Title: Feeding the City: Work and Food Culture of the Mumbai Dabbawalas
Abstract: 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 kilometres away.A mild sense of duty, of a delicate, humble and scrupulous mission, interwoven with a generous readiness to work for the good of the customer: these are the recurring motifs of work that seem to make the dabbawalas happy.They bring together the beneficiary and the benefactor (and is this not pure Jajmani philosophy?) in a shared satisfaction, yet seem to expand unexpectedly in the heart of frenzied modernisation.Food is a message, transmitted through nutrition: more than in other contexts, its energetic communication is released socially and physically in space.Born out of tender, loving care, it bridges the distance between one individual and another, passing the expanses desecrated by traffic, the mingling of people and vehicles, environmental impurities of exhaust gases, and inclement weather.The custom of ordering takeaway food, to be delivered from the restaurant to the consumer's house, is far more widespread in the western xii Feeding the City does not preclude further steps, which may be even more unpredictable and riskier, and may lead to the products of this moral economy flowing effectively into other, uncontrollable market circuits.