Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

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

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.

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.

How Food Shapes Our Lives

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 result 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 /files/14/08/19/f140819/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?