Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  ‘So what?’ you might ask. If the coffee is good and the sofas soft, who cares whether Starbucks is ‘authentic’ or not? Once again, it is a question of scale. Going for a fantasy coffee in a pretend Seattle coffee shop might be jolly once in a while. But when that is the only choice one has, it starts to mess with one’s identity. The problem with chain restaurants is not the fact that they exist, but what they prevent from existing. In her book No Logo, the American journalist Naomi Klein described how large chains target entire urban districts – even towns – and use their economies of scale to ‘brand-bomb’, putting local rivals out of business.79 The strategy is exemplified by Starbucks’ policy of ‘clustering’ several outlets in a single neighbourhood – specifically targeting those with thriving café cultures – in order to saturate the local coffee trade. Starbucks drop their prices sufficiently to force their rivals to quit, then move in and take over their abandoned positions. The process can involve what Starbucks calls ‘cannibalisation’, in which the company’s own outlets fight one another to destruction in the coffee battle’s bitter endgame. Whatever the name of the tactic, its effect on indigenous café cultures is similar to the one rabbits have had on local wildlife in the Australian outback.

  In 2007, Starbucks announced their intention to open another 100 branches in Britain in 2008 – and one in London every fortnight for the next decade – saying the British market had proved ‘way bigger’ than they had expected. So if you have a nice local café in your neighbourhood, watch out for a bit of cluster-bombing coming your way soon. Unless you live in Primrose Hill, that is. In 2002, the residents of the London neighbourhood (admittedly an unrepresentative bunch consisting mainly of the sorts of people – actors, politicians, literati – who frequented coffee houses the first time round) refused to allow Starbucks to cannibalise their beloved high street, with its long-established, family-owned cafés. Their high-profile campaign, which attracted several thousand glittering signatories, was enough to persuade the company to cut its losses and try its luck elsewhere. In Primrose Hill, at least, a spark of indignation ignited the British soul at the very idea of having its food identity stolen.

  The Cornucopia Complex

  Obesity is never found either among the savages, or in those classes of society in which men work to eat, and eat only to live.

  Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin80

  Most of us in Britain neither know about food, nor care about it much, yet our indifference, coupled with our ‘special relationship’ with the nation that first brought conspicuous consumption to the masses, is affecting more than our cities. It is going straight to our middles.

  We may not farm, shop or cook for ourselves any more, but we all have to eat. One way or another, we should all be experts at eating – but are we? Our environment is evolving faster than our bodies can adjust: most of us lead sedentary lives in superheated buildings, yet our appetites seem to be keeping pace with whatever the food industry can throw at us. Several recent studies have confirmed that our ancient survival instincts are still intact, urging us to carry on eating whatever is put in front of us, whether or not we are hungry. As a result, the more food we are presented with, the more we tend to eat.81 ‘Supersize’ and ‘BOGOF’ deals, in other words, appeal to those parts of our brains that haven’t evolved since we were living in the frozen wastes and hunting the woolly mammoth.

  All of which would be bad enough if woolly mammoth was what we were eating. But of course it isn’t. For the past 30 years, we have been consuming increasing quantities of industrialised food, which has been putting some very strange things into our bodies. In his 2003 book Fat Land, the journalist Greg Critser described how, once again, the process began in America, as the food industry began to experiment with a range of new ‘Frankenfoods’ in the 1970s: foods geared not so much towards nutritional value as their ability to ‘perform’ according to the dictates of modern food production. First on the list was palm oil, colloquially known as ‘tree lard’: a vegetable oil that remains solid at room temperature, so giving products a good ‘mouthfeel’ and imbuing them with such a long shelf life that, as one insider gushed, they seemed to ‘last for ever’.82 With credentials like that, no manufacturer was going to quibble over whether it was ethical to sell customers products containing ‘vegetable oil’ with saturated-fat levels higher than beef tallow. Another major discovery was high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), first developed by Japanese scientists in 1971. Six times sweeter than cane sugar, HFCS is also far cheaper to produce and remains fresh-tasting for longer: qualities that make the fact that it bypasses the body’s normal digestive processes, arriving ‘almost completely intact’ in the liver, easier to overlook. Certainly neither Coca-Cola nor Pepsi seemed overly concerned when they switched their products over to the new sweetener in 1984.

  Armed with its new range of Frankenfoods, all the food industry had to do was persuade people to eat more of them. During the 1980s, American fast-food chains took over where the labs had left off, offering ‘supersize’ and ‘value meal’ promotions to customers. Although the deals seemed a good bargain, all they were really doing was sneaking high-profit (and high-calorie) items such as Coke and fries in under the radar. Nevertheless, the strategy brought immediate results: Taco Bell, the first chain to adopt value meals in 1988, more than doubled its sales within eight years, forcing other companies such as McDonald’s to follow suit. By 1996, a quarter of the $97 billion spent on fast food in America went on food sold on the basis of larger sizes or extra portions. By that time, a McMeal, which had originally contained 590 calories, had ballooned to a whopping 1,550.83

  Bigger, faster, cheaper, pizzazzier: American fast food turned the old rules of the table on their head. ‘Eating big’ had always been a sign of high status; now, for the first time, an entire nation was doing it. Between 1970 and 1994, the number of calories available in the American food supply rose from 3,300 to 3,800 per person per day – an increase of 15 per cent.84 But, as any ancient ruler could have told you, there is a limit to how much any one person, however great, can eat. So where were all the extra calories going? By the century’s end the answer was all too obvious. Several decades of porking out had taken a terrible toll on American bodies. Soaring levels of obesity, Type-2 diabetes and Type-B malnutrition – surely the most ironic of all urban diseases – meant that eating had overtaken smoking as America’s most injurious activity.85 As if that were not bad enough, researchers found that Americans were also the world’s most anxious eaters, associating food more with health concerns than pleasure. As one researcher put it, Americans now believed that ‘food is as much a poison as it is a nutrient, and that eating is almost as dangerous as not eating’.86 So much for happy meals.

  Fat Cities

  Viewed as a way of life, American food culture could hardly be called successful. Disastrous would be closer to the mark. If the sight of citizens of Houston, Texas (regular claimant to the title of ‘fattest city on earth’), driving along the pavement in their fat-buggies were not enough, the rash of exposés and lawsuits that hit the fast-food industry at the turn of the millennium ought to have been enough to ensure that its gaff was well and truly blown. So why do we in Britain, and increasingly other nations, persist in eating the American way? Although it is true that many of the fast-food industry’s tactics – use of social demographics, economies of scale, aggressive marketing – are mightily effective, that does not explain why the product is so universally appealing. The real answer lies not just in the nature of the food, but in the way it has altered our whole relationship with eating.

  Fast-food chains work because they offer safety in numbers – they make us feel we are not alone when we eat. In the anonymity of the post-industrial city, they appeal to the oldest human instinct of all: the sense of belonging and safety that comes from sharing food with others. When we eat fast food, our primary relationship is with the food itself, not with anyone we might be sharing it with. Fast food is the first food in the world that is
meant to be eaten alone – that wants to be your friend. It is the food of substitution: food that comes in helpings so all-encompassing, so laden with goodies and additives that it seems to offer the world in every mouthful. Yet despite its liberal doses of salt, sugar and fat (the classic obesity triad), much fast food remains strangely unsatisfying. Layering blandness on blandness does not lead to satisfaction, any more than eating a bowl of fries brings consolation. The most tragic aspect of the cornucopia complex is that it is a search for fulfilment that will never come.

  Fast food is popular precisely because of what it does not provide: satiety, companionship, well-being. Like the cigarette whose heady buzz wears off after the first lungful of smoke, it promises everything and delivers little, trapping ‘heavy users’ in a cycle of dependency that keeps them coming back for more. In essence – as Cesar Barber’s lawyer John Banzhaf argued in the McDonald’s ‘fat suit’ – fast food is addictive.87 By its very nature, it leads us into temptation, not just because of its salty, fatty sugar-rush, but because it is an autonomous ‘fix’ we can get any time we want. Greed has been frowned upon by every society in history, yet we can now indulge in it with impunity, because the social mechanisms that once controlled it (table manners, ethics, respect for food) are no longer in place. Because it exists independently of any social constraints, fast food removes the last check on our tendency to behave like Labradors given half the chance. No wonder dieting in America has become a religion. After decades fighting the flab with low-fat and low-carb, Slimfast and Slimslow, F-plan and Dr Atkins, would-be American slimmers have finally turned to God. Divine Health, founded by Pastor Don Colbert MD, is the latest diet craze in the USA. With the slogan ‘Lose weight, eat what Jesus ate’, worshippers pray to be delivered not from the devil, but from the desire for ‘food to comfort me’.

  Despite increasing alarm over the obesity epidemic sweeping America and Britain, there are few signs that our Anglo-Saxon love affair with industrialised food is on the wane. Over the past 50 years, a typical British meal has morphed from meat and two veg to sticky chilli chicken, via burgers, Coke and fries. The trend is pure Americana, as is our growing predilection for eating out. Our bodies are responding too: one in four Britons is now obese, and we are fast catching up with the world’s fattest nation, where the figure is now one in three. Clearly this is bad news, but threatening to deny obese patients NHS treatment or banning children from eating chips at lunchtime is to fail to recognise the nature of the problem. As one Rotherham school discovered in 2006 when it tried to introduce obligatory ‘healthy meals’, we British can become passionate about food when denied our favourite fodder. On that occasion, outraged parents simply climbed through undergrowth to feed their kids chips through the railings.88

  Treating us like naughty schoolchildren caught with our fingers in the sweetie jar is not going to work. Obesity is not just a question of what we eat – it is an illness that goes to the heart of the way we live. It is the bodily manifestation of our disconnected, industrialised food culture – a culture in which food is not valued or understood, and is therefore open to abuse. If we are to tackle obesity, we are going to have to look at every aspect of our food culture, with all that implies. We are going to have to question how we dwell in cities: how we design and build them, feed and live in them.

  A century ago, Americans turned their amazing ethnic inheritance into a fearful, neutered, deeply unhealthy national gastronomy. Now we need to turn things the other way. We need to reconnect with the culture of food, and remember what it means. There is always a danger, when thinking about food, of getting nostalgic for the past: for ‘good old days’ that probably never existed. But there is still a lot that we can learn from it. The history of the table is full of injustice, manipulation and snobbery; it is also full of pleasure, fellowship and joy. It is a reflection, in short, of society itself. To ignore its power is to deny our humanity.

  The shared meal is mankind’s most complex social phenomenon for a reason. It is the context in which, more than anywhere else, we define ourselves as social beings and recognise our deeper bond with land, sea and sky. We have yet to discover what a strong, local, post-industrial food culture could be like, but there has never been a better time to find out.

  Chapter 6

  Waste

  A sewer is a cynic. It says everything.

  Victor Hugo1

  The Thames Embankment under construction in 1867.

  Crossness Pumping Station, London

  If Crossness Pumping Station were a dog, it would be a mongrel of very mixed breeding. A large rectangular edifice on a barren stretch of the Thames by Thamesmead, it is fashioned chiefly from pale brownish brick with a queasy yellow tinge, with details picked out in red. Style-wise, the building’s round-arched windows, carved column capitals and dog-tooth string coursing all hint at the Romanesque, while its no-nonsense massing and beefy structural piers are pure Train Shed. Round the back, the architectural signals become even more confusing. In place of the expected derelict goods yard, there is a formal garden straight out of the Italian Renaissance, complete with symmetrical flower beds, gravel paths, a cedar tree, and pedimented pavilions at either end.

  So far, so weird. But it is only on entering the building that one is well and truly flummoxed. Part cathedral, part machine room, the space is filled with an ethereal light, filtering down from clerestory windows through an ironwork grid two storeys above one’s head. Every element of the room is decorated in some way: patterned brickwork and fancy tiles cover the walls and floor, while screens, grilles, stairs and balustrades compete with yards of elaborate ironwork, their red, yellow and green floral motifs overlapping in a visual cacophony of colour. In the centre of the room, a large octagonal opening (the cathedral crossing) punches through the ironwork grid above, each of its angled faces a writhing mass of emerald leaves from which the Metropolitan Board of Works monogram MBW peeps out in red. Perhaps because of all this ferrous foliage, it can take a while to clock the really serious pieces of ironwork in the room, but once noticed, they command all one’s attention. Four looming, mostly rusting metal giants stand one to each corner, their mute power obvious even at rest. At the sight of them, all the building’s visual clutter falls away, like excited chatter at a party when someone famous enters the room. Meet Victoria, Prince Consort, Alexandra and Albert Edward: the four largest rotatative beam engines in the world.2

  A rotatative beam engine, in case you were wondering, is an engine that applies force at one end of a pivoted beam in order to do work at the other, using a flywheel to regulate the motion. It is essentially a powered seesaw, whose vertical rocking motion will be familiar to devotees of Dallas from the ‘nodding donkeys’ seen pumping oil out of the Texan desert in the series’ opening credits. Sucking up large volumes of fluid from underground is what beam engines do best, and in the case of the royal quartet at Crossness, those volumes were once very large indeed. In their nineteenth-century heyday, their 43-foot, 47-ton rocking beams were each capable of lifting six tons of liquid at a single stroke, at a rate of 11 strokes per minute. However, it was not oil they were lifting, but something that once threatened to bring the world’s greatest city to a stuttering, stinking standstill – its sewage.

  London at the start of Queen Victoria’s reign was capital of the largest, most powerful empire the world had ever seen. The city’s dominion encompassed over a fifth of the world’s land surface and a quarter of its population. But great global metropolis though it was, London had a serious domestic problem. The city had never adopted what might be called an integrated policy on waste, and its two and a half million inhabitants were still being served by a sewage system best described as medieval, essentially comprising the River Thames, its stinking tributaries, and around 200,000 overflowing cesspits.3

  London’s failure to deal with its ordure was far from unique. Most pre-industrial cities adopted a reactive, rather than a proactive, approach towards waste. Unlike the food supply, to
which even a day’s disruption caused chaos, rubbish could be allowed to pile up for years, even centuries, before it created a real nuisance. Part of the reason for this was that most waste in the pre-industrial world was organic. Although it was messy, it was also seen as a valuable resource. In what the historian Donald Reid called the ‘golden age of urban ecology’, very little went to waste – indeed, the more a city stank, the richer it was deemed to be.4 Leftover food was gobbled up by pigs; human and animal faeces were collected to be used as manure; urine and fermented dung were vital to a variety of artisanal processes such as dyeing and paper-making. What little rubbish could not be used was either thrown straight into rivers, or taken to dumps on the city outskirts. That was the theory, anyway. In practice, most people simply chucked their waste out into the street – a habit that, in smaller cities at least, was not quite as antisocial as it sounds, since much of what was thrown away could be collected and put to good use.