New Books In Food

Preparing the Modern Meal: Urban Capitalism and Working-Class Food in Kenya's Port City (Ohio UP, 2025) is an urban history that connects town and country. Devin Smart examines how labor migrants who left subsistence food systems in Kenya’s rural communities acquired their daily meals when they arrived in the Indian Ocean city of Mombasa, a place where cash mediated access to daily necessities. In their rural homes, people grew their own food and created mealtimes and cuisines that fit into the environments and workday routines of their agrarian societies. However, in the city, migrants earned cash that they converted into food through commercial exchange, developing foodways within the spatial dynamics of urban capitalism. Thus, Smart considers how working-class formation and urbanization, central themes of modern world history, changed East Africa’s food systems. Smart explores how these processes transformed domestic labor within migrant households, as demographic change and daily life in a capitalist cit