Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
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November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
28
The little boy referred to the whole chickens, the big beef quarters and the lamb legs
hanging from the counters of the stalls in the via Gisira. While the sight of fish was never
reported to me as repelling, things are different for meat; many people find the sight of blood
and animals disgusting. The urban daily experience of meat happens in contexts, such as
supermarkets, where customers are not exposed to sights, such as that of blood and offal, that
are very often considered disgusting. People do not see the animal’s shape and they do not see
the animal alive.
According to my informants, attitudes toward the smell of meat changed in the 1990s,
when supermarkets and hypermarkets became popular.
9
The market’s butchers consider
themselves as artisans of the art of butchery and they think that supermarket packaging
prevents people from having the ‘real’ experience of meat. Antonio, one of the market’s
butchers, pointed out to me that the contemporary concept of butchery keeps the slaughtering
process separated from the sale. It was, in fact, at the end of the 19th century that across
Europe the slaughterhouses were moved outside city centres (Fitzgerald 2010). This move
was justified by reasons of hygiene. The legislation about animal slaughtering constitutes an
interesting example of how our ideas around these issues have been changing; as Herzfeld
(2006: 131) points out, ‘the progressive removal of “polluting” abattoirs to marginal spaces’
belongs to a progressive rationalisation of public spaces.
Death is removed from sight through the de-localisation of the slaughterhouse but also
through the display of meat that is already sliced, losing the resemblance of the animal shape.
Vialles (1994) highlights that meat raises questions of taboos, especially concerning blood.
She reminds us that ‘[t]he urban consumer is never, in terms of his daily alimentary
experience, brought face to face with the animal. His steps take him no farther than the
butcher’s shop where he buys his meat.’ (Vialles 1994: 28).
It seems that the exposure to death speaks against an idea of modernity, whereby, as
Bauman (1993: 39) writes, ‘[o]ur world hides the secret of decomposition beneath its
glittering surface, and decomposition is there because the inner energy of the emancipation
drive, needed to keep the bubble inflated and impregnable, is all gone’.
The Urban Touch
A digression similar to Bauman’s given above can be applied to touch. An ever-increasing
distance between food and people has been introduced due to notions of hygiene. In Italian
supermarkets, for instance, the customer is required to wear a plastic glove to handle produce
even if vegetables and fruit are displayed in a market-like array. At La Pescheria, people are
in the habit of touching produce in order to choose what they want. While the vendor is busy
helping a customer, ladies approach the stall and start inspecting the wares on sale. Many of
the buyers with whom I talked clearly explained that it is possible to assess the quality and the
ripeness of the produce by touching it. For example Mrs La Rosa, one of the regular buyers,
used both words and her hands to explain, ‘It depends on what you want to eat and cook.
9
Catania is the European city with the second highest concentration of hypermarkets after Norway,
including 650,000 sq. metres of shopping malls (Camarda 2008).
