Thanks to Food Tank: The Food Think Tank for publishing my guest blog coauthored with Tara Moreau of UBC Botanical Garden on the role of botanical gardens in food security. Much of this is due to Norbert Steinhaus inviting me to become involved in the EU-funded “Big Picnic” project. You can access the article here.
This book provides an overview and analysis of the habit of “public eating” in Thai society with specific attention paid to the case study of Bangkok where the phenomenon has been particularly widespread for several decades. Using the well-established ethnographic approach of “thick description”, this contribution to the study of Thai and Southeast Asian foodways concentrates on the nexus between eating habits, the social construction of gender and patterns of urban development in one of the world’s mega-cities. By providing a detailed snapshot of the rapid growth period of the early to mid-1990s in central Bangkok and concluding with insights as to the impacts of the economic crisis that wreaked havoc in the latter part of the decade, I illustrate the recursive social, economic and cultural impacts of the “foodscape” on urban space.