Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  Whether or not settlements such as Jericho count as cities is a matter of debate among archaeologists. The consensus is that they don’t, because they fail to display the division of labour characteristic of urbanity. Nevertheless, Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, dating from about 7000 BC, at least marks the beginnings of urban civilisation. Çatalhöyük’s many decorated shrines and elaborate craftwork suggest it had a rich cultural and religious life, indicating that having a stable, reasonably predictable food source gave people the freedom to indulge in non-essential creative pursuits: the characteristic activities of urban man.

  Uruk, founded by the Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia around 3500 BC, is the first settlement that even the strictest of archaeologists agree was a proper city. Along with its neighbours Ur, Larsa and Nippur, it had what is now considered to be the sine qua non of fully fledged urbanism: zoning. Not the most exciting sounding attribute perhaps, but critical to the way the city was run. Uruk can claim to be the world’s first true city, not because of its magnificent temples and monuments, but because its citizens were employed in specialised tasks, including the running of a civic administration.19 To judge from its records, the latter was devoted almost entirely to managing the agricultural hinterland, and many experts believe it was the complexity of this task that led the Sumerians to invent writing.

  In many ways, the location of this first attempt at full-blown urbanity was far from ideal. The land’s fertility relied on the annual flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which although rich in minerals from the northern hills were also highly unpredictable. The spring floods came too late for the growing season, so the floodwater had to be stored for later use. The city solved this problem by building a series of massive levees – the first municipal public works ever undertaken – to contain the river, and sophisticated irrigation systems to distribute the water evenly between outlying farms. The earthworks required constant upkeep and a massive investment of time and effort, but they were the means by which the flood-ravaged semi-desert was transformed into a blossoming oasis. Date palms flourished on the levees, along with a range of vegetables and legumes to keep any modern chef happy: chickpeas, lentils and beans; onions, garlic and leeks; cucumbers, cress, mustard and lettuce; dates, figs and grapes. Hardier crops such as wheat, barley and sesame grew further afield in irrigated paddocks.20

  By moulding the natural world to suit their needs, Sumerian cities established the basic ground rules of urban civilisation. Their municipal market gardens were the world’s first artificial landscapes, showing how nature might be modified to serve urban man. City and country combined to form a single entity, the city-state, and their mutual dependence, so clear in the ancient world and so obscure in ours, has underpinned urban existence ever since.

  Man and Grain

  Nobody in the ancient world ever took their food for granted. The fact that our words ‘culture’ and ‘cultivate’ share the same stem (the Roman cultus) tells its own story. Cultivation and civilisation in the Graeco-Roman world were inextricably linked. The ancient Greek word sperma referred to the seed of both man and grain, and the two were bound together in reality and myth. To Homer, man was, simply, ‘bread-eater’: a creature whom agriculture had transformed from a savage beast into a cultured, thinking being.

  The bond between man and grain dominated life in the ancient city, with festivals that mirrored the agricultural calendar. Every year at harvest time, Athenians would decamp to Eleusis (the mythical ‘original fields’ where the earth goddess Demeter was said to have first taught man to cultivate) to celebrate the Eleusinia, a nine-day-long ritual of ceremony, fasting and feasting. Every four years the festival included inter-regional games, a sort of agrarian Olympics at which the victors were given not medals, but sacred ears of corn to take home to sow. Agrarian rites were also performed in the city. The Thesmophoria was a ritual in which women buried pig carcasses to ferment over the summer, returning in autumn for a three-day fast, after which they would mix the putrid remains with new seed to create a ‘sacred compost’ for the following year’s sowing.21 The importance of the ritual can be gauged from the fact that it took place on the Pnyx Hill, right under the noses of the all-male Athenian assembly. Women took part in similar fertility rites all over the ancient world. The figure of the Earth Mother was common to many archaic cultures, representing the female embodiment of the earth’s mysterious power to nurture life. But the bounty of the earth could never be taken for granted. The success of the harvest was the gift of the gods, who must be appeased by ritual sacrifice. Death was necessary to bring forth new life; blood spilt to make the soil fertile.

  For the Greeks and Romans, the bond between city and country would take on greater significance as their empires spread. With new cities to be founded in distant territories, choosing the right sites, and ensuring their capacity to support life, was vital. Sites for new Roman cities were chosen by augurs, who made careful observations of natural phenomena such as prevailing winds and the movements of animals before choosing the right spot. The city was then bound to the ground by the digging of a pit, the mundus, into which sacrifices to the gods of the underworld were thrown. The mundus marked the city’s symbolic centre, through which it was ‘married’ to the soil.22 In Rome itself, the mundus was in the Forum Romanum, guarded night and day by Vestal Virgins, whose sacred duty it was to tend the fire that burned there. The boundaries of Roman cities were also established by agrarian rites, with the ploughing of a sacred furrow, the pomoerium, along the line the walls would later follow. To cross the pomoerium, other than through its gates (where the plough was duly lifted), was a crime punishable by death; yet in Rome’s foundation myth, that is precisely what Remus does, forcing his older brother Romulus to kill him. Remus’ blood, of course, provided the necessary sacrifice to ensure the soil’s fertility, and thus the city’s future prosperity.

  Through such rites, the ancients recognised their debt to farming, but also revealed its darker side. Grain may have liberated man, but its production had also imprisoned him in a life of toil; one that was chiefly viewed as the punishment of the gods. Myths abounded of an earlier, happier time, when food grew on trees and men did not have to labour in order to feed themselves. The Garden of Eden, partly derived from eighth-century Sumerian texts, was one such myth, as was the ancient Greek notion of a former Golden Age, described by the poet Hesiod as a time when men had dwelt in a ‘fruitful grainland’ that ‘yielded its harvest to them of its own accord’.23 Farming, according to Hesiod, was the punishment handed to man by Zeus in return for Prometheus’ having stolen fire. The story is echoed in the Old Testament, in which Adam and Eve are banished from paradise as soon as they acquire self-knowledge. Agriculture, according to the Bible, is man’s punishment for being human.

  Taming Nature

  Whatever their opinion of farming, the ancients accorded it a status equal to that of the cities it served. The fields and vineyards of ancient city-states were considered just as important as their streets and buildings, and rural citizens of the polis (city-state) of Athens enjoyed the same rights as their urban counterparts. Many Athenians owned farms, and farmers came frequently to town in order to vote, or carry out other business. Similarly, the cultivated land around Roman towns, the ager, was considered an extension of the civitas, the city. The ager was distinguished from saltus, wild and unproductive nature, which the Romans viewed with disdain, or even dread. To Roman eyes, nature was split into two: the tame and the untamed, the productive and the unproductive, the good and the bad. It was a view that would persist as urbanity strengthened its hold on Western culture, but despite the Romans’ best efforts, it never convinced the tribes of northern Europe.

  Away from the Mediterranean, Europe was still covered in dense forest, and Teutonic myth bound men to trees, not grain. Northern forests were imbued with the spirit of the hero Wotan, whose self-sacrifice, hanging himself on a tree, led to his miraculous rebirth as a life-giving god. The event was celebrated by Ge
rmanic tribes with blood sacrifices; a practice the Roman historian Tacitus, rather two-facedly, declared repellent. Celts and Germans spent their lives hunting and fishing, and pasturing horses, cows and pigs in the forest. Indeed, pigs were so important to the northern economy that from the seventh century onwards, forests were measured not in terms of their physical dimensions, but by the number of animals they could sustain. With all this natural bounty, there was little need to build cities or engage in the tedious business of tilling the earth. As Caesar remarked of the Germans, ‘for agriculture they have no zeal, and the greater part of their food consists of milk, cheese and flesh.’24 Tacitus noted that the northerners preferred to live close to nature: ‘None of the German tribes live in cities,’ he wrote, ‘they live separated and scattered, according as spring water, meadow or grove appeals to each man.’25 Yet as Seneca observed, this natural lifestyle seemed to suit the Germans: ‘They nourish themselves on the wild beasts which they hunt in the forest. Are they unhappy? No, there is no unhappiness in that which has become natural through habit; what has become necessity soon becomes pleasure …’26

  The Roman view of Germania, a mixture of repulsion and admiration, summed up the cultural tensions between north and south. While life in the forest appeared uncivilised to the orderly Roman mind, it clearly offered protection from the urbane decadence to which Rome was then succumbing. The disdain was mutual, even if the admiration wasn’t: when the ‘barbarian’ hordes came sweeping down across Rome’s carefully manicured landscapes, they saw little there to engage them. Cities held no value for the forest-dwelling Germans, nor for the nomadic horsemen of the eastern Steppes, the Huns, who plundered them for portable treasures before sacking them and riding on.27

  Who Owns the Land?

  The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau28

  Cities may not have been universally appealing to early Europeans, but land was a commodity that everybody valued, whether hunter, nomad or city-dweller. The difference was in the way they used it. A German tribesman might keep a few cows and pigs, but he made little investment in feeding them. He might make a clearing in the forest to create pasture for cattle, or encourage wild deer to come there to graze, but that was about it. The vastness of the forest belonged to nobody. It was common territory, in which everyone was free to go and forage, raise pigs or hunt. But such an open-ended approach could never have worked in the agricultural south. Cultivated land didn’t just offer up nuts, berries and pigs out of the blue – it required constant hard work, and needed to be protected. It had to be owned.

  From the beginning, the cultivated farm belts around cities were owned by urban elites. Rich Sumerians leased out land to tenant farmers in return for rent or labour, the latter being especially valuable during the harvest, when there was invariably a shortage of manpower.29 Similarly, pre-democratic Athens’ rural hinterland was controlled by a land-owning elite, the Areopagoi, who used slave labour to produce oil and wine, much of it for export. The arrangement nearly caused the city’s downfall, since the Areopagoi didn’t generally bother with growing the less lucrative, yet far more necessary, grain. Yet despite their greed, the Areopagoi managed to hang on to power after the city became a democracy, largely because the law-giver Solon was one of their kind, and decreed that only the wealthiest citizens (i.e. landowners) should be allowed to hold public office.

  In Rome, land ownership was not a prerequisite to power, but in a city obsessed with social prestige, it certainly helped. Many powerful Romans owned villas close to the capital, allowing them to enjoy the contemplative life in the countryside, as well as to attend to business in the city. Pliny the Younger’s description of his seaside villa near Ostia, with its shady porticoes, fragrant vines and gentle sea breezes, reads like something out of a modern holiday brochure. But Roman villas were not just pleasant retreats: the majority were also working farms that used slave labour to produce high-value crops such as fruit and vegetables, poultry, fish and snails for the urban market. The agronomist Varro hailed the huge profits to be made from this pastio villatica (villa farming), advising farmers to focus on supplying ‘a public banquet or somebody’s triumph … or the collegia dinners that are now so numerous that they make the price of provisions go soaring’.30 By Augustus’ day, the suburbs of Rome were an endless sprawl of commercial farms, described by the Greek visitor Dionysius of Halicarnassus as merging seamlessly with the city:

  If anyone wishes to estimate the size of Rome by looking at these suburban regions, he will necessarily be misled for want of a definite clue by which to determine up to what point it is still the city and where it ceases to be the city; so closely is the city connected with the country, giving the beholder the impression of a city stretching out indefinitely.31

  Rome, of course, was a monstrous aberration. For a thousand years after its fall, urban civilisation would wane in Europe, as ‘barbarian’ hunting cultures restored the concept of forest as privileged territory. However, by the ninth century, the forest no longer seemed limitless. Clearances for agriculture had encroached on its vastness, and influxes of tribes from the east brought new pressures to bear. Disputes over territory became increasingly common as various powers, including the monasteries, tried to secure exclusive rights over the forest for themselves.

  The spread of Frankish and Gothic tribes brought a new understanding of the forest to northern Europe. Both cultures took hunting very seriously indeed, linking social prestige directly to its rituals. The right of Norman kings to hunt was considered a sacred privilege, and to meddle with their aim was a treasonable offence. Once William the Conqueror had defeated Harold at Hastings, he lost no time in annexing a quarter of his new kingdom as ‘royal forest’, which, as the name suggests, was territory in which the king, and only he, was allowed to hunt. Punishments for foraging and poaching were severe, ranging from the removal of one’s eyes and testicles for the killing of a deer, to the less imaginative but undeniably effective penalty of death. All this would have been harsh enough, were it not for the fact that William’s ‘forest’ included great swathes of countryside (including the entire county of Essex) which were not wooded at all, but included, as the historian Simon Schama has pointed out, ‘tracts of pasture, meadow, cultivated farmland, and even towns’.32 Quite what Essex Man, used to snaring himself the odd rabbit for the pot, was supposed to do under this draconian regime was anyone’s guess. It was tantamount to a life sentence of covert criminality to those who had always made their living from the woods.

  The Norman land-grab signalled the start of feudalism in England, and a system of land management that would dominate in some parts of Europe until well into the nineteenth century.33 Feudalism came in many forms, but typically it consisted of large manorial estates or strips of land around villages or towns, which were owned by lords and worked by peasants, whose privileges depended largely on how their numbers matched up to the demand for labour. After a major plague, such as the Black Death, which wiped out a third of the population in Europe during the 1340s, a peasant’s life could be tolerable. At such times, landowners might see their way to extending peasants’ rights, allowing them to keep a proportion of their own produce, or even granting them ownership of their land, in exchange for military or other obligations. But when labour was plentiful, peasants’ lives could be bleak, and they were often treated as little better than slaves. The serfs who worked on Russian grain estates, for instance, could be branded or sold at public auction, and one law of 1649 allowed the torture of children who denied their feudal bond to lord and land.34

  Feudalism didn’t spread much happiness, nor was it very good at producing food; it was the latter failing, rather than the numerous peasant revolts that characterised its history, that would eventually prove its downfall. As a system of land management, feudalism was just about capable of sustai
ning an essentially rural population. As a means of feeding cities, it was next to useless.

  Town and Country

  By early medieval times, urban civilisation was making a comeback in Europe. Ever since the fall of Rome, monasteries had provided some civilised sanctuary amidst the lawlessness that raged over the continent, and by the ninth century, thanks chiefly to the Christian conversion of the Frankish king Charlemagne, they had gained an impressive foothold. Some were so large, they were effectively towns in their own right: the monastery of Tours, with a population of 20,000, was one of the largest settlements in Europe.35 With their close-knit, self-sufficient communities, protective walls and market gardens, monasteries provided the template for a new kind of city. From the eleventh century onwards, fortified ‘communes’ began to appear in northern Italy and Spain, France, Germany and the Low Countries, reviving the ancient city-state in a new, Christian configuration.

  One such commune, Siena, has a council chamber with one of the finest views in all of Italy. A large rectangular room set high within the city’s thirteenth-century town hall, the Sala dei Nove has a great window that looks out over a classic Tuscan landscape, with its gently rolling patchwork of vineyards, olive groves, villas and cypresses. That the landscape has barely changed in nearly 700 years becomes evident when one looks at the frescoes decorating the room, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338. To the left of the window is a fresco entitled The Effects of Good Government on City and Country, depicting a tidy, well-maintained Siena surrounded by a neat landscape just like the one outside. Peasants till the fields, two huntsmen set off with a pack of orderly hounds, a farmer enters the city with mules laden with corn, and another drives a flock of sheep to market. City and country exude peace and prosperity – which is more than can be said for the scenes on the opposite wall. In The Allegory and Effects of Bad Government, war is raging in the countryside, the fields are a burnt-out wasteland, and Siena itself resembles a medieval sink estate, with broken windows, dilapidated buildings, and a populace intent on robbing and fighting one another. Even if the Council of Nine never uttered a word in that room, the walls themselves – and the view outside – would have carried the argument for them. Look after your countryside, and it will look after you.