Rational menus?

Hi again,

Thanks Kirsty and Paul for your recent posts - good stuff. All this talk about messiness (in Kirsty's post) makes me realise that my conclusions in the 'emerging themes' post possibly appear a little too rational! Oh well. I was also tempted to propose extending the menu idea from a paper David Bell wrote in 2002 where he produces a menu to describe culinary culture in the city (he organises the themes alphabetically, like a city A-Z). In the afters paper - where we might ditch the starter and main and go straight to afters!? - I was thinking we could present the themes a like that!? Is that a little bit on the cheesy side of things and as Kirsty says not PiHG enough? Probably - hence why I decided not to suggest it earlier. It probably also sounds even more rational than my earlier post, but the intention in Bell's paper is to provide a set of fragments exploring the relationship between food and the city - some entries better developed than others. That idea of fragments probably better captures what the emergent themes in this blog represent. Here's the abstract, or appetiser as Bell describes it, so you can see what he means:

"APPETISER
This paper presents a series of fragments exploring particular aspects of the relationship
between food and the city. My intention is not to provide a fully articulated thesis on urban
culinary geography, but instead to present some random snapshots, some first thoughts. Some are better developed than others, which flash past like fast cars or subliminal blipverts; that’s
inevitable in such polymorphous sites as postmodern metropolises. Like that familiar publication that guides us round the urban landscape, the A–Z, the entries are arranged alphabetically, and
each follows its own logic and trajectory. The disjunctures between them reflect the chaotic
heterotopian shape of the contemporary city. Taken together, they represent the beginning of the project of rethinking how food and urban space come together in particular contexts, from the work of the chef to the scavenging of feral animals. Conscious of perpetrating the crime of generalizing ‘the city’, I would state that the cities of which I am tasting here are early twenty-first century ‘world cities’, the postindustrial metropolises, the themed, malled, mediatized urban sprawls—and I apologize for the exclusions and omissions that this inevitably means. Others can surely add to my lexicon with their own entries from diverse locations."

The full ref is:
Bell, D. (2002) Fragments for a new urban culinary geography. Journal for the Study of Food and Society, 6, 1, 10-21.

This ref might be the same one Paul mentions? I can't remember.

I don't think Vegas gets a mention or Partridges!

OK - enough from me!!

Cheers
Damian