This is not a book about food, even though it may look that way. Rather, it is about the cities we live in and how they shape the food we eat. Tomatoes & Taxi Ranks looks beyond the fresh produce that leaves farmers’ gates, and considers how that food gets from the farm and onto our plates. It looks at the many forces and agents that shape how much that food eventually costs, and what form it takes once it gets to our plates. And it explores whether this food leaves us feeling full or hungry, and if it nourishes us in the long term.
On its journey from farm to fork, food may stay in its original form – say, as a bundle of cal-ories and nutrients in the shape of a fresh, ripe tomato. Or, through some industrial wizardry, it may get repurposed into something that’s more food-like, and less food – such as a handful of maize kernels that have been transformed into a cheese-flavoured crisp snack.
There is an ocean of invisible undercurrents that tugs us this way and that in today’s urban food system; forces that nudge us subtly as we decide what type of food we’ll lift from the food seller’s shelf: will we choose the tomato over the maize snack, and why do we make our decision? Will it satisfy our hunger, and will we be well nourished over time?
Most specifically, this book is about the many factors that shape a poorer person’s life in an African city, and how those express themselves in the foods they eat and in the wellness of their bodies.
The Consuming Urban Poverty (CUP) research project started in 2015 when a group of urban geographers, sociologists, economists and planners from the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town teamed up with colleagues at the Copperbelt University in Zambia, the University of Zimbabwe, and the Kisumu Local Interaction Platform (KLIP), a research and policy knowledge hub facilitating urban research in Kisumu, Kenya.
Tomatoes & Taxi Ranks is based on the team’s main findings, following three years of immersing themselves in three southern and east African cities: Kitwe, a mining town in the Zambian Copperbelt, about 350 kilometres north of the capital, Lusaka; the inland port city of Kisumu, on the banks of Lake Victoria in Kenya; and Epworth, an informal settlement on the edge of the Zimbabwean capital of Harare. The book also lo-cates itself in Cape Town, South Africa, where the team has done additional supporting research.