Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (2 page)

I began to look for ways of bridging the gap: to bring life into architecture, and architecture to life. My search took me to Rome in the 1990s, where I studied the everyday habits of a local neighbourhood over the course of 2,000 years; and to the London School of Economics, where I was director of the first urban design studio ever held there. My time at the LSE was fascinating: there were architects, politicians, economists, developers, sociologists, housing experts and engineers all gathered together in one room, trying (and failing) to find a common language with which to discuss cities. It was then that I hit on the idea of using food as a common medium. How would it be, I
wondered, if one tried to describe a city through food? I was confident that such a thing could be done, but had no idea how one might go about it, or where it would lead. Seven years later, this book is the result.

Hungry City
began as an attempt to describe one city – London – through food, but it became much more than that. It was only through writing the book that I realised I had stumbled on a connection so profound that its applications were virtually limitless. Writing it has been a bizarre as well as lengthy process, since it has taken place during a period in which many of the themes I was linking together – food miles, the obesity epidemic, urbanisation, the power of supermarkets, peak oil, climate change – were rising inexorably in the public consciousness. Eventually, it got to a point where I could barely turn on the radio or TV without dashing to my computer to take notes. Food has become a hot topic in contemporary Britain, and a very fast-moving one. I dare say that by the time you are reading this, the scene will have shifted again. No matter.
Hungry City
taps into the zeitgeist, yet its essential themes are as old as civilisation itself.

With a book as horizontal in scope as mine, I have had to thread my arguments carefully.
Hungry City
is not an encyclopaedic book; it is more of an introduction to a way of thinking. It uses London (and other cities in the West) to draw out eternal themes that are global in reach: to trace the critical path of urban civilisation as seen through food, from the ancient Near East, through Europe and America, to modern-day China. The book follows food’s journey from land and sea to city, through market and supermarket to kitchen and table, waste-dump and back again. Each chapter begins with a snapshot of contemporary London, exploring the historical roots of that stage of food’s journey and the issues it raises. The chapters deal in turn with farming, food transport, shopping, cooking, eating and waste, asking how each affects our lives, and impacts on the planet. The final chapter asks how we might use food to rethink cities in the future – to design them and their hinterlands better, and live in them better too.

Writing
Hungry City
has changed the way I see the world so fundamentally that I now struggle to imagine how I saw it before. To see the world through food, as I now do, is to see it with lateral vision;
to understand how apparently disparate phenomena are in fact connected. I very much hope that reading the book will change the way you see things too – that it will show you how powerfully food shapes
all
our lives, and give you the power and motivation to engage more with food, and through it, to help shape our common destiny.

The supply of food to a great city is among the most remarkable of social phenomena - full of instruction on all sides.

In the run-up to Christmas a couple of years ago, anyone with access to British television and some recording equipment could treat themselves to a surreal evening’s viewing. At nine p.m. one night, two programmes were broadcast simultaneously about how our Christmas dinners are produced. You had to be a bit keen, even obsessed, to watch both, but if you chose to make a night of it as I did, the effect was truly discombobulating. First up was
Rick Stein’s Food Heroes Christmas Special
, in which Britain’s favourite champion of high-quality local produce set off in his Land Rover (accompanied by faithful terrier Chalky) to sniff out the finest smoked salmon, turkey, chipolatas, Christmas pudding, Stilton and fizz the nation has to offer.
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An hour of gorgeous landscapes, uplifting music and mouthwatering fodder later, I could hardly bear to wait six days before tucking into the promised feast for real. But lurking on my DVD recorder was the antidote to all that. While Rick and Chalky had been busy charming millions of us into the festive mood on BBC2, on Channel 4 the
Sun
journalist Jane Moore had been putting off several million others from ever eating Christmas dinner again.

In
What’s Really in Your Christmas Dinner
, Moore explored the same traditional meal as Rick Stein, but sourced her ingredients from rather different suppliers. Using secretly shot footage of unspecified industrial units, she showed how most of our Christmas food is produced, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. There were pigs on a Polish factory farm confined to sow stalls too narrow to turn around in; turkeys crowded together in massive dark sheds with so little space to move that many went lame.
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The normally unruffled chef Raymond Blanc was wheeled in to perform a post-mortem on one specimen, revealing its pathetically
weak bones and blood-swollen liver (both the result of premature growth) with a zeal that was close to macabre. If life was grim for these birds, the manner of their death was even worse. Slung into trucks by their legs, they were hung upside down from hooks on a conveyor belt, their heads dipped into a stun bath that rendered them unconscious (although not always) before having their throats cut.

Back on BBC2, Rick Stein also touched on what he called the ‘unmentionable side of turkeys – slaughtering them’. The subject came up when he visited Andrew Dennis, an organic farmer whose turkeys are reared in flocks of 200 or fewer in natural woodland, where they can forage freely, just as their forebears would have done in the wild. Dennis sees his turkey-rearing enterprise as an exemplar that he hopes will be followed by others. ‘Of all farm animals,’ he says, ‘turkeys are by far the most abused. And that’s why we’re trying to produce a blueprint for compassionate turkey rearing and breeding.’ When the time comes for their slaughter, the birds are taken to an old barn familiar to them and killed individually, out of sight of one another. When his slaughterman failed to turn up in 2002, Dennis practised what he preaches, killing every one of his birds himself. ‘It’s the quality of life that’s so important, and the quality of death,’ he says, ‘and if you can provide for both those things, I think I’m comfortable with what we do.’ So there you have it. If you want to eat turkey for Christmas and still feel good about yourself, you can either shell out about £50 for a ‘happy’ bird, or you can spend less than a quarter of that and try not to think too hard about how the animal was reared and killed. No prizes for guessing what the majority of us do.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.