For many years, the Urbanism Laboratory (LUB-UPC) led research in Barcelona, with its work on the Eixample. For a few years now, the Habitar research group, led by Magda Mària and Xavier Monteys, has taken over, expanding the scope to other disciplines. And, a bit at the last minute and without appearing in any official program of the Model Architecture Festival, they organized a knife and fork breakfast to talk about cities, climate, and food that was a delight. To start, Monteys' tripe with chickpeas was already extraordinary.
Why are urban planners debating food now?The debate on food is very present in the territorial sphere, because the volume of food that cities ingest has ramifications from Catalonia to New Zealand. Perhaps what we put on a plate is the best synthesis of the journeys food makes, from remote territories to cities. Every day of this blessed world. At all hours, hauling food in trucks, transoceanic ships, and airplanes. We ingest calories that have emitted a lot of smoke. Finally, this discipline opens up a bit and begins to participate in a conversation animated by Maria Nicolau or the Michelin-starred chef Paco Pérez, who have long claimed that cooking well at home or choosing restaurants that work with good products is not just a matter of health, but almost of militancy. And I say militancy because
For many years, food activity has had more to do with industry than with farmers.Food has been, in Western societies, one of the sectors that most rapidly mechanized: from slaughterhouses (which meant the end of herds, chicken coops, and dairies in cities) to cans of
Corned Beef American, 19th-century cities created large economies of scale for canning, processing, and packaging unit doses of food. In fact, whenever we talk about industrial Barcelona, we think of textile chimneys and factory complexes like Can Batlló or Fabra i Coats, but many years before, that obsession with giving everything pre-chewed to hungry urbanites had begun: yogurts, hamburgers, or industrial loaves of soft, white bread are examples of all this. In reality,
packaged foods arrived much earlier than Zara t-shirts,to understand each other. That's why it's so difficult for us to go back now: because many generations ago we abandoned the culture of food. I recommend reading
The hypermodern eater, by François Ascher, a renowned French Trotskyist sociologist who predicted a revolution in eating habits long before seeing Glovo bicycles circulate.
I have never ordered food delivery and I will try not to ever do so. I have nothing against the digital shopping and delivery model, as long as we use it sporadically. But it must be said loud and clear: we cannot continue packaging each dish individually or have hamburgers circulating from one end of the city to the other at all hours. That cities allow it is an insult to the people who work in the fields and to the chefs who prepare dishes with skill, serve tables, and attend to diners with personal treatment.
But it must be said loud and clear: we cannot continue packaging each dish individually or have hamburgers circulating from one end of the city to the other at all hours
The contradiction behind all this is that we still haven't eradicated world hunger. And there's a lot of it!
All of this has a rather simple urban planning derivative: a dark kitchen is not a kitchen or a restaurant. It is a place where certain types of food are processed and packaged. It has an industrial use, not a culinary one. Just like tourist-use dwellings, they are not homes, but temporary stays with a hotel business model. A home is where one can stably deposit things and memories; an airbnb is an apartment for having fun for a few days. The dark kitchens and airbnbs must have a totally different regulation than that of kitchens and homes because they represent, exactly, the complete opposite.And the last derivative is that the habit of cooking requires that regulars to the
delivery (I suspect people much younger than me) have a kitchen where they can practice and a dining room large enough to host two friends. Here, too, a beautiful alliance between architects and chefs comes to mind:
innovation involves building affordable homes with bright kitchens, as opposed to dark kitchens, which only cook up precarity.