Feeding the City
Sara Roncaglia
(Translated by) Angela Arnone
This book is about the anthropology of the city or, more accurately, anthropology in the city, based on the extensive map of one of the many systems of circulation: food. Food that is carried, delivered and returned from the kitchen to the consumer. The Mumbai dabbawalas are food deliverymen that connect homes and workplaces—messenger boys, urban servants who are fast and precise, trustworthy and discreet, clean and punctual. Service, certainly, but service immersed in the teeming ocean of urban modernity. Each day they move along the rail network; their work thus entails a journey and this journey is repeated on a daily basis, with long itineraries cadenced by the sequence of customer addresses where they must deliver without fail the tightly sealed tin that each wife has prepared and handed to them early in the morning, to be taken to a husband working in an office, on a construction site, in a shop, many kilometers away.
Every day in Mumbai 6,000
dabbawalas (literally translated as "those who carry boxes")
distribute a staggering 200,000 home-cooked lunchboxes to the city's workers
and students. Giving employment and status to thousands of largely illiterate
villagers from Mumbai's hinterland, this co-operative has been in operation
since the late nineteenth century. It provides one of the most efficient
delivery networks in the world: only one lunch in six million goes astray.
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Author(s)
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Sara Roncaglia
(Translated by) Angela Arnone |
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Place of Publication
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Online
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Publisher
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Open Book Publishers
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Publication year
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2013
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Total pages
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238
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Language
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English
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पुस्तक पढ्नको लागी (To Read This Book ) :-
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