Food in Movement

This slideshow is part of: Master of Architecture II Fall 2012

Mumbai: Food in Movement

Ja-Sheng Chen

A dabbawalla is a person who delivers lunch boxes to office workers from their homes in the residential areas around the city to downtown Mumbai. Since 1880, dabbawalla have traveled to office workers' homes to collect about forty freshly cooked lunch boxes each morning. They then travel downtown by train and deliver them to the respective workplaces before noon. In the afternoon, the empty lunch boxes, known as tiffins, are recollected and returned to the customers' residences. Aproximately 5,000 dabbawallas flow into Mumbai and deliver about 200,000 tiffins each day.

In order to sort and deliver the meals precisely, the dabbawalla use a six sigma color coding system to assign the tiffins to the right groups, train stations and offices. This coding system is so accurate that only one mistake is made in every 6,000,000 deliveries, all without from the use of any electronic technology.

The recent, increasing presence of western restaurants, such as McDonald’s, has had a strong influence on Mumbaikars’ diet habits. This has created a dynamic interplay between traditional and modern food, between Mumbai's urban fabric and movement.

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