The Food Connection

This post is written partly in response to one of the suggestions that Dr Braiterman gave on nearby food outlets as well as in response to Carolyn Steel's Hungry City. So I cycled down to Mode Off last Thursday but spent most of the time standing outside the store. Here's a rough sketch of its immediate surroundings:

As you can tell from this brief sketch, Mode off (in red) is quite close to the main road, and there are many food outlets (colored yellow) nearby ranging from ramen to sushi to McDonald's. The interesting thing about five out six of the food outlets is that they can be classified as offering differing degrees of fast and/or automated food services. Now, there are a few implications here.


Firstly, the most obvious aspect is that the side street is definitely going to be crowded during mealtimes, specifically during usual lunch and dinner hours. This is an assumption still as I've yet to prove this but let's assume for now that this is the case. The question that arises is: how would the lunchtime or dinnertime crowd affect the space of the shop both inside and outside? Will an increase in traffic outside the shop necessarily lead to an increase in the number of customers who patronize it?


Secondly, the fast/automated food services seem to stretch the short span of time an average employee gets to take his/her meal, and this enables him/her to do other things during that one hour besides eating, which is what Steel talks about when she described mealtimes in cities (224). Steel comments that people are so busy doing other things besides eat during mealtimes that they have completely missed the animated atmosphere of eating out in cities. Therefore what these fast/automated food services tend to do is to encourage and hasten the pace of life in cities. Like Steel's example of the tavern(227), the food outlets we see here surrounding Mode Off are an extension of home dining and the kitchen in your own home. However, unlike the tavern and with the exception of perhaps 和民, the izakaya, there is not much of a social space in which socializing takes place all the time in the other food outlets. Before you begin to disagree and say that friends do go to such food joints and they socialize, yes I agree that is possible. But what I also have in mind are the people who patronize these joints out of convenience and by themselves so what we have here is a scenario in which people eat together but not with one another. This scene is well-illustrated by Steel's quotation of Antoine Rosny's account of the Parisian restaurant in 1801, that people enter what was still called the dining room without greeting or knowing each other, "seat themselves without looking at each other and eat separately without speaking to each other, or even offering to share their food."(231) Of course, this is taken for granted in our society today because outside the private sphere of the home, people generally mind their own business, even and, perhaps one might say, especially when it comes to public dining. In this sense, I feel that we seem to have lost this act of socializing in public food outlets.


Another thing I want to point out about the fast/automated food services is that not only do they applaud the independent diner for going to eat on his/her own and leaving other fellow diners alone, they also attempt to reassure these diners by pampering them with services so that they don't feel like they are missing anything in this eating experience. To quote Steel, "fast food is popular precisely because of what it does not provide: satiety, companionship, well-being."(245) This effectively means that to the independent diner, fast food can be his/her friend, comfort, tummy filler and perhaps even cathartic experience. And when you add the chain restaurants which are mechanically feeding you processed food after getting you to order via an automated machine to the equation, the human touch in food seems to be lost from the very beginning.


Before I digress about food further, I just like to point out the placement of the game center nearby and how this, together with the food joints popular with young people kind of determines certain demographics in their shared customers. Yet, if you stop right there and assume that only young people come to this side of the very long and winding side street, you would have missed a very robust crowd of women in their 30s and 40s. This is because next to Mode Off is a jewellery shop that serves such patrons. I think this is an advantage for Mode Off because they can attract customers from both groups. This also connects to what I've mentioned so far in previous posts about how the shop tries to project a certain image in a bid to maintain a strong customer base - mainly those who either are very trendy themselves or strive to be trendy, and trendy in this sense also has the "young" factor in it.  


Ok, I guess I will end here and give you a photo galore of the shops that are in the rough sketch:


Clockwise from the left, this is the umbrella shop. They also sell bags but mainly umbrellas and small knick knacks:

and this is the unagi shop, where I have incidentally been to with Susan once:

 this is the ramen shop next to it:

and next to it is McDonald's:

 and next to McDonald's which is very strategically placed is the large game center:

and next to this is the izakaya, otherwise known as watami:

across the street is yet another ramenya:

next to it is the sushi place, which unfortunately I missed out, so I'll show you the spectacles shop next:

and then of course we have Mode Off:

and lastly, we have the jewellery store:

 Ok I guess that ends my post today. In my next post, I am hoping to look at some small recycle shops in my neighborhood and compare them with Mode Off as part of a large organization. This is partly inspired by Susan's comment in the last lesson that Mode Off doesn't cater to the older crowd, and I've seen a few small-scale recycle shops in my neighborhood (hon-komagome) that actually do target mostly older women, so I think I'm going to have a look around for the next post so stay tuned!