Digesting Urban Space: Dietary Wellbeing in Mumbai Slums

Policymakers and industrial developers in Mumbai face the mounting social and spatial needs of a constantly increasing urban population. Slum dwellers account for up to half of the city’s inhabitants, and are the socioeconomic group most vulnerable to deficient and exclusive governance practices. This article explores the social and psychological determinants of ‘dietary wellbeing’ from the viewpoint of cultural ideology and temporality intersecting and a relational perspective on the (re)production of urban space. Urban policy directives and a deficient Public Distribution System negatively impact the ability of slum dwellers to access quality food and avoid dietary illness, thus reinforcing shifting cultural norms within dietary preferences and notions of success. The prevailing urban ideal established by Mumbai governance authorities contradicts the real modes of spatial and temporal legitimacy inherent to slum spaces and populations, whose dietary wellbeing is at stake

A blind spot in food and nutrition security: where culture and social change shape the local food plate

It is estimated that over 800 million people are hungry each day and two billion are suffering from the consequences of vitamin and mineral deficiencies. While a paradigm shift towards a multi-dimensional and multi-sectoral approach to food and nutrition insecurity is emerging, technical approaches largely prevail to tackle the causes of hunger and malnutrition. Founded in original in-depth field research among smallholder farmers in southwest Kenya, we argue that incorporating cultural or social dimensions in this technical debate is imperative and that by systematically overlooking these dimensions, food insecurity cannot be accurately captured nor properly addressed. Based on a sub-location in rural southwest Kenya where the food plate is rapidly narrowing towards a high-calorie low nutrient diet and where over 80 % of households experience food shortages at least once a year, conclusions suggest that preferences, the local function of food, and the practices that emerge therefrom can affect the regularity of meals and their composition. The findings allow us to complement emerging research and program development with a more comprehensive and locally adapted approach to tackle food and nutrition insecurity