Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  Although no city has yet been deliberately designed through food, plenty of existing cities are starting to see food’s design potential. Food, as we have seen, can be a powerful agent for urban renewal, and several British cities, including Bradford and Leicester, are now actively pursuing regeneration programmes through the strategic design and support of local food markets.73 Other cities are using food as a tool for reducing the impact of urban consumption. ‘Transition Towns’ is a programme initiated by Rob Hoskins in Kinsale, Ireland, that creates ‘Energy Descent Action Plans’ for cities, strategies by which they can reduce their eco-footprints over time. ‘Transition Town Totnes’ (TTT) is the first working model, and it has a number of initiatives underway, including the strengthening of local food networks, the reskilling of locals in the arts of cooking and vegetable-growing, and the creation of more space for allotments. The town also aims to raise its profile by becoming the ‘Nut Tree Capital of Britain’, planting a wide variety of edible nut trees in its streets. Like the Cittaslow movement, Transition Towns is an optimistic programme that sees the need to ‘think globally, act locally’ as a positive thing: ‘The thinking behind TTT is simply that a town using much less energy and resources than we presently consume could, if properly planned for and designed, be more resilient, more abundant and more pleasurable than the present.’74

  Who knows how food might shape cities in the future? As more of us do our shopping on the internet, out-of-town supermarkets might become redundant, and be converted to local food hubs with the function of dispatching our food to us by electric buggy, just as milk floats used to do.75 Local food shops might be replaced by refrigerated locker rooms where we can go and collect our pre-ordered food parcels on the way home. Such systems might be an efficient way of delivering our food, but they would make for a pretty soulless street life.

  How food shapes our lives in the future is up to us. Whoever we are and wherever we live, we can make choices that together would make an enormous cumulative difference. We can choose to eat ethically. Protect the countryside by ‘eating the view’. Demand transparency in the food chain. Eat less meat and fish, and pay more for it when we do. Support local farmers through box schemes, farmers’ markets, or community-supported agriculture.76 Buy from our local food shops if we are lucky enough still to have them. Talk to shopkeepers about food; let them know we care. Demand that whoever we buy our food from, whether local grocers or supermarkets, they source their food ethically on our behalf. Get political about food. Demand government action. Learn to read food labels. Cook more. Invite our friends over for dinner. Get invited back. Eat with our kids. Buy them baby frying-pans for Christmas. Teach them to cook. Enjoy food more. Dig up the back garden. Start composting.

  These things may sound trivial, but they’re not. Food is all about networks; things that when connected together add up to more than the sum of their parts. Whether or not we care about food, the consequences of the way we eat are all around us. The global food system is a network in which we are all complicit. If we don’t like the way it works, or the world it is creating, it is up to us to change it.

  Man and corn – it all comes back to that. Cultivation and civilisation, city and country, paradise and hell: food has always shaped our lives, and it always will. Our legacy to those who inherit the earth will be determined by how we eat now – their future lies in our knives and forks and fingers.

  Notes

  Chapter 1 The Land

  1 George Dodd, The Food of London, Longman Brown, Green and Longmans, London, 1856, p.1.

  2 The programmes were broadcast on 19 December 2005.

  3 Since the birds have been bred to develop prematurely, most struggle to support their own body weight in any case.

  4 See Joanna Blythman, Bad Food Britain, Fourth Estate, 2006, p.132.

  5 ‘Fuellies’ are people who eat food simply as fuel in order to keep going. According to the IGD, 17 per cent of Britons are ‘unhappy’ about having to eat food at all. See http://www.igd.com/cir.asp?cirid=1873&search=1.

  6 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) food balance sheets: http://faostat.fao.org/site/502/default.aspx.

  7 According to Defra, there were 17.4 million hectares of farmland in the UK in 2006.

  8 See Feeding our cities in the 21st century, Soil Association 60th Anniversary Conference press release, 12 September 2005.

  9 Estimates by Philip M. Hauser, quoted in Norbert Schoenauer, 6000 Years of Housing, W.W. Norton, New York, 2000, p.96.

  10 Livestock’s Long Shadow, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome, 2006.

  11 Globalisation and Livestock, Agriculture 21, Spotlight: 2005. See the FAO website: www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0504sp1.htm

  12 FAO website, statistical archives, national food balance sheets.

  13 Erik Millstone and Tim Lang, The Atlas of Food, Earthscan Publications Ltd, 2003, pp.34–5, and FAO, Livestock’s Long Shadow, op.cit., p.xxi.

  14 The environmental geographer Vaclav Smil reckons between 11 and 17 calories of feed are required to produce one calorie of flesh (beef, pork or chicken). Vaclav Smil, ‘Worldwide transformation of diets, burdens of meat production and opportunities for novel food proteins’, Enzyme and Microbial Technology 30 (2002), p.309.

  15 Jonathan Watts, the Guardian, 10 November 2005, and Gareth Chetwynd, the Guardian, 28 May 2004.

  16 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan, Methuen, London, 1925, vol. 1, p.191.

  17 For a general discussion of the origins of farming, see Reay Tannahill, Food in History, Penguin, 1988, pp.22–5.

  18 See Joshua, Ch. 6, for the Old Testament version of Jericho’s end. Archaeological evidence suggests that the town was destroyed by an earthquake around 1400 BC.

  19 See Graham Lawton, ‘Urban Legends’, New Scientist, 18 September 2004.

  20 See Tannahill, op.cit., p.47, and J.N. Postgate, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History, Routledge, London and New York, 1994.

  21 See Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone, Faber and Faber, 1996, p.71.

  22 See Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town, Faber and Faber, 1976, p.59.

  23 Hesiod, Works and Days, trans. Richmond Lattimore, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1959, p.31.

  24 Caesar, The Gallic War, VI, 22, quoted in Massimo Montanari, The Culture of Food, trans. Carl Ipsen, Blackwell, Oxford, 1994, p.7.

  25 Tacitus, Germania, Ch. 16, trans. M. Hutton, William Heinemann, London, 1970, p.155.

  26 Seneca, De Providentia, Dialogues Book 1, quoted in Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, Fontana Press, 1996, p.87.

  27 In fact, the ‘barbarian’ reaction to Roman civilisation was mixed: some Germanic tribes became law-abiding members of the Empire.

  28 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), trans. G.D.H. Cole, (38), William Benton, London, 1952, p.348.

  29 Postgate, op.cit., p.96.

  30 Varro, Res Rustica, quoted in Neville Morley, Metropolis and Hinterland, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.88.

  31 Ibid., p.85.

  32 Schama, op.cit., p.144.

  33 ‘Feudalism’, like ‘city’, is a hotly debated term. In its pure meaning it refers to a system in which a lord would lease a portion of land, known as a fief, to a tenant, known as a vassal, in exchange for military service – but I use it here in its broader sense, to refer to the practice of peasants or serfs working the land in return for annual labour or services.

  34 Frank E. Huggett, The Land Question and European Society, Thames and Hudson, 1975, p.17.

  35 See Wolfgang Braunfels, Monasteries of Western Europe, Thames and Hudson, 1972, p.31.

  36 Henri Lefebvre describes the visual order of the Tuscan countryside, with its groups of poderi, peasant farmhouses clustered around landowners’ villas and joined by radiating roads lined with cypresses, as anticipating the ‘discovery’ of perspective in cities. See Henri Lefebvre, The P
roduction of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1998, pp.78–9.

  37 The habit of deserting the city at harvest time even persisted into twentieth-century Britain: the Kent hop harvest was traditionally picked by migrant workers from the East End of London, who treated it as something of an annual holiday.

  38 Quoted in Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century (3 vols.), trans. Siân Reynolds, Collins, London, 1981, vol.1, p.488.

  39 Dodd, op.cit., pp.222–3.

  40 Braudel, op.cit., vol.1, p.486.

  41 Thomas Starkey, Cyvile and Uncyvile Life, quoted in Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, Penguin, 1984, p.247.

  42 Hugh Latimer, A Notable Sermon of the Plough (1548), quoted in Xavier Baron, London 1066–1914: Literary Sources and Documents (3 vols.), Helm Information, East Sussex, 1997, vol.1, p.233.

  43 Anon, quoted in Ian Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p.53.

  44 Quoted in Thomas, op.cit., p.250.

  45 In fact the name was that of Penn’s father, Admiral William Penn, to whom the land was bequeathed by Charles II in recognition of the elder Penn’s services to the nation.

  46 Thomas, op.cit., p.250.

  47 Quoted in Jules Pretty, Agri-Culture, Earthscan, London, 2002, p.30.

  48 John Locke, An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government (1690) (Two Treatises of Government), in Ernest Barker (ed.), Social Contract, Oxford University Press, 1971, p.18.

  49 See W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape, Penguin, 1970, p.185.

  50 Arthur Young, Observations on the Present State of the Wastelands of Great Britain (1773), quoted in Thomas, op.cit., p.255.

  51 Quoted in Dyck, op.cit., p.51.

  52 Political Register, 28 September 1833, p.827, quoted in ibid., p.53.

  53 Political Register, 29 January 1831, p.288, quoted in ibid., p.3.

  54 William Cobbett, Rural Rides (1830) (2 vols.), London, Reeves and Turner, 1885, vol.1, p.52.

  55 See Huggett, op.cit., p.90.

  56 Rousseau, op.cit., p.352.

  57 See Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant, Harvard, 2000, pp.57–9.

  58 Although Edmund Burke’s 1756 Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful thrilled to the towering peaks and yawning chasms of ‘sublime’ nature, for Burke such wilderness remained ‘terrible’: decidedly (if enjoyably) ‘other’.

  59 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), Oxford University Press, 1997, p.84.

  60 See Jules Pretty, op.cit., p. 42, and Schama, op.cit., p.7.

  61 The problem was that Liebig assumed, incorrectly, that plants acquire all their nitrogen needs from the atmosphere, so failed to add it to his fertiliser. See Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth, MIT Press, 2004, pp.8–11.

  62 Quoted in Craig Sams, The Little Food Book, Alastair Sawday Publishing, 2003, p.23.

  63 Lady Eve Balfour, address given at a conference of IFOAM (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements) in Switzerland in 1977: www.journeytoforever.org.

  64 Huggett, op.cit., p.129.

  65 John Vidal, the Guardian, 17 May 2003.

  66 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), http://www.who.int/ceh/publications/

  pestpoisoning.pdf.

  67 Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards was Britain’s glasses-wearing representative in the ski-jump at the 1988 Winter Olympics.

  68 The government recently announced plans to put stricter rules in place for regulating welfare standards of overseas producers. However, the difficulty of checking them at long distance remains.

  69 The phrase was first used by the American Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, speaking at a Defense Department Briefing, 12 February 2002.

  70 Pretty, op.cit., p.28, and FAO Special Programme for Food Security, www.fao.org/spfs.

  71 Farming and Food: A Sustainable Future, Report of the Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food, January 2002, chaired by Sir Donald Curry, p.68.

  72 Ibid.

  73 The court ruled that a microbiologist, Ananda Chakrabarty, could take out a patent for a genetically engineered bacterium he had created on the grounds that ‘the fact that micro-organisms are alive is without legal significance for purposes of the patent law’: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=447&invol=303.

  74 The talks took place at the Uruguay Round of GATT, the World Trade Organization General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade.

  75 Vandana Shiva, speaking at the Soil Association One Planet Agriculture Conference, January 2007.

  76 Vidal, as note 65 above.

  77 Richard Heinberg, speaking at the Soil Association One Planet Agriculture Conference, January 2007.

  78 E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Vintage, 1973, p.3.

  79 For a discussion of the issues surrounding peak oil, see Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over, New Society Publishers, 2006.

  80 Heinberg, as note 77 above.

  81 Smil, op.cit., p.xv.

  82 In 2006, sales of organic food accounted for just 2 per cent of the food sold in Britain.

  Chapter 2 Supplying the City

  1 George Orwell, ‘Charles Dickens’ (1939), in Critical Essays 1903–1950, London, Secker & Warburg, 1946, p.35.

  2 Pears are grafted on to quince rootstocks; apples on to crab apple.

  3 The Validity of Food Miles as an Indicator of Sustainable Development, Defra, July 2005, p.6.

  4 Ibid., p.7.

  5 Quoted in Tim Lang and Michael Heasman, Food Wars, Earthscan, 2004, p.144.

  6 High Street Britain: 2015, House of Commons All-Party Parliamentary Small Shops Group, 2006.

  7 Joanna Blythman, Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets, Fourth Estate, 2004, pp.73–82.

  8 Defra, op.cit., p.ii.

  9 From an interview with the author conducted in November 2005.

  10 Neville Morley, Metropolis and Hinterland, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp.63–5.

  11 Quoted in Alex Forshaw and Theo Bergström, Smithfield Past and Present, Heinemann, London, 1980, p.34.

  12 The real end came three years later, with the completion of the railway link between London and Great Yarmouth. See Richard Tames, Feeding London: A Taste of History, Historical Publications Ltd, 2003, pp.87–8.

  13 See Malcolm Thick, The Neat House Garden: Early Market Gardening Around London, Prospect Books, 1998, pp.103–4.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771), ed. Lewis M. Knapp, Oxford University Press, London, 1966, p.122.

  16 Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century (3 vols.), trans. Siân Reynolds, Collins, London, 1981, vol. 1, p.124.

  17 Peter Hall (ed.), Von Thünen’s Isolated State, trans. Carla M. Wartenberg, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1966, p.7.

  18 Derek Cooper, Snail Eggs and Samphire: Dispatches from the Food Front, Macmillan, London, 2000, p.2.

  19 The term ‘food miles’ was first coined by the food policy expert Professor Tim Lang.

  20 Neville Morley, Metropolis and Hinterland, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.65.

  21 A litre of unleaded petrol cost 80p in Britain in November 2000, 60p of which was tax. At the same period, a litre of air fuel cost just 18p. See Eating Oil: Food Supply in a Changing Climate, Sustain, 2001, p.30.

  22 Some medieval Chinese cities probably reached a similar size. See Tertuis Chandler and Gerald Fox, 3000 Years of Urban Growth, Academic Press, New York and London, 1974, p.363.

  23 Morley, op.cit., p.13.

  24 Geoffrey Rickman, The Corn Supply of Ancient Rome, Clarenden Press, Oxford, 1980, p.19.

  25 Cassiodorus, Variae, VII, 29, quoted in Massimo Montanari, The Culture of Food, trans. Carl Ipsen, Blackwell, Oxford, 1994, p.51.

  26 At Amarna, Akhenaten’s capital 200 miles south of Cairo, regular festivals were held in whic
h offerings of grain would be laid out on tables within the temple compound, after which the king would appear before his people at a special window, in order to ceremoniously redistribute what ‘remained’.

  27 Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, Routledge, London, 1989, p.195.

  28 The population density of Imperial Rome has been estimated at 800 people per hectare: similar to modern-day Kolkata or Mumbai. See Morley, op.cit., p.34.

  29 Rickman, op.cit., p.170.

  30 Unfortunately, Brutus and friends also put paid to Caesar’s plan to build a canal from Rome to Ostia, which might have saved his successors an awful lot of trouble.

  31 Tacitus, Annals, I. 5, quoted in P.A. Brunt, ‘The Roman Mob’, in M.I. Finley (ed.), Studies in Ancient Society, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974, p.102.

  32 Rickman, op.cit., p.2.

  33 See Brunt in Finley (ed.), op.cit., pp.93–4.

  34 Braudel, op.cit., vol.1, p.52.

  35 Norman Davies, God’s Playground, A History of Poland (2 vols), Oxford University Press, 2005, vol.1, p.204.

  36 N.T.L. Des Essarts, Dictionnaire Universel de Police Paris 1786–90, quoted in Stephen Kaplan, Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade During the Eighteenth Century, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1984, p.24.

  37 See Kaplan, op.cit., p.x.

  38 Ibid., p.39.

  39 Quoted in ibid., p.44.

  40 Quoted in ibid., p.24.

  41 Ibid., p.62.

  42 See Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant, Harvard University Press, 2000, pp.123–38.

  43 Quoted in Felix Barker and Peter Jackson, London: 2000 Years of a City and its People, Macmillan, London, 1974, p.9.