Tasting ‘kienyeji’: gustatory explorations of city futures in Nakuru, Kenya

Abstract

In Nakuru, a secondary city in Kenya, the city’s future is explored multi-sensorially. In this article, I argue that Nakuru residents explore urban futures through the taste of different kinds of foods. I examine how the relational power of taste not only triggers visceral imaginaries of greener and ‘cooler’ futures in which bodies and landscapes grow more ample, lush and healthy but also invokes memories of, and nostalgia for, pasts in which the entanglements of foods were configured differently, often explained as more ‘authentic’ and ‘clean’ (safi). I argue against vision as the most important sense-making tool to look back at lost pasts and to ‘imagine’ healthier urban futures. Instead, I demonstrate how futures in Nakuru are experienced and given shape by engaging in critical gustatory explorations of the real, tangible materialities of different kinds of food that flow through the city.