Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (25 page)

One group of people who
can
make a difference to the way food shapes cities is ordinary customers – you and me. Our cash is what drives the food system, and our decisions about what food we buy, and from whom, have a greater influence than we might think. In 1998, the east Suffolk town of Saxmundham demonstrated the fact by saying no to Tesco, with a vigorous campaign organised by a local resident, Lady Caroline Cranbrook, supported by her MP, none other than John Gummer, he of PPG6 fame. As part of her campaign, Lady Cranbrook spoke to every trader in the town, as well as many local producers, in an effort to map the devastating impact the superstore would have on local businesses. Her work proved decisive, and six years after the council decision went in her favour, she revisited the same traders to see how they were faring. What she found was extraordinary: not only was every one of the town’s 81 local shops still intact, but several more were opening up, and the number of local producers had risen from 300 to 370 – an unheard-of state of affairs, given the general trend in Britain.
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Saxmundham was, in Cranbrook’s words, ‘on the verge of becoming a food destination’. It is true that the social demographic of Saxmundham is such that most residents can afford to pay a bit more for their food, but then so could a lot more of us. It is just a question of priorities. You don’t have to be rich to eat well in Britain, and if more of us realised that, good food would soon get cheaper. Tipping points can work in both directions.

Despite the general decline of food markets in Britain, many still flourish, and not just those that sell cut-price food or rely on food tourism either. Some of the most successful are those serving the nation’s ethnic communities, whose inhabitants still shop for traditional raw ingredients to cook at home. With its diverse population, London has many such markets, such as that in Brixton where, in the narrow arcades and leftover spaces beside the railway viaduct, one can buy anything from shark and salt fish, goat and plantain to okra, breadfruit and yams, all to the throb of reggae. Apart from the weather, one could almost be in the Caribbean. Likewise in Southall High Street, a huge variety of South Asian vegetables spill out on to the pavements, most of
them air-freighted in via Heathrow. No worries about the death of the high street here: you can hardly make your way along the pavement for the crowds, and not a tourist in sight. When food takes centre stage like this, even unpromising spaces become animated, and show themselves capable of engendering human warmth.

The passion such markets inspire only becomes obvious when they come under threat. Queen’s Market in Upton Park is London’s most ethnically diverse, with 80 stalls and 60 local shops serving the local African, Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities. But in 2005 Newham Council proposed demolishing it to make way for an Asda Wal-Mart superstore, a mall, and 220 flats. Although the market was to be retained in reduced form, the locals were having none of it, organising a petition with 12,000 signatories against the proposals. In 2006, Asda Wal-Mart pulled out of the deal, but by then the council had signed a management lease with the developer St Modwen, admitting that ‘the Council and the Developer’s income will depend on the success of the new shopping centre’.
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In other words, no supermarket, no deal: the familiar cry.

Thirty years on from Covent Garden, it seems London councils still haven’t learnt their lesson. However, the Parisians appear to have learnt theirs. In 2005, Mayor Bertrand Delanoe announced his determination to prevent what he called ‘
La Londonisation
’ (the corporate takeover of retail) from happening in Paris. Delanoe placed restrictions on half of the city’s 70,000 independent shops to protect their use, so that, for instance, local butchers and bakers cannot be taken over by mobile phone companies.
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Delanoe’s approach did not meet with universal approval: some commentators accused him of trying to preserve Paris in aspic for tourists. Some of the loudest criticism came from Mayor Livingstone, whose spokesman dismissed Delanoe’s approach as backward-looking: ‘Paris’s choice will increase London’s competitive edge in a globalised and modern economy – in reality trying to buck the trend of a modern, globalised city won’t work.’
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Quite how being a ‘modern, globalised city’ squares with the Mayor’s ambition to make London a ‘world-class sustainable’ one remains to be seen. However, since London seems, as ever, to be putting its trust in the forces of commerce, you can place your bets now.

As usual with polarised debates, there is a third way – in this case
represented by the city of Barcelona. The Catalan capital proves that cities don’t have to be folksy or old-fashioned to sustain authentic neighbourhood life. Barcelona manages it perfectly well, and the city has a gridded block structure about as rational as it gets. Tough government legislation prevented supermarkets from gaining a foothold in Spain the way they did in Britain; and although there are plenty in Barcelona, they are prohibited by law from selling fresh food at street level, so cannot compete with the city’s food markets. Barcelona has 43 of the latter, including the famous Mercat de la Boquería off the equally famous street Las Ramblas. Recently twinned with Borough Market, La Boquería is a world-renowned food emporium, but it is not just urban showstoppers like these that preserve Barcelona’s street life; rather the fact that people there still take their food very seriously indeed, and support local food shops and markets as a matter of course. Nobody could accuse Barcelonans of being backward-looking: their bold transformation of their city for the 1992 Olympics stunned the architectural world. Yet after more than a decade of urban renewal, Barcelona has managed to maintain a balance between commercial development and traditional ways. It can be done.

The battle over food is not just about what we eat; it is about society itself. Public life is the social glue of cities; public space its physical expression. Without them, urban society – civilisation itself – is fatally weakened. The role of food in forging both is immense. There is no question that supermarkets have a role to play in our lives, but it is up to us to decide what that role should be. They are businesses doing a job; in some cases, doing it very well. Supermarkets fit in with our crazy, hectic lifestyles. But do we really want them to design where we live? Is cheap food really that important? In the end it comes down to whether or not you agree with Margaret Thatcher’s infamous dictum that ‘there is no such thing as society’.
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If all we want is a comfortable suburban lifestyle for ourselves, then supermarket cities – for those who can afford them – are the future. But if we believe civilisation should deliver more than that, we are going to have to fight for it.

My definition of man is, ‘a cooking animal’.

The kitchen at the Savoy Hotel is about the closest you can get to a culinary holy grail in London. Created at the turn of the century by the legendary French chef Auguste Escoffier, it is the spiritual home of haute cuisine in Britain. Here the author of the 1903
Guide culinaire
(an essential chef’s bible even today) constructed banquets for kings and queens, created peach Melba for the eponymous soprano Dame Nellie while La Melba was performing at nearby Covent Garden, and raspberries Pavlova for the prima ballerina Anna Pavlova while La P was doing likewise. Waiting in the plush River Restaurant for my guide, Rebecca Todd, I am anticipating a grand theatre of cookery, a worthy counterpart to the velvety art deco luxury of the Savoy’s public rooms.
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But, as Rebecca arrives and leads me behind a discreet wooden screen, I am rapidly disabused. Down a sloping passage, its worn lino patched with masking tape and its walls covered with messy rotas, we arrive in the main kitchen, which, far from the imposing chamber of my imagination, is a cramped, sweaty inferno: a long, low, hellishly hot room in which the only thing more startling than the temperature is the noise. The food of the gods, it seems, comes from the other place.

Immediately in front of us, a group of black-clad waiters are standing at the pass (the long steel counter where orders are dispatched), gazing at the white-hatted chefs beyond, who work with concentrated precision, apparently oblivious to the waiters’ eyes trained on them. The
chef de cuisine
is also at the pass, barking out orders to his ‘brigade’, who shout back without once looking up from their work. The military terminology is not misplaced. A professional kitchen at full throttle resembles nothing so much as an army unit under siege. Flames burst forth like mortar shells, faces are grim and determined, and tasks
are carried out with soldier-like focus and urgency. Teamwork and discipline are vital in a kitchen such as this, since it is split into different sections (
parties
), each of which performs a different culinary function – hors d’oeuvres, sauces, roasting, grilling and so on – so that a miracle of co-ordination is required to assemble each dish at precisely the right moment. Cooking, like comedy, is all in the timing. The division of the kitchen into
parties
was Escoffier’s idea: a way of streamlining the professional cooking process. Watching the Savoy chefs turn out their lunch service, I find myself wondering how much here has changed since Escoffier’s day. The equipment might be modern, but its purpose is ancient. No technology will ever remove the stress, heat and noise of proper cooking.

After a while, Rebecca leads me back to the entry passage and a winding, almost domestic staircase down to the floor below. The stairs smell faintly of icing sugar as we descend, and sure enough, resting somewhat incongruously on a lower step is a tray of miniature cakes: puff-pastry castles with piped cream battlements, sitting in tidy rows. We have arrived in the pastry kitchen, a tranquil oasis a world apart from the raging bedlam above, where the products seem more like philosophical musings than food. On a counter to our right, several trayfuls of gravity-defying concoctions in millefeuille, chocolate and cantilevered biscuit wait to make their impact on some well-heeled diner’s waistline. But it seems that not even this fairy-tale world is immune from stress. When a couple of waiters arrive to take the cakes off to a distant banqueting room, it seems there is a crisis underway, and the manoeuvre is accompanied by a volley of Ramsayan expletives. Time for us to beat a retreat back upstairs.

This far into our tour, it is becoming clear that the Savoy kitchen is a culinary rabbit warren: a series of burrow-like rooms in the bowels of the hotel connected by numerous narrow staircases and passageways. This impression is confirmed as we proceed to the rooms beyond the main kitchen, each of which can only be reached through the one before. First in the sequence is the sandwich room, where two chefs are cutting the crusts off dozens of loaves with long, narrow knives. They have clearly been at it for some time, since the pile of offcuts is already the size of a small bonfire. I ask one of the chefs what happens to all the
crusts, and with an apologetic smile he indicates the bin. Such wastefulness is endemic in top-flight professional cookery: part of the price we pay for ‘perfect’ food, such as the razor-edged sarnies Savoy guests get with their tea.

Our next stop takes us to a far less tidy world: the butchery, now being scrubbed down for the day. In the middle of an otherwise unremarkable room is the largest wooden chopping board I have ever seen. At least eight inches deep at the edges, it could easily accommodate an entire cow. The board is clearly old: years of slicing sirloin and fillet have reduced its depth by several inches in places, so that its contours resemble a scale model of the Scottish Highlands, from where much of its meat must have come. There is something powerful about this hunk of wood – something of the sacrificial slab about it. Even when empty, it feels like this is the kitchen’s epicentre – the place where the seriousness of cooking can be most keenly felt.

Down yet another sloping passageway is the last space in the culinary enfilade: the fish room. A small, dim space facing on to a glazed brick light well, it feels more like a cave than a kitchen, a melancholy chamber filled with damp, clammy air and the sound of running water. A lone chef stands at an enamel sink shucking oysters, sliding his knife swiftly round the encrusted shells to reveal their pearly insides. The tiled floor is lethally slippery, so that we skate, rather than walk, across it to the cold store, a cabinet of cold secrets rather like a bank vault. Inside, behind a heavy door, are stacks of wooden boxes packed with every kind of fish: gleaming salmon, turbot and bream, striped prawns and shining mussels, all packed on beds of ice. There are also live lobsters, dopey in the cold, pincers tied to prevent any last-minute bid for freedom. The chef picks up one of them to show us: a jet-black female with clusters of bright orange eggs on her underbelly. The sight inspires a sense of horror in me, but also one of pity. Kitchens can do the strangest things to you.