Who are the enemies of a capacious and dynamic food culture? Private property, the exploitation of labor, and commodity fetishism. Before March 2020, restaurant critic and editor Jonathan Nunn notes, 40 percent of the UK’s restaurant reviews were “taken up by a few square miles of the most expensive real estate in central London.” Nunn likens the reviews to representations of Hollywood: satirical, and primarily for those who live outside it. Put another way: There is a desire to eat well; and then, there is the desire to eat an endive salad priced at a third of your month’s electricity bill. Any restaurant review that can’t tell the difference is a problem.
Perhaps, instead, any such review should begin with a few questions. It would help to tell the difference between the desire to eat an excessively priced endive salad, and the desire to eat well. What really is a capacious and dynamic food culture? Where is such a culture to be found? And, if such a culture exists, who are its enemies?
Such enemies are “multiple,” according to London Feeds Itself, reissued by Fitzcarraldo Editions and Open City in 2024; and thanks to editor Jonathan Nunn, these villains are—refreshingly—identified with the clarity of a cast call. These include “the City of London Corporation (sometimes), landlords (frequently), the British Library café, the pandemic, and in the case of Jeremy Corbyn’s allotment, Barnet council,” referring to the steadfast socialist MP, formerly the Labour Party leader, and the collective victory of his allotment over the council’s failed attempts to first sell off the allotment to developers and then hike its rent by 300 percent. But the biggest villain—according to Nunn—is time itself: the loss of the beloved city to unrecognizable depths, everywhere you look.
But this too-familiar treachery of time is, briefly, overcome by a collection such as London Feeds Itself; indeed, it is the book’s main achievement. Twenty-six essays piece together the city, otherwise partitioned by its piecemeal boroughs, through the intimacy of food practices in everyday spaces, including but not restricted to the mosque, the park, the viaduct, the canteen, the ports, the housing estate, and the A-Road. The writers themselves are often writers of food, in addition to being, for instance, political figures, film curators, journalists, sociologists, architectural critics, and community organizers. There are essays by art critics who date at sports bars, politicians who garden in allotments, educators who travel to desi pubs, and owners of Arab library-cum-cafés, and several others, in essays named after sites: “The Port,” “The Park,” “The Mosque.” Writers tackle—using first-person essays, photographs, interviews, and columns that read like restaurant recommendations without the PR—the question of how London eats. London Feeds Itself seeks to rewrite this representation of London by looking away from affluence, trends, and the ubiquitous review-as-advertisement, toward Londoners who eat.
Such a kaleidoscope of perspectives is necessary. How else to adequately represent a city with a food culture so audacious that for every restaurant that is lost to the joint villains of property and state, another unrecognizably but determinedly creeps over it? How else to examine the vast crew of food culture workers needed to initiate each new job?
The collection looks innocuous enough, inviting even, consisting of brightly colored photographs, restaurant round-up pages tinged with the hue of butter, and essays in plain text. After spending many evenings with it, however, I found myself unpicking a pattern across each essay and column: The real reason why a certain dish or cuisine became known somewhere, this collection shows, is usually an immigrant cuisine toward the edges of the city.
A warehouse in Dalston that used to be an Art Deco textile factory, writes Melek Erdal, became a site for exquisite Kurdish food: “Rice with chickpeas and butter bean stew with lamb’s neck, lentil and yayla soups, the sulu yemek of the day, lamb-and-aubergine-kavurma, and ‘tost’ with kasar and sucuk in the mornings.” Here, Erdal highlights how underground factories for Kurdish immigrants doubled up as community spaces to get help with other aspects of immigrant life, such as loans, housing, visas, and jobs.
Where there is community, there is food, made by those most vulnerable and exploited for others like them. A circular production cycle, outside of waged labor demands. As I read more, I realized there was a cunning but deeply welcoming operation at work: a barely concealed materialist politics to the whole endeavor.
The essays are organized with a loose thematic resonance. Mike Wilson’s essay on settlement houses and community kitchens—outlining the British welfare state experiments with the architectural form—flows into an interview with Claudia Roden, grande dame of Jewish Middle Eastern food, about Hampstead Garden Suburb, a planned neighborhood and a part of the North-West London Eruv—which leads on to another essay about Jewish food focused on “the shop” by Laura Goodman, which explores B&K, an old Jewish deli and London institution run by a Greek Cypriot family. The restaurant page following that is themed around the idea of masquerading, wherein the food in a restaurant “obscures ownership,” resulting in pleasantly dizzying situations where “Nepali-run fish and chip shops, where you can order momos and use the jhol for dipping chips,” thrive alongside the “east London genre of Bengali sushi.”
Across these essays, another theme emerges. The immigrant is insider, not outsider. Moreover, gentrification moves in historical cycles, none perhaps more terrible than the one we are living through: at the nexus of hostile immigration policy and corporate landlords. Food practices and tastes are influenced by these shifts, but are not hemmed in by them.
Indeed, the adaptive nature of the precarious—frequently immigrant—worker extends to and beyond their food. When their labor is stretched by employers, they stretch the possibilities of what food can do in the world: the kinds of freedom it can offer, the astounding ways in which it can enliven the imagination.
In Stephen Buranyi’s essay on baths, for instance, he notes the legacy of public city baths as being “places of pleasure and excess, sensual overload, and, most importantly, communal experience. Health is a by-product—sometimes a rationalisation—but it’s never the main event.” Wellness and its clockwork punishments on the individual body are unwelcome. Lingering is welcome, and as Buranyi observes, the presence of a menu “suggests you might stay a while.” Baths built in the early 20th century were grand council projects, often delivered late but becoming spaces where people mingled across class and racial lines. In the Porchester Bath, there was a “massive mahogany table” where groups would gather and eat. “Jerk was always present, alongside South Asian pastries, kosher sandwiches and fry-ups from the kitchen.”
When their labor is stretched by employers, immigrants stretch the possibilities of what food can do in the world: the kinds of freedom it can offer, the astounding ways in which it can enliven the imagination.
The city baths are mostly dead, owing to “currents of privatisation, profit-seeking, and soaring property prices,” but Buranyi’s essay focuses on the New Docklands Steam Bath, which began as a squat and is now a “charitable trust situated on an industrial estate beside a scrapyard.” Black-and-white images of naked men cut through the essay. The men look relaxed but vulnerable. They wear towels around their necks and lather each other’s heads, their bellies hairy, sagging. I can imagine wanting to break bread after such gruff intimacy, even if you don’t speak the same language.
However, the collection isn’t rose eyed about the utopic function that food can be seen as serving in nationalist visions of the country, dreamed up either by the British or those who arrive in Britain from afar. The tensions between an imagined nostalgia and the conservative dreams of provincialism are laid bare in several essays.
Ciaran Thapar’s essay, “The Partition,” appears as two columns split down the page, referencing the split between India and Pakistan in 1947, as well as the 1971 shaving off of East Pakistan—subsequently Bangladesh—from Pakistan. The two texts are separate, but simultaneous, detailing the ways in which these affiliated food legacies continue to chafe against each other. Chicken shops in Tower Hamlets in the east of London serve “typical fast-food menus but also naga chicken wings, naga doner kebab, shatkora doner kebab … Before London’s East End stocked naga [chilis], Bangladeshis would grow them in allotments—a practice upheld by household elders today.” In the west column, Thapar exposes another legacy from the west of South Asia (Punjabi cuisine) in the west of London (Southall). Southall pubs were spaces for political organizing, and the “desi pub,” which began in the Midlands “where thousands of men from post-partition Punjab settled—on invitation from Westminster—to fill workforce gaps,” eventually mobilized its own diaspora to the point of reinventing the kitchen, serving garlic naan and tandoori paneer.
Both Thapar and Zarina Muhammad write, though, about the tensions that emerge in these diasporic contexts around the question of gender. Thapar notes that “female presence is a rarity” in many desi pubs, while Muhammad, who writes about heartbreak and love in Gujarati sports bars ring-fencing where “Indians live cosy, settled lives: North Circ[ular] ring road from Wembley to Southgate like lens glare, 1970s immigration wave from East Africa,” admits that “sometimes it feels weird to be a woman in these spaces,” adding that London’s suburban sports bars “are not magical … but suburban crappiness is mine to share in. I love it because it belongs to me entirely. Not just the sports bars: I love the middling banality of suburbs more than I have loved any of these boys. The skylights and scaffolding; the overpasses; the tunnels full of graffiti, crisp packets and piss.”
Suburban London has main character energy in Muhammad’s essay and several others. When I first read this essay, which arrives toward the end of the book, it felt like more than a relief—it felt exciting to feel the encore build for the rewriting of a city’s margins as central to the story of the city. In a future edition of such a collection, perhaps, the operations of caste in diasporic food plates will find similar valence as race, gender, and class do here.
This isn’t an anthology that placates. It agitates, not to bond over differences so as to erase them entirely, but to eat into difference. Following the era of Blairite multicultural policy—which involved celebrating curry and invading Iraq, and liberal appropriations of the same across British broadsheets—it is revelatory to have a text that takes history seriously: both of the British Empire, and the culinary seasonings that followed it there. As Aditya Chakrabortty writes in his essay on the shopping center, “In hyper-diverse Edmonton, for instance, it is impossible to ignore the history of the items on sale in this market: those long, thick sugarcanes in the corner once harvested by slaves in the West Indies, the breadfruit intended as cheap food to keep their bellies full and spirits pacific.”
At the heart of this collection are workers: the food they make, eat, and serve. Given the structure of the essays—which frequently locates the self as a material, political force that creates social relations rather than as a confessional one that excavates them—it is unsurprising that workers of food are witnessed at every turn. The writers often eat with them, watch them work, and are part of those communities in direct or oblique ways.
The city, in turn, is remapped through these rhythms of work, and waged and unwaged labor. In “The Church,” Carla Montemayor identifies how parishes in London reflect specific immigrant waves in their congregations. Filipinos, for instance, some of whom are at the Our Lady of Muswell Sunday lunch that Montemayor is at, “are a relatively recent addition from the 1990s, and many of them are, or were, employed in the health, care and domestic work sectors.” Jess Fagin’s essay on Smithfield Market recognizes how by day “the restaurants flanking the market serve office workers and tourists, profiting from symbolic proximity to the market. By night it’s a meat rave of trade, retail and distribution as drivers, shoppers, traders and cutters tussle over the space and its clashing rules.” In Ruby Tandoh’s essay on the ice cream parlor, Sam Bagshi, owner of Watani Sheeryakh, an Afghan ice cream parlor in East London, performs his labor as he makes up to three hundred portions of sheeryakh a day; labor that seep into the flavors of the ice cream. Bagshi shimmies, pours, seizes, rotates, and churns, “the body-object synthesis of a great drummer in action.” The result is infused with the taste of his physical exertion: “The sheeryakh is implausible, a dense, matte cloud. It is like a dream of a dream of a McFlurry: pure milk, gently sweet, lightly perfumed, with a gossamer texture that could only come from exhausting, muscular graft.”
London Feeds Itself functions both as an alternative guidebook to London, and as a utopic vision of a city now plagued by traffic wars and landlordism. In doubling up as an urban planning document, and in doing so, the volume introduces a new materialist form of food writing: one that works from the plate up toward the hand that plates it, and eats from it. 