Urban Foodways And Communication

Embedded in the quest for ways to preserve and promote heritage of any kind and, in particular, food heritage, is an appreciation or a sense of an impending loss of a particular way of life – knowledge, skills set, traditions -- deemed vital to the survival of a culture or community. Foodways places the production, procurement, preparation and sharing or consumption of food at an intersection among culture, tradition, and history. Thus, foodways is an important material and symbolic marker of identity, race and ethnicity, gender, class, ideology and social relations. Urban Foodways and Communication seeks to enrich our understanding of unique foodways in urban settings around the world as forms of intangible cultural heritage. Each ethnographic case study focuses its analysis on how the featured foodways manifests itself symbolically through and in communication. The book helps advance our knowledge of urban food heritages in order to contribute to their appreciation, preservation, and promotion.

Everybody Eats tells the story of food justice in Greensboro, North Carolina—a midsize city in the southern United States. The city's residents found themselves in the middle of conversations about food insecurity and justice when they reached the top of the Food Research and Action Center's list of major cities experiencing food hardship. Greensboro's local food communities chose to confront these high rates of food insecurity by engaging neighborhood voices, mobilizing creative resources at the community level, and sustaining conversations across the local food system. Within three years of reaching the peak of FRAC's list, Greensboro saw an 8 percent drop in its food hardship rate and moved from first to fourteenth in FRAC's list. Using eight case studies of food justice activism, from urban farms to mobile farmers markets, shared kitchens to food policy councils, Everybody Eats highlights the importance of communication—and communicating social justice specifically—in building the kinds of infrastructure needed to create secure and just food systems.

Building Communities through Food: Strengthening Communication, Families, and Social Capital examines the power of food as a communicative tool to bring people of diverse backgrounds together. David F. Purnell argues that food enables people to look past their differences and focus on their similarities, thus creating a stronger sense of community via the sharing of a meal. The preparation, presentation, and ingredients of meals reflect a concrete representation of our individual identities and offer others an opportunity to share and take part in those identities. Scholars with an interest in family communication, interpersonal communication, and sociology will find this book especially useful.

This book explores the food history of twentieth-century Sydney, Shanghai and Singapore within an Asian Pacific network of flux and flows. It engages with a range of historical perspectives on each city’s food and culinary histories, including colonial culinary legacies, restaurants, cafes, street food, market gardens, supermarkets and cookbooks, examining the exchange of goods and services and how the migration of people to the urban centres informed the social histories of the cities’ foodways in the contexts of culinary nationalism, ethnic identities and globalization. Considering the recent food history of the three cities and its complex narrative of empire, trade networks and migration patterns, this book discusses key aspects of each city’s cuisine in the twentieth century, examining the interwoven threads of colonialism and globalization. ​

Exploring Food and Urbanism looks at the ways food and cities interconnect in a diversity of places across the globe. The book’s focus moves from transformations in feeding the city and its hinterland in Istanbul, Turkey, through neighbourhoods struggling with food access in Blantyre, Malawi, to the challenges in making convivial public food spaces in Cairo. It explores everyday buying practices in Islamabad food markets that reflect wider changes in food cultures in Pakistan. The possibilities for growing food in suburban Cape Town in South Africa are tested, while possibilities for sharing meals using online methods to bring cooks and eaters together are considered across the Netherlands. This edited volume makes clear that globally food is critical to sustainable urbanism everywhere across cities from kitchens to gardens, food markets, food shops, streets, squares, neighbourhoods, cities, suburbs, and hinterlands. It shows how food cultures, practices, and economics are closely intertwined with how places are planned and designed even if this is not always fully recognised. The editors of the book conclude that food can and should contribute to responding to the challenges presented by the worsening climate emergency through a focus on sustainable urbanism. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Urbanism.

Discusses how urban agriculture can help revolutionize the environmentally unsustainable modern food industry, providing evidence of thriving urban farms within "food deserts" and describing the global movement towards alternative food production.

The Cultural Politics of Food, Taste, and Identity examines the social, cultural, and political processes that shape the experience of taste. The book positions flavor as involving all the senses, and describes the multiple ways in which taste becomes tied to local, translocal, glocal, and cosmopolitan politics of identity. Global case studies are included from Japan, China, India, Belize, Chile, Guatemala, the United States, France, Italy, Poland and Spain. Chapters examine local responses to industrialized food and the heritage industry, and look at how professional culinary practice has become foundational for local identities. The book also discusses the unfolding construction of “local taste” in the context of sociocultural developments, and addresses how cultural political divides are created between meat consumption and vegetarianism, innovation and tradition, heritage and social class, popular food and authenticity, and street and restaurant food. In addition, contributors discuss how different food products-such as kimchi, quinoa, and Soylent-have entered the international market of industrial and heritage foods, connecting different places and shaping taste and political identities.

This book develops "organizing eating" as an organizational communication-centered framework for understanding how communication and power combine to actively shape eating and working in the U.S. food system. Drawing together established scholars, the book sheds light on how the interconnected aspects of power are communicative in nature, shaping and constraining the possibilities for organizing across the food system. Chapters provide grounded insight into the role of racism, corporate and state power, food co-operatives, urban farm systems, food policy, and labor practices, drawing attention to the pathways needed to pursue more equitable food systems. Providing readers with a set of useful critical conceptual tools and an understanding of communication frameworks, the book identifies common principles for critical organizing within the food movement and addresses the relevance of the Covid-19 pandemic and the national uprising against anti-Black violence for understanding the urgent possibilities of food justice. This cohesive collection of cutting-edge scholarship will be of interest to organizational communication scholars, environmental scholars, and health communication scholars, as well as those working in the areas of environmental communication, health communication, cultural studies, and the interdisciplinary fields of agriculture, food studies, and organization and labor studies.

The human-nature dichotomy has created a rift that has drastically impacted the global environment. To accept the intrinsic value of nature across the disciplines of the built environment begins a process of healing and reform from the local to the global scale. Environmental philosophers, such as Arne Naess, encourage the learning and practicing of ecological knowledge to gain perspective of the interconnectedness between peoples and their landscapes. Food and agriculture, for example, can be used as a tool to highlight human's dependency on the role of nature in production. Agrarian and Indigenous communities practice food production methods that value land sensitivity, regeneration and reciprocity as opposed to the harmful practices that comprise the global food system. The deep, intergenerational knowledge that is gained through regional food production generates environmental virtue and nurtures individual and collective identities connected to a local place. In an increasingly urbanized world, connections to a natural region are being overshadowed by unlimited human expansion. Grounding design in regional and natural sensory immersion from the city to the human scale can stimulate identity and a sense of place. The design solution for this practicum explores the concepts of place and identity, interiority and practical wisdom by considering the human-nature connection within a new urban food network. This practicum examines how interior design has the opportunity to embed eco-consciousness and healing at the human scale of an urban metabolism by valuing community learning and highlighting new and traditional food processes that are linked to the landscape.