Tuesday 18 October 2011

Food and the City

Food is the common link people have to a city. Rarely is a building made without consideration to food; its preparation, its consumption, its storage. The ‘food history’ of a place is easier to swallow than the actual ‘school taught history’ of a place, it is also much easier to imagine a place through ones olfactory senses. Patrick Suskind’s book Perfume creatively describes Paris using smell; although the smells imagined were mostly that of the grotesque kind.  The smell of food is one of the many essences of a city. 
Spitalfields Market and the surrounding streets are packed full of restaurants and food outlets. To map these outlets photographically would provide an overall feeling of the space. To then compare this to historic food mappings would show the critical development. Ultimately a futuristic image of the area and the food supply chain can be envisioned, by distinguishing a pattern along a timeline. 
Delicatessen, the french film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro perceives an apocalyptic time where food is so so scarce it is used as currency, and where many of the inhabitants have turned to cannibalism in order to retain their carnivorous ways. What happens to a place when most of the shops and ground floor public domain is dominated by food shops, restaurants and delis? What if food wasn’t so conveniently attainable; most of the shops would be derelict; boarded up for fear of riots. What does this mean for our cities?

Google Map, Food Search

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