Carolyn Steel: How food shapes our cities

178,522 views ・ 2009-10-05

TED


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00:12
How do you feed a city?
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It's one of the great questions of our time.
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Yet it's one that's rarely asked.
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We take it for granted that if we go into a shop
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or restaurant, or indeed into this theater's foyer in about an hour's time,
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there is going to be food there waiting for us,
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having magically come from somewhere.
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But when you think that every day for a city the size of London,
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enough food has to be produced,
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transported, bought and sold,
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cooked, eaten, disposed of,
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and that something similar has to happen every day
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for every city on earth,
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it's remarkable that cities get fed at all.
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We live in places like this as if
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they're the most natural things in the world,
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forgetting that because we're animals
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and that we need to eat,
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we're actually as dependent on the natural world
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as our ancient ancestors were.
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And as more of us move into cities,
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more of that natural world is being
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transformed into extraordinary landscapes like the one behind me --
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it's soybean fields in Mato Grosso in Brazil --
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in order to feed us.
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These are extraordinary landscapes,
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but few of us ever get to see them.
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And increasingly these landscapes
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are not just feeding us either.
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As more of us move into cities,
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more of us are eating meat,
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so that a third of the annual grain crop globally
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now gets fed to animals
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rather than to us human animals.
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And given that it takes three times as much grain --
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actually ten times as much grain --
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to feed a human if it's passed through an animal first,
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that's not a very efficient way of feeding us.
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And it's an escalating problem too.
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By 2050, it's estimated that twice the number
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of us are going to be living in cities.
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And it's also estimated that there is going to be twice as much
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meat and dairy consumed.
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So meat and urbanism are rising hand in hand.
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And that's going to pose an enormous problem.
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Six billion hungry carnivores to feed,
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by 2050.
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That's a big problem. And actually if we carry on as we are,
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it's a problem we're very unlikely to be able to solve.
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Nineteen million hectares of rainforest are lost every year
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to create new arable land.
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Although at the same time we're losing an equivalent amount
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of existing arables to salinization and erosion.
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We're very hungry for fossil fuels too.
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It takes about 10 calories to produce every calorie
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of food that we consume in the West.
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And even though there is food that we are producing at great cost,
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we don't actually value it.
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Half the food produced in the USA is currently thrown away.
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And to end all of this, at the end of this long process,
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we're not even managing to feed the planet properly.
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A billion of us are obese, while a further billion starve.
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None of it makes very much sense.
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And when you think that 80 percent of global trade in food now
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is controlled by just five multinational corporations,
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it's a grim picture.
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As we're moving into cities, the world is also embracing a Western diet.
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And if we look to the future,
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it's an unsustainable diet.
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So how did we get here?
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And more importantly, what are we going to do about it?
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Well, to answer the slightly easier question first,
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about 10,000 years ago, I would say,
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is the beginning of this process
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in the ancient Near East,
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known as the Fertile Crescent.
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Because, as you can see, it was crescent shaped.
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And it was also fertile.
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And it was here, about 10,000 years ago,
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that two extraordinary inventions,
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agriculture and urbanism, happened
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roughly in the same place and at the same time.
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This is no accident,
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because agriculture and cities are bound together. They need each other.
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Because it was discovery of grain
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by our ancient ancestors for the first time
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that produced a food source that was large enough
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and stable enough to support permanent settlements.
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And if we look at what those settlements were like,
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we see they were compact.
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They were surrounded by productive farm land
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and dominated by large temple complexes
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like this one at Ur,
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that were, in fact, effectively,
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spiritualized, central food distribution centers.
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Because it was the temples that organized the harvest,
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gathered in the grain, offered it to the gods,
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and then offered the grain that the gods didn't eat back to the people.
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So, if you like,
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the whole spiritual and physical life of these cities
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was dominated by the grain and the harvest
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that sustained them.
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And in fact, that's true of every ancient city.
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But of course not all of them were that small.
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Famously, Rome had about a million citizens
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by the first century A.D.
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So how did a city like this feed itself?
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The answer is what I call "ancient food miles."
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Basically, Rome had access to the sea,
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which made it possible for it to import food from a very long way away.
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This is the only way it was possible to do this in the ancient world,
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because it was very difficult to transport food over roads,
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which were rough.
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And the food obviously went off very quickly.
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So Rome effectively waged war
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on places like Carthage and Egypt
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just to get its paws on their grain reserves.
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And, in fact, you could say that the expansion of the Empire
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was really sort of one long, drawn out
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militarized shopping spree, really.
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(Laughter)
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In fact -- I love the fact, I just have to mention this:
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Rome in fact used to import oysters from London,
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at one stage. I think that's extraordinary.
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So Rome shaped its hinterland
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through its appetite.
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But the interesting thing is that the other thing also
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happened in the pre-industrial world.
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If we look at a map of London in the 17th century,
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we can see that its grain, which is coming in from the Thames,
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along the bottom of this map.
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So the grain markets were to the south of the city.
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And the roads leading up from them
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to Cheapside, which was the main market,
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were also grain markets.
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And if you look at the name of one of those streets,
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Bread Street, you can tell
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what was going on there 300 years ago.
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And the same of course was true for fish.
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Fish was, of course, coming in by river as well. Same thing.
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And of course Billingsgate, famously, was London's fish market,
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operating on-site here until the mid-1980s.
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Which is extraordinary, really, when you think about it.
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Everybody else was wandering around
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with mobile phones that looked like bricks
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and sort of smelly fish happening down on the port.
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This is another thing about food in cities:
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Once its roots into the city are established,
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they very rarely move.
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Meat is a very different story
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because, of course, animals could walk into the city.
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So much of London's meat
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was coming from the northwest,
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from Scotland and Wales.
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So it was coming in, and arriving at the city at the northwest,
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which is why Smithfield,
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London's very famous meat market, was located up there.
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Poultry was coming in from East Anglia and so on, to the northeast.
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I feel a bit like a weather woman doing this. Anyway,
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and so the birds were coming in
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with their feet protected with little canvas shoes.
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And then when they hit the eastern end
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of Cheapside, that's where they were sold,
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which is why it's called Poultry.
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And, in fact, if you look at the map of any city
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built before the industrial age,
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you can trace food coming in to it.
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You can actually see how it was physically shaped by food,
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both by reading the names of the streets, which give you a lot of clues.
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Friday Street, in a previous life,
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is where you went to buy your fish on a Friday.
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But also you have to imagine it full of food.
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Because the streets and the public spaces
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were the only places where food was bought and sold.
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And if we look at an image of Smithfield in 1830
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you can see that it would have been very difficult to live in a city like this
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and be unaware of where your food came from.
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In fact, if you were having Sunday lunch,
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the chances were it was mooing or bleating outside your window
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about three days earlier.
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So this was obviously an organic city,
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part of an organic cycle.
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And then 10 years later everything changed.
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This is an image of the Great Western in 1840.
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And as you can see, some of the earliest train passengers
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were pigs and sheep.
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So all of a sudden, these animals are no longer walking into market.
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They're being slaughtered out of sight and mind,
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somewhere in the countryside.
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And they're coming into the city by rail.
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And this changes everything.
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To start off with, it makes it possible
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for the first time to grow cities,
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really any size and shape, in any place.
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Cities used to be constrained by geography;
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they used to have to get their food through very difficult physical means.
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All of a sudden they are effectively emancipated from geography.
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And as you can see from these maps of London,
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in the 90 years after the trains came,
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it goes from being a little blob that was quite easy to feed
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by animals coming in on foot, and so on,
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to a large splurge,
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that would be very, very difficult to feed with anybody on foot,
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either animals or people.
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And of course that was just the beginning. After the trains came cars,
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and really this marks the end of this process.
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It's the final emancipation of the city
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from any apparent relationship with nature at all.
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And this is the kind of city that's devoid of smell,
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devoid of mess, certainly devoid of people,
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because nobody would have dreamed of walking in such a landscape.
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In fact, what they did to get food was they got in their cars,
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drove to a box somewhere on the outskirts,
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came back with a week's worth of shopping,
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and wondered what on earth to do with it.
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And this really is the moment when our relationship,
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both with food and cities, changes completely.
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Here we have food -- that used to be the center,
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the social core of the city -- at the periphery.
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It used to be a social event, buying and selling food.
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Now it's anonymous.
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We used to cook; now we just add water,
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or a little bit of an egg if you're making a cake or something.
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We don't smell food to see if it's okay to eat.
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We just read the back of a label on a packet.
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And we don't value food. We don't trust it.
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So instead of trusting it, we fear it.
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And instead of valuing it, we throw it away.
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One of the great ironies of modern food systems
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is that they've made the very thing they promised
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to make easier much harder.
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By making it possible to build cities anywhere and any place,
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they've actually distanced us from our most important relationship,
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which is that of us and nature.
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And also they've made us dependent on systems that only they can deliver,
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that, as we've seen, are unsustainable.
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So what are we going to do about that?
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It's not a new question.
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500 years ago it's what Thomas More was asking himself.
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This is the frontispiece of his book "Utopia."
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And it was a series of semi-independent city-states,
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if that sounds remotely familiar,
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a day's walk from one another where everyone was basically farming-mad,
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and grew vegetables in their back gardens,
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and ate communal meals together, and so on.
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And I think you could argue that
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food is a fundamental ordering principle of Utopia,
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even though More never framed it that way.
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And here is another very famous "Utopian" vision,
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that of Ebenezer Howard, "The Garden City."
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Same idea: series of semi-independent city-states,
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little blobs of metropolitan stuff with arable land around,
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joined to one another by railway.
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And again, food could be said to be
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the ordering principle of his vision.
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It even got built, but nothing to do with
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this vision that Howard had.
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And that is the problem with these Utopian ideas,
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that they are Utopian.
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Utopia was actually a word that Thomas Moore used deliberately.
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It was a kind of joke, because it's got a double derivation from the Greek.
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It can either mean a good place, or no place.
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Because it's an ideal. It's an imaginary thing. We can't have it.
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And I think, as a conceptual tool
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for thinking about the very deep problem of human dwelling,
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that makes it not much use.
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So I've come up with an alternative,
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which is Sitopia, from the ancient Greek,
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"sitos" for food, and "topos" for place.
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I believe we already live in Sitopia.
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We live in a world shaped by food,
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and if we realize that, we can use food as a really powerful tool --
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a conceptual tool, design tool, to shape the world differently.
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So if we were to do that, what might Sitopia look like?
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Well I think it looks a bit like this.
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I have to use this slide. It's just the look on the face of the dog.
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But anyway, this is -- (Laughter)
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it's food at the center of life,
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at the center of family life, being celebrated,
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being enjoyed, people taking time for it.
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This is where food should be in our society.
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But you can't have scenes like this unless you have people like this.
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By the way, these can be men as well.
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It's people who think about food,
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who think ahead, who plan,
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who can stare at a pile of raw vegetables
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and actually recognize them.
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We need these people. We're part of a network.
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Because without these kinds of people we can't have places like this.
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Here, I deliberately chose this because it is a man buying a vegetable.
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But networks, markets where food is being grown locally.
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It's common. It's fresh.
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It's part of the social life of the city.
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Because without that, you can't have this kind of place,
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food that is grown locally and also is part of the landscape,
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and is not just a zero-sum commodity
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off in some unseen hell-hole.
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Cows with a view.
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Steaming piles of humus.
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This is basically bringing the whole thing together.
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And this is a community project
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I visited recently in Toronto.
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It's a greenhouse, where kids get told
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all about food and growing their own food.
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Here is a plant called Kevin, or maybe it's a
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plant belonging to a kid called Kevin. I don't know.
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But anyway, these kinds of projects
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that are trying to reconnect us with nature is extremely important.
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So Sitopia, for me, is really a way of seeing.
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It's basically recognizing that Sitopia
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already exists in little pockets everywhere.
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The trick is to join them up,
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to use food as a way of seeing.
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And if we do that, we're going to stop seeing cities
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as big, metropolitan, unproductive blobs, like this.
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We're going to see them more like this,
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as part of the productive, organic framework
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of which they are inevitably a part,
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symbiotically connected.
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But of course, that's not a great image either,
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because we need not to be producing food like this anymore.
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We need to be thinking more about permaculture,
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which is why I think this image just
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sums up for me the kind of thinking we need to be doing.
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It's a re-conceptualization
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of the way food shapes our lives.
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The best image I know of this is from 650 years ago.
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It's Ambrogio Lorenzetti's "Allegory of Good Government."
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It's about the relationship between the city and the countryside.
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And I think the message of this is very clear.
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If the city looks after the country,
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the country will look after the city.
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And I want us to ask now,
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what would Ambrogio Lorenzetti paint
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if he painted this image today?
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What would an allegory of good government look like today?
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Because I think it's an urgent question.
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It's one we have to ask,
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and we have to start answering.
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We know we are what we eat.
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We need to realize that the world is also what we eat.
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But if we take that idea, we can use food
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as a really powerful tool to shape the world better.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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