Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  List of Illustrations

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: The Land

  Chapter 2: Supplying the City

  Chapter 3: Market and Supermarket

  Chapter 4: The Kitchen

  Chapter 5: At Table

  Chapter 6: Waste

  Chapter 7: Sitopia

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Carolyn Steel is an architect, lecturer and writer. Since graduating from Cambridge University, she has combined architectural practice with teaching and research into the everyday lives of cities, running design studios at the LSE, London Metropolitan University and at Cambridge, where her lecture course ‘Food and the City’ is an established part of the degree programme. A director of Cullum and Nightingale Architects, she was a Rome scholar, has written for the architectural press, and presented on the BBC’s One Foot in the Past.

  Hungry City won the RSL Jerwood Award for Non-fiction (for a work in progress) in 2006.

  List of Illustrations

  1. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Effects of Good Government on City and Country (1338). Detail from The Allegory of Good Government, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. (The Bridgeman Art Library)

  2. Map of the Fertile Crescent. (Drawn by the author, with thanks to Matt Seaber)

  3. George Robertson, A North View of the Cities of London and Westminster with part of Highgate (1780). (The Bridgeman Art Library)

  4. Hoisting hogs on a Hurford revolving wheel (c.1906), Chicago. (Courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library)

  5. Albert Bierstadt, Yosemite Valley (1868). (The Bridgeman Art Library)

  6. Christmas fatstock show at Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire. Photo, early 20th century. From The Land, by John Higgs, Readers Union, 1965.

  7. Map of the food supply to ancient Rome. (Drawn by the author)

  8. Ramesseum (the mortuary temple of Rameses II). Plan after U. Hölscher. (With the kind permission of Barry Kemp)

  9. The Grève, or Port aux Blés, in Paris, looking toward the Pont Marie. 17th century engraving. (Courtesy of Getty Images/Roger Viollet)

  10. The Great Western Railway at Kelston Bridge Near Bath. Lithograph from Illustrations of the Great Western and Bristol and Exeter Railways, L. Hague, 1840.

  11. Palazzo della Ragione and Piazza delle Frutta, Padua. 20th century photograph. (The Civic Museum, Padua)

  12. John Ogilby, A Large and Accurate Map of the City of London (1676). Detail from facsimile published by the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society (1894). (Annotated by the author)

  13. Pieter Bruegel, detail from The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559). (Courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien)

  14. Smithfield Market (c.1830). Aquatint by R.G. Reeve after James Pollard. (The Bridgeman Art Library)

  15. Southdale Shopping Centre, Minnesota. Photograph of the interior, 1956. (Courtesy Victor Gruen Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming)

  16. Joris Hoefnagel, detail from A Fête at Bermondsey (c.1570). (The Bridgeman Art Library)

  17. Fetching Home the Christmas Dinner. Engraving from the Illustrated London News, 1848. (Courtesy of ILN/Mary Evans Picture Library)

  18. Cooking in a small country kitchen. Photograph from Christine Frederick, Household Engineering, 1915.

  19. Le Corbusier, Villa Stein-de Monzie, Garches. Photograph of the kitchen. (© FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2008)

  20. A View of the Inside of Guildhall as it appeared on Lord Mayor’s day, 1761. Detail of engraving from The Gentleman’s Magazine, December 1761. (The Bridgeman Art Library)

  21. Detail of a place set at a formal dinner table of a great house. Photograph from Emily Post, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, 1922.

  22. Interior of a London coffee house. Aquatint signed and dated A.S.1668. (The Bridgeman Art Library)

  23. Photo of first Cincinnati, Ohio White Castle, 1927. (The White Castle images and materials and the “WHITE CASTLE®” mark are the exclusive property of White Castle Management Co. and are used under license. No use, reproduction or distribution is allowed)

  24. The Thames Embankment under construction. Detail of engraving from the Illustrated London News, 1867. (Courtesy of ILN/Mary Evans Picture Library)

  25. Sewage farming at Gennevilliers in the 1870s. Engraving from L’Illustration, 1877. (Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library)

  26. Allotments by the Albert Memorial, 1942. (Courtesy of Getty Images/Fox Photos)

  27. Arup, Dongtan Eco-City, aerial view of South Village (2007). (Courtesy of Arup)

  28. Le Corbusier, Ville Contemporaine (1922). Perspective rendering with triumphal arch. (© FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2008)

  29. MVRDV, Pig City (2001). Detail of pig-rearing floor. (Courtesy of MVRDV)

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders, and the publishers will be pleased to correct any omissions brought to their notice at the earliest opportunity.

  For my mother and father

  CAROLYN STEEL

  Hungry City

  How Food Shapes Our Lives

  Introduction

  Close your eyes and think of a city. What do you see? A jumble of rooftops stretching off into the distance? The chaos of Piccadilly Circus? The Manhattan skyline? The street where you live? Whatever it is you imagine, it probably involves buildings. They, after all, are what cities are made of, along with the streets and squares that join them all together. But cities are not just made of bricks and mortar, they are inhabited by flesh-and-blood humans, and so must rely on the natural world to feed them. Cities, like people, are what they eat.

  Hungry City is a book about how cities eat. That is the quick definition. A slightly wordier one might be that it is about the underlying paradox of urban civilisation. When you consider that every day for a city the size of London, enough food for thirty million meals must be produced, imported, sold, cooked, eaten and disposed of again, and that something similar must happen every day for every city on earth, it is remarkable that those of us living in them get to eat at all. Feeding cities takes a gargantuan effort; one that arguably has a greater social and physical impact on our lives and planet than anything else we do. Yet few of us in the West are conscious of the process. Food arrives on our plates as if by magic, and we rarely stop to wonder how it got there.

  Hungry City deals with two major themes – food and cities – yet its true focus is on neither. It is on the relationship between the two: something no other book has ever directly addressed. Both food and cities are so fundamental to our everyday lives that they are almost too big to see. Yet if you put them together, a remarkable relationship emerges – one so powerful and obvious that it makes you wonder how on earth you could have missed it. Every day we inhabit spaces food has made, unconsciously repeating routine actions as old as cities themselves. We might assume that takeaways are a modern phenomenon, yet five thousand years ago, they lined the streets of Ur and Uruk, two of the oldest cities on earth. Markets and shops, pubs and kitchens, dinners and waste-dumps have always provided the backdrop to urban life. Food shapes cities, and through them, it moulds us – along with the countryside that feeds us.

  So why write about food and cities, and why now? With cities already gobbling up 75 per cent of the earth’s resources and the urban population expected to double by 2050, the subject is certainly topical. Yet the real answer is that Hungry City is the r
esult of a lifelong obsession. Seven years in the making, it has taken a lifetime to research, although for most of that time, I had no idea that it – or indeed, any book – would be the outcome. Hungry City is an exploration of the way we live, from the perspective of someone who decided at the age of ten she wanted to be an architect, and has spent the rest of her life trying to work out why.

  Perhaps because I was born and bred in central London, I have always been interested in buildings. However, my interest was never limited to the way they looked, or to their physical form. More than anything else, I wanted to know how buildings were inhabited. Where the food came in, how it got cooked, where the horses were stabled, what happened to the rubbish – these details fascinated me as much as the perfect proportions of their facades. Most of all, I loved the unspoken bond between the two: the public/private, upstairs/downstairs divisions within buildings, and the way they were subtly interwoven. I suppose I have always been drawn to the hidden relationships between things.

  This predilection probably came from my grandparents’ hotel in Bournemouth, where I spent most of my holidays as a child. Wandering around the hotel on my own, I had the excitement of knowing both its ‘front of house’ and ‘backstage’ areas at once, and of being able to move between the two at will. I always preferred to lurk in the service quarters: the sculleries full of teapots and hot-water bottles; the laundry room with its piles of freshly ironed, neatly folded linen; the porters’ room, with its ancient workbench and the stench of tobacco and furniture polish. But more thrilling by far were the kitchens, with their worn tiled floors and greasy enamel walls, mounds of butter and chopped vegetables, steaming stills and copper pans full of fragrant boiling stock. I loved those rooms, not just for their pragmatic homeliness, but for the fact that they were separated from all the antiques and politeness of the public rooms by the merest swing of a green baize door. The allure of such thresholds has never left me.

  Looking back, I suspect my love of food must have begun then, although it was only years later that I realised that my twin passions for food and architecture were really two aspects of the same thing. It was architecture that I pursued as a career, first studying it at Cambridge, and then, two years after qualifying, returning there to teach. By then, I understood architecture to be the embodiment of human dwelling in its fullest sense, with politics and culture as its social contexts, landscape and climate its physical ones, and cities its greatest manifestation. Architecture encompassed every aspect of human life – which made the teaching of it in an architecture school somewhat limiting. I felt increasingly that in order to study architecture, one had to look away from it – only then could one see it for what it really was. It seemed to me that what was missing from the traditional discipline was life itself: the very thing it was supposed to support. I found the same in practice: discussing projects with clients, it was clear to me that I had somehow learnt to think and speak in an architectural code that excluded non-practitioners. This struck me as not only wrong, but potentially disastrous. How could architects expect to design spaces for people to inhabit, if we had no proper dialogue with them?

  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.

  Chapter 1

  The Land

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

  George Dodd1

  Detail of The Allegory of Good Government by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. A rare glimpse of city and country in perfect harmony.

  Christmas Dinner

  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.2 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 pig
s 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.3 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.