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By Isabela Vera and Emily Vera

My brother and I almost share a birthday — I was born on August 11th, 1992, and he just over three years later, on August 12th, 1995. Most of my early memories of our birthdays involve him crying.

As classically hyper-invested North American parents, my mom and dad took pains to organize blowout birthday parties for us each year. Our family was small — just the four of us in Vancouver — and so they wanted to make sure that we could invite all our friends and that they would have a good time. The parties were nothing particularly fancy or expensive, but they were ornate in terms of costumes and characters.

I remember waking up on the morning of my Harry Potter-themed eleventh birthday to a living room transformed with poster paper into Hogwarts’ Great Hall, and hysterical sobbing emanating from my brother’s bedroom. While I prepared to don my bushy black wig and crooked plastic glasses, my mom, in full dress as Minerva McGonagall, had cornered my brother with a revamped (in the sense that it now had four holes for arms and legs) potato sack and a homemade headband with two hot-glued grey ear tufts. I wasn’t sure what the fuss was about — Dobby was a very important character! I advised him to get himself together before my first guests arrived and the Sorting Hat ceremony started. 

Even his own birthdays were occasions for frustrated tears. You should have thought about the fact you didn’t want to wear green tights before choosing a Peter Pan party, I hissed at him a year or two later through the bedroom door he’d barricaded himself behind, while adjusting the straps of my green Tinkerbell jumpsuit. 

We’ve long since grown up and moved out, but last year we both found ourselves at home in Vancouver for birthday season — the big 3-0 for me, and his 27th. My mom, relieved of her duty to put on a British accent and wave a wand around, got to work thinking about how we could celebrate as a family. She quickly became fixated on recreating a lobster dish she had as a child at a long-shuttered Chinese restaurant in Montreal, Ruby Foo’s. In her own words:

Ruby Foo’s was an iconic Montreal restaurant open from 1962-84. For our family, it held particular significance in the mid-70s to the early 80s. It was a place we would go when we wanted something a little extra special — either for an occasion or when we just needed a treat after a long week. As soon as I would hear the words “Let’s go to Ruby Foo’s tonight” I would begin to salivate and my heart would double-beat — like one of Pavlov’s dogs, just better fed. I knew that Lobster Cantonese, our family’s favourite, would certainly be on our order list, as would another love of mine, beef & broccoli. I would peel off my jeans and toss them on the floor, slipping a flowered dress and patent shoes onto my skinny frame. The car ride itself was mundane but, like flying to any frequented destination, still provided a certain bubbly excitement of anticipation.

In my memory the tables were round but I am not sure that is accurate. Once the food was ordered we would share stories from our day or argue over big issues, even though I really had no idea what I was talking about. And then the moment would arrive when that steaming plate of pure lobster-y deliciousness would be set down on the table. Serving spoons would slide into the sauce, like a canoe going into the water from shore. A little stir of the ingredients would reveal the chopped lobster, the pea-sized pieces of pork, the slices of green onion and the sauce — oh the sauce! Conversation halted. Each bite was enjoyed and savoured until the inevitable reality: the plate was empty.

With full bellies and hearts we would head back home. Food was such a point of connection for our family of four. It has woven through our lives, and even though Ruby Foo’s is long gone and my parents are not on this earth anymore, I feel them and our shared love of good food with my own family now — and that feels as good as eating the famous lobster Cantonese itself!

Unsure if this dish really existed, I set out to trawl the depths of the internet — but it didn’t take long to come across Ruby Foo’s menu archived online. 

And sure enough: it had lobster cooked Cantonese style for the grand price of $2.60, on the shortlist of Ruby Foo’s Suggestions.

The menu conjures up the exact image of the kitschy 70s decadence my mom described. Montreal’s most permed and perfumed coming together, with the drinks — the strongest ones are suggested on the menu in pull quotes — flowing and the Virginia Slims burning.

I thought of Ruby Foo’s lobster while editing Alison Wong’s CITY piece about her grandparents’ Chinese restaurant in New York City, and Chelsea Lee’s piece about her family’s helper, Jia, and her “iconic” tomato-egg stir-fry that Chelsea continues to cook today from her kitchen in London. 

My mom, a secular North American Jew, grew up eating a lot of Chinese food with her even more secular parents. Chinese restaurants were a way they connected to their heritage and community without going to synagogue or keeping kosher. Lobster, of course, is one of the least kosher foods of all, and some 50 years later, this dish still looms large in her mind — much like Jia’s stir-fry continues to for Chelsea. Dishes take on a life of their own in our imaginations; they become a vessel for our memories and a stand-in for homes that we’ve long since left, ties to people who are no longer near.

I’ve lived most of my life without my maternal grandparents. My grandmother passed away before I was born, and my grandfather when I was just five years old. The few memories I do have of my grandfather feel about as far away as an economy where cocktails cost 60 cents. But when I closed my eyes to savour the first bite of our recreated Ruby Foo’s, for a brief moment, I could summon a world where they were still alive — sitting around the table with us, arms slung over my mom, reminiscing on years of themed birthday parties they hadn’t missed (remember when Ethan cried because he had to wear tights?) and enjoying a dry martini or two.

-Isabela

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Lobster, Cantonese-style

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One of the highlights of the experience chronicled in Steph’s piece was receiving an early morning message that alerted her to the presence of the fabled St. George’s mushrooms, just 10 minutes from her flat. Out she goes to find some, and upon return, she writes:

I return home and cook just a couple of the mushrooms for breakfast. At first, they taste a bit bland, but then I realize they just have a different kind of flavour than the mushrooms I commonly eat. That night I make the most delicious sea spaghetti dish with the mushrooms, a creamy sauce made with chestnut flour, a little wild garlic, and lovage, seasoned with dried fermented horseradish.

We’ve been lucky enough to have Steph share the recipe with us here. If you’re not yet financially supporting our work and are in a position to do so, consider upgrading now so that you can try it out for yourself!

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Read the Issue

It’s hard not to start every Letter from the Editors with something about the strangeness of passing time. Perhaps looking back at an issue — work which has accompanied us through many months and involved the hard work of many people — leaves us feeling a little sentimental. 

When we put out our call for pitches for CITY in the grey, gritty days of February, we were expecting the focus to fall heavily on topics relating to urban planning, urban food policy, sustainable supply chains, and (de)industrialization — urbanism in all its technicality. But by striving to choose a lineup of the kind of stories that you’re not likely to see published elsewhere, we ended up with an issue dominated by contributions that are far more personal, more tender. Together, the pieces in CITY bring us closer to understanding the complex linkages — material, symbolic, emotional — between food and cities, and how they contribute to feeding our bodies, our memories, and our ways of relating to one another.

Our CITY issue at a glance:

Respectable Lives and Transgressive Tastes | Sohel Sarkar

Bitter Oranges | Theodora Cadbury

The Shadow Mothers | Chelsea Lee 

Home or Something Like It | Isabela Vera

CROSS POST: Parks and recreation (and picnics) | Apoorva Sripathi (from shelf offering)

Happy Family | Alison Wong

Food, gentrification, and the city | Isabela Vera with Alison Hope Alkon (podcast)

BONUS: A wee walk on the wild side | Steph Marsden

Food and movement

Given that 19% of the world’s foreign-born population is estimated to live in global or world cities and the powerful role food plays in connecting us to people and place, it is perhaps unsurprising that this issue deals a lot with the related themes of movement, migration, home, and belonging. 

In “Bitter Oranges”, we accompany Theodora Cadbury as she navigates sourcing bitter oranges — an abundant but inaccessible and undesirable foodstuff — in her new city after a move from London to Barcelona. We were captivated by Theo’s vivid descriptions of the challenges and discomforts of being an outsider in a new urban space, as well as the magic moments that can begin to make you feel at home.

In conversation with Theo’s piece, co-founding editor Isabela Vera, who recently moved to Barcelona from Berlin, brings us “Home or Something Like It”. It is a bittersweet reflection on the many homes she’s had over the years and a meditation on the things we leave behind when we go looking for more. Like Theo, she portrays the importance of food in forging new relationships with people and place, in ripping up old roots and putting down new ones. While perhaps food’s centrality to this process is not unique to cities, it is unique in them, as both Theo and Isabela explain.

Further east, in Hong Kong, Chelsea Lee’s “The Shadow Mothers” also explores the loss of things left behind when someone moves to a city in a country far from home — but in an entirely different context and with entirely different stakes. Chelsea illuminates the complex dynamics of live-in domestic work and how it blurs the lines between labour and love, using powerful descriptions of her own experiences with her family’s domestic helper Jia. We learn that Jia moved to Hong Kong from the Philippines leaving behind her children and jeopardizing her relationship. Despite the sacrifices she and other domestic workers make, however, their work — like so much other gendered labour —  is invisiblized in spite of its essential contributions to the city’s economy. Essential, too, is the care, or something akin to love, that they provide to their charges, as demonstrated by Chelsea’s continuing desire to cook Jia’s best recipe as an adult from her kitchen in London, and tender reflections on their relationship. 

In Alison Wong’s “Happy Family” we see people of an older generation forging connections to a new (urban) place through food. In this piece, Alison tells the story of her grandparent’s Chinese restaurant in The Bronx, explaining the pivotal role they, and many other migrants, have played in shaping New York City into the place it is today. She uses her grandparents’ story to explore how gender and race have influenced labour dynamics in the United States since the mid-1800s. This includes the ways that cooking was seen as a “safe”(i.e., feminine) job for Chinese men in the face of white angst over labour competition, and how contemporary male chefs are credited with bringing “authentic” Chinese food to the American public. She also looks at how these dynamics played out at a micro-level within her own family, describing how her grandmother would shoo her out of the kitchen, hoping she would study instead of cook.

Food, power, and public space

No issue on cities would be complete without some discussion of public space — and of course, in our case, food and eating in public space. In this issue, Sohel Sarkar, Apoorva Sripathi, Alison Hope Alkon, and Steph Marsden, all raise questions about placemaking, or reimagining public places to promote urban vitality and human health, equity, justice, happiness, and well-being. They also make us think about the ways that power operates through food and public space in urban contexts. 

For Sohel, this means using street food as a conduit for reclaiming women’s rights to the city. Sohel’s evocative essay, “Respectable Lives and Transgressive Tastes”, weaves together personal memories about street food from growing up in 1990s Calcutta with historical research and feminist and class critiques. She demonstrates how street food can be a vessel for existential anxieties over the mingling of genders and identities in the streets, and how these anxieties can be tucked into the language of health and sanitation as a proxy. She also explains how the oppression of women and the marginalization of vulnerable men intertwine over plates of street food since both women and street vendors are considered intruders in public spaces.

When we read the serendipitously published “Parks and recreation (and picnics)” by Apoorva (of MILK fame) on her Substack shelf offering, we were excited by the resonances with our issue. In it, Apoorva speaks of the history, meaning, and risk of the picnic, in cities where the right to access public space is under threat. She argues that a “hospitable city” depends on the reimagining of public places like parks and beaches as spaces of commensality. Again in her piece, we see how power works through restrictions on food consumption in public space: “In a conservative and congested country where intimacy is difficult and constantly policed, gatekeeping public spaces only reinforces moralities in the name of ‘culture’”, writes Apoorva on the Horticulture Department of Karnataka’s decision to dictate that couples cannot sit close together nor consume food in a popular park in Bengaluru. (P.S. If you don’t already subscribe to shelf offering, run, don’t walk to sign up!)

In the only podcast of this issue, “Food, gentrification, and the city”, Isabela talks with Alison Hope Alkon, Associate Professor of Teaching in the Community Studies Program in the Department of Sociology at UCSC and co-editor of A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City. In their conversation, Alison importantly points out how food — urban agriculture, restaurants, and retail — can become a tool of displacement. Local food cultures are packaged up and sold to newcomers with deeper pockets, often in gendered ways, falling back on tropes of women of colour as loving, caring food producers. Even well-intended acts of placemaking, like urban agriculture, can end up damaging the livelihoods of vulnerable communities by driving up property values. 

Finally, Steph’s piece, “A wee walk on the wild side” about urban foraging in Edinburgh, points to placemaking of a different kind — reimaging urban public space as a food source. Steph was a participant in The Wildbiome Project, a citizen-science experiment that involved foraging and eating wild foods for a month to assess the impact on health and the microbiome, and in this piece, she documents her experiences participating in this project and how it changed her relationships to her urban surroundings. Steph reflects on the sheer amount of labour required to sustain herself in this way, raising questions about privilege, time, and nourishment.

New perks for paid subscribers coming soon

We hope you enjoyed this issue’s journey through some of the world’s great cities as much as we did. We’d love to hear your thoughts about it: Did you see resonances between the pieces in this issue that we’ve missed in our letter? Let us know in the comments. 

We couldn’t produce FFJ without the support of our paid subscribers. Paid subscribers can expect a few goodies to come their way before we wrap up CITY once and for all. We’re going to share CITY-related recipes for:

• Sea Spaghetti

• Ruby Foo’s Lobster Cantonese

• Seville Orange Marmalade

To receive them, consider supporting FFJ through a monthly or annual subscription plan. Paid subscribers also get access to other bonus content like audio versions of most written stories, including those in CITY, usually read by the authors themselves. (You can find the links for these at the top of each post in Substack.) We’re also soon going to launch our paid-subscriber-only Whatsapp group, where we hope many interesting conversations will be had! 

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We’ve already started working on SEA and are excited to bring it to your inboxes in September.

We will be taking some holidays over the next weeks as we get ready to launch SEA, the Whatsapp group, and a new online merch store. We hope you will also take some time to rest, reconnect with yourself and your loved ones — and of course to eat well — as you enjoy the slow fading of the current season towards the next.

So far in CITY, we’ve been to Kolkata, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Hong Kong, New York, and Oakland. Now, our last piece takes us north to the hilly, majestic city of Edinburgh. We first stretch our legs in Gorgie, a southwest neighbourhood home to food designer and retailer Steph Marsden of Amuse.

We connected with Steph earlier this year about documenting her participation The Wildbiome Project, a citizen-science experiment that began in May 2023 and involved foraging and eating wild foods for a month to assess the impact on health and the microbiome. We commissioned CITY back in February and originally fretted that this piece might come too late to include in the issue — but thankfully, everything has worked out time-wise and we’re thrilled to share her reflections on the project with you here. The following excerpts from her journals explore her new connections to place and renewed appreciation for food labour. - IV & ZJ

May 2022

Observations: A Post-Pademic Walk Through My Neighbourhood

It’s early spring, and as I step onto my tenement back green, I see the start of dandelions, young nettles, and hogweed shoots. An apple tree still bearing rotting unpicked fruit to my left and a sprouting hedge full of bramble thorns waiting for the fruits of the autumn season. I smile to myself as I see the wild strawberry variety I transplanted from my parent's overgrown garden in-between lockdowns, camouflaged amongst the undesirable “weeds” —  plants thought to be in the wrong place. 

Like many shared private spaces in the city, it's shamefully “unkempt”, but the wild parts are great for nature, making it a desirable hang-out for squirrels, birds, snails, slugs, insects, and local cats. It’s been a battle to try to keep the space safe and secure, but the wild parts play a role here too. I’ve certainly grown fond of the nettle patch, for its success at deterring intruders who may be looking for a place to empty their bladders after a Heart’s football match. 

There is litter everywhere. It’s unsurprising, since this is one of the most densely populated areas of Edinburgh, and is loved by fly-tippers who seek out our community to dump their business waste or old rental furniture. Some of this anti-social behaviour has been addressed by the local councillor who regularly walks around the area, tweeting at the council to uplift the rubbish and  cut the hedges, and by local community artists who initiated a project disposing of needles and crafting, planting, and painting in the streets, to liven up areas in need of a little care. Although the art may be a sign of gentrification, it is appreciated by many. 

Apart from furniture, mattresses, and unceasing dog shit, the most noticeable items are empty cans of Tennent’s Lager, plastic takeaway cartons, and McDonald's packaging, interspersed with the odd bit of shiny plastic or interestingly textured ropes or cable ties. Through a fence near the brewery I see a pizza box surrounded by these types of items, backlit by a sunny burst of daffodils; it is a sweet and weird juxtaposition as surely someone must have planted the daffs but nobody picked up the rubbish. 

I follow a route which became one of my favourite lockdown walks. I pass car parks planted  with spiky-leaved bushes of blue-green mahonia and blousy roses. I traipse over a wooden bridge with a flowering currant bush on the right and past my local, fragrant sweet cicely patch.

This patch of land by the Water of Leith always brings me calm and joy. I love to see that the kids from the local primary school, Balgreen, are usually outside. Often the younger ones walk two in a row, holding hands or clutching clipboards for identifying plants. Sometimes I see them cooking over a fire in their outdoor school area, which is peppered with hammocks swinging from trees. I swing past the skate park, past the playground, which are always packed with kids and their adults during the summer. 

Then I wander through Saughton Walled Garden and head down Gorgie Road. Gorgie, a southwest neighbourhood, just 3.5 km from the centre of Edinburgh, has the majority of usual UK retail suspects: an Aldi plastered with large “Buy Scottish'' ads, a big Sainsburys, a wee Co-op, Greggs, Costa, Poundstretcher, plus a large array of independent grocery shops selling a diverse range of staples, fruit and veg to serve the needs of a diverse community. 

As I walk down Gorgie Road from Saughton Park I take care to observe the spaces, the food, and people also walking. I long to ask them what they think Gorgie tastes like, and what they tend to eat at home most regularly. Some day I may ask…

April 2023

The Wildbiome Project: Preparing to Taste Georgie

As life would have it, I now have a little more opportunity to discover what Gorgie tastes like. In February, I signed up for a call out for participants in The Wildbiome Project, a citizen science project led by forager Monica (Mo) Wilde, to examine what effect a wild food-only diet would have on the gut microbiome. Along with fellow forager Matthew Rooney, Mo spent a year during the COVID-19 lockdown eating only wild food. They documented their experiences in their book The Wilderness Cure. They both found significant health benefits and noticed interesting changes to their gut microbiome during this time, and wanted to expand the project to allow further tests as a basis for research. In essence, they wanted to know: If you are what you eat, what happens when you add something wild?

I was one of 26 participants who would be living off a wild indigenous British diet. Half the group would be eating wild for three months and the remainder (myself included), for one month. This meant cutting out most sugar, dairy, carbs, and fat, as well as caffeine and alcohol, based on what was classified as wild and available in the UK. As a citizen science project, the plan was to raise funds, log and document everything we picked and ate, while taking a lot of tests, including nutrition and hormone tests, blood glucose monitoring, and gut samples aimed at analyzing changes to our health. At the end, our results would be compared against a control group of 26 people eating normal, store-bought food.

In preparation, I spent a couple of months stocking my kitchen, filling my freezer with wild game, sourcing a stash of wild nuts, and re-organising the stockpile of smoked fish I’d accrued from travels around Scotland in the past. I’d intended to use this fish to make Cullen skink, but had ended up lazily stashing it in the freezer after a couple of days in the fridge. I filled jars with wildflower bubbling sodas and started fermenting wild greens and pickling buds. I googled “how to make mead” and found a few articles with lists of required starters, sterilizers, and specialist equipment. I ignored the fermenter-bro rhetoric and re-entered “How to make wild mead”, setting about a brew with nothing more than a large jar, luke-warm water, local honey, and witchy enthusiasm. This enthusiasm was less about magic, and more about trusting in my experiences of dabbling in fermentation over the last few years and learning to use all of my senses when observing the fermentation process.

As the project’s start date approached, I tidied out my kitchen cupboards, hiding the tempting array of teabags, herbs, spices, pasta, and anything containing sugar on shelves behind doors that I wouldn’t plan to open for the duration of the month. The cupboard I would open was reserved for wild food only. I planned a couple of days off from my retail job for when I started the wild food diet, in case I was lacking in energy or suffering from caffeine withdrawal. 

May 2023 

Eating Wild Part 1: Flowers, Greens, and Labour

It’s possible I’d had romantic notions of how my wild food diet would begin: spring sunshine dappled on plants; me, picking cherry blooms and wild greens on the way back from reading books in the local parks. I was looking forward to planning day trips to the coast, or the woods to harvest seaweed or hunt for mushrooms, replacing my expenditure on brunch and beers with Scotrail day tickets. But my first week is spent with a cold, popping out only for short walks in-between intermittent bouts of rain, on mostly grey days. It’s a good reminder that I am a part of nature and nature cannot always be controlled. 

As the skies — and my cold — begin to clear, I venture out more. I pick the fresh shoots of dandelions, young nettles, and hogweed shoots from my tenement back green, which I will freeze and use for quick dinners later in the month. I curse myself for not picking the now rotten fruit off of the apple tree. I notice how the sweet cicely seeds I planted two years ago are now growing, and how the wild alpine strawberry has spread as ground cover. 

There’s still litter and dog shit everywhere. It’s often smeared across pavements like the flourish of a sauce on a plate of a fine-dining restaurant and means I’m usually watching the ground during this part of my journey through my neighbourhood. The local councillor, who used to walk around the area making reports, has since been replaced.

I walk my favourite route, harvesting tart but juicy blue fruits from spiky-leaved bushes of mahonia next to where, later in the month, I’ll be plucking petals from the rugosa (the beach rose being a council favourite) when they’re about to fall from the bush. Over the bridge, the (flowering) currant flowers have already been picked, but I discover the heady scents of cicely in many more locations than I noticed last year. I find wild leek, wild garlic, nettles (both dead and stinging – alive!), ribwort plantain heads, and Jack-by-the-Hedge (garlic mustard) in patches away from the main path. I stuff the bounty into the biodegradable freezer bags I have taken to carrying around with me. I sometimes feel awkward when picking greens, especially in larger quantities, but the roll of bags I’m using to collect feels like a kind of shield. I could be a dog owner, about to clear up my dog’s mess. Except I don't have a dog.

As I hear the gentle gush of the river, I think of the Dreamer of Peace sculpture in Saughton's walled garden and realise I feel tranquil again. I haven't seen many schoolchildren outside this year.  It must be because the weather has been murky, and COVID-19 restrictions have been relaxed. Up an embankment nearby, I find yarrow, common vetch, and the delicious lemony greens of common sorrel. I pick around some leaves, which are adorned with cheap plastic feathers off the boas worn by Harry Styles fans. They are still lingering on these plants days after his Murrayfield Stadium gig. Harry, please say something to your fans! I pick cherry blossoms from the trees outside of Saughton Walled Garden, remembering to select those that are beginning to open but not yet in full bloom, which I will take home to ferment and salt. 

Day to day, foraging to eat is quite simple. I pick things as and when I need them, on the way home from work, or by adding a little extra walk when visiting friends or running errands around the city. The process of seeing and picking within nature is always calming. I I like learning about the medicinal properties of some plants, and using them to relieve period pain or other ailments. 

The food prep and cooking, however, is quite a lot of work. As I ration eggs, get creative with nut flours, and endeavour not to waste anything, I wonder if Mrs Beeton would be proud of my household management. 

By the midway point of my month of eating wild, I am thinking more about domestic labour than I am about my immersion in nature and daily connection to indigenous practices. So much of my time is spent doing the washing up, putting things away, and keeping on top of preserving and preparing the bounty of my foraging. It’s impossible to turn these thoughts of labour off. One night while watching Jewish Matchmaking on Netflix and munching crab and sweet cicely pancakes, I began thinking about the extra labour involved for those observing a diet rooted in specific cultural or religious practices. Labour not just in the daily cooking of food, but in the planning and sourcing of ingredients. I think about the impact of diets on socialization and how much I rely on other people’s labour. I try to socialize as much as I can, but as my wild food diet is exclusionary I miss a friend's birthday celebration in a restaurant. 

When I have to translate the common names of all the plants I pick into Latin for spreadsheets (see the glossary at the end of this piece!) , I feel like I’m doing a Masters again! However, this process helps me understand some roots of biology I never got to learn at school, and makes me appreciate the variations of common names used in both different regions and different countries by other foragers. Fitting all these tasks around my day job in food retail and buying, I abandon the notion of train trips to the coast on days off, and choose instead to rest. I ditch my plan to spend significant time diarising my Wildbiome experience on Instagram, or on my sporadic food and design blog Amuse in lieu of rest. Rest is important. 

Eating Wild Part 2: The Power of Community 

One morning around two weeks into the diet, I wake at 5:00 am to sunshine streaming through the window and a whole load of missed Whatsapp messages and videos from my friend Robyn. 

“I think I’ve found St George’s mushrooms in the cemetery. Look! They’re in a ring… so I took some home to identify.”

The location is just 10 minutes from the flat. This feels too good to be true, I am nervous but also excited. Though I’m not normally a morning person, by 5.30, I am on my way to the grounds, armed with a rucksack and mushroom knife.  

It takes me a while to locate the patches in the video. When I find them,  I’m nervous, as I’ve never ID’d a mushroom on my own before, certainly not one I was planning to eat. I re-read all the Instagram posts of my fellow Wildbiome foragers about this variety, which include pictures and descriptions, as well as a handy guide to lookalikes. Then I spend a while on Google to confirm that  this could be none other than the fabled St George's mushroom. The smell is so distinct – like wet pastry! (Or, if you agree with some of the internet commentaries, semen.) I also take a spore print, but hours later I realize that using a white piece of paper for white spores wasn't the wisest move. 

I return home, 95% sure of the ID, and cook just a couple of the mushrooms for breakfast. At first, they taste a bit bland, but then I realize they just have a different kind of flavour than the mushrooms I commonly eat. That night I make the most delicious sea spaghetti dish with the mushrooms, a creamy sauce made with chestnut flour, a little wild garlic, and lovage, seasoned with dried fermented horseradish. 

After that, the mushrooms become a staple of my wild diet. As a snack, I make mushroom pate with rosemary found in Harrison Park and dried fermented wild garlic to eat with acorn and seaweed crackers. I take the plate to a Eurovision party, along with some of my homemade mead. 

Almost a week later, I get a Whatsapp message – “Food is coming!” – from two friends who’d been foraging in the woods outside of the city. She has a pantry full of fresh and dried staples waiting for me, a flurry of gifts that make it feel like Christmas. They hand me a huge variety of seaweeds, a bunch of sweetly scented woodruff, and a textural variety of chicken of the woods mushrooms. 

This friend was one of many who left jars for me at work or sent Instagram messages asking if I’d like the wild food surpluses they had. I realize that having a strong community is key to eating this way. Unlike the majority of foragers in the research project, I was not a professional, and at times I felt a little awkward as to the limitations of my knowledge. The network of support I found through the Wildbiome Project was essential to my success in and enjoyment of the project.  

Take-Aways: In Both Senses of the Word

As I near the end of my month on the project, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at my energy levels. Someone even told me that I was glowing! Fortunately, my cravings for foods I could not eat weren’t as extreme as I had anticipated. 

I head down Gorgie Road again. Since last May, many new takeaways and grocery shops have opened despite recent harassment from teenage gangs in the area. Sadly some of last year's takeaways closed before I had a chance to visit them and I resolve to sample all of the offerings once my wild diet is over. I reflect on how this experience has given me a greater appreciation of the edible bounty on my doorstep — both the diversity of tasty wild plants found permeating spaces not filled with concrete, stone, tarmac or brick, and the abundance of food businesses in the local community. I begin to think about which local eatery’s food I will enjoy first, once the experiment is over. Will it be pizza from 1926 or masala dosa from Chennai’s Marina? 

The experiment concludes as it began, with a slew of blood tests, blood glucose monitoring, and the all-important gut microbiome test. There is only one issue: I can’t poop on demand on the day I planned to give my sample. Or the next day. Like my illness at the start of the month, it was a reminder that I can’t always control this part of nature…myself.

Along with the other 25 participants, I am looking forward to receiving the results of my microbiome tests and detailed analysis of the project which we expect to be shared publicly in September. In the meantime, I have returned to my previous predominantly organic diet, the majority of food sourced from Locavore CIC, where I work. Although I doubt wild food will be the mainstay of my diet in the future, it’s impossible to imagine life without wee walks on the wild side in the coming seasons; seeing, sniffing, picking, tasting, learning and sharing. Now, as I walk down Gorgie Road from Saughton Park I wonder how many people in the neighbourhood know just how many wild greens are in the vicinity of these shops and take aways. Some day I may ask…

To find out more about The Wildbiome Project or help make a donation to cover the costs of the tests and subsequent analysis, please visit their Go Fund Me page.

Steph Marsden is a food designer, retailer and researcher based in Edinburgh. She completed an MSc in Gastronomy at QMU, Edinburgh in 2018. Steph believes finding fun ways to ‘play with food’, or our perceptions of it, is a great way to learn more about the complex nuances of what we eat, and its relation to culture, the environment and our global food system. She will be documenting her forthcoming food projects on her blog at .

Glossary

In your city (or area), how do you see food linked to broader patterns of development and economic change? Is it a force for good — revitalizing neighbourhoods and catering to eager tastes? Or is it a harbinger of more sinister changes to come, changes which constrain the ways you live and experience your place?

In this episode of Feminist Food Stories, originally published on our podcast, Isabela sits down with Alison Hope Alkon, Associate Professor of Teaching in the Community Studies Program in the Department of Sociology at UCSC1 and co-editor of A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City. Published in July 2020 by NYU Press and focused on large to mid-sized cities in Canada and the US, the edited volume explores the complex links between food, urban development, gentrification, and the right to the city.

Isabela and Alison reflect on the book’s findings to discuss why we should include food in conversations about gentrification, and vice-versa; how to understand gentrification as an outcome of cultural or structural drivers; how well-intended activities like urban agriculture and food activism can inadvertently displace vulnerable communities, and how gentrification links to gender and racial justice.

Credits

This episode features research, writing, and sound editing by Isabela Vera and original music by the Electric Muffin Research Kitchen.

Big thanks to all contributors to A Recipe for Gentrification, whose insights and analysis were instrumental in shaping this interview.

Transcript

A full transcript of the episode is available online here.

Further reading

Alkon, A. H., & Agyeman, J. (Eds.). (2011). Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8922.001.0001

Anguelovski, I. (2015). Alternative food provision conflicts in cities: Contesting food privilege, injustice, and whiteness in Jamaica Plain, Boston. Geoforum, 58, 184-194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.10.014

Anguelovski, I., Brand, A. L., Ranganathan, M., & Hyra, D. (2022). Decolonizing the Green City: From Environmental Privilege to Emancipatory Green Justice. Environmental Justice, 15(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2021.0014

Bonotti, M., Barnhill, A. Food, Gentrification and Located Life Plans. Food ethics 7, 8 (2022). https://rdcu.be/dhzRR

Fullilove, M. T. (2013). Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities. NYU Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt21pxmsz

Guthman, J. (2008a). “If They Only Knew”: Color Blindness and Universalism in California Alternative Food Institutions. Professional Geographer, 60(3), 387–397. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330120802013679

Guthman, J. (2008b). Bringing good food to others: Investigating the subjects of alternative food practice. Cultural Geographies, 15(4), 431–447. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474008094315

Sbicca, J., Kato, Y., Alkon, A. H., & Project Muse (Eds.). (2021). A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City. New York University Press.

Smith, N. (1987). Gentrification and the Rent Gap. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 77(3), 462–465. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2563279

By Alison Wong | Paid subscribers can listen to Alison read this piece on our podcast.

Read the whole CITY issue

Before I was born, my grandparents owned a Chinese restaurant called Chow Fon, in Pelham Parkway, a neighbourhood in the Northeast section of the Bronx. It had a yellow awning with large green and red letters, which my Yeh-yeh, or grandfather, kept in the hopes of retaining the clientele of the previous owners. Far from the neighbourhoods with more established Chinese populations, like Manhattan's Chinatown and Queen's Flushing, Chow Fon was among the limited Chinese take-out spots in this northern corner of New York City. 

My father remembers Chow Fon feeling like an extension of home. He and my aunt and uncle would work in the restaurant after school, handling the cash register and cycling deliveries. In the kitchen, he recounts, white takeaway food boxes were piled high above the prep counters where wooden chopping boards sat, surrounded by large containers of diced carrots, onions, and celery. The sound of my grandparents swiftly striking pork and chicken with their meat cleavers as they cut it into bite-sized pieces reverberated around the space. 

On the stove, pots of flavour-rich sauces simmered — sweet and sour, brown gravy, soy-based marinade — all heavily concentrated with the salty-sweet tastes that characterize Chinese American cuisine. When the chopping was done, my grandparents would stand at their woks, stir-frying dishes over high flames, enduring the heat that blistered from the fryers. They served up barbecued spareribs, fried chicken, and fried rice for a local clientele made up mostly of Jewish and Italian immigrants who populated that area of the Bronx. 

By the time I came into the world, the restaurant had been sold. My main experiences of Chinese food were inside the home with my grandparents. More often than not, my Ngin-ngin, or grandmother, could be found in front of the stove, standing tall at 5’4” as she chopped and fried away, engulfed in a cloud of steam from the rice cooker to a soundtrack of sizzling oil from the stove, her lips painted a deep shade of red. 

Yeh-yeh, on the other hand, stayed out of the kitchen. A taciturn man, when Yeh-yeh spoke, his deep cadence could almost be felt, like a low rumble. I always thought his tall stature and perfectly coiffed hair gave him the air of a serious businessman. While Ngin-ngin cooked, he often sat with his feet up on a stool in front of him, his arms crossed, his face bathed in the blue light of a Cantonese TV channel. 

"Yeh-yeh was the head chef at the restaurant, right? Why does he never cook for us at home?" I once asked my dad, watching as Ngin-ngin tossed onions in the wok.

"He doesn't know how to cook," my Dad replied. 

"But didn't he cook at the restaurant?"

"Yes, but that wasn't cooking."  

At first, this answer confused me. Hadn’t he spent decades manning the woks, too?

“Take a look behind every kitchen door and you will find a complicated history of cultural migration and world politics," writes Cheuk Kwan in Have You Eaten Yet?: Stories from Chinese Restaurants Around the World. This is certainly true in the case of my grandparents’ restaurant and home kitchen. When my father said that my grandfather "never actually learned how to cook", he really meant that he never learned how to cook homestyle Chinese cuisine. 

Instead, as a line cook in Chinese American restaurants, he cooked food tailored to the white American diet. The dishes he prepared bore little resemblance to Ngin-ngin's Cantonese home cooking, which drew on generations of knowledge handed down to her. These dynamics in my grandparents’ household trace the racialized and gendered considerations of immigration and labour in the US — immigration which gave rise to the explosion of Chinese restaurants in the country.

***

My grandfather immigrated to North America from Hong Kong in the late 1950s in search of better economic opportunities, leaving behind my grandmother and my father, who was a young baby at the time. He settled first in Vancouver and entered into work eagerly, saving every penny as he tried to establish a foothold on the new continent before bringing his young family over. He found work in restaurants, as a line cook, taking long shifts behind the stove. After my grandmother and father moved to Vancouver, my aunt and uncle were born. The young couple worked hard to build up their savings before finding a pathway to immigration and moving to New York City. 

New York City had already become a hub for the Chinese American community and a locus for the country’s Chinese restaurant scene in particular. The story of Chinese restaurants in the city begins in the mid-1800s when workers — most of whom were young, male, and from rural areas of the Cantonese-speaking Guangdong province in China's south — travelled to San Francisco as labourers during the California gold rush. Many of these men worked for the Central Pacific Railroad, building a rail line from California to Nevada. The conditions of this work were dangerous and exhausting and Chinese labourers received only one-third of the pay of other workers.  

By the end of the 1860s, the railway's last spike had been driven into the ground, the gold rush was slowing, the Civil War had ended, and the US economy had begun its slide into the Long Depression of the late 19th century. As jobs dried up, white labourers began to blame the Chinese immigrants, holding anti-Chinese rallies that eventually turned violent; Chinese labourers were forced out of Chinatowns in Western regions and Chinese miners were lynched so the mobs could steal their gold. Meanwhile, the government implemented The Page Act of 1875 — one of the first federal immigration laws — which effectively prohibited the entry of Chinese women into the US, under the assumption that most were sex workers. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese men from entering the US, constructing an entire group as "undesirable" and essentially locking the Chinese community in place, as they no longer had the right to enter and exit the country. Chinese migrants, trapped in the US with dwindling opportunities, began to move eastwards and settle in the enclaves we know now as Chinatowns in states like New York.

Some decades later, these laws would be amended to allow highly-skilled migration, and eventually repealed entirely, but they had a lasting impact on the American economic landscape and the place Chinese immigrants carved out for themselves within it: namely, running restaurants and laundries. This niche, writes Jennifer 8 Lee in her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, had everything to do with racial and gender hierarchies: “Cooking and cleaning were both women's work. They were not threatening to white labourers.” These jobs were deemed safe for Chinese men to hold, instead of agriculture, mining, and manufacturing jobs.

In the fifty years between 1870 and 1920, the number of Chinese restaurateurs in New York City exploded from 164 to 11,438, even as the total number of Chinese workers employed in the city went down. The city went from having six Chinese restaurants in 1885 to more than 120 between Fourteenth and Forty-fifth Streets and Third and Eighth Avenues alone just 20 years later. 

As Greg Young and Tom Meyers note in an episode of their Bowery Boys podcast, Chinese food became a part of New Yorkers' diet long before bagels, hot dogs, or pizza, making it a cuisine that is "authentically New York". The preferences of New York City's eaters shaped Chinese restaurants' taste, price, and style, as savvy Chinese entrepreneurs worked to increase their cuisines' appeal to American society. Chop Suey was a famous entry point; the city went wild for it. In the early 20th century, this dish fuelled a rising New York City, with bohemians and well-to-dos alike indulging in it during their midday breaks from the office or after nights at the jazz clubs. Eventually, the chop suey craze morphed into a more expansive taste for a cuisine that Lee writes is "more American than Apple pie". Often more heavily fried and sugared, the food offered in America’s Chinese restaurants began to diverge from Cantonese cooking at home. Soy-barbecued spareribs, boneless chicken wings, and beef steak and onions — these dishes were created solely for the American consumer.

***

While my grandmother's home cooking was tied to the preservation of culture, my grandfather's time in the kitchen, cooking Americanized Chinese dishes, was a purely economic pursuit. In other words, my grandmothers' reproductive labour — like that of so many other home cooks — was considered separate from the "productive" work of running a restaurant.  

At the same time, although women of my grandmother's generation were traditionally confined to domestic functions such as childcare, cleaning, and cooking, my grandmother tested the boundaries of these traditional gender roles. At Chow Fon, she adopted dual responsibilities as the head of the family's home kitchen and an invaluable restaurant cook. After it was sold, she continued her role as head chef at home. I see her as someone who had agency, both in the home and outside of it.

A table set by Ngin-ngin was a feast for the eyes and the stomach. From Chinese broccoli to Bok choy, the steamed and fried greens would be piled high, slathered in soy and oyster sauces. Bowls of egg noodles with Chinese flower mushrooms and chicken, lightly stir-fried, would waft their juicy aromas. Lobster and black bean sauce would sit at the head of the table, next to traditional Hainanese chicken rice. On festive occasions, such as Chinese New Year, seemingly never-ending dishes would flow out of Ngin-ngin's kitchen, day after day.

Ngin-ngin took pride in being the sole cook in the family and would rarely allow me into her kitchen to help. No matter how much I wanted to be her sous chef, she would instead encourage me to study. Learning math, she said, was more important than cooking. When I would visit my grandparents at home, Yeh-yeh usually only greeted my arrival with a stoic, serious frown. Ngin-ngin, however, would come to greet me with a giant kiss on the cheek — leaving behind a lipstick kiss that I took to be good luck — but she wouldn’t let me follow her back into the kitchen. I wonder how it would have been if I pushed a little more; maybe I could have seen more, caught a glimpse of what she put in her meals. 

When my grandparents got older, we began to eat outside of the home — no one in the family was expected to replicate Ngin-ngin's cooking. In Manhattan's Chinatown, we'd dine at restaurants where glass Lazy Susans were set atop white tablecloths. Here, my grandmother's expertise was undeniable. She would frequently comment on the quality of the food: "Too much oil," she would tut. Or, more devastatingly, "That's not how you cook that". 

My grandmother was certainly not alone in her discernment. As time has passed, New York City has become home to restaurants serving food in more home-cooked styles; more traditional than the Chinese American fare of restaurants like Chow Fon. One needs only to read about the recent dim sum scandal surrounding Shun Lee's on the Upper West Side to see how seriously New Yorkers take Chinese cuisine. The controversy surrounding the use by copycats of the Shun Lee name is a testament to the quality that customers expect from its head chef, Mr. Wang, who has been credited as the first to bring food that went “beyond Americanized Cantonese cooking” to New York.

If my grandmother had been born in a different generation, I wonder if she would have been in more professional kitchens, donning her apron and serving guests at a larger establishment. I can imagine her cooking different kinds of food, more like those that were served in the home, to her hungry clientele. But it's the Mr. Wangs of this world who are credited with introducing "real" Chinese food to the general public. Despite their immeasurable culinary knowledge and skill, Chinese women still rarely get to use these abilities in professional spaces. 

***

Regardless of perceived authenticity, Chinese food and Chinese American food are quintessential parts of New York City. With their knowledge of both traditional and adapted tastes, Ngin-ngin and Yeh-yeh, along with countless other immigrants like them, played a pivotal role in shaping the city into the culinary destination it is today. New York’s Chinese restaurants have become part of the city's fabric, a reflection of the large community of Chinese immigrants who now call the city home. Today, Chinese restaurants feature on many street corners. Everybody has their local favourite.

Whether their role in city-making is recognized, however, is a different matter. Racist labour laws may be a thing of the past, but anti-Asian sentiment in the US remains; we saw this with the increased discrimination and attacks on New York City's Asian community during the pandemic. Restaurants in New York City, and other parts of the nation, faced violent attacks, destruction of property, and countless economic losses. My grandmother passed away in 2011 and my grandfather in 2019, but it’s painful for me to think of what it would’ve been like for my grandparents to live through the pandemic. I’m grateful that they did not have to witness the recent rise of anti-Asian rhetoric and hate crimes, although my father feels that these dynamics have been long brewing in the US. He, like my grandparents, experienced feelings of being stereotyped and othered long before 2020. For their generations, the main goal was to try and survive in America, while resisting the systemic forces of discrimination. 

The legacy of that survival can be found in Pelham Parkway. The yellow awning is still on the front of the building where my grandparents' once ran their Chinese restaurant. It’s passed to new ownership now and instead of reading Chow Fon, it displays the name Happy Family. But it continues to serve Chinese takeout to the neighbourhood, playing a small role in New York City’s ecosystem. Most of all, it reminds me of my grandparents’ sweat and sacrifice.

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Alison Wong writes about food and her Chinese American heritage. Originally from the Bronx, New York, she received her MA in the Anthropology of Food from SOAS University of London and her BS in Environmental Science from Macaulay Honors College. Find her on Twitter @woalison.

What do we lose when we go searching for more?

By Isabela Bonnevera | Paid subscribers can listen to Isabela read this piece on our podcast.

I recently moved from Berlin to Barcelona — punctuated by a brief interlude in France — and everything and nothing is the same. I look out my window and see not the skeleton of a naked winter tree surrounded by tiny leaks of grey light but green mountains topped with castles and fresh laundry blowing in the breeze. My dog still spends most of the day sitting on the couch, but he now takes long breaks out on the terrace and I worry about him getting skin cancer. I used to walk up four flights of stairs; now I go up six. In Berlin we grew tomatoes and a few vines, but here I plant okra, jalapeños, zucchini and don’t worry about them withering from the cold. My living room, previously dim even on the brightest of days, explodes with house plants curling their leaves towards the seemingly endless sun streaming through our sliding door. I still try to cycle as much as I can but my beloved six-speed already fell victim to Barcelona’s many sticky fingers, and so I use a bike-share scheme instead.

Like before, I’m mostly at my computer during the day and at night I go out to eat or host friends. If it’s the latter my partner does most of the cooking while I uncork bottles and get the house in order; if it’s the former I scarf down fried artichokes and patatas bravas and usually go home complaining that I don’t feel well. Just like my old life, it feels like much of my new one is fuelled by food and friends, the twin motors of my 30 years on this earth. 

I’m in my ninth month here so my closest relationships are that old. I meet a soulmate of a friend in my second week — and on her second day — in town, on a smothering September evening that convinces me of the need to find a flat with air conditioning. We immediately bond over not liking the anchovy-flavoured olives served in every glass of vermouth. It turns out she doesn’t like anchovies at all and accuses me of being a traitor when I admit under duress that I do actually enjoy the real thing. 

Serendipitously, one of her childhood best friends also lives here with her girlfriend and the three of them immediately make me feel at home. Come spring, one tells me she wants to pitch FFJ and what lands in my inbox is a gorgeous essay on bitter oranges in her old life and new. It got me thinking about how food connects me to this place, too, but also how it reminds me of what I’ve left behind. 

***

The frenetic pace of moving began to abate in our third month here, and around that time I invite a new friend over for the first time for tea on the terrace. He’s beautiful, with a shaved head and flawless bone structure framed by three dangling earrings, seeming to float into the flat in a mesh shirt and jeans that fit him like a glove. With my tired face and peeling nail polish I feel like something of a goblin in comparison. The only reputable bakery nearby had been out of plain croissants, forcing me to pick up a half-dozen “specials” that look like 18th-century aristocrats, piled ridiculously with icing and Speculoos crumbs. I’m slightly ashamed to serve them. 

Chatting nervously, I under-stir his latte, leaving clots of matcha powder thickening at the bottom of his mug. He puts it down after a few delicate sips.

It’s chunky, right? Too chunky. Before he can reply, I grab his mug and hurry back to the kitchen, nearly tripping over the door frame. Through the window, I see him picking carefully at a pastry. Later I see on Instagram that after getting home he put together a flawless squid ink risotto for one. 

He gives me a second chance and we go on to share many delicious meals. My partner and I accompany him to his favourite Malaysian restaurant where we spoon creamy laksa into miniature bowls and wolf down sambal nasi goreng, one of the only genuinely spicy dishes we’ve been able to find in the city. We bring more friends to Szechuan hotpot and try Italian fusion in a restaurant the size of a janitor’s closet. He vows to stop making plans with us after we turn up to the umpteenth reservation 15 minutes late, but we continue to eat together week after week. Bursts of giddy camaraderie are punctuated by moments where we lapse into silence or have to ask each other for more background detail than a story can comfortably accommodate. I realize, with some alarm, that I appear now without context, a self in a vacuum; I could become anyone, and nobody would recognize that I’ve changed.

***

The day before we left Berlin, friends came to hold vigil in our boxed-up apartment, and one gave me a mug inscribed “Schönleinstraße” — the name of the derelict U-Bahn station next to our old flat, the butt of many an internet meme and usually reeking of urine. The mug is now a regular fixture of my morning coffee on the terrace in Barcelona, even though I hated every second I spent in that station, and even every second I spent on that street, with its rotting mattresses, anarchic double-parking, and endless stream of undercover yuppies who looked exactly like me. But I hated it with a strange undercurrent of something that felt a lot like love. Love was hard to detect at the time but I can’t deny it now; it engulfs me whenever I think of our friends, some still there, many now far away.

In the months leading up to our final goodbyes, I fell to pieces over the smallest moments. A bee that had stopped to land on our dying balcony plants, neglected by a friend who sublet our place while we trialled moving away. A superficial argument over the timing of a birthday dinner. I told everyone that I couldn’t wait to leave yet I couldn’t seem to stop crying. Walking home from my last yoga class on the morning we had agreed to host friends for a goodbye lunch, I found myself suddenly unable to take in any air. The letters on my phone keyboard blurred as I collapsed onto a bench and tried to tell a friend where to come get me, overwhelmed by visions of myself arriving five years prior with two suitcases and some big dreams, by the weight of all the people who had become a part of me that I would have to sever myself from, even though the departure had been my decision and I had brought all of this pain upon myself. When we finally left the city, I took photos of the most mundane things — our courtyard, the tree outside our building, the bench a neighbour had built around it — wanting to remember every last detail.

When I think of those details now, I think of silly summer picnics in the park, voices carrying into the musky dusk air, the metallic sweetness of cheap sekt. I think of potlucks with too many people in too small of a space, of travelling to open-air parties in wobbly bicycle convoys, of holding each other through breakups and job dramas and deaths — of being, as a group of young childless immigrants, everything to each other. I think of the early days of the pandemic, when we did a three-month series of micro supper clubs with three friends from two other households, with kitschy themes like Dim Sum Delight and American BBQ. During those meals, life felt perfectly bubble-wrapped, the coziness of the night enveloping us as we stirred our fourth Negronis with the curtains pulled so neighbours wouldn’t see we were technically one body over the lockdown limit. When I go back to visit the perfect dance floors of Berlin nightclubs and dance so hard I detach from my body, I can almost believe those moments still exist, stretched over time, eternal. Behind my lowered eyelids, bodies come flying back to our kitchen table from the various continents they’ve now spread out to and we’re one again, foreign orphans living through moments that seemed profane but I now understand were sacred.

***

Bodies from that table do come from their various continents, not to our old living room but to our new one. They stay at our flat in Barcelona while we’re away, watering our plants and leaving us Catalan cookbooks, or visit over long weekends, monopolizing our attention for days on end. Even with them on the sofa in the flesh, I find myself scrolling through years of photos on my iPhone, looking at versions of us gone by and commenting on what we ate on this night or discussed on that one. They’re not overly interested in what I’m showing them on the screen, but I’m used to people not sharing my bottomless nostalgia or tendency to fixate on dates and the passing of time. When we all go to bed I stay up sitting up against the pillows and index-finger through more, more, more.

After a decade on the move, sometimes it feels like I could scroll back forever and not get to the end of the memories. In Melbourne, I had the most beautiful group of girlfriends who brought me into their childhood friend group. They roasted chickens and hosted a Hannukah dinner on my behalf and lent me their cousin’s car for an Easter trip and their parents’ camping caravan for Christmas. Back home in Vancouver, lifelong friends are having babies, generously asking them to call me “auntie” on Facetime even though I haven’t seen them in person since a few weeks after they were C-sectioned out of the womb. Former coworkers become Facebook feed fodder, old roommates no more than acquaintances. In the aftermath of leaving a place you always think that, despite the distance, nothing will ever change, but eventually the years and time differences and sheer enormity of life that you’ve missed wear down your bond. I fall asleep on the beach, valuables tucked under my tummy, while a family of American tourists plays nearby, and when I wake up for a second I have no idea where I am.

How many times can you transplant yourself before the capillaries start to leak, the tendons fail to reattach? My partner — dependent on me, a woman, for a large chunk of his social life like so many other straight cis men seem to be — seems to have bounced back from the dislocation quickly. But my wounds still weep, and I worry that others can smell something off, a faint whiff of stagnancy every time my anecdotes relate to a place and time irrelevant to the present moment. 

Food and connection, thankfully, act as cauterizers. People are friendlier in this city, warmer than I had gotten used to in Berlin. They’re kind about our clunky Spanish and as-of-yet-non-existent Catalan; when I introduce myself, they laugh gently at my inability to pronounce even my own theoretically Castilian name. I feel at peace on Saturday mornings surrounded by retirees and the overweight chihuahuas they doll up coloured puff jackets, all of us enjoying cafe amb llet in nondescript cafes that smell of the second-hand smoke drifting in through the windows. Our friends, crystallizing into a core group, gather in our living room to share green curry, three-minute Air Fryer pizzas, and spaghettini with record levels of butter, and although I worry each time about our rising voices leaking through the paper-thin walls, these dinners also move me closer to the rhythms of the new city pulsing beneath my feet. Everyday moments feel imbued with communion, something close to soul – and I feel brighter, more alive than I have in years. But some kind of emptiness remains, the kind you might feel when you realize you don’t know how many siblings the person sitting across the table from you has, whether their parents are together, who they lived with in college, which arcane things they love or what memories they most want to forget.

In the spring, my mom visits Barcelona and brings me a cookbook. She goes back home and takes a piece of my heart with her. I cook and cook and cook from the book to pretend she’s still here, to feel like a part of her is making the food with me. A month later, I serve the book’s roast chicken to my grandmother, who comes to visit on what is likely to be her only trip here. She’s started asking me some things twice, a reminder that although the time ahead of me to move here or there feels limitless, an hourglass never remains equal. There is no one place to eat with everyone I love.

In my younger years I felt like I could reinvent myself endlessly, be born again for each new place and career change. But the older I get, the more I realize I am mostly the sum of people who changed me in ways both big and small — people I’ve loved who have loved me back, people who have cooked for me and eaten my (or at least my partner’s) cooking and shared moments in time that are far more remarkable than we perceive when living them. I see these people in every corner of my new life, like ghosts, a realm apart even if most are just a text message away. My next dinner spread, the sprouting seedlings on my terrace, this essay itself — they are all ways of rooting in place while remembering connections I’ve left behind, of writing love letters to people that they won’t receive. But I hope they know that I feel it just the same.

Isabela Vera is a founding editor of Feminist Food Journal.

Part of our CITY issue

By Chelsea Lee | Paid subscribers can listen to a version of this piece, read by Chelsea, on our podcast.

I’ve had many mothers in my life. Some stayed longer than others and Jia* was one of them. She came to my family when I was ten and the duty of care was passed along to her in the form of a thick slice of peanut butter toast slathered with condensed milk — my favourite breakfast — that she would prepare daily before dawn. This had been my morning routine with the last domestic helper. Now, it was mine and Jia’s.

Since both of my parents worked full-time jobs, like many families in Hong Kong, they hired someone to watch over me soon after I was born. So when Jia arrived in the late summer of 2007, she fit right into our household. Having previously worked in Brunei and Taiwan, she impressed my parents with her repertoire of succulent steamed dishes, nourishing soups, and carefully cut fruit, prepared to their liking. For my brother and I, it was her signature tomato and egg stir fry that she cooked for us on the weekends that made an impression. In my brother’s words, the dish remains “iconic” to this day.

But Jia didn’t only cook. She took on all the duties of a parent, ferrying me and my brother back and forth from after-school activities. Knowing that Jia was at the helm of our three-bedroom flat gave my parents peace of mind. Life, otherwise, would have been tricky. For a while, my mother, an accountant, rarely made it home on weeknights before 8 pm. And she hated spending time in the kitchen. So at night, it was Jia who would serve my family dinner. After cleaning up, she would retreat to her bed in my room and FaceTime her daughter, Marie*, who lived in the Philippines. For the six years that Jia spent with us, this was her routine.

Six years is not a small amount of time. But when I started researching this piece, I found just 12 photos of Jia on my old hard drive. Some had been taken in front of mall displays on the way to extra-curricular classes and others were from the time she’d accompanied me and my brother on a trip to Hong Kong Disneyland. There is also a grainy 4:3 video from a family junk boat trip one summer, where Jia is seen chaperoning me and my cousins on the roof with my cousin’s helper, who went on to work for her family for a total of 22 years. These were big, exciting events, but they hardly encapsulate the levels to which our lives were intertwined. So why do we have so little record of her?

Hong Kong director Justin Cheung asks a similar question in his documentary “Yaya”: Sacrifice of Domestic Workers, which looks closely at the power dynamics between employers and their domestic helpers by turning the camera on himself and his family. Cheung describes his family’s relationship with his helper of over 30 years as being “full of contradictions”. I see these contradictions in my own family’s  relationship with Jia. They are inherent to the nature of live-in domestic work, where the boundaries of work and love are blurry. 

Over the last few decades, Hong Kong has emerged as a global financial hub. Mountains that used to surround farmlands now cradle a sea of skyscrapers piercing the clouds, which house the offices and homes of working professionals. Much of life in the city is built around the ebbs and flows of their needs. Mass Transit Railway (MTR) trains go in and out of stations like clockwork, lifelines for the busy Hong Kongers who flood into lively and efficient eateries at all hours of the day. 

The rise in domestic workers in the city began in the 1970s to alleviate the countless household duties that prevented women from joining the workforce. Since local domestic workers were in short supply, foreign domestic helpers were increasingly relied upon to facilitate the economic boom that required white-collar citizens to do away with most work inside the home.  

Most of the time, the labour that these domestic workers contribute is invisible, tucked away between the walls of small apartments. But walk around Central or Victoria Park on a Sunday, where hundreds of them congregate on their one day off a week to swap stories, food, and companionship, and you’ll see that they have become essential to the fabric of this city. Government data shows that the number of domestic workers in Hong Kong reached over 399,000 in 2019, employed by as many as 327,770 households. Mostly women, they constitute 10% of the city’s workforce, providing affordable care for children and senior citizens. As a result, foreign domestic workers have indirectly contributed up to US$2.6 Billion to Hong Kong’s gross domestic product (GDP). They are, as Cheung calls them, “the secret engine to Hong Kong’s economy”.

Though they may be fuelling Hong Kong’s prosperity, the work of domestic helpers cannot be quantified in merely economic terms. Growing up, I’d noticed the complex joys and hardships of this work, so when I met up with Jia one summer afternoon in 2018 (at which point she was working for a different family in the city), I asked her about what it had been like to take care of me. She told me that the work was not dissimilar to being a mother.

Since much of our time on a day-to-day basis was spent together, Jia got to know me extremely well. She knew that I hated Chinese kale so she would steer clear of it when cooking us dinners. She was there when I got my first period just before a swimming lesson. She cooked me congee and changed my bedsheets over and over again when I fell ill one Christmas Day. She indulged me in my 10-year-old fantasies of becoming a break dancer and helped me choreograph a dance routine for one of my P.E. assessments set to the tune of “Don’t Phunk with My Heart” by the Black Eyed Peas. Despite having to put up with essentially the worst and most embarrassing versions of me, she hardly complained. She continued cooking us the tomato-egg stir fry. This was a token of her care for us. As kids, we saw Jia as a family member, a caregiver, and a friend all in one. 

Jia has always been very humble, open and, for the most part, positive in her outlook on her life. When I asked her in 2018 whether she enjoyed being a domestic helper, she answered without hesitation: “I enjoy it very much.” But looking back on our time together, I can’t help but wonder what it was like having to accept the blurring of boundaries of personal and professional as just “part of the job”, and how it may have impacted her. 

Angela Garbes writes in her essay The Devaluation of Care Work is By Design that “Quality care means forging intimate, familial relationships and acquiring professional knowledge that is sensual and personal.” For Jia, the intimacy of this relationship was heightened by physical proximity: for three years, she shared a room with me and my brother in our home. In a city that struggles for space, this was a fairly common setup. 

Hong Kong law dictates that foreign domestic workers live with their employers, in “suitable accommodation”. In reality, most workers live in built-in rooms that are the size of a closet, or share sleeping quarters with those that they care for, usually children. For the employer, this is a convenient arrangement. For the domestic helper, it implies a lack of autonomy to decide where work ends and rest begins. Surveys show that foreign domestic workers put in an average of 16 hours a day, and — while this was not the case for Jia with my family — nearly half report being deprived of food. 

Despite migrant domestic workers being the backbone of the city’s success, they are not offered the same privileges as other foreigners, who can claim permanent residency after seven years of employment in the city. In the case of contract termination, domestic helpers are required to leave the city within 14 days, unless a new employer is found within that time. These laws position foreign domestic workers as second-class citizens, both within the city and inside its homes. They also suggest that while domestic work is important to Hong Kong, the people who perform it are not. 

“Care is expected to be cheap the world over, in part because the global economy doesn’t have the ability to properly value care work,” Garbes writes. The minimum wage for domestic workers in Hong Kong currently sits at HK$4,730 (approximately US$603) per month. Yet according to a 2019 report, the real value of paid domestic work should amount to HK$184,971 per year. 

The devaluation of care work partially comes from the fact that many consider it to be low-skilled labour. This is further complicated by the way Hong Kong’s domestic workers often occupy the grey area between family and lodger in their employer’s homes. Care work becomes “confused” with acts of favour; labour is mistaken for love. These dynamics enable the exploitation of workers: their efforts are simply taken for granted. But being a domestic worker is anything but easy. 

It was usually in the hour before bed that Jia filled me in on the latest updates on her daughter, Marie, who was three years my senior. Jia often showed me photos of her daughter, asking “Isn’t she beautiful?” Jia loved her daughter immensely and all she wanted was to provide her with a good life. Working abroad as a domestic helper allowed her to earn a higher income than even some white-collared jobs back home in the Philippines. The salary she earned from my parents was divided between Marie, her only child at the time, and her nine younger siblings.

Being away from home was difficult. For Jia, taking care of us came at the expense of time with her daughter. Sometimes, after a phone call with Marie, Jia would whisper across the room, “Oh, she is a bit frustrated today. Marie is asking me why I am spending so much time with you and your brother but not her.” In 2017, Jia gave birth to another daughter in Hong Kong, Jen*, who she sent back to her family in the Philippines when she was three months old. Though it was incredibly upsetting, Jia felt that this was her only option in order to provide Jen with a fruitful life. 

Distance also crippled Jia’s marriage. I distinctly remember the night when she found out about her husband’s infidelity. Through painful sobs, Jia recounted the phone call she had received about the news, repeating the question, “What do I do?” between stifled breaths. While I did my best to comfort her in the moment, I was only 14 at the time and seeing her experience this loss helplessly from afar was poignant and devastating. Here she was, working to maintain stability within our family home and yet in a twisted paradox, that same balance within her own family was thwarted by aspects of her job. When I shared these thoughts with her in our 2018 conversation, Jia was predictably stoic: “It’s okay for me. Life must go on.”

In my mind, Jia is an acrobat balancing on a tightrope, responsible for the success of both my family and hers. Her identity constantly blends and morphs from domestic worker to family, to caregiver, to breadwinner. Domestic helpers are remarkable in the way they embody such a broad range of skills and responsibilities, yet the status quo doesn’t value their efforts or sacrifices. They are, in many ways, the unsung mothers of the city, keeping hundreds of thousands of families like mine afloat from the shadows. Without them, life in Hong Kong would look very different. 

Foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong deserve to be fairly compensated. Their rights are human rights and they deserve to have greater support from employers in managing the balance of their work and personal life. Hopefully, changes are afoot: a non-profit organization called Pathfinders (among others) is working towards these goals. The group helps migrant mothers, especially those who fall pregnant during their employment in Hong Kong, and spreads awareness on related issues through op-eds and research.

It’s been a year since I last spoke with Jia. The transience of her presence in my life is characteristic of our complex relationship, but I owe to her many positive aspects of my upbringing. She kept me company on nights I feared the dark and never faltered in her care for me, even when she was unable to physically care for her own family. She kept my life stable. Now 4,000 miles away in London, Jia comes to mind whenever I miss home. I haven’t quite perfected her tomato and egg stir fry, but still, the dish brings me tremendous comfort. It’s Jia’s indelible mark.

Chelsea Lee is a freelance journalist from Hong Kong, currently based in London. Her work has been featured in CNN and she loves learning about the intersections between food, environment, and migration.

*Names used in this piece have been changed.

Part of our CITY issue

When I first moved to Barcelona I lived in an old industrial Catalan neighbourhood near the sea — now better known for its coworking spaces than its warehouses — where the streets are lined with orange trees. In spring you walk surrounded by the scent of blossom tinged with the unexpected sourness of fermenting fruit fallen from the trees. Below the branches, pockmarked oranges lie dusty in the tree pits alongside dogs desperate to relieve themselves anywhere except the concrete. 

If you don’t look down, the orange trees contribute to a vision of an idyllic city. As a visitor or an immigrant (these classifications blur in my mind when I see graffiti demanding “TOURISTS GO HOME” and wonder if it applies to me) you are left wondering why nobody picks these bright fruits. Why isn’t everybody taking oranges away to split and juice, or rushing home to scrape away the segments from the pith with their teeth over the kitchen sink before even taking off their shoes? It’s because Barcelona's street oranges are bitter. It's not that they've been sullied by car fumes (though I'm sure the pollution doesn't help). They are bitter by name, and bitter by nature; these are bitter oranges, also known as Seville oranges, and nobody here seems to understand why the city would plant over 3,300 trees bearing fruit that nobody wants to eat.

Most Catalan residents see them simply as bad oranges, but in London, where I grew up, Seville oranges are famous for making marmalade, a condiment so quintessentially British that Paddington Bear and the Queen bonded over it at Buckingham Palace. The fact that marmalade feels so British even though neither of its two main ingredients are grown at scale in the UK seems quintessentially British in itself. The sugar trade was founded on the labour of African people enslaved in the Caribbean by the British Empire; present-day fruit picking in Spain raises strong concerns about modern slavery due to poor conditions imposed on migrant workers. In a way, it’s no surprise that we've found a way to capitalize on these two raw situations and ingredients to make a recipe we call our own. 

As someone from a country built so foundationally on exploitation, enjoying any product of that legacy feels sticky. I could simply swallow this history and accept it, but I am more drawn to delving my hands deep into that stickiness, perhaps to squeeze out understanding, or reckoning. What emerges feels messy, and I try my best to accept how it lands in my mixed heritage body and to make sense of what I see through the prism of my different identities.

As a young woman denying my queerness, I avoided reading Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit as if it would give too much away, and instead settled into coming out by watching Orange Is The New Black (where fresh oranges only occasionally feature on grey breakfast trays or as a clandestine treat peeled and eaten alone). Later, sharing a house in London with two other women my age, I started hosting Passover Seder meals to share my Jewish traditions with some of the women I was closest to in the city. Passover Seders involve a retelling of the exodus of Jewish people from slavery, reminding us of our collective duty to fight in solidarity with all oppressed peoples. A Passover Seder centres around a Seder plate filled with various traditional symbolic foods which are eaten ritualistically over the evening: herbs such as parsley to remember the bitterness of slavery; a roasted egg to symbolize life, death, and renewal; and, for many feminists, an orange. 

Why an orange? The idea comes from feminist Jewish scholars who introduced it to symbolize the inclusion of women and queer people in Jewish religion and culture — the fruitfulness that bursts forth when people from minoritized and marginalized communities have a seat at the table. So my friends and I — many neither queer nor Jewish — ate slices of sweet oranges as part of the ritual meal, spitting out the pips to enact our rejection of all forms of oppression as we took turns reading and reflecting on an alternative retelling of the story from our chosen Haggadah, Love & Justice (in times of war). The orange sits amongst other new additions to our ritual foods: a chilli for the climate crisis and an olive for freedom in Palestine.

As I think about who in Barcelona to share this combination of traditional and transgressive rituals with for the first time, I wonder if we could use an orange from the city’s trees on this year's Seder plate. Wouldn't it be perfectly symbolic to share an orange grown on the streets of our new home, not just to represent inclusion for women and queer people, but also to seek acceptance from the city as women born elsewhere? But while we have herbs on the Seder plate to remind us of the bitterness of slavery and oppression, the point of the orange is to represent the sweetness of inclusion. Using bitter oranges would make our presence seem unappetizing — it seems some things need sugar to make them palatable.

***

Now that he's in the later stages of diabetes my dad eats No Added Sugar marmalade made with Sorbitol, but as a child, I remember him eating the real stuff on toast in the morning at the weekends. I was convinced only grown men like him could handle the bitter flavour and the thick cuts of orange rind. It had the same status in my mind as a Yorkie bar: “Not for girls”. The marmalade my dad ate was shop-bought — he's only ever in the kitchen to make chocolate cake for a birthday and, though my mum cooks dinner every night after a long day's work, she's never been into making things she could easily buy. 

I don't remember which brand we used to have on the breakfast table, but two of the most well-known commercial versions have their roots in British cities and both bear men's names: James Keillor & Sons from Dundee, and Frank Cooper's from Oxford. If you look at the small print you see it was actually Janet Keillor and Sarah Jane Cooper — not son James and husband Frank — who came up with their original 19th-century recipes using oranges from Seville and sugar undoubtedly grown, harvested, and processed by enslaved people in the Caribbean. Writes Marissa Nicosia on the arguments of feminist scholar Kim F. Hall:

[Her] work on sugar and status in the early modern era rightfully insists that women’s aspirational confectionary work deeply implicated them in the labour conditions of enslaved people of African and Caribbean descent who worked in orange groves and sugar cane fields halfway around the world. It is only these global systems of exploitative labour and overseas shipping that would allow an accomplished lady to prepare a citrus marmalade.

Another brand, Robertson's, was also originally made by a woman only known as “Mrs Robertson”(her first name presumably lost to time and lack of interest). Until 2002, Robertson’s mascot was a Golly (a racist, anti-Black caricature), which was finally replaced in 2014 with the much more commercially (and politically) friendly Paddington Bear, a modern symbol of refugee inclusion. I wonder what was on the front of the marmalade jars my parents used to buy. 

The idea of making marmalade, rather than having it materialize magically in the cupboard, didn't enter my life until my girlfriend did. She came with a collection of River Cottage Handbooks, simple but beautiful instructional guides on how to make your own bread and preserves, and how to forage and ferment. During the pandemic, we spent months on end stuck with my parents in London, and the arrival of Seville oranges to the (online) shops in the darkest days of two consecutive Januarys created a new and much-needed shared ritual: the joy of a Saturday spent boiling, de-pipping, slicing, and stirring kilos of the bitter fruits with twice their weight in sugar into jar upon jar of deep golden marmalade. 

Preserving food is all about using gluts in one season to ensure you have food through the next. But Seville grows over 4 million kilos of bitter oranges a year, almost entirely for the British marmalade market. Making marmalade in London, therefore, felt somewhat futile: we were preserving fruit grown in Spain for the mass-manufacture of the very conserve we were making. Maybe the real draw was just the opportunity for me, a city girl, to connect to the country idyll that I often dream of. Making marmalade gives me a short glimpse into the Instagrammable life of a rural domestic goddess — always a goddess, never a god — donning an apron and blissfully stirring a bubbling pot of jammy fruit in a naturally lit, rustic kitchen.

As a child marmalade was for men, but it's now my mum, my girlfriend and me who enjoy the fruits of our labour. It's my mum who decides that our first year's yield of five jars isn't quite enough, so the next year we order an extra kilo of oranges and leave plenty of jars with her in London, taking just a couple with us to our new city. As we get further into our first roundtrip through the seasons in Barcelona, spring is approaching and we are halfway through our last jar. We decide it's time to make our first batch here. 

Concerned about how it would look to start harvesting fruit on the streets, I set about going from supermarket to market, looking for naranjas de Sevilla (Seville oranges) or naranjas amargas (bitter oranges). Both the shelves and the shop assistants look at me blankly, so I wonder if I've got the translation right. Google tells me that they are also known as naranjas agrias (sour oranges), but I don’t understand how they could be known as both bitter and sour — perhaps it's just about warning people that these are not the sweet oranges they know and love. It reminds me of a citizen science project I was involved in London with a community of women from migrant and non-migrant backgrounds, where a Syrian woman I had become close with over the years described how, at home in Damascus, she had both an orange tree and a bitter orange tree. One of the British women assumed she had got the English translation wrong and corrected her. “You mean two orange trees. There’s only one type of orange.” The assumptions this comment lays bare, and the discussions it sparks, end up leading us to name our project documentary “An orange tree, and a bitter orange tree”.

All this wondering about and translating oranges, but nobody in Barcelona stocks them. All I get is a pitying look from the supermarket staff, who I assume feel sorry for this strange woman with an accent who wants to buy bad oranges that she could get for free on the street. I update my mum on the situation, and she offers to bring a few kilos in her suitcase when she next visits. I refuse. The irony of bringing Seville oranges, imported to the UK, back to Spain feels like too much, even though I quickly realize it’s no more absurd than many other international food arrangements. In any case, I've already hatched another plan. 

My girlfriend volunteers at a community garden run by local residents following a community campaign to Salvem l'Alzina (“Save the Oak” in Catalan), which stopped developers from tearing down the oldest tree in the area. The area has now been converted into a small park with boardwalks protecting the oak's roots, a small huerto (allotment), borders of succulents and shrubs, and two smaller citrus trees: a lemon tree, and a bitter orange tree.

She's been volunteering there for six months and has been completely welcomed in, despite being a few decades younger than anyone else and the only foreigner. There are two rival factions in the garden: a group of older Catalan women who run the show, and men who hate being told to water anything except what they've planted themselves. They all speak to her — often to complain about each other — in a mix of Spanish and Catalan, teaching her words while they learn from her years of working as an urban community gardener in London. I convince her to ask the women if we can take oranges from the garden, to see if anyone would mind. Her tentative request is met with laughter. "Go ahead, nobody else wants them," one woman says, chuckling.

Nervous that someone will spot us and think we're stealing from the community, we head out on a Wednesday morning when we should be working, armed with a huge empty bag and a small knife. We set up the rickety ladder, and she supports it while I climb up and pick orange after orange after orange from the tree. Inside the branches, I’m overwhelmed by the sharp scent of pith bursting through the oranges’ puckered, rough skins, and when I eventually clamber down, I have scratches on my jacket and leaves in my hair. As we admire our harvest, we suddenly hear drums and cheers nearby. 

Laden with fruit, we follow the sound to a square two streets away and it's only then that we remember it's 8th March. The Día de la Mujer (International Women's Day) is a bigger deal here than in any other city I've lived in; posters about the Vaga General Feminista (Feminist General Strike) have been plastered all over town. We get to the square just as the drumming stops and women are gathering and shouting, at once convivial and filled with rage. After a while, a few women lift a banner and everyone follows as they start marching across the square and down a main shopping street into town. They are heading towards the city centre, where later that day, as I cycle to my Spanish class, I'll pass women calmly blocking traffic by sitting on a main road.

Feeling lifted, we walk the oranges home then go our separate ways to get some work done. It's not until a Sunday two weeks later that we finally find time to simmer them whole for a few hours until their rind can be easily pierced with a fork, slice the now-soft skin, remove the pips, and boil it all together with the sugar until the mixture sets. We start the process too late, so we only end up sealing the jars after midnight. It's not quite an idyllic moment, as we, somewhat grumpily, stand over the stove, willing the bubbling juice to turn to something like jelly so we can go to bed. I could easily take pictures of the jars the next morning and pretend that I live the life of a country housewife, but I have to go to work. 

***

We read soon after that there had been a huge collection of street oranges in our neighbourhood and others just a few weeks before, to make marmalade for Barcelona residents "experiencing food poverty or at risk of social exclusion". Given how people responded to our attempts to source oranges to make marmalade for ourselves, I am left wondering whether this is a dignified way of using the city's surplus for people who don't have enough to afford the essentials. Nevertheless, we would have volunteered if we'd known about it, but finding out about activities like this is hard as a newcomer. 

Perhaps it’s mad for me to spend time making marmalade when so much other food is readily available on our doorstep in this city. But now, any time I tuck into a bite of it spread thickly on toast, I remember the magic of seeing the streets lined with oranges when I first arrived here, the old vecinas in the community garden who have welcomed us in, and the crowd of women drumming in the square on the Día de la Mujer. I remember choosing not to have a bitter orange on the Seder plate, and I consider the dark history of the sugar needed to turn them into sweet marmalade. And while I don't live in rural domestic bliss surrounded by orange groves and birdsong, I do feel connected to the land where I live, growing closer to this new city as a woman born in another. And there's nothing that feels bitter about that.

Theodora Cadbury is a facilitator and participatory organizer. She works with social & environmental justice organizations, founded grassroots feminist organisation Xenia, and loves to make delicious food unnecessarily from scratch.

In India, prohibitive injunctions against street food are a way of controlling women’s access to public space. But can the transgressive joy of street food also be a conduit for reclaiming women’s rights to the city?

By Sohel Sarkar

Growing up in 1990s Calcutta, the sound of the final school bell would signal an onslaught of temptation. As we filed out the doors with hungry bellies and pockets prickling with a bit of change, we’d be greeted by the familiar sight of vendors lined up outside with their four-by-three feet carts selling phuchka (puffed puris with spicy potato stuffing and mint and tamarind chutney, also known as pani puri or golgappa), jhalmuri (rice crisps mixed with condiments and garnishes), and ghugni (a spiced lentil dish). But we needed to try our hardest to resist. Indulging in even the smallest of snacks, and getting caught in the process, would mean facing a parental tirade on the dire consequences of ingesting these tongue-tingling delicacies.

“The plates won’t be washed! The vegetables will be rotting! The water will be contaminated and the oil adulterated! How can they stop the grime and dust from getting into the food?” I could usually use my grandmother’s lenience to get away with the things my mother would disapprove of, but on this subject, the two formidable women stood united. And while their reactions were exaggerated, they certainly weren’t alone in their beliefs about street food. Many adults of these generations were convinced that these foods could be harbingers of cholera, jaundice, or worse. Every once in a while, the street vendors gathered outside the school would be forced to disappear for several days after parents raised a hue and cry with the principal about their kids gorging on forbidden snacks. 

To be sure, our parents’ anxieties were not completely unfounded. Barely a decade prior, a health crisis related to adulterated cooking oil had left residents of Calcutta — a city in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal that would later be renamed Kolkata — on edge. Even after the problem was brought under control, though, the fear around street food never quite went away. This was perhaps because, as I would come to later realize, our parents’ fears had little to do with the adulterated oil crisis. They related more closely to a long history of social and cultural anxieties related to caste, class, and gender, which predate street food itself.

Contested spaces and their dangerous potential

Before we had the street food cart, we had public eateries. In nineteenth-century colonial India, as more and more men migrated from the rural countryside to urban centers like Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras to study or find jobs, a plethora of boarding houses, lodges, hotels, restaurants, coffee houses, and roadside tea stalls cropped up to offer inexpensive stay and cheap meals. These institutions were among the first to bring food and dining out of the private kitchen into the public sphere. As such, they were not without controversy. 

For starters, the public eateries served unfamiliar foods that had been newly introduced by the British colonizer. These included baked items such as breads, cakes, and biscuits, and deep-fried foods such as chops and cutlets, many of which would become part of contemporary street food. Hindu caste purists associated the consumption of these “new” foods with the loss of (upper) caste. Their disdain may arguably have had anticolonial elements, but it was just as deeply rooted in casteism. 

Public eateries earned upper caste ire for other reasons as well. As Utsa Ray writes in Culinary Culture in Colonial India: A Cosmopolitan Platter and the Middle Class, dominant norms of the time dictated that men eat communally only within their caste groups, with women being left out of the purview of public eating entirely. But in the new eateries, people were forced to dine alongside those from different castes. This was less a sign of changing social norms than an unavoidable reality of life in India’s densifying cities. Eating communally became a source of considerable anxiety for upper castes, as did the idea of being served food by men from oppressed (or lowered) castes.

Big cities afforded migrant men anonymity that did not exist in the close-knit communities of their villages and small towns where everyone knew everyone. This was as true of those who stayed and ate in these institutions as those who cooked in the public kitchens. As the number of inexpensive urban eateries expanded, the demand for Brahmin (upper caste) cooks increased to such an extent that many migrants hid their caste identity to find employment. But in Hindu society, where upper castes had violently upheld caste hierarchies and codes of purity and pollution connected with eating and touch for centuries, the idea of eating food cooked by men of oppressed castes was a source of moral panic. 

Together, these anxieties prompted an urgent need, especially among upper castes and middle/upper classes in India, to reconfigure and redefine what constituted a modern refined cuisine. Ray explains that starting in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, a series of cookbooks and domestic manuals began to create an image of the model housewife whose culinary skills could elevate and modernize regional Indian cuisines while retaining their “authenticity”. Women were positioned as passionate cooks and their cooking was glorified in affective terms. In the narrative spun by these cookbooks, the finest nuances of cuisine could only flourish in domestic kitchens where women infused their cooking with love and affection — not in public eateries powered by the transactional labour of male cooks. 

The social construction of taste

These interventions put women, especially upper-caste and upper/middle-class women, at odds with the concept of public cooking and eating. Part of this opposition was couched in moral contempt for the purportedly extreme tastes of so-called “bazaar food”, a term used in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century to refer to any food produced outside the home.

Historically, many regional cuisines in India denigrated sour and hot/spicy tastes “as the markers of the subaltern, the sensual, the unrefined and the uncivilized”. Cultural theorist Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay notes that in the reconfigured Bengali cuisine of the time, sour tamarind and hot chillies “were considered taboo, as unfit for polite cuisine” and relegated to the bottom of the taste hierarchy. Bengali cookbooks of that period excised the excessive use of these ingredients, reserving them only for chutneys and pickles. Bengali nationalist leaders like Vivekananda and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay condemned the consumption of tamarind and chillies, and viciously attacked “uneducated rural women and the uncouth bazaar” for patronizing these titillating tastes. As sociologist Krishnendu Ray writes in The Ethnic Restaurateur, it is perhaps due to such prejudices that, only a few generations ago, young women expressing an appetite for spicy and tangy foods were reprimanded for their dushtu khide, a Bengali phrase that translates to naughty or unruly appetite. 

Paradoxically, the more these “taboo” tastes were repressed in “refined” cuisine, the more alluring they became in “bazaar food”, which already lay outside the dominant hierarchies of taste, Krishnendu Ray explains. Because of their association with historically taboo tastes, street foods — and especially the sub-category of chaat which is dominated by tamarind and chillies — remained firmly entrenched outside the realm of the respectable. Given that women were historically constructed as the upholders of refined domestic cuisine, and defined in opposition to all forms of public eating/cuisine, their appetite for these foods was deemed particularly unbecoming and disreputable. For women, then, the instruction to stay away from street food was really an instruction to stay away from such unruly appetites. 

This was evident in my own family’s disdain for street food, which took on a strikingly different tone in my mid-to-late teens. Suddenly, the bogeyman morphed from contaminated water and adulterated oil to the rather cryptically worded “dangers of the streets”. This was news to no one: as a teenage girl, I had already learnt that stepping into the streets meant holding my body in a permanent state of hyper-vigilance, ignoring or warding away the unwanted gaze, unsolicited comments, and wandering hands with steely resolve. But it told me that the warnings around street food, as they applied to me, had become gendered. And I wasn’t alone in this.

Almost everywhere in India, the sight of teenage girls and young women indulging in roadside food invites, at a minimum, strong disapproval, if not outright censure. While this may not stop them from gathering around the chaatwallah’s (chaat seller) cart, asking for “zyada teekha” (extra hot) bhel puri (a puffed rice and chutney snack), or extra helpings of mint chutney in their dahi puri (puffed puris loaded with veggies, yogurt and chutneys), they know that their presence is seen as contentious. 

Ray describes chaat as “the touchstones of boyishness or untamed femininity, offering the possibilities of lives lived differently — on one hand, nostalgic and conservative, on the other, virile with heterotopic possibilities”. The street food vendor’s cart, Ray writes, is one of the few sites where unrelated middle-class young boys and girls can engage in social interactions and exchange outside the boundaries of caste, class, and ethnicity. “Breaking some barriers and taboos animates these moments with unknown possibilities, for instance, of romance across class and caste lines,” he adds. 

With some exceptions, street food vendors in India, and many of their customers, are predominantly poor working-class men. As an informal sector of the economy, street food vending is also a source of livelihood and sustenance for migrant men who have little access to formal jobs and face discrimination based on their ethnicity and caste. Mumbai’s iconic vada pav, the unique kati roll of Kolkata, Delhi’s robust chole bhature, and the kachori sabzi that is common to many Indian cities and small towns, serve as quick, filling meals for many working-class men who may be able to afford little else. 

The seemingly amorphous “dangers of the streets” about which young women are warned include the socially-unacceptable possibility of such interactions that threaten the breakdown of rigidly held boundaries of caste, class, and ethnicity. To foreclose such a possibility, it is women who are instructed to stay away from public spaces, including street food carts. Sometimes, these warnings fail to keep women away, but at other times, they work. In his study on street food and the urban politics in Mumbai, anthropologist Harris Solomon notes that the city’s vada pav stands are highly masculinized spaces, with “the gendered politics of respectability governing access to public spaces” making women a rare sight in the city’s street-side vending stalls. 

The gendered politics of respectability and control

Street food is a decidedly public cuisine; Solomon writes that the streets act as “both the substance and site of food processing” and “a location for food’s consumption”. Unlike the public eateries of the past, women today have unhindered access to public spaces, at least in theory. In reality, though, their right to exist in and move through such spaces remains contingent on their ability to “demonstrate respectable purpose” in being there, write feminist scholars Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade in their book Why Loiter?: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets. Women could be on the streets to get to work, they could be returning from the university, they could be dropping kids off at school, they could be out in the market or for exercise, or they could be on their way to visit a relative or a friend. In each of these cases, the streets are a means to get somewhere, to do something, or simply move from one private space into another. 

The problem arises when women linger without purpose or when their reasons for lingering are not deemed respectable. One such instance is when women are out on the streets for “unconditional fun”, the authors of Why Loiter write. The pursuit of fun, women are told, is not enough reason to expose themselves to unnecessary risk. The implicit suggestion is that while women deserve protection from sexual harassment and abuse if they are out on the streets for a respectable purpose, the same cannot be guaranteed when they are out for pleasure. 

Safety is, therefore, the apparent reason women are denied unhindered access to public space. But as Phadke, Khan, and Ranade assert in their book, there are other less apparent and far more insidious reasons for such diktats. “The unarticulated reason why women are barred from public space is not just the fear that they will be violated, but also that they will form consenting relationships with ‘undesirable’ men,” they write.

In other words, the so-called dangers of the streets lie not only in the potential threat of sexual harassment or assault but also in anxieties of social miscegenation. These anxieties are “rooted in conservative class and community structures, particularly those of ‘sexual endogamy’, which means that sexual relationships are sought to be kept within specific, defined groups,” the authors of Why Loiter argue. In other words, the push to keep women off the streets without a clear purpose is to prevent them from forming unsuitable alliances with men of different castes, classes, or ethnicities, even if consensual.

Paradoxically, the same prohibitions that deny women legitimate access to public spaces as potential victims of abuse also serve to exclude marginalized men, as potential perpetrators, from those spaces. That is, both women and marginalized men — a category that most street vendors fall into — are intruders in public space. As part of the informal economy, vendors’ claims to the streets where they set up their carts are temporary and contingent. Many operate without licenses because legal recognition is expensive to secure and out of reach for those who lack the necessary documentation. This leaves them vulnerable to the whims of local politicians and extraction by the police and municipal officials. They are often forced to pay bribes to occupy a small corner of a street or pavement. 

The vendors outside my school were not the only ones forced to disappear or relocate under pressure from disapproving parents and municipal regulations. For almost a decade starting in 1996, street food vendors were one of the primary targets of an anti-street hawking gentrification drive in Calcutta euphemistically named Operation Sunshine. Such eviction drives remain commonplace, especially in India’s metropolitan cities. During the Commonwealth Games held in New Delhi in 2010, street food vendors were not allowed to set up their carts in certain locations for fear that they would defile the world-class image of the city that the government sought to project. 

Loitering and pleasure as resistance

The prohibitions surrounding street food are thus wielded as a form of control, both of male vendors and women. They are a means of controlling women’s bodies and movements under the guise of safety and protection. But precisely because such prohibitions thwart women’s unconditional access to public space and their right to unconditional fun, the antidote may lie in reclaiming the right to loiter and the right to fun, as the authors of Why Loiter suggest.

Social scientist Asef Bayat says that “fun is seen as threatening because it fundamentally questions the idea that women’s presence in public space is only acceptable when they have a purpose.” Therefore, to move without purpose in a public space is to reclaim the right to loiter. According to the Oxford Dictionary, to loiter is “to stand or wait somewhere, especially with no obvious reason”. Loitering, then, can both redefine and expand the terms of women’s access to public space, opening up the possibility for fun. In a country where women are only allowed access to public spaces if they can demonstrate a specific purpose, the act of aimless loitering and the pursuit of fun is how women can assert their right to the city. And street food, by its very nature, can be a blueprint for both.

Let’s catch up over a plate of chaat on such and such date at such and such time, said no one ever. Street food is all about that sudden intense craving that demands we abandon all productive pursuits to indulge in a few moments of unproductive aimless pleasure. The sights, sounds, and smells emanating from the street food vendor’s cart — the sizzle of hot oil in which samosas and jalebis are being fried; the flourish of puffed rice being jostled with spice powders, chopped onions, and chillies before being poured into newspaper cones; the twang of a steel ladle tossing noodles around in a wok; the aroma of an egg landing on a hot pan — lure unsuspecting passersby away from their purposeful strides into entirely unplanned bouts of indulgence. Often, the mere sight of a random stranger meditatively channelling the canape-like sev puris loaded with veggies, herbs, spices, and condiments into their mouth is enough to stop mid-stride and head towards the chaatwallah’s cart. 

Then there is the delicious pleasure of consumption. The perfectly crispy, airy puris stuffed with potatoes laced with just the right amount of chilli heat, and topped with cool mint water and a sweet-sour tamarind chutney have little aim apart from the bursts of “extreme” flavour they produce in the mouth. The spiciest street food can leave you teary and out of breath but eternally eager to devour some more. In between are those little moments of camaraderie when you catch the eye of the person standing next to you and break into a guilty smile as a nod to the moment of transgression in which you are both happy and willing participants. 

Finally, the streets are at the heart of street food, which demands that the desiring consumer veer off course to nooks and corners, lanes and bylanes to find a particularly famed dahi vada seller or run into an anonymous bhel puri wallah. As real connoisseurs of street food well know, it is often through aimless loitering that you discover your new favourite pani puri wallah. If for women, the act of loitering is a way to reclaim public space, street food is the perfect conduit. And while the joyful encounters around street food can never truly dissolve the boundaries of caste, class, and ethnicity, they offer moments of reprieve. For those waiting expectantly around the street food vendor’s cart for their next pani puri or a plate of chaat, these lines are inadvertently bent and twisted, as eaters and sellers are joined together in mutual affinities, even if temporary. 

This is not to say that the streets are (or will magically become) a welcoming, hospitable space for women, just waiting for us to jostle elbows at the vendor’s cart. Indeed, I was barely in my teens when I was molested by two men on a passing motorbike while waiting my turn at Manik kaku’s (kaku in Bengali translates to uncle) phuchka cart. Without thinking, I dropped the sal-leaf cone into which Manik kaku would plop the loaded phuchkas almost as fast as I could eat them, paid and left. For a long time, I couldn’t venture anywhere near that street corner, taking a longer detour to go back home. Over time, Manilk kaku’s cart moved elsewhere. The next time I hesitantly approached another phuchka stall was when I was an undergrad, having heard about a nearby vendor’s reputation for making a strikingly tangy mint chutney. The phuchka lived up to its reputation and my love affair with this quintessential Kolkata street snack was restored. 

The interim, when I stayed away, had been my reckoning with the limits that the city would always impose on me and my movements as a woman. But, just like in my school years, I found myself attempting to renegotiate those limits through the transgressive joys of street food. 

Sohel Sarkar is an independent writer and editor with bylines in Whetstone Magazine, Sourced Journeys, Eaten Magazine, Goya Journal and Smart Mouth, among others. Find her on Twitter @SohelS28 and on Instagram @sarkar.sohel10.

Further reading

Bayat, Asef (2007). Islamism and the Politics of Fun. Public Culture, 19(3), 433-459. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2007-004

Mukhopadhyay, Bhaskar. (2004). Between Elite Hysteria and Subaltern Carnivalesque: The Politics of Street-Food in the City of Calcutta. South Asia Research. 24. 10.1177/0262728004042762. 

Ranade, Shilpa, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Phadke (2011) Why Loiter?: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets. Penguin Books.

Ray, Krishnendu (2016). The Ethnic Restaurateur. Bloomsbury.

Ray, Utsa. (2015). Culinary Culture in Colonial India: A Cosmopolitan Platter and the Middle-Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107337503