Fragments for a New Urban Culinary Geography

Abstract

APPETISER This paper presents a series of fragments exploring particular aspects of the relationship between food and the city. My intention is not to provide a fully articulated thesis on urban culinary geography, but instead to present some random snapshots, some first thoughts. Some are better developed than others, which flash past like fast cars or subliminal blipverts; that's inevitable in such polymorphous sites as postmodern metropolises. Like that familiar publication that guides us round the urban landscape, the A—Z, the entries are arranged alphabetically, and each follows its own logic and trajectory. The disjunctures between them reflect the chaotic heterotopian shape of the contemporary city. Taken together, they represent the beginning of the project of rethinking how food and urban space come together in particular contexts, from the work of the chef to the scavenging of feral animals. Conscious of perpetrating the crime of generalizing ‘the city’, I would state that the cities of which I am tasting here are early twenty-first century ‘world cities’, the postindustrial metropolises, the them ed, mailed, mediatized urban sprawls—and I apologize for the exclusions and omissions that this inevitably means. Others can surely add to my lexicon with their own entries from diverse locations.