With its primary digestion tanks, sludge-powered generator, aquabelt thickeners and so on (none of them, disappointingly, named Elizabeth, Duke of Edinburgh, Charles or Anne), Crossness represents the state of the art when it comes to treating human waste – the approach to it, at least, that sees sewage as a problem, not a resource. Despite the on-site incineration that was forced upon it, Crossness remains the product of the one-way approach to waste disposal typical of ‘well-to-do civilised’ nations ever since industrialisation. Contrary to the approach common among pre-industrial cities, commercial market gardeners and (as Will and Hoffmann noted) the Chinese, it is one that uses engineered solutions to find ways not of using waste better, but of getting rid of it more effectively. Yet as Herbert Girardet pointed out in his book Cities, People, Planet, the nutrients found in sewage are a finite commodity. Phosphates, one of the key ingredients of artificial fertiliser, are currently mined in North Africa, Florida and Russia, but when deposits run out in a few decades’ time, human sewage will be their most easily available source.25
Societies have always differed in their attitudes towards waste; not just sewage (by its nature a highly provocative substance), but every by-product of their lives. What is wasted by society is the direct and opposite expression of what is valued. As a way of understanding the material basis of civilisations, nothing could be more telling.
The Problem of Waste
If our gold is so much waste, then, on the other hand, our waste is so much gold.
Victor Hugo26
What is waste? Rubbish, detritus, effluent, excess, garbage, scrap: it has so many names, and comes in so many different forms, that to try to sum it up in a word can be misleading – even meaningless. Just about the only thing that can be said about waste is that it is stuff that someone, somewhere, does not want. However, that is not to say that someone, somewhere else, might not want it. What is considered waste – what is wasted – differs from one nation to another, from one section of society to the next, from one man to his neighbour. Waste, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
Attitudes towards waste in the pre-industrial world were straightforward compared to those of today. Since most waste was organic (either the direct or indirect by-product of the food chain), its re-use was taken for granted. Cities formed part of an organic cycle in which the food supply was fuelled by the waste it generated. Any inconvenience caused by the arrangement (not least its smell) was simply something one had to put up with. Squeamishness in the pre-industrial world was a luxury few could afford. But our attitudes in the post-industrial West are very different. Much of the waste we produce today is both non-organic and highly differentiated, ranging from material with high embodied value (scrap paper, second-hand cars) to substances so toxic they could kill us or our descendants on contact (nuclear waste). In such a complex material landscape, waste has itself become a highly differentiated industry, with its own logic, processes and dilemmas. All of which tends to obscure the fact that a city’s organic inputs and outputs are vitally connected: that they constitute the cycle of life itself.
A century and a half after London’s decision not to recycle its sewage, the British approach to waste remains essentially one-way. We live in a consumer society in which everything is expendable: we throw away cars and clothes, mobiles and computers, not because they have worn out, but because they have reached their cultural ‘use by’ date. We have, in other words, lost the ability to distinguish between embodied and applied value. Wastefulness epitomises our way of life, not just in what we throw away, but in what we consume and how it is made. In those terms, we consume nothing more wastefully than we do food. Despite its obsession with ‘efficiency’, everything about the modern food industry is precisely the opposite: beef reared in feed lots instead of on grass, out-of-season produce raised in heated polytunnels, carbon emissions from subsidised aviation fuel, refrigerated containers on the international ‘chill-chain’ – the list goes on. Yet of all the forms of waste involved in modern food production, none is more damaging than that of food itself, because it contains all the others put together. When we waste food, we waste all the effort, labour, water, sunshine, fossil fuels – even life itself – that went into making it.
We may not be aware of much of the waste associated with industrial food production, but there is one part of it we can’t pretend not to know about: our own. In Britain we throw away 6.7 million tonnes of household food a year – that is one third of all the food we buy.27 Of course, such phenomenal levels of waste are only possible in a society that no longer values food – that has lost its sense of moral wrong in wasting it. A recent survey by the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) found that more than half of us are ‘not concerned’ about food waste, with 40 per cent saying that throwing food away is ‘not a problem’ because food is ‘natural and biodegradable’.28 Unfortunately, the ‘natural and biodegradable’ content of landfill, where most of our food waste ends up, is a highly toxic environmental hazard, poisoning watercourses with its fermented ‘leachate’ (the contaminated liquid that leaches from the waste), releasing carcinogenic dioxins into the atmosphere, and contributing more than a quarter of the UK’s emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than CO2.29
The same survey by WRAP identified a raft of reasons why we waste food. It found that the majority of us buy more than we need, because instead of making a shopping list or planning meals ahead, we wander around supermarkets in a dreamy haze, succumbing to ‘BOGOFS’ as we go.30 Once we get the food home, our lack of knowledge in the art of household management compounds the problem. We misjudge the amount of food to cook at mealtimes, allow children to refuse whatever they don’t want, and throw leftovers away because we lack the culinary skills to use them up. Last, but not least, we fail to notice when food is nearing its ‘use by’ date, or even throw it away before it has done so, because we don’t understand what the labels mean, and don’t trust our own judgement to tell whether or not it’s off. One in five of those questioned by the survey said they ‘would not take a chance’ on food close to its ‘best before’ date even if it looked fine; in other words, they didn’t know what ‘best before’ means. Another survey by the Food Standards Agency in 2005 came up with similar results, finding that only a third of us interpret food labels correctly – which means a staggering two thirds don’t.31 Even food labels themselves have to be adjusted to account for our incompetence. Once food has left the professional chill-chain, we are likely to subject it to all manner of daft things: leave it in the boot of a hot car, forget about it at the back of a too-warm fridge, put it within reach of the dog. Since food manufacturers are forced to take our behaviour into account when they calculate ‘use by’ dates, food’s potential shelf life is shortened before it even leaves the factory.32
Fear of Dirt
There is no such thing as absolute dirt.
Mary Douglas33
The reasons why we waste food all boil down to the same thing: our disconnected food culture. We live in a fog of ignorance about food, but the fact that we find it easier to throw the stuff away than determine whether or not it is safe to eat says more about us than that we are lazy or ill-informed. In our post-modern, clinical, hygiene-obsessed world, food makes us fearful – not just because it is so intimately connected with our bodies, but because, in Nanny State Britain, it is just about the only aspect of our health and safety for which we ourselves are still required to take responsibility. Dirt, like danger, is something we have tried to expel from our lives, yet the more remote we become from food and cooking, the less we are able to control either. Nuclear waste may be scary, but we are unlikely ever to come into contact with it – or to be required to exercise judgement over it if we do. However, food is something we have to confront every day. Faced with food of dubious edibility, we prefer to get rid of it – with a massive margin for error – rather than sniff it, prod it or – heaven forfend – nibble a bit to see whether i
t tastes OK. It is as if we fear the encounter itself – not just because something might happen to us if we were to venture into the realm of the semi-rotten, but because something about the very idea offends us.
In her 1966 book Purity and Danger, the anthropologist Mary Douglas analysed how rejected food comes to be classified as ‘dirty’. There is no such thing as ‘dirt’ in nature, she argued, just various forms of matter. It is our habit of separating and categorising objects that creates dirt. It is simply ‘matter out of place’: something that threatens to undermine our human sense of order.34 In order to illustrate her point, Douglas considered an item of food on a plate. At first, she said, the food is clearly ‘good’, since it belongs to the meal about to be consumed. But once it has been rejected and pushed to one side, its position becomes ambiguous. No longer clearly part of the meal, nor obviously waste, the food becomes ‘dirty’ – and dangerous – because it threatens to contaminate the rest of the food on the plate. However, once safely scraped off into the bin, good order is restored, because the food is now clearly rubbish, and can no longer be mistaken for what it is not. Matter is once again in its rightful place.
Douglas went on to contrast the way in which ‘dirt’ in primitive cultures is often adopted as part of a sacred structure, whereas in the West it is almost entirely ‘a matter of hygiene or aesthetics’.35 The fact that our idea of dirt is, as she put it, ‘dominated by our knowledge of pathogenic organisms’ gives us a strange relationship with it; a fear that renders us incapable of acknowledging its creative, even redemptive, power. Returning to the rejected item of food, Douglas described how it would be transformed by the ‘long process of pulverising, dissolving and rotting’ into a universal medium, capable, like water, of absorbing the past and generating new life.36 As fecund organic mulch, its creative formlessness would render it as much a ‘symbol of beginning and of growth as it is of decay’.37 It is this regenerative property of dirt, she argued, that we are closed to in the West, because of our obsession with purity. For Douglas, the Western lifestyle was ‘irremediably subject to paradox’, since it denied the very life-forces that animated existence: ‘It is part of our condition that the purity for which we strive and sacrifice so much turns out to be hard and dead as stone when we get it.’38
Douglas’s arguments provide an insight into our problematic relationship with food, particularly when it comes to dealing with items we consider ‘iffy’. Given our difficulty in telling the difference between good and bad food, nothing could be more threatening to us than that which appears – to our perception, at least – to be somewhere in between. Since ‘dodgy’ food refuses to be categorised, we find it easier to throw it away, rather than risk it contaminating other food in the fridge we know to be good, because we have just bought it.
Even more tellingly, Douglas touches on the way our fear of dirt is linked to our deeper fears about life itself. For well over a century, the foods we eat in the West, like the spaces we inhabit, have been designed to filter out any reminders of our own mortality. We have constructed a physical and mental cordon sanitaire around ourselves, from which anything redolent of death and decay, putrefaction and rottenness – anything, in short, that might once have been celebrated as Carnivalesque – has been excluded. As a result, we live in a theatre of anxiety: in a world that feels under constant threat from the very things necessary for sustaining life.39 We recoil from our own waste, because it reminds us too closely of what we are.
The Immaculate City
Fear of dirt, and the corresponding quest for purity, has deep roots in the West. It can be traced back to the Enlightenment, when a series of scientific revelations (Newtonian physics, Galileo’s astronomy, Harvey’s circulation of the blood) shifted the very basis of human understanding about the natural world. Philosophers such as Descartes began to argue that man, suitably armed with scientific knowledge and a rational brain, could do more than merely explain the world about him, he could control it. Henceforth, it seemed, nothing – nature, society, the universe – would be beyond the grasp of man’s reason. The Enlightenment made its mark on every aspect of Western culture; not least on cities, whose overcrowded and decrepit state now sprang sharply into focus. Just as human bodies were starting to be seen as objects of science, cities were viewed as diseased. Like sick bodies, they needed to be surgically operated on: their rotten parts removed so that the healthy flesh could be saved.
Not only were cities in the nineteenth century under constant threat of pollution and disease, they were also full of social anxiety. In his book Paris Sewers and Sewermen, Donald Reid described how material and social fears combined in post-revolutionary Paris to create a city fraught with the danger of disruption ‘from below’: from the underworld of rejects – animal, vegetable, mineral and human – that it sought to suppress. Clogged up, decaying and disease-ridden, the city’s sewers were multiply threatening: not merely a source of pollution, but the realm of an unruly and murderous underclass that might rise up at any minute and overwhelm the city. For Victor Hugo, the sewers were redolent of the city’s moral turpitude:
The sewer … is the conscience of the town where all things converge and clash. There is darkness here, but no secrets. Everything has its true, or at least its definitive form. There is this to be said for the muck-heap, that it does not lie … Every foulness of civilisation, fallen into disuse, falls into that ditch of truth …40
Hugo was not alone in conflating physical degradation with moral abjection. Four years’ immersion among London’s poor was enough to convince Henry Mayhew of the closeness of the ‘connection between physical filthiness in public matters and moral wickedness’.41 Hugo’s Paris and Mayhew’s London were cities on the brink, whose social and physical decrepitude would soon lead, in Reid’s words, to ‘unprecedented efforts … to control and transform the subterranean’.42
In the case of Paris, the efforts were chiefly those of Baron Georges Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine to Napoleon III, and the driving force behind arguably the most radical transformation ever visited on a European capital. Enjoined by his emperor to impose some sort of order on the city, Haussmann set about the task he described as that of making Paris ‘the Imperial Rome of our time’ with ruthless efficiency. He spent the years from 1852 to 1870 ripping the medieval city to shreds, slicing through its ancient fabric with a series of imposing neoclassical boulevards of truly epic proportions, each running above an equally impressive sewer. The mastermind behind the subterranean half of the enterprise was Haussmann’s chief engineer Eugène Belgrand, who not only pioneered many of the techniques later used by Bazalgette, but faced a far sterner test than his British counterpart, since the flow of the Seine was too feeble to flush out his sewers. Consciously following the example of Marcus Agrippa, Haussmann worked with his engineer to construct a system of aqueducts (including, aptly enough, connections to several ancient Roman ones) so that the sewers could be flushed out artificially.
The ‘Haussmannisation’ of Paris was a remarkable achievement, but its engineered bravura hid a darker side. Haussmann’s sweeping demolitions, ostensibly necessary to construct the sewer network, served the dual purpose of making the capital far easier to control, allowing troops to shoot down boulevards at long range, and seal off entire sections of the city from one another. What was apparently a scheme to establish material order in the city masked the imposition on it of a martial one.
Whatever the motives behind its transformation, the Paris of Haussmann marked the industrial city’s coming of age. As the crumbling infrastructures of the Ancien Régime gave way, a new urban order was emerging – zoned, serviced, controlled – that would provide the blueprint for urban planning in the future: indeed, it formed the basis of the modern discipline. From now on, the constituent parts of cities would be separated out, so that those intended for work and play, rich and poor, clean and dirty would have their allotted places. The traditional mixed-use approach to city-building, in which all of human life existed on
the same street, would be dismissed as old-fashioned, inefficient, dirty. With iron hearts and bowels of stone, cities would henceforth present themselves as rational, autonomous machines. Their inner workings, like those of the body, would remain hidden. Purged of their ordure, cities would be spared any reminder of their organic natures. In place of pigs and chickens in back yards, there would be landscaped parks and gardens: empty reminders of the natural world to bring the old pastoral fantasies back to life.43
Flawless Food
In the same way that Western cities have been purged of organic content, so the food we eat increasingly appears and behaves as if it were inorganic. Our quest for purity in the West has led to a demand for visually perfect food, and public acceptance of denatured, tasteless produce. Since that is what the food industry is ideally suited to producing, it is only too happy to indulge us, weeding out ‘ugly’ fruit and disguising bits of dead cow in order not to offend our sensibilities.
The removal from the food chain of what is perfectly edible food has created a whole secondary industry in the West. Our demand for meat with no discernible relationship to anything furry, feathery or fluffy, for instance, has spawned an industry entirely devoted to using up unwanted body parts, involving everything from the making of hamburgers (100 per cent ‘pure’ beef – just don’t ask which bits) to the ultimate perversion of feeding dead animals back to themselves. As our willingness to pay for meat has dwindled along with our soaring demand, the livestock industry has increasingly relied on this secondary source of profit, finding ways to dispose of the meat and offal we refuse to eat, but which other cultures (and creatures) eat quite happily. The visual and conceptual sanitising of food is not limited to animals either: vegetables are also subjected to a beauty parade to ensure they match our aesthetic expectations. One report in the Observer found that in order to pass muster at Sainsbury’s, Cox apples had to be between 60 and 90mm across and 30 per cent red, so that 12 per cent of perfectly good apples were rejected at source.44
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