From Abidjan to Jakarta, how the city reinvents our meals

"Junk food", "Mal-bouffe", "MacDonaldization" of the world: the most pejorative imaginings of food are often linked to urban space.

Audrey Soula, University of MontpellierNicolas Bricas, CIRAD and Olivier Lepiller, CIRAD

Anthony Bourdain and Barack Obama at a canteen in Hanoi, Vietnam (May 23, 2016). Pete Souza/Wikimedia, CC BY-NC-ND

The city is thus the place par excellence for food, nutrition and epidemiological transition, for "empty calories" and ultra-processed products. By association, it is responsible for obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, diet-related cancers, and increasing poisoning from chemical residues.

A privileged space for commercial consumption and the industrialization of food via its supermarkets, where numerous products imported from international markets compete, the city embodies the "Walmartization" of the world.

Because the West experienced this process before other regions of the world, and because the major companies in the food system originated in the West, some equate this evolution with the Westernization of food. The nutritional structure of the diet is certainly evolving in the same direction everywhere, albeit at different speeds: the share of carbohydrates in energy intake is declining, that of lipids is increasing and animal proteins are replacing vegetable proteins, while the consumption of industrially processed products is taking off.

Yet eating is more than just consuming. While influenced by global trends, people's eating practices are also shaped by their local representations, spaces and roots.

Socio-anthropological surveys that focus on the finer scales of observation look not only at what people eat, but also how they go about doing it, what they say about it and what they think about it. Eating is much more than just eating, even for the most precarious populations. It's about enjoying oneself, maintaining links with others, weaving relationships with one's environment, building and marking individual and collective identities.

City dwellers subject to contradictory injunctions

When it comes to food, city dwellers are under the influence of multiple normative prescriptions, between which they are constantly navigating, and which can even be contradictory.

Mexicans, for example, are subject to a paradoxical injunction. For example, the Ministry of Tourism and Economy has a strategy to promote Mexican street food, which will be listed as an intangible heritage of humanity by Unesco in 2019.

Ministry of Health obesity prevention campaign in Mexico. Author provided

At the same time, there's a lot of talk about health and nutritional standards that sometimes collide with this cuisine, making it responsible for cardiovascular disease and obesity.

It's easy to imagine the anxiety that can result from the contradiction between these two normative registers.

But a closer look reveals that nutritional standards are interpreted differently in different social circles, and that individuals deal with this nutrition/heritage contradiction in different eating situations, in a general context where eating Mexican remains highly prized.

South-South" channels

It's true that international supermarket and fast-food chains are springing up in cities across Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Hanoi's first supermarket, for example, opened in 1998. Today, the city boasts dozens of them, including a huge mall with almost 150 stores, from the Korean chain AEON, opened in 2015.

A Hungry Lion sign, South African fast food chain, here in Cape Town, South Africa, 2019. Discott/Wikimedia, CC BY

Another example is Hungry Lion, a South African fast-food chain created on the KFC model in 1997, which today boasts almost 200 restaurants in southern Africa. It is owned by the Shoprite holding company, the largest food retailer in Africa with almost 3,000 outlets, also of South African origin. But the evolution of their food systems is far from limited to this industrialization.

The popular urban economy invents new cuisines

The popular urban economy remains largely dominant in feeding the urban population, and is constantly inventing new practices and new cuisines, far removed from the strategies of the major economic players.

In Jakarta, Indonesia, kampung (literally: "villages") are poor neighborhoods dominated by an "informal" economy.

These areas are characterized by a high level of movement and constant mixing of populations, many of them recent immigrants from rural areas, as well as by a high level of promiscuity. Many residents don't cook at home for lack of equipment, skills, space or time.

A particular type of food establishment has developed in these neighborhoods: the warung makanoffering inexpensive, homemade dishes.

A "warung makan sate kerbau/sapi Jepara" establishment in Indonesia. Midori, CC BY-NC-ND

As a kind of public kitchen, where you serve yourself, bring your own dishes and pay flexibly, these shops help maintain traditional, domestic eating habits, while facilitating the maintenance of community food sociability.

The distinctions between the domestic and commercial worlds, public and private spaces, are blurred, prompting us to reconsider the scale on which we analyze food, which in this case is not so much the household as the housing block or neighborhood.

The invention of urban kitchens

Popular catering is a crucible of culinary innovation, where compromises between various normative injunctions are combined and constructed.

Often originating in the working classes, these new urban dishes are also gaining ground in the middle classes and, for some, are becoming identity markers for an entire city, or even a country. Such is the case ofattiéké-garba in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.

A garbadrome in Cocody, YouTube.

This popular dish, which originated in garbadromes, the restaurants frequented by young people near universities, was initially developed in opposition to hygiene standards perceived as un-African. By eating garba, eaters assert an urban, Ivorian and transgressive identity. This dish is made from poor-qualityattiéké (cassava couscous), topped with pieces of fried salted tuna and served "wet", i.e. generously drizzled with frying oil, ideally browned by successive cookings, as a guarantee of quality!

Despite being regularly criticized as Ivorian "junk food", not least because of accusations about the questionable hygiene of the dish and the establishments where it is served, garba is recognized as a dish of choice in popular restaurants.

Originally sold by Nigerian immigrants attracted by the dynamism of the Ivorian capital and carried by young urban students, garba has now become emblematic of the Abidjan, and indeed Ivorian, identity.

Preparing babendâ.

In Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, bâbenda, originally a rural dish specific to the Mossi ethnic group, is gradually gaining the status of a city-wide identity dish, but along a different path.

It was a dish for the lean season, a porridge combining the last remnants of millet with the first leafy vegetables of the new rainy season. Improved versions, using pounded maize or broken rice instead of millet, are now offered and eaten by ethnic groups other than the Mossi, thanks to their easier accessibility in town.

Some dishes are lost, others are created

Highlighting the creativity of cities in Africa, Latin America and Asia, and their ability to invent their own food supply, can lead to opposition to a vision that places greater emphasis on the dependence of these cities on international markets and capital, and on the westernization of the world.

In reality, these two trends are intertwined. While some so-called "traditional" dishes are being lost, new ones are being invented.

"Combo Obama", menu of the popular restaurant where Barack Obama had lunch in Hanoi. O.Lepiller, Author provided

It's true that globalized food cultures and practices are visible in the cities of the Global South, but this does not correspond to a simple erosion of local food repertoires.

Globalized products are certainly spreading, but they are used differently in different cities and, within them, in different social circles. In India, for example, Maggi instant noodles, associated with a desirable Western modernity, have found their place in middle-class practices by relying on the commercial figure of the "Maggi mom", who has made it possible to remove the guilt from a time-saving activity that could be seen as a transgression of the role of nurturing, loving mother.

In 2009, advertising for Maggi noodles (Nestlé) with vegetables, a "healthy" and nutritional product prepared by the mother.

These processes of local adaptation/reinterpretation of globalized products have been analyzed in the emblematic case of pizza.

Co-existing systems

The evolution of food systems linked to urbanization cannot simply be read as a shift from domestic and artisanal systems to industrial ones.

These systems co-exist and combine. They offer resources for coping with the multiple food challenges of these cities with their often galloping population growth. Often forged under severe constraints, in urban contexts of "resourcefulness and circulation", these resources are tools for adapting to situations of hardship and uncertainty. Rather than imagining solutions that come from outside and from technology, we can draw on this treasure trove to promote practices and standards conducive to social and economic justice, the peaceful cohabitation of cultural otherness, health and the environment.

Editions Quae, Manger en ville, February 2020. CC BY

This article is based on the authors' work and their recently published collective work Manger en ville, Regards socio-anthropologiques d'Afrique, d'Amérique latine et d'Asie, published by Quae, with contributions from researchers from these three continents..

Audrey Soula, Anthropologist, CIRAD, UMR Moisa, University of MontpellierNicolas Bricas, Socio-economist, researcher, Univ. Montpellier, CIRAD, and holder of the UNESCO World Food Chair, CIRAD and Olivier Lepiller, Sociologist, CIRAD researcher, UMR Moisa, University of Montpellier, CIRAD

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.