and social inclusion? What other values are attached to these consumption practices? What are the ethics and aesthetics of gourmet street food and how are they localised?
In this paper, I discuss the meaning of the seemingly ordinary practice of handing out free samples by ecological farmers at farmers' markets. I show that free samples are not only a crucial marketing tactic but a critical means to connect peri-urban food producers to their urban target customers.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I discuss the meaning of the seemingly ordinary practice of handing out free samples by ecological farmers, who grow produce without the use of synthetic agricultural inputs such as pesticides and herbicides, at farmers' markets. I show that free samples are not only a crucial marketing tactic but a critical means to connect peri-urban food producers to their urban target customers. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork at farmers' markets across Shanghai from September 2014 to September 2015, I examine the role of free samples in relationship-building between food producers and consumers. Given widespread concern over issues of food safety such as excessive levels of pesticide residue in food in China, establishing a relationship of interpersonal trust with potential customers is crucial to the economic success of the ecological farmers who do not have official organic certification. By having potential customers taste their produce, the farmers could give potential customers a better understanding of the differences between conventional and ecological produce. The farmers aimed to expose potential customers to flavours that reminded those old enough to remember of a time before the widespread use of synthetic agricultural inputs and opened the eyes of those too young to remember flavours they never thought possible. I argue that offering free samples is not simply a sales tactic; in fact, these samples are goods that have a critical social role in building long-term relationships between ecological farmers and potential customers.
Through sensorial experiences, urban gardens raise awareness for the qualitative values in everyday life, opposing the quantified landscape of the city. As a response to the accelerating urban environment, these green 'oases' share a sense of community, socio-ecological solidarity and mindfulness.
Paper long abstract:
Worldwide small groups of people living in cities gather to practice gardening together. Being the product of field research amongst urban gardeners in the city of Utrecht, the Netherlands, this paper explores the motives of people in this specific urban area to engage with gardening practices. In Utrecht, urban agriculture appears as a social phenomenon opposing the ongoing acceleration of everyday life, by encouraging qualitative experiences instead. The urban gardens do not build on a purpose of production or efficiency. Rather, they are green 'oases' in landscapes of concrete, conveying a sense of tranquility, solidarity and gratefulness through mindful practices and a communal environment. Through practices like planting, spading, cooking, tasting, talking and being people not only share and communicate with themselves and the community, but with the natural environment as well.
Urban agriculture contrasts both urban space and agriculture industry, which are characterized by capitalist ideologies of efficiency, productivity and accumulation. Urban agriculture instead delivers sensorial experiences of gardening in a social setting. Connecting people to practices like farming, cross-cultural collaboration and meditative spading of fields, raises awareness of ecological, social and mental relativity. As a result, the gardens foster association with the nature, society and self at the same time. It is a sign of resilience from a society suffering under the hegemonic notion of quantitative valuation of practices. The education of the senses creates awareness of opportunities to escape this dominant obsession with efficiency, and instead experience and reproduce solidarity to society and ecology.
This paper focuses on the consumption practices associated with the family celebration of the secular coming-of-age ritual Jugendweihe in Thuringia, eastern Germany, and traces their links to place as a significant constituent of personhood.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the continuities and changes in consumption practices during the Jugendweihe family celebration in peri-urban Thuringia, eastern Germany. The majority of research on the secular coming-of-age ritual Jugendweihe has focused on the public ceremony that draws a symbolic boundary between eastern and western Germans. In contrast, this paper examines what the associated family celebration intends to accomplish. I show how alcohol and cakes offered and consumed during the celebration help to maintain familial continuity and simultaneously strengthen ties beyond the family. During state socialism, cakes were seen as central to the success of a family celebration and used to connect the household to others in a network of obligations. Today, hosts may forgo to offer cakes and frame this decision as one based on frugalness, although it marks a distinction between peri-urban and urban settings and their associated change in social relations. Importantly, in many post-socialist countries, particular types of alcohol and cakes at life cycle celebrations serve to make claims to and embody a modern nation (see, for example, Lankauskas 2015). Here, however, these comestibles tend not to reinforce Germanness. Rather, their aesthetics and tastes create - in the process of consumption - embodied reminders of both the familial and the regional home (Heimat). Since place is a significant constituent of personhood, the family celebration more so than the public ceremony, thus refashions roots to Thuringia, that is, being a Thuringian.
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