Sometimes, in a Pret A Manger or the office canteen, an existential worry
descends. I look at all the sandwiches or all the plates full of curry, then
multiply them by the zillions of other sandwiches and curries being consumed
in all the other food outlets throughout the world. I imagine the sheer
impossible weight of squawkless chickens, mountains of bread, Baikals of
orange juice, and worry about where the hell all this comes from and - even
less aesthetic - where it all goes to.
This is exactly where Carolyn Steel begins in her exuberant, provocative and
irritating book. There are billions of us living modern urban lifestyles,
being fed, we know not how, and being sluiced, we care not whence.
Increasingly, she argues, we have become alienated from both our input and
our output, and sooner or later there will have to be a reckoning. Though
the book was completed before the troubles of the past few months became
headline news, it is possible to view recent rises in world food prices
(and, indeed, in oil prices) as early signs that Steel's reckoning is nigh.
Or, at least, nigher.
Steel (alas in one way, hooray in another) can be a superbly undisciplined
thinker. Although the possible food and energy gap is a huge subject on its
own, she only really devotes two-and-a-half chapters to it, preferring along
the way to bound off into almost any aspect of the history of urban food
culture that takes her fancy.
You learn about how animals were brought into Georgian London, visit
“Porkopolis” (the pig-killing city of Cincinatti), and discover that most
Victorian city-dwellers - contrary to bucolic myth - couldn't cook since
they had no kitchens and sent their food out to be roasted, boiled or
braised in local cook-shops. Steel also points out that the family meal, far
from being a useful bonding fixture among our recent ancestors, was a rare
event, since labouring fathers would be fed separately from their children,
with their wives waiting upon them.
Steel's knowledge and understanding of space (she is an architect) also allows
her to make a number of telling points in the course of her journey. To take
an example, she contrasts the social freedom - the “negotiated space” - of
the open food and goods market, with the constraints placed by shopping mall
authorities on any behaviour regarded as being aberrant. She's surely
correct: the right to express a view or a lifestyle publicly must trump the
right to shop with nothing louder in your ears than the sound of Muzak.
So why is Steel irritating? She is slightly given to cast the entire world in
terms of her own preoccupations. So, when she quotes John Stuart Mill to the
effect that “over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”, it is
only to append the codicil: “One need hardly add that without sovereignty
over food, the concept becomes practically meaningless.” In that sense, why
is the same not true of medicine, clothing, shelter or sexual fulfilment?
For that matter, why is alienation from food production any more species-
threatening than alienation from clothing or energy production?
And then, too, her cast of villains is - given her contemporary
anti-globalisation bibliography - too predictable and also too easy. She
doesn't like corporations, agribusinesses, computers, GM foods, Tesco,
Starbucks, McDonald's and Americans. “They” somehow make us buy ready meals
to “extend their influence”, or plot to destroy the high street and small
food shops.
Steel knows her architecture and her cookery, but seems to be less assured
about nutrition and psychology. The food culture we have just left behind
was itself a pretty unhealthy one, as studies in the US just after the war
revealed. And the traditional Japanese diet may have kept the men and women
of Nippon relatively free from heart disease but, because it was so
salt-intensive, left them the stroke monarchs of the world. Steel argues
that “Obesity is the bodily manifestation of our disconnected industrialised
food culture”, but had we had the wealth to eat as much food in, say, 1808
as we do now, and the freedom from physical exertion, we would have been
just as obese.
The second irritation is that although Steel pretends to, she doesn't think
much of us. She is often like a happily censorious nun, a foodie Sister
Wendy, assured of her own salvation and wanting to save our souls, not for
our worthless sakes, but for God's. Whenever she talks about now, about
2008, it's clear that we can never be virtuous enough. We stupidly don't
like food, or we like the wrong sort, of if we do like the right sort, we're
just poseurs.
And we are so terribly fake. The parks and gardens we enjoy are “empty
reminders of the natural world to bring the old pastoral fantasies back to
life”, not the negotiated space of the disappearing marketplace. The things
we like to buy are inferior to the things we don't, and thus a Starbucks
peppermint frappuccino is somehow less intrinsically worthy (along with its
consumer) than a coffee purchased from a Carolyn Steel-approved independent
coffee shop.
This judgementalism extends beyond Steel's range of competence and has her
resorting to bad metaphysics. GM technology she objects to on the sole
Carolinian ground that it “interferes with the very life force of a plant”.
When you read such a phrase it is usually a sign that the writer doesn't
know what she's talking about.
That's a shame, because Steel is definitely on to something, and her desire
that we understand better and think more about our food, how much of it we
waste, how much energy it consumes and how we dispose of it is - in the real
sense of the word - vital.
Extract
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 ... 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. 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 ... 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.
Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives by Carolyn Steel
Chatto & Windus, £12.99 Buy
the book here
