One could be forgiven for feeling confused about food in contemporary Britain. There is almost blanket coverage of it in the media, increasingly polarised between the ‘foodie’ strand, for which Rick Stein is justly renowned, and the sort of shock-horror exposé delivered that night by Jane Moore. With farmers’ markets, speciality food shops and fancy restaurants popping up all over the place, we are supposedly in the midst of a gastronomic revolution, yet our everyday food culture belies this. We have never spent less on food than we do now: food shopping accounted for just 10 per cent of our income in 2007, down from 23 per cent in 1980. Eighty per cent of our groceries are bought in supermarkets, and when we shop for food, our choices are overwhelmingly influenced by cost, well ahead of taste, quality or healthiness.4 We are losing our kitchen skills too: half of those under the age of 24 say they never cook from scratch, and one in three meals eaten in Britain is a ready meal. Hardly a revolution.
In truth, British food culture is little short of schizophrenic. To read the Sunday papers, you would think we were a nation of rampant gastronomes, yet few of us know much about food, or care to invest our time and effort in it. Despite the recently acquired veneer of foodie culture, we remain Europe’s leading nation of ‘fuellies’, happy to let food take a back seat as we get on with our busy lives, unconscious of what it takes to keep us fuelled.5 We have become so used to eating cheaply that few of us question how it is possible, say, to buy a chicken for less than half the cost of a packet of cigarettes. Although a moment’s thought – or a brief channel-flick to What’s Really in Your Christmas Dinner – would soon tell us, most of us steer clear of such sobering revelations. It is as if the flesh we put in our mouths bears no relation to the living bird. We simply don’t make the connection.
So how come a country of dog-owning bunny-huggers like us can be so callous about the critters we breed to eat? It all comes down to our urban lifestyles. The oldest industrialised nation on earth, we have been losing touch with rural life for centuries. Over 80 per cent of us in Britain now live in cities, and the nearest most of us ever get to the ‘real’ countryside – the working sort, at any rate – is when we see it on television. We have never been more cut off from farms and farming, and while most of us probably suspect, deep down, that our eating habits are having nasty consequences somewhere on the planet, those consequences are sufficiently out of sight to be ignored.
Even if we wanted to, supplying ourselves with the amount of meat we eat today with free-range animals would be next to impossible. We British have always been a carnivorous lot: not for nothing did the French dub us les rosbifs. But a century ago, that meant each of us ate around 25 kg of meat a year, not the whopping 80 kg we eat today.6 Meat was once a luxury food, and leftovers from the Sunday roast – if you were lucky enough to have one – were eked out during the week. No longer. Meat today is an everyday commodity; something we consume without thinking. Every year we eat 35 million turkeys, and at Christmas we get through 10 million birds. That’s 50,000 times more than Andrew Dennis produces. Even if we could find 50,000 farmers as dedicated as he is, to rear all our turkeys the Dennis way would take some 34.5 million hectares: double the total amount of farmland the UK currently has in production.7 And turkeys are just the tip of the iceberg – we currently eat some 820 million chickens every year in the UK. Try rearing those by hand.
The modern food industry has done strange things to us. By supplying us with cheap and plentiful food at little apparent cost, it has satisfied our most basic needs, while making those needs appear inconsequential. That applies not just to meat, but to every type of food. Potatoes and cabbages, oranges and lemons, sardines and kippers; whatever we eat, the scale and complexity of the process of getting it to us is considerable. By the time it reaches us, our food has often travelled thousands of miles through airports and docksides, warehouses and factory kitchens, and been touched by dozens of unseen hands. Yet most of us live in ignorance of the effort it takes to feed us.
No inhabitant of a pre-industrial city could have been so unaware. Before the railways, supplying themselves with food was the biggest headache cities faced, and evidence of the struggle was unavoidable. Roads were full of carts and wagons carrying vegetables and grain, rivers and docksides were packed with cargo ships and fishing boats, streets and back yards were full of cows, pigs and chickens. Living in such a city, there could be no doubt as to where your food came from: it was all around you, snorting and steaming and getting in the way. City-dwellers in the past had no choice but to acknowledge the role of food in their lives. It was present in everything they did.
We have lived in cities for thousands of years, yet we remain animals, defined by animal needs. And therein lies the basic paradox of urban life. We inhabit cities as if that were the most natural thing in the world, yet in a deeper sense, we still dwell on the land. Civilisation may be urban, but the vast majority of people in the past were hunters and gatherers, farmers and serfs, yeomen and peasants, who led predominantly rural lives. Theirs is largely a forgotten history, yet without them, none of the rest of the human narrative would have been possible. The relationship between food and cities is endlessly complex, but at one level it is utterly simple. Without farmers and farming, cities would not exist.
As civilisation is city-centric, it is hardly surprising that we have inherited a lopsided view of the urban–rural relationship. Visual representations of cities have tended to ignore their rural hinterlands, somehow managing to give the impression that their subjects were autonomous, while narrative history has relegated the countryside to a neutral green backdrop, good for fighting battles in, but little else. It is a curious distortion of the truth, yet when you consider the extraordinary power that rural communities could have wielded over cities had they ever realised their potential, an understandable one. For 10,000 years, cities have relied on the countryside to feed them, and the countryside, under various degrees of duress, has obliged. City and country have been locked together in an uneasy symbiotic clinch, with urban authorities doing all in their power to maintain the upper hand. Taxes have been imposed and land reformed, deals done and embargoes issued, propaganda spread and wars waged. The effort has been unceasing, and despite appearances, it still is. The fact that so few of us are aware of it is symptomatic of the political sensitivity of the issue. No government, including our own, has ever wanted to admit its dependency on others for its sustenance. Put it down to the siege mentality: the fear of starvation that has haunted cities through history.
We may no longer live in walled citadels, but we rely just as much on those who feed us as any ancient city-dweller did – arguably more so, since the cities we inhabit today are mostly sprawling conurbations on a scale that would have been unthinkable even a century ago. The ability to preserve food, as well as transport it long distances, has freed cities from the constraints of geography, making it possible for the first time to build them in such unlikely spots as the Dubai desert, or above the Arctic Circle. Whether or not one considers such settlements to be the ultimate in urban hubris, they are far from being the only ones to rely on imported food. Most cities today do precisely that, having long outgrown their local farm belts. London has imported the bulk of its food for centuries, and the modern city is fed by a global hinterland with a combined area more than a hundred times larger than the city itself – roughly equivalent in size to all the productive farmland in the UK.8
Meanwhile, the countryside we like to imagine just beyond our urban borders is a carefully sustained fantasy. For centuries, city-dwellers have seen nature through a one-way telescope, moulding its image to fit their urban sensibilities. The pastoral tradition, with its hedgerows and its meadows full of fluffy sheep, is part of that tendency, as is the Romantic vision of nature, all soaring peaks, noble firs and plunging gorges. Neither bears any relation to the sort of landscape capable of feeding a modern metropolis. Fields of corn and soya stretching as far as the eye can see, plastic polytunnels so vast they can b
e seen from space, industrial sheds and feed lots full of factory-farmed animals – these are the rural hinterlands of modernity. Our idealised and industrialised versions of ‘countryside’ may be antithetical, but both are products of urban civilisation. They are the Jekyll and Hyde of the natural world as modified by man.
Cities have always moulded nature in their image, but in the past their impact was limited by their size. Back in 1800, just 3 per cent of the world’s population lived in towns with 5,000 inhabitants or more; in 1950 that figure was still less than a third.9 But in the past 50 years, the situation has been changing far more rapidly. Sometime in 2006, the global population became predominantly urban for the first time, and by 2050, the UN predicts the figure will be 80 per cent. That means three billion more people will be living in cities in 40 years’ time. With cities already consuming an estimated 75 per cent of the world’s food and energy resources, it doesn’t take a mathematical genius to see that pretty soon the sums won’t add up.
Part of the problem is what city-dwellers like to eat. Although meat was always the staple food of hunter-gatherers and tribal herdsmen, in most societies it has been the preserve of the rich; its presence in the diet a sign of prosperity when the vast majority subsisted on grain and vegetables. For centuries, rates of global consumption have been a case of ‘the West and the rest’, with Americans recently topping the tables at a gut-clenching 124 kg per head per year. But now it seems that the rest are catching up. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the world is in the grip of a ‘livestock revolution’, with global consumption rising fast, particularly in the developing world, where diets have traditionally been vegetarian.10 By 2030, the UN predicts, two thirds of worldwide meat and milk supplies will be consumed by developing nations, and by 2050, global meat consumption will have doubled.11
What lies behind the world’s increasing carnivorousness? The reasons are many and complex, but in the end they come back to our animal natures. Whether or not we are vegetarians by choice, we are omnivores by nature, and meat, quite simply, is the most privileged food we can eat. Although some religions, notably Hinduism and Jainism, eschew it, most humans who have forgone meat in the past have done so mainly due to lack of opportunity. Now, however, urbanisation, industrialisation and greater prosperity are creating an appetite in many countries for the sort of meat-based diet we have long taken for granted in the West. The most startling changes are taking place in China, where 400 million people are expected to urbanise in the next 25 years. For centuries, the typical Chinese diet has consisted of rice and vegetables, with the occasional morsel of meat or fish. But as the Chinese abandon the countryside, it seems they are abandoning their rural diets too. In 1962, the average Chinese person was eating just 4 kg of meat per year; by 2005 that figure was 60 kg and rising fast.12 The inexorable rise of burgher and burger go hand in hand.
What, you might ask, is wrong with that? If we in the West have long enjoyed a meat-based diet, why shouldn’t the Chinese – and anyone else who wants to – enjoy the same? The problem is that meat is a very environmentally costly food to produce. Most animals we consume today are fed on grain rather than grass, with one third of the world’s crop going to feed animals, not people.13 When you consider that it takes an estimated 11 times as much grain to feed a man if it passes through a cow first, that is hardly an efficient use of resources.14 It also takes a staggering thousand times more water to produce a kilo of beef than of wheat, which, given that fresh water is in increasingly short supply worldwide, is not good news either. According to the UN, animal farming now accounts for a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, with forest clearances and methane emitted by cattle high on the list of contributors. Since climate change is a key driver of water shortages, our growing taste for meat is doubly damaging.
The impact of China’s urbanisation can already be felt globally. With much of its land mass covered by mountain and desert, China has always struggled to feed itself, and as its population urbanises, it is fast becoming dependent on land-rich countries such as Brazil for its food. China is already the world’s largest importer of grain and soya, and its demand is growing exponentially. In the 10 years to 2005, its soya imports from Brazil increased more than a hundredfold, and in 2006, the Brazilian government agreed to add another 90 million hectares to the 63 million already in production.15 Needless to say, the extra land that is to go under the plough isn’t any old scrubland nobody cares about. It is Amazonian rainforest, one of the richest and most ancient natural habitats on earth.
If the global future is urban, as every indication suggests it is, we need to take an urgent look at what that means. Until now, cities have existed largely on their own terms, commanding resources and consuming them more or less at will. That is going to have to change. The feeding of cities has been arguably the greatest force shaping civilisation, and it still is. In order to understand cities properly, we need to look at them through food. That, in essence, is what this book does. It suggests a new way of thinking about cities, not as autonomous, isolated entities, but as organic ones, bound by their appetites to the natural world. We need to put away our one-way telescopes and think holistically: use food to take a fresh look at how we build cities, feed them and dwell in them. In order to do that, we have to understand how we got here in the first place. We need to go back to a time before cities even existed; to a time when it was grain, and not meat, that held everyone’s attention.
A New Food
Corn is a necessary; silver only a superfluity.
Adam Smith16
The origins of agriculture are obscure, but what can be said with some degree of certainty is that before farming came along, there were no cities. Half a million years before grain came on the menu, our ancestors were nomadic hunter-gatherers who spent their lives tracking the annual migrations of the beasts that formed the basis of their diet. Men had learned to shape the natural world with fire, using it to burn clearings in the forest to improve grazing for animals, and presumably to ward off predators too. Fire also helped our ancestors to survive in inhospitable habitats, such as Europe during the last Ice Age; and it must have provided at least some comfort in an otherwise bleak existence (one presumes woolly mammoth tasted better roast than raw). But despite man’s command over fire, his life was still essentially peripatetic. Permanent settlements were about as much use to him as they were to the animals he hunted.
Around 12,000 years ago, all that began to change. As the last Ice Age retreated northwards, it left behind it a swathe of land so rich in natural foods that it has been dubbed ‘the Fertile Crescent’. Running northwards from the Nile Delta, along the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean as far as southern Anatolia (modern Turkey) and then southwards again through Mesopotamia (Iraq), the territory blossomed into an arcadia of oak forests and wild grasslands (the ancestors of wheat and barley) grazed by the forebears of the modern sheep and goat. The land was bursting with good things to eat, although it may not have seemed that way to its human inhabitants. To people used to a meat-based diet, the idea of eating wild grasses can’t have been too appealing. But the growing pressure of population, together with the migration of larger animals northwards, probably forced their hand.
The Fertile Crescent.
The first attempts of early farmers to harvest wild grain must have been frustrating, to put it mildly. The ears had to be gathered at the exact moment of ripening, or they would burst, scattering their seed and leaving nothing but an inedible husk behind. Pioneer harvesters probably set up temporary camps next to the fields in order to make sure that they were there at the critical moment; a practice that over the course of millennia led to the establishment of settled villages, such as those found in Palestine from around 10,000 BC. These villages, consisting of groups of circular stone-walled huts, suggest that early village life combined hunting and herding with the intensive gathering of wild grain, which would be laboriously processed by winnowing, threshing and
stone-grinding, to make the world’s first attempt at bread – or its first mashed-up grain paste, at any rate.17
The poor state of the villagers’ teeth suggests that this earliest of processed foods made somewhat challenging eating – yet its discovery was to prove pivotal. For the first time in history, here was a food (albeit not a very palatable one) that could be gathered and stored in large enough quantities to allow at least some people, some of the time, to live in permanent settlements. Grain, in other words, was the means by which the land could be made to yield a food surplus – one which over the course of two millennia became increasingly secure, as the intensive gathering of wild grasses evolved into the conscious management of crops, through the saving and scattering of seed: until it became, in other words, what we would now describe as farming.
The First Cities
Jericho was an early settlement that characterised this period of transition from rural to urban life. Founded beside an oasis of the River Jordan in Palestine around 8000 BC, its inhabitants fed themselves partly through hunting, and partly through the intensive gathering of wild seeds, which they ground up to make flour. Life in Jericho was seasonal: the town was fully occupied during the harvest, but at other times its inhabitants would abandon it to go foraging in the countryside. The biblical account of Jericho’s downfall, which refers to it being ‘shut up’ by divine intervention prior to Joshua’s destruction of its walls, alludes to its heavy dependence on its rural links.18 Without being able to lay aside emergency reserves of grain, being cut off from its food supply was fatal. Nobody is quite sure what finally did for Jericho, but whether earthquake, famine, or the playing of magic trumpets spelt its end, the event took place sometime around the late fourteenth or thirteenth century BC, by which time the town had survived for some 6,500 years. Not bad for a semi-rural mixed farming community.
Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives Page 2