For all the ways in which food governs our lives–determining many of our daily habits, influencing our social, political, and economic structures–it is astonishing how disconnected we are from the processes by which we are fed. Equally astonishing, perhaps, is that we are fed at all, given our increasingly urban existences, our physical separation from the land, and the ever more byzantine systems by which our food is delivered to our mouths. “It’s a daily miracle that we’re able to feed a city the size of London,” says Carolyn Steel, architect and author of the provocative new book, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. “That’s 10 million people, three times a day. 30 million meals! It’s a routine of astonishing power–growing, transporting, selling, cooking, cleaning, eating, distributing, disposing–and a complex spatial problem that has to be satisfied.”
It’s this spatial problem–the relationship between food and shelter–which interests Steel, and in Hungry City she makes a compelling argument that food has literally given shape to the places we live. This is the case not only in rural settings, as we might expect, but also in the city, says Steel. We see the influence of food and food distribution in the organization of urban public space (first the town market, now the mall food court), as well as private space (Steel examines the phenomenon of the shrinking home kitchen in Britain, where eating out has gradually become the new norm). Even a generation ago, the links between city and food were still everywhere to be found–reflected in place names (Milk Street, Fruit Street), and in the smells wafting from the fish market or the meatpacking district. But thanks to the wonders of modern refrigeration and transportation, food production has largely disappeared from view in the city, and thus we’ve arrived at an odd place in human history: most of us now live in cities–places shaped by food as much as by any other force–and yet for many of us food has become an abstraction.
This dislocation has had painful consequences for the world. It has encouraged our most unsustainable habits (we live not only far from our farms, but far from our dumps, as well), and the evidence of the last century suggests that we cannot continue on the course we have chartered, with its immense wastefulness and resource depletion. Hungry City is equal parts history and polemic, but also a call for change. We need a new urban model, Steel suggests, and she articulates a vision of a city–Sitopia, or “food place”–wherein the connection between bread and land is once again restored, and food is brought from the background of our lives into the foreground. Steel’s vision calls for us to reintegrate urban and rural spaces, sourcing our food sustainably, locally, and thoughtfully. It may seem a quixotic dream, given the direction of things: last year marked the first time in human history that more people lived in urban areas than rural ones. But Hungry City is a hopeful book, as well as a persuasive one, and Steel is convincing in her argument that such a food place is not only necessary, but also possible.
Photo: © Errol Jones
Jennifer Leonard is co-author of Massive Change: The Future of Global Design, and a Senior Project Lead at IDEO in San Francisco.
