Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  Like all utopian visionaries, Corbusier and Wright were very good at seeing what was wrong with the world, and much less good at fixing it. They could see that urban civilisation posed some very big questions. What they could not see was that big questions don’t always have big answers. Sometimes the questions themselves need to be broken down, or asked in a different way.

  The Trouble with Utopia

  If all utopian projects are doomed to fail and all ‘activist’ utopians deluded, why bother to look at utopia at all? The reason is that utopianism represents the nearest thing we have to a history of cross-disciplinary thought on the subject of human dwelling. Thinking in disciplines is what the Enlightenment taught us to do, and very useful it is too, up to a point. But two centuries of disciplined thought have given us architecture, planning, sociology, politics, economics, anthropology, geography, ecology and traffic engineering, each capable of operating in a virtual vacuum. What they have not given us is a way of thinking about dwelling holistically. Utopianism is at least an attempt to do that. You could say it brought us ‘integrated urbanism’ centuries before anyone at Arup came up with the term.

  Taken on their own, activist utopias tend to come across as cranky, fanciful or flawed. Taken together, they reveal remarkable consistency. Their goals are often identical: bringing man close to nature, fusing town and country, the sharing of labour, a strong sense of community. The same is true of their dislikes: large conurbations, globalisation, the concentration of wealth, mindless serfdom. Teased out of their historical context, utopian themes start to read like a universal wish list for human happiness; dystopian ones like a description of modern post-industrial society. So why, if there is such a clear body of thought pointing towards the kind of life that might bring human happiness, have we gone so firmly in the opposite direction?

  The problem lies in the nature of utopia itself. Utopia might be a ‘good place’, but it is also ‘no place’, because the real world can never be perfect. The mistake comes when we try to build a perfect world – when utopia stops being a philosophical ruse and becomes a practical mantra. That way lies delusion; the belief that the complexities of human existence can be manipulated as effectively as, say, cars at a roundabout. ‘Social engineering’ is one of the most unfortunate legacies of socialist utopianism. It has clouded our thinking about cities for 200 years, and despite the many lessons of modernism, it remains endemic to the discipline of urban planning. But cities, as numerous sink estates and windswept public plazas testify, don’t work like that. One cannot capture the buzz of the Barcelona Ramblas by reproducing its proportions, nor knit communities together by giving people a piece of communal grass to sit on. Such gestures can work – but only as part of a deeper understanding of the social situation. In isolation, they are little better than urban phrenology.

  By failing so consistently, utopianism teaches us some vital lessons. It warns us of the dangers of myopia, megalomania, monoculture. It shows us what can and cannot be achieved through design. It demonstrates the importance of scale, history, zeitgeist. It shows us that we can neither control the world, nor escape it. Most of all, it reminds us of our own limitations. Even when we try to change the world, we remain part of it. Ironically, its greatest lesson is the need to keep things real. We can’t live in utopia, that much is clear. But once we accept that, we are in a much better position to address head-on the problem of dwelling. Perhaps the greatest barrier we face is the sheer scale and complexity of the problem. Urbanisation, capitalism, geopolitics, peak oil, hunger, global warming – faced with a list like that, where on earth does one start? It might strike us that there is something that does connect them all, not in an all-encompassing, Gesamtkunstwerk sort of way, but in a complex, messy one. That something is food. As a means of addressing the way we live, food shares with utopia the quality of being cross-disciplinary. But its great advantage is that it is grounded in reality. As we have seen in this book, food resists being contained and controlled. It embodies all the mess, chaos and dirt of the world, as well as its orderliness. Its rituals are specific in time and place and highly codified; yet food itself is inexorable, inevitable, universal. Most importantly of all, food is necessary, and so is very good at showing us what really matters.

  Here, it seems, is what we have been looking for all along: a tool for shaping the world so ubiquitous and powerful, yet so obvious and simple, that it has somehow escaped our notice. So why, if it is so obvious, has food not been used as a design tool before? The answer, of course, is that it has – for millennia. But it has been done blindly. Those who have used food have generally wielded it like a weapon. Wars have been waged over it, continents conquered, landscapes transformed, regimes overthrown, treaties sealed. Food, the ubiquitous medium of civilisation, has always shaped the world, not always for the better. So what if we were to use food differently? To recognise that, while the atmosphere is what we breathe, the sitosphere (from sitos, the ancient Greek word for food) is what we live in?43 To recognise that rather than trash the planet in order to produce food, we need to plan how we are to feed ourselves in order that we don’t?

  For a start, we would have to alter the power structures that currently control food; to stop using food as a weapon, and start sharing it as a force for good. That would require a revolution of sorts, but only in our minds. Change will come when we change the way we think. We have never seen food’s true potential, because it is too big to see. But viewed laterally, it emerges as something with phenomenal power to transform not just landscapes, but political structures, public spaces, social relationships, cities. Its effects depend on those who control it. So who does control food? Farmers? Supermarkets? Government? Agribusiness? You and me? In the end, we all have a part to play, even those of us who never give food a second thought. Politicians need our votes, just like supermarkets need customers. They only have power because we give it to them. We can change the way they think and act by changing the way we do.

  Eating the View

  Once you start to see the world through food, everything changes. Seemingly unconnected things turn out to be closely linked; apparently confusing relationships spring into relief. Food, as we know, is one of the greatest forces shaping the world. So how might we use food to shape it better? Nowhere is the impact of food greater than in the countryside, so we might as well start there. We already know that you can’t have countryside without farmers. Wilderness, yes; but not the manicured landscapes of ‘Constable Country’, ‘Brontë Country’ and the rest, with their hedgerows and meadows, vales and dales. As the Countryside Agency pointed out with its recent ‘eat the view’ campaign, the landscapes we love are often the product of farming.44 Man has always eaten the view – or rather, has shaped the view according to his appetites. Things are no different today. When it comes to the land, food’s influence is obvious and direct. If we want a beautiful planet – or even one capable of sustaining human life – we had better start changing the way we eat.

  Britain is a verdant, varied, fertile land blessed with a temperate climate and reliable rainfall. It is also a crowded island that would struggle to feed itself entirely – but that is no reason not to maximise the amount of food we produce here, as long as we do it ecologically. Apart from the issue of food security, the ecological, political and social benefits of growing local, seasonal food are overwhelming. If we put our minds to it, we could have a thriving agriculture in Britain, as well as a beautiful landscape. Beef reared on Highland grass, lamb from the hills, dairy from specialist breeds such as Guernseys and Jerseys, apples from Kent. Precisely the sort of farming, in fact, that once evolved naturally in response to the landscape and to urban markets. It would all need paying for, of course, but no more than we are already paying for something infinitely worse.

  Is such a vision reactionary, nostalgic? I would argue not. Responding directly to the land is never retrograde. On the contrary, it is our only hope of salvation. Permaculture is the farming of the future: farming that
renews itself, that works with the land, not against it, that harnesses nature’s own ecosystems, and crucially, that allows people to live on the land if they want to.45 We need more farmers in the world, not fewer: people who will act as caretakers and custodians of the land, as well as harvest it on our behalf. Ironically, the greatest body of knowledge on the subject of permaculture belongs to the very nation whose urbanisation now threatens the planet: China. For thousands of years, the Chinese have been perfecting the art of closed-cycle farming – systems that use integrated biodiverse eco-cycles to maximise productivity and minimise waste. Land that is suitable for farming in China has always been scarce; yet now that it is scarce everywhere, we seem to be abandoning such techniques in favour of farming methods whose so-called ‘efficiencies’ are nothing of the kind.

  It is symptomatic that there is no English word for terroir. We should either invent one or adopt the French word and apply it globally. That would not mean abandoning research into new technologies. Terroir, after all, has never excluded science. It is simply an ongoing search for the best way to harness the land – an exercise in the perfection of husbandry. The manufacture of genetically modified ‘suicide genes’ by companies such as Monsanto is utterly wrong; even wicked. But the problem lies with the cynical use of technology by such companies, not with science itself.46 We need ‘third way’ agriculture that combines the best of ancient wisdom with modern technology.

  The Food Network

  If local farming is to survive, it must do so fairly, as part of an equable, balanced and internationally regulated market, in which all nations have equal access and say. That means addressing government policies, international trade agreements, the role of agribusiness – the whole shebang governing the global food system. Local small-scale and medium-scale farmers need our support, but international protectionism is not the way to deliver it. The most obvious way is simply to value what farmers do and pay them for it. In order to do that, we need more direct access to them. We need governments to intervene to prevent supermarkets from screwing them into the ground. Government should use its power to prevent monopolistic control of the food supply; not to encourage it.

  Food is a form of dialogue. If we are to become what the founder of the Slow Food Movement Carlo Petrini calls ‘co-producers’, we need open lines of communication between consumers and producers – networks and channels that flow both ways. The global food superhighway is exactly what we don’t need: a one-way system that delivers food as though the people at either end had no relationship with one another. It is a system based on profit, nothing else; one that only profits those who run it. As a diagram, it is what the architect Christopher Alexander calls a ‘tree’: a system in which many roots are channelled into a single trunk that then feeds many branches and lots of tiny leaves – us. Since the leaves can only get their nutrition through the trunk, the latter has a monopoly over their supply. If we want more influence over food, we need a different sort of system, one that joins the leaves directly to the roots. That would be what Alexander calls a semi-lattice: a complex network of interconnections – localised, personal, flexible, multi-directional – all of which can affect the other. As Alexander points out, that is closer to the way that cities themselves work.47

  There is nothing wrong with a global food system per se, it is just a question of how you run it. Operated along current lines, the system is a social, economic and environmental catastrophe. But if we could put in place a more lattice-like global trading network, things could be very different. As initiatives such as Fair Trade have demonstrated, we in the West can deal equably with small farmers anywhere in the world, provided the right mechanisms are in place. Of course, we should only buy from them food that can be grown sustainably, and imported without threatening the planet (bring back sailing ships). For that, we need the help of food importers, whether they be supermarkets or other businesses. We need them to make the right choices for us – to ‘choice edit’ their products, so that nothing on their shelves is socially or environmentally damaging. Governments could insist upon it, if they had the will.

  Above all, we need transparency in the food system – fair trade, not just for Colombian coffee-growers, but for small farmers everywhere, including Britain. Only then will we achieve true co-production. It all comes down to food sovereignty, defined by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina as ‘the RIGHT of peoples, countries, and state unions to define their agricultural and food policy’. The movement, set up in 1993 to give those living on the land a voice, goes on:

  Food sovereignty organizes food production and consumption according to the needs of local communities, giving priority to production for local consumption. Food sovereignty includes the right to protect and regulate the national agricultural and livestock production and to shield the domestic market from the dumping of agricultural surpluses and low-price imports from other countries. Landless people, peasants, and small farmers must get access to land, water, and seed as well as productive resources and adequate public services. Food sovereignty and sustainability are a higher priority than trade policies.48

  In the end, control of food is a question of liberty. In 1859, John Stuart Mill wrote a treatise on the latter; one that remains embedded in the British constitution and our concept of social justice. ‘Over himself,’ wrote Mill, ‘over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.’49 One need hardly add that without sovereignty over food, the concept becomes practically meaningless.

  Grow your Own

  The dream of every peasant has always been to be self-sufficient in food. That was also the aim of early city-states – and some, at least for a time, came close to achieving it. But of course the ‘Wens’ and ‘Babylons’ we inhabit today couldn’t possibly manage it. They are the reason we have a global food economy in the first place, with its monolithic supply chains, monocultural wastelands and animal gulags. But is there anything we could do to mitigate their effects? Could we, to some extent at least, grow our own food in them?

  As we know, many pre-industrial city-dwellers produced some of their own food, as many in the developing world still do. A recent survey estimated that five million Egyptian families keep ‘back yard birds’: chickens raised either to be eaten at home or sold at market.50 The chickens are often treated as family pets, and women feed them by chewing corn and blowing it into their beaks – a practice that dates back to the time of the pharaohs. We may not be ready for quite such an intimate relationship with lunch in Britain, but there are signs that we are at least warming to the idea of a home-grown breakfast. One of the surprise commercial hits of 2004 was the ‘eglu’: a high-tech urban chicken coop (complete with two organic hens and a fox-proof run), designed by four students from the Royal College of Art.51 By 2007, over 10,000 eglus had been sold, and an estimated half a million British families now keep hens.52

  Man cannot live on eggs alone, and there are signs of a resurgence of interest in growing other sorts of foods in Britain too. Allotments, first established in the eighteenth century as a means of compensating the rural poor for being turned off their land, are in greater demand now than at any time since the Second World War. A campaign led by the land reformer Jesse Collings (whose famous slogan ‘Three Acres and a Cow’ was later adopted by Joseph Chamberlain) led to local authorities being required by the Small Holdings and Allotment Act of 1908 to provide them for the benefit of the deserving poor, a requirement that remains in force today. Their charitable roots gave allotments something of an image problem in Britain, but that is starting to change, as middle-class foodies join the queues of people waiting for a patch of their own, and the chance to grow their own fruit and veg.

  Most of those who grow their own food in Britain do so out of choice, but as the famous ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign showed during the Second World War, growing food in cities can be a much more serious business. The sight of London transformed by farming would no doubt have delighted William Morris had he lived to see it. Co
ntemporary photographs of allotments next to the Albert Memorial and sheep grazing by the Serpentine look surreal today, but they serve as a reminder of the latent bounteousness of cities. By the end of the war, an estimated 1.5 million allotments in Britain were providing a tenth of the nation’s food, and one half of all its fruit and vegetables.53

  It often takes the disruption of normal food supplies to reveal a city’s productive potential. During the 1970s, the failure of state-run agriculture in the Soviet Union drove millions of Russian city-dwellers to start growing their own food, cultivating fruit and vegetables on marginal land in the urban periphery. As time wore on, people began building themselves little huts on their strips in order to spend the weekends there – a habit that has outlasted the collapse of the Soviet regime. Today around a quarter of Russian city-dwellers have their own mini dachas – cut-price versions of the elegant summer residences of the eighteenth-century urban elite – and the May Day holiday has become an annual mass migration, as millions leave the city to plant crops for the following year.54 St Petersburg is now the peri-urban farming capital of Europe, with two and a half million inhabitants engaged in agricultural activities of some sort, on either private dachas or community farms known as sadovodstvos, consisting of between 50 and 600 individual plots sharing common facilities.55 Plenty of citizens also farm in their back gardens, in a sort of popular Russian version of The Good Life.56

  Across the Atlantic, the collapse of the Soviet regime created an even more startling example of urban agriculture in extremis. The loss of its main trading partner turned Cuba from a dependent satellite into an isolated state virtually overnight.57 With a US trade embargo in place, the island, where 80 per cent of the population lived in cities, was forced to rely on its own resources. Over the next decade, it underwent an extraordinary agricultural revolution, as government-sponsored agriculture converted suburbs into community-run farms, and cities including the capital Havana into a maze of organopónicos, high-yield market gardens inserted into every available open space and tended by local residents. State-owned land was parcelled out to anyone willing to cultivate it, with amateur farmers given government training, advice, seeds and equipment. Crucially, the government also departed from its communist principles in order to allow farmers to sell their produce on the open market. By 2003, over 200,000 Cubans were employed in urban agriculture, and although the island remained short of meat, grain and eggs, it was approaching self-sufficiency in vegetables, producing over three million tonnes annually – more than had been available before the crisis.58