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Monday essays on food and culture, thoughts and feelings. Paid subscribers have access to the full archive and receive two-three posts per month (usually on Fridays), whether that's interviews, recipes, book reviews and more.

Parks and recreation (and picnics)

The importance and value of shared spaces through commensality, plus reading recommendations for the week

Apoorva Sripathi

Jun 19, 2023

∙ Paid

Cross-post from shelf offering

This week's CITY piece is an essay on the importance and value of shared spaces through commensality — namely, eating in parks and at picnics. Written by Apoorva Sripathi for shelf offering, her fortnightly newsletter, it speaks of the history, meaning, and risk of the picnic, in cities where the right to access public space is under threat. We're big fans of Apoorva's work — she wrote an excellent piece on women and bovines as India's founding mothers for our first issue, MILK — and we encourage you to subscribe to shelf offering to receive her excellent essays on food, culture, and anthropology. -

Feminist Food Journal

uni campus lounging in summer — Uni campus green during summer. Photos by the writer.

Although I’ve been part of field trips and school picnics, I didn’t really start picnicking until I moved to London to study in 2018, taking advantage of the city’s many green spaces—including the vast unkempt garden that was shared by my flatmates and myself, where we threw more barbecue parties than…