Chapter 5 - Urban cuisine in Brazzaville (Republic of the Congo)

This chapter highlights the results of a baseline survey conducted in Brazzaville in 1992-1993 and a follow-up survey in 2018 on changes in food consumption patterns based on meal monitoring and interviews with food consumers, caterers and food processing companies. Trends regarding meals created by city dwellers, meals from other African cities disseminated by immigrants and by the catering industry are also analysed. Urban catering has undergone major changes over the past 25 years, and Congolese city dwellers now have ready access to international meals as well as new locally invented dishes.

Chapter 2 - Getting out of the kitchen! Reshaping gender relations and food practices in Casablanca

This chapter focuses on some findings of recent anthropological research on changes in food habits in urban areas. The field survey revealed marked transformations in women’s relationship to food. Among these changes, we focused specifically on readjustment of the hdaga attribute, whereby women are commended for their supposed skills and excellence in carrying out their domestic roles. These changes generate tensions for women who are torn between social injunctions and their personal aspirations for wellbeing and fulfilment.

Chapter 10 - Attiéké-garba – good to eat and think about. Social distinction and challenging hygiene standards in the Ivorian urban context

Garba has become a food mainstay in Abidjan and several major cities in Côte d’Ivoire, while also being a select food dish in popular food outlets throughout the country. Nutritionists claim that garba is harmful to health, yet it is ‘worth thinking about’ in terms of challenging food hygiene standards. Garba is nevertheless a hallmark of the rich and diversified Ivorian food heritage, while the wealth of terms currently used to describe it reflects changes in the cultural landscape within which it is eaten. Garba is also ‘worth thinking about’ because the spaces where it is produced and consumed are also venues where social categories take shape: “Tell me where you eat your garba and I’ll tell you who you are”.

Chapter 9 - Bâbenda – a modernized traditional dish: Urban trajectory of a Burkinabe culinary specialty

Bâbenda is a traditional ‘lean season dish’ of the Mossi ethnic group, mainly in the Plateau-Central region of Burkina Faso where the capital Ouagadougou is located. This dish is currently undergoing a popular ‘modernization’, in the words of bâbenda eaters. This chapter aims to shed further light on this urban modernization trend, clarify what it refers to in terms of practices and social perceptions, and how it reshapes food satisfaction functions.

Chapter 6 - Warung makan – public kitchens at the epicentre of informality in Jakarta

In Jakarta’s kampung (slum neighbourhoods), warung makan are food outlets that offer traditional ‘homemade’ dishes (masakan rumah) on a daily basis. Eaters who frequent these commercial food outlets every day regard them as extensions of their households. Moreover, domestic activities are shifting towards warung makan, which are propitious to interactions between eaters and vendors within social networks bound by ties of neighbourliness, kinship, solidarity and trust.

Chapter 3 - Can I trust this food? Trust and distrust in eating among middle-class youth in urban India

The chapter presents an ethnographic study in an urban Indian setting. It discusses how youth notions of trust and distrust mediate their eating choices in the context of macro level changes in food systems. Two aspects are discussed. The first examines the extensive popularity of a packaged product Maggi noodles and the sustained trust invested in it across generations. The second analyses eating out, a common practice among urban middle-class youth.

Chapter 7 - “Home and away” – narratives of food and identity in the context of urbanization in Malaysia

In this study, we use food as a lens to explore the impact of the rural-urban migration on the sense of identity among single, male Malaysians who migrated to the capital city of Kuala Lumpur for work in the 1980s. Following Tibère (2015), we explore the ways the increasing contact between diverse ethnic groups in the cities has contributed to the emergence of innovative ways of regulating multicultural co-habitation through commensality. We conclude that the longing for local and ‘authentic’ foods coexist with the desire among urban residents for hybrid national cultures and transcultural foodscapes.