Street food in Mombasa: how city life shaped the modern meal

Chapati can be made on the street and paired with meat and vegetables. Ssemmanda Will/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

As Kenya’s cities grew, more and more people left their rural homes and subsistence farming systems to go to urban settlements like Mombasa to find work. In the city, meals were paid for with cash, a major transformation in Kenya’s food systems.

A new book called Preparing the Modern Meal is an urban history that explores these processes. We asked historian Devin Smart about his study.