London Feeds Itself, edited by Jonathan Nunn

A very Vittles book

London Feeds Itself is a book about food, but more so about where Londoners go to get it. It’s not really about restaurants, though many are featured within it. It doesn’t focus on chefs, though several are detailed through essays and interviews. It’s not even straightforwardly about the people who eat that food, at least not taken as individuals, though it has plenty to say about them too.

No, this is a book about London’s food communities, and the places where they gather. And those may include restaurants, the chefs that run them, and the people that eat at their tables, but they take far broader forms besides: the church groups that cater to their local diaspora; the canteens that nourish office workers and taxi drivers alike; the shopping centres that chart the slow onward roll of gentrification.

Edited by Jonathan Nunn, the book collects 26 essays by and interviews of a motley crew of food writers, historians, chefs, and one former leader of the Labour Party - you can probably guess which.

They make for a diversity of writing styles and backgrounds, but there’s a unifying approach to the content: an interest in the places in which people gather to eat, and the history behind them. Whether it’s immigration routes, affordable housing, or the magnetic pull of local institutions, there’s no essay in here that ignores why some specific population ended up eating in the pocket of London where it did, though all take their own approach.

Aditya Chakrabortty retraces her childhood steps through the Edmonton Green shopping centre, marking its changes since her own youth and those of the generations before. Laura Goodman follows the story of the Cypriot chef that came to master salt beef and create a miniature Jewish deli empire along the way. Ciaran Thapar tells the parallel stories of Punjabi and Bangladeshi groups that have adapted to London life in very different ways, through the desi pub and the PFC, the far-reaching consequences of Partition still carving out divisions in miniature in a city on the other side of the planet.