Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives
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Not only does our susceptibility to visual seduction create a vast amount of ‘pre-waste’ in the food chain, it creates waste at the other end too. We may no longer witness the slaughter of thousands of oxen at the dedication of a temple, but orgiastic food displays (with all the wastefulness that entails) still have the power to move us. In many ways, supermarket aisles overstuffed with goodies have replaced the groaning tables of banquets past. They rely for their effect, as did public feasts of old, on theatrical display, and a real or implied profligacy. Unlike street markets, where the selling-off of leftover food at the end of the day is all part of the theatre, supermarkets strive for the illusion of uniform, unsullied freshness. To admit that some of the food might be getting a bit ‘iffy’ would destroy the entire effect. Although some supermarkets do put food near its sell-by date discreetly on offer, most prefer to dispose of it on the quiet, either giving it away to charities, or, more commonly, simply throwing it away.
Even Whole Foods Market, the latest ‘organic’ food retail sensation to hit Britain from America, feels the need to display produce as if it were at a fashion show.45 Its gleaming pyramids of flawless, polished aubergines and perfect, plump tomatoes look more like the food of immaculate conception than anything that might have come out of the ground. Despite the company’s ethical roots and what it calls its ‘uniquely mission-driven’ stance, its great skill is in the theatre of superabundance, not in helping us get down and dirty with a knobbly carrot. The theme is carried through every aspect of the company’s display techniques. In the flagship New York store, shelved foods, such as the myriad trays of packaged meats prepared 20 different ways, are invisibly replenished via sliding back-panels, from which white-gloved hands emerge to whisk away the old and bring in the new with conjuror-like legerdemain. The trays are kept full to the brim right until the store closes, sending out the message that this is food that will never run out, never go off, never let you down.
It is only when we get the food home that the illusion starts to wear off. Out of its carefully nurtured chill-chain, supermarket food rapidly starts to reassume its organic properties – and to reveal the effects of having had them suppressed. Soft fruit in particular does not lend itself well to the rigours of modern food delivery, and is often picked unripe so that it is not bruised in transit. As a result, visually stunning peaches that entice us with their comely blush turn out to have flesh like cannonballs, going straight from rock-hard to rotten without ever passing ‘Go’. Untimely ripp’d from the bough, they are the fleshly victims of our desire for food that is beyond nature; that bears no scar of ever having lived.
Bin Bounty
Beautiful peaches you can’t eat, wastebins full of things you could: something is rotten in the state of modern gastronomy. A quick glance downwards is enough to warn many of us that the way we eat is not doing our bodies much good; the fact that it is not doing the planet much good either is equally evident, once you know where to look. Not only are we chomping our way through reserves of oil, soil, forests and aquifers that have taken millions of years to develop, we are not even making good use of them as we do so. Almost half the edible food in the USA, worth an estimated $75 billion a year, is wasted; a worrying statistic whichever way you look at it, and one that doesn’t take into account the most damaging waste of all: the food that people do eat, but would be much better off if they didn’t.46
The modern food industry is a business; not the planet’s caretaker. So long as its bottom line remains unaffected, it is content. Worse still, the industry is dedicated to overproduction, because it has discovered that, with a little persuasion, it can expand an apparently limited market just that little bit further. Viewed as a closed-loop system, all excess is waste. Viewed as a business opportunity, it is potential profit.
As termini of the industrial food supply chain, supermarkets are like badly designed valves. Since their scale allows them to buy food virtually at cost, a degree of operational wastage is preferable to losing customers because of empty shelves. The same applies to the food service sector. Caterers find it easier to buy cheap raw ingredients in bulk with a generous margin for error, rather than aim for higher quality and waste less. Hardly surprising, then, that British supermarkets sent half a million tonnes of edible food to landfill in 2005, and the food sector as a whole some 17 million tonnes.47 In 1994, the homeless charity Crisis set up a subsidiary, FareShare, with the aim of redirecting some of that waste to the four million or so people in Britain who cannot afford to eat properly. In 2005, the charity managed to recover 2,000 tonnes of edible food from supermarkets and caterers – an impressive enough haul, but one that, when set against the millions of tonnes wasted in Britain, remains a drop in the ocean. Charities such as FareShare face an uphill struggle, not least because of the complexities of modern food logistics. Safety regulations mean they must reject certain foods such as shellfish outright, and they have to operate their meals-on-wheels service like emergency ambulance-drivers, rushing in order not to break the chill-chain that has kept the food they are trying to save ‘fresh’ from wherever in the world it has come from.
Not only are the scale and methods of modern food supply wasteful, they bedevil the attempts of those who would try to salvage something from the wreckage. However, for one group of urban consumers, the rules that govern food waste are there to be broken. In cities of old, the poor and sick once gathered at the gates of monasteries to be fed; now ‘freegans’ gather after dark in supermarket car parks to share out the bounty of the black bins.48 In one sense, freeganism is nothing new – people have lived off other people’s waste for centuries – but unlike their spiritual forebears, many freegans are highly educated, articulate individuals, whose way of life is a deliberate protest against the wastefulness of Western industrial society. The freegans’ message is a powerful one, but as they themselves acknowledge, their approach presents no solution to the human dilemmas of scale. If we all ate like freegans, there would be nothing left for freegans to eat, and, reductio ad absurdum, there would be no cities, either. We would, literally, have to go back to living in forests.
One-Way Cities
As an environmental catastrophe, industrial civilisation is a work in progress: well on the way to meltdown, but not quite close enough yet to tarnish its gas-guzzling fatal attraction. It is not only the bosses of agribusiness who prefer to ignore the future. If life is good enough, we all have a tendency to fiddle while Rome burns. Quite where our one-way lifestyles will lead us remains to be seen; but luckily we do not have to wait to get a good idea, because we have the entire history of urban civilisation at our disposal.
The earliest Mesopotamian city-states provide what a geography teacher might describe as the perfect worked example of a one-way civilisation. Irrigating their otherwise barren hinterlands with mineral-rich water from the hills worked perfectly well for many centuries. But critically what Ur, Uruk and the rest failed to do was to drain their land sufficiently. As river water evaporated on the plains, it left behind salty deposits that over hundreds of years began to salinise the soil, gradually reducing its fertility. During the third millennium BC, the Sumerian diet shifted from wheat to barley, a crop more able to withstand a salty soil, and poets began to refer ominously to the ‘whiteness of the fields’.49 From that time on, surviving records reveal the cities’ increasingly desperate struggle for food, with land put under continuous production rather than being allowed to lie fallow, and yields at just a fifth of what they had been 800 years before. By the seventeenth century BC, Sumerian city-states were all abandoned, and the world’s first urban experiment was at an end.
The city-states of ancient Greece faced a similar problem to those of Sumeria, with local soils unsuited to the large-scale growing of grain. However, the Greeks faced the additional problem of hilly terrain. Initial forest clearances to make way for grazing during the Bronze Age had already caused a degree of soil erosion, but when heavier clearances were made in the fourth century BC in order
to grow wheat, they denuded the landscape to such an extent that it became virtually barren. Surveying the Attican hills, Plato lamented the change in them he had witnessed in his own lifetime: ‘What is left now,’ he wrote, ‘is, so to say, the skeleton of a body wasted by disease; the rich, soft soil has been carried off and only the bare framework of the district left.’50 Had Athens had to rely on its local hinterland to feed it, it would have faced the same lingering death as its Mesopotamian predecessors. Athens, of course, was spared by the sea, across which it not only imported food, but exported people to found new colonies abroad.
In ancient Greece and Mesopotamia, what appeared at first to be successful strategies for survival turned out to have long-term defects impossible to reverse. In both cases, the catastrophe was clearly visible: poets and philosophers gazing out from the city walls could see the denuded landscapes for themselves. But in the case of the greatest one-way city in history, things were rather different. The only physical evidence of his own consumption a Roman citizen would have seen from his back yard would have been the bulk of Mons Testaceus, Rome’s 54-metre-high ‘eighth hill’ to the south of the city, made out of all the shattered amphorae and testae that brought oil and grain from Spain and Africa.51 Far from being barren, the city’s local hinterland flourished with all the fruit and vegetables, poultry and game the market-gardening practitioners of pastio villatica could squeeze out of it. It took an educated eye to see that all this luxury farming must have its invisible counterpart elsewhere. As the poet Martial drily observed, Egypt had once sent its winter roses to Rome; now Rome produced its own roses, and relied on Egypt for its grain.52
Due to its unparalleled command of logistics and military might, Rome found a way, for a while at least, of having its cake and eating it. It pioneered the expansionist model of urban consumption, spreading its load further and further afield as its needs increased. In the end, it was not the lack of food that did for Rome so much as a lack of interest: the effort of maintaining its overextended supply chains meant that at their furthest extremities they were manned by foreign soldiers who had never laid eyes on the city and frankly weren’t bothered if they ever did. Having stretched itself to the furthest reaches of the map, the concept of Rome imploded like an overfilled balloon.
Rome’s rise and fall have long been favourite topics among urban theorists. Opinions differ about the precise nature of the city’s demise, but whatever its political and military position before its fall, the nutritional writing was already on the wall. Egypt and North Africa, Rome’s breadbaskets for some 500 years, were nearing the end of their useful lives. Centuries of intensive monoculture had depleted their soils; deforestation had permanently altered their climates. Writing in AD 250, St Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, described a land plundered to the point of exhaustion: ‘The world has grown old and does not remain in its former vigour. It bears witness to its own decline … The husbandman is failing in his fields. Springs that once gushed forth liberally now barely give a trickle of water.’53
What makes Rome’s experience so pertinent now is not the nature of its end, but its attitude towards feeding itself at its height. Its aberrational scale allowed Rome to act independently of the natural checks that governed other cities. Like a greedy child in a chocolate factory, it gorged itself unthinkingly, becoming consumed by the very act of consumption. No longer required by the mores of society, restraint and abstinence became a matter of individual choice. Like so many modern Hollywood stars, the great and powerful took to presenting themselves as having next to no appetite. The fourth-century AD Historia Augusta, an ancient exercise in political spin, insisted that Septimius Severus was ‘partial to greens from his own land and occasionally enjoyed drinking wine; often he did not even bother to sample the meat that was served’.54 Diet fads, like obesity, are symptoms of a food culture out of kilter.
Despite the many similarities between Roman patterns of consumption and our own, there is one crucial difference. Rome had the luxury of an expanding world; we don’t. As it happens, Rome ran out of infrastructure before it ran out of food, but evidence suggests it was a close-run thing. To the inhabitants of late-eighteenth-century Britain, that was a sobering thought. The first nation in Europe to possess a capital comparable in size to Rome, the British were encountering food supply problems of a similar nature for the first time. Casting a mathematical eye over the swollen metropolises of his day, the English political economist Thomas Robert Malthus did a simple calculation, and came up with a gloomy prediction. In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, he argued that ‘population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence’, and that since human populations increased geometrically, while agricultural outputs only did so arithmetically, mankind would eventually run out of available land, and was so doomed to run out of food. Only some reduction in numbers, through war, pestilence or voluntary ‘moral restraint’ could save man from this inevitable end.
The impact of Malthus’s pessimistic tract was widespread and profound. Among his many admirers was Charles Darwin, who later used Malthus’s ideas to help formulate his own theory of natural selection, applying it not just to mankind, but to all living creatures. But not everyone was so impressed. Malthus’s critics, whose ranks swelled almost from the moment his ink dried, argued that he had left something essential out of the equation: mankind’s ingenuity. Man, they said, would not starve, because he would adapt, either by limiting his consumption for the common good, or by finding ways to increase agricultural yields. Since faith in artificial fertiliser was by no means universally shared (most notably not by its own inventor, Justus von Liebig), opinions differed as to quite how the latter was to be achieved. However, the cheery consensus was that somehow, man would be saved by his ability to think his way out of trouble.
Two centuries later, the debate continues. Malthus’s detractors and supporters have both scored victories since his day. The mass starvation he predicted for the mid nineteenth century never took place, thanks largely to monocultural grain production fuelled by artificial fertiliser; on the other hand, the world’s two most populous countries – India and China – have felt the need to adopt population-limiting policies aimed at effecting the same results as Malthus’s ‘moral restraint’. Opinions still differ over whether population control, technology or a new-found selflessness will save mankind. One thing, however, is clear. All that we have achieved by tearing up rainforests and dumping chemicals on the ground is to postpone the Malthusian question. What we have not done is make it go away.
‘Pecunia Non Olet’
We never exercise, or should never exercise a besoin as pure loss. It should be put to use as manure.
Jeremy Bentham55
Of all bad habits, those to do with food can be the hardest to crack. The past is littered with examples of cities that one way or another have eaten themselves to death. Of course, civilisations fail for many reasons: lack of knowledge, climate change, shifting political allegiances, even sheer bad luck can spell their end. But as Jared Diamond argued in his recent book Collapse, it is often the choices people make in the light of clear evidence that seal their fate – even when the facts that could have saved them were staring them in the face.56 What makes the study of past civilisations so grimly fascinating is the discovery that the dilemmas we face are nothing new. The struggle to survive is part of the human condition, along with a certain blindness to its consequences. Unless you happen to have shares in agribusiness, the signs that our industrialised food systems are flawed – that we are well on the way to Malthusian meltdown – are about as unambiguous as you could get. Yet like so many civilisations before us, we fail to see the problem, because we have trained ourselves for centuries not to see it.
In the same way that other people’s doomed love affairs are easier to dissect than one’s own, we can talk endlessly about how the Romans got it wrong, without seeing the same faults in ourselves. But not even the all-consuming Romans were blind to the v
alue of their waste. Popinae, as we saw, were cookshops that sold leftover meat from temples, and Roman agronomists were enthusiastic about the benefits of using night soil as fertiliser. But the most blatant use of waste was by the emperor Vespasian, who raised funds by imposing a tax on urine from public latrines. Suetonius reports that when the emperor’s son Titus complained that such a tax was not seemly, his father asked him to sniff the money to see whether it smelled bad. ‘Pecunia non olet’ – money does not smell – became Vespasian’s most famous axiom.57
Even post-industrial cities have occasionally shown an enlightened attitude towards waste. Nineteenth-century Cincinnati, dubbed ‘Porkopolis’ as we saw due to its meat-packing activities, gave its hogs the freedom of the city, allowing them to roam about at will, while citizens were required by law to throw their food waste into the middle of the street to make it easier for the hogs to eat. As one English visitor remarked in 1832, ‘If I determined upon a walk up the main street, the chances were five hundred to one against my reaching the shady side without brushing by a snout fresh dripping from the kennel.’58