Devin Smart's Preparing the Modern Meal: Urban Capitalism and Working-Class Food in Kenya's Port City is a groundbreaking study spanning the colonial and postcolonial periods in Kenya's port city.Smart sets the tone of the book from the outset by showing how "food was personal and local" (1) and its gendered dynamics among Kenyans during the period he explores.He argues that, in a globalized modern world, capitalism and migration altered how Kenyans in the twentieth century accessed and consumed food.He states, "capitalism and regional migration transformed the food system of a single city in East Africa during the twentieth century, forming part of the global story about how modern urban life changed the way people access, prepare, and consume food, that most essential of all necessities" (2-4).By anchoring his analysis in "how food fits into the systems that maintained working classes on a daily basis in capitalist cities" (4), Smart positions food not merely as sustenance but as a lens through which to examine the structural forces shaping urban life.This framework allows him to bridge migration, labor, food, gender, and business history, demonstrating how the seemingly mundane act of eating reveals the workings of capitalism in African cities. Smart critically engages with existing scholarship, noting its tendency to focus "on residential space as a site of social reproduction in African cities" (15).He pushes beyond this domestic focus by shifting attention to the public sphere, streets, markets, and food stalls, where working-class people actually acquired the meals that sustained them.This analytical move reframes social reproduction as an urban, commercial, and fundamentally public process.His focus on food aligns closely with a growing body of scholarship that uses consumption to reinterpret African modernity, not as a derivative of Europe, but as locally produced, through markets, migration, and gendered labor relations.Smart uses Chapter One to provide background on Kenya's agrarian social reproductive work, in which the kitchen was within women's ambit until the colonial economy drove men into the city of Mombasa in the 1910s and 1920s, leading to "masculine compromise."This compromise allowed men to enter the kitchen when women were absent.Smart compares the colonial capitalist economy in Kenya to the British Empire, where rations were provided to working-class women, who were treated as servants.In Chapter Two, Smart walks us through how the ration system was phased out and how "workers in Kenya's port city became more like urban proletariats elsewhere, dependent entirely on cash for the acquisition of daily necessities like food" (52).This began in the 1930s, when Kenyan
Jonathan OKOE (Fri,) studied this question.