Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  Yet of all nineteenth-century cities, the one that really bucked the trend was Paris. Although Haussmann’s sewers purged the capital extremely effectively, the Seine did not flow strongly enough to carry the waste away, and for 45 miles downstream of the city it was a black and bubbling morass. The solution to this latest threat from ‘below’ would vindicate the pleadings of those such as Liebig and Chadwick who had argued in vain for the re-use of London’s waste. Their French counterpart was Pierre Leroux, a prominent social philosopher whose ‘circulus’ theory of 1834 was written in direct refutation of Malthus. In it, Leroux declared that since humans were producers as well as consumers, if they would only recycle their own waste, they need never run out of food. Leroux’s theory had long exposed him to ridicule in France, but while licking his wounds in exile in Jersey, he found a powerful convert in Victor Hugo, who became so convinced of Leroux’s arguments that he broke off from the narrative thread of Les Misérables to philosophise on the subject:

  Do you know what all this is – the heaps of muck piled up on the streets during the night, the scavengers’ carts and the foetid flow of sludge that the pavement hides from you? It is the flowering meadow, green grass, marjoram, thyme and sage, the lowing of contented cattle in the evening, the scented hay and the golden wheat, the bread on your table and the warm blood in your veins – health and joy and life.59

  In 1867, five years after Les Misérables was published, the sanitary engineer A. Mille, already a convert to sewage filtration, persuaded his boss Eugène Belgrand to try it out in Paris. At an experimental farm at Clichy, Mille showed how irrigating the sandy soil with waste water not only filtered the water so effectively that it emerged purer than if it had been treated with chemicals, but rendered the land extremely fertile. Mille’s first experimental crop, consisting of 27 varieties of vegetable, had a market value six times greater than the grain previously grown on the site, and was of such high quality that it earned compliments at the 1867 Universal Exposition. The results delighted Chadwick, who had supported Mille’s experiments and defended him against those who objected to the idea of raising crops on sewage-enriched land:

  An Academician pronounced it to be gross, and unfit for the food of cattle. I appealed from the judgment of the Academician to the judgment of the cow on the point. A cow was selected, and sewaged and unsewaged grass was placed before it for its choice. It preferred the sewaged grass with avidity, and it yielded its final judgment in superior milk and butter of increased quantity.60

  Soon it was not only cows that approved of sewaged grass. With the discovery that porous sandy soil could both purify foul water and be made fertile in the process, political economists had found their philosopher’s stone. It seemed that shit really could be turned into gold. In 1869, Mille and his assistant Alfred Durand-Claye set up the world’s first municipal sewage treatment works at Gennevilliers, a sleepy little town across the river from Clichy. In order to overcome local resistance to the works, they offered 40 local farmers the chance to cultivate the irrigated land for nothing. By the following year, the engineers were inundated with requests from farmers for the right to irrigate their own land with sewage water. Results were so remarkable that Napoleon III felt compelled to make a visit to the sewage farm, arriving incognito, but leaving with armfuls of juicy vegetables. By 1900, there were 5,000 hectares of land under irrigation at Gennevilliers, each receiving 40,000 cubic metres of sewage water a day and capable of growing 40,000 heads of cabbage, 60,000 artichokes, or 200,000 pounds of sugar beet each per year. The water was used to soak the roots of crops, never touching their stems or leaves, and was found to be pure enough after filtration to be drawn off for domestic use. Gennevilliers was transformed from a one-horse town into Paris’s horticultural supplier of choice, with the city’s best hotels eager for its produce, and visitors coming out on day trips to marvel at the ‘veritable gardens of Eden’.61

  It is curious that Gennevilliers was the product of one of the most ruthless purges of any city in history – that the Haussmannisation of Paris should have demonstrated how the golden age of urban ecology could be replicated in the post-industrial era. Yet the fact that Paris’s circulatory experiment was the combined result of military strategy, sanitary reform and the accident of geography did not detract from its underlying message. Contemporary authorities in Berlin didn’t think so, anyway. In 1878, Berlin abandoned the chemical treatment of its waste in favour of sewage farms along Parisian lines. By the turn of the century, the city had 6,800 hectares of municipal farms under irrigation, with 3,000 farmers and their families living in rent-free cottages on them.62 Contemporary commentators declared the farms to be a living vision of utopia. Some are still in use today, as an integral part of Berlin’s waste management and water purification systems.

  ‘Veritable gardens of Eden.’ Gennevilliers in the 1870s.

  Cyclical Cities

  Living in the urbanised West, the fact that the cities we inhabit are part of an organic continuum can be hard to grasp. Since we appear to live independently of nature, worrying about our waste can seem irrelevant; cranky, even. In Britain, we have never been overly fussed by the matter in any case. Food and raw materials have come too easily to us; and the sea has always been there to dump stuff into when we’re done with it. As a result, our throwaway culture is one of the most entrenched in Europe. In 2007, only Ireland and Greece sent more waste per capita to landfill.63 But however hard we try to ignore it, the issue of waste refuses to go away. Indeed, after a century or so of suppression, it is making a comeback in Western cities, threatening us once more with the danger of contamination ‘from below’. As a House of Commons Select Committee put it in 2007:

  A little over ten years ago, 84 per cent of our municipal waste – the refuse councils collect from homes and businesses, parks and street bins – went to fill holes in the ground; a little over ten years from now, at present rates, there will, it is estimated, be no such holes left to fill.64

  We need to change our ways in Britain; not just because of the lack of holes, but to avoid punitive fines from the EU Landfill Directive, which from 2010 will impose stiff penalties on us if its targets are not met.65 But as the days of chucking stuff into the ground draw to a close in Britain, we find ourselves caught between a rock and a mushy place. Unlike nineteenth-century Berliners, we Britons have neither the zeal nor the infrastructure for recycling. The introduction in 2006 of fortnightly bin collections – the government’s latest attempt to make us recycle more – simply caused widespread outrage, as the spectre of rat-infested, rotting garbage on the streets signalled a return to the horrors of the nineteenth-century city.

  It is no accident that Austria, and not Britain, is the recycling champion of Europe. A landlocked, mountainous country, it has of necessity had to develop a very different attitude towards waste, and in the 1980s, the capital, Vienna, reached a point when its outgoings had nowhere left to go. The city began to collect biowaste separately, composting it in municipal depots and using it to fertilise suburban farming schemes, as well as handing the compost back to citizens for their own use. By 2000, the city was composting 90,000 tonnes of organic waste a year, enough to grow half the food for its hospitals, saving an estimated £5 million annually.66 Today, 60 per cent of Austria’s domestic rubbish is recycled, with every household obliged to sort it into four separate categories: glass, organic, paper and mixed. In Vienna, the remainder is burnt in a high-tech incinerator that by 2008 is expected to heat two thirds of the city’s homes. The fact that the incinerator is as highly decorated as Crossness Pumping Station sends out its own message. For the Viennese, treating waste is once more a matter of municipal pride.

  Contemporary Vienna, like nineteenth-century Paris, has had a waste epiphany. Faced with the horror of pollution in its own back yard, the city took a momentous decision, only to discover that what it feared most was in fact a cash cow in disguise. Because the city had clogged up, it experienced a seismic shift in thinking that
has altered its entire relationship with waste. Donald Reid’s remarks, referring to post-revolutionary Paris, could equally well describe Vienna’s recent past: ‘The danger to civilisation came from unthinking repression of waste; only by processing this waste could society conquer its anxieties and turn to profit the hidden worth of what it rejected.’67

  It is no accident that the nineteenth century was the great age of debate about waste. Cities then were on the cusp; at a moment of transition from their pre-industrial, semi-rural status to their post-industrial, illusory autonomy. It was at that point that the scale of the issue became evident; that urban consumption revealed itself to be a global problem. Yet once the moment had passed, spirited away by bold engineering or temporary technologies, the crisis appeared to have been averted. A century and a half later, we know that not to have been the case.

  Now that waste is back on the urban agenda, we face a tough physical challenge. The cities we live in do not lend themselves easily to recycling; on the contrary, most have been designed with the opposite in mind. Urban expansion has pushed up land values, making suburban market gardening economically unviable (those at Gennevilliers, for instance, ceased operation in the 1980s for that very reason). The fact that urban food supplies are no longer municipally controlled makes such schemes harder to replicate too. Then there is the organic purging of cities. Feeding scraps to pigs, the time-honoured method of choice, requires there to be pigs in the city – or at least nearby – to feed. Tottenham, for instance, used to be famous for its ‘recycled’ sausages, made from pigs fed on London scraps.68 But there is little place for such cosy arrangements in modern food delivery. Even if the logistics could be made to work, EU regulations since the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001 have banned the practice of feeding leftovers to pigs, stipulating that food waste must either be composted or anaerobically digested, rather than fed directly to next Sunday’s lunch. As with other aspects of the food chain, legislation geared towards industrial production often condemns small-scale practices that have worked perfectly well for centuries.

  Waste is the by-product of life itself, and life these days has become mightily complicated. Yet, as the Austrians have demonstrated, with a bit of an effort, we can turn cities into reasonably effective recycling machines. We can invent new technologies to harness waste; make use of it to create new life. Yet when it comes to feeding cities, the real battle is not with what accumulates in them, but in controlling what arrives in the first place. The ‘dirt’ that pollutes our streets is as nothing to all the poison, pollution, destruction and depletion our food creates before it even reaches us – of which at least a third need never have taken place, since we don’t even bother to eat the food when it gets here.

  In the end, waste is a matter of attitude. It is in our nature only to value things we have to struggle for – what comes easily is easily tossed away. In Britain, our well-fed maritime lifestyles have allowed us to live oblivious to our place in the organic continuum; to pretend we play no part in a system that is both bigger and longer-lasting than ourselves. As was the case with ancient Rome, our part in the exchange is invisible to us – but that does not mean it is not there. In the global food chain, waste is the missing link: the vital element that makes or breaks the entire cycle. In order for the chain to function, every link must be joined, not just the last. Cities in the past were too aware of the value of food and its by-products to waste them. If they broke the organic cycle, it was because they lacked the knowledge to understand the long-term consequences of their consumption. We have no such excuses.

  Chapter 7

  Sitopia

  ‘Digging for Victory’, in 1942.

  Dongtan, China

  From the third-floor balcony of Shu-Li’s flat in downtown Dongtan, I can see across the bay to the island of Heng Sha and beyond to the mainland city of Shanghai, its spiky skyline just discernible in the evening haze. Below me in the street, the neighbourhood is starting to come alive, as people return home from work, stopping at the food shops below to pick up something for dinner, or dropping in at the bar on the corner for a drink. Their voices carry up clearly from below, as does the spicy smell of fried fish, making me wish it was time for dinner. But apart from the friendly hubbub of trading, the street is relatively quiet. Most people here travel either on bike or on foot, and the one vehicle in the street – the electric tram – makes just a faint whine as it sets off for the suburbs on its rubberised wheels.

  It is a typical July in Dongtan: steamy and humid, with just the slightest threat of thunder. Since it is not actually raining, I am under strict instructions from Shu-Li to water her plants, which are mainly vegetables: hin choy, or Chinese spinach, yard-long beans, and bitter melons. Standing on the balcony, I turn on the valve that will pipe nutrient-rich water to her plant-boxes. Shu-Li lives in one of the few downtown apartment blocks in Dongtan that has a food factory in its basement, which means she can receive the water directly from the municipality through a metered supply. The water used to be free of charge, but demand was so great that the city was forced to start charging for it. Leaning over the balustrade, I watch the last workers leave the building for the night: farmers emerging from the basement where they have spent the day tending the fruits and pulses that make up the bulk of factory-grown food in Dongtan.

  I turn off the irrigator and get ready to go out – tonight I am meeting up with Shu-Li and some of her friends at the ‘bunds’, the sea defences that separate Dongtan from the wetlands that line its eastern seaboard. We are going to eat in one of the restaurants there that specialises in locally caught fish; a hangover from the days, not so long ago, when the only inhabitants of this part of the island were some local fishermen, a few farmers, and several hundred thousand nesting seabirds. The restaurant has a spectacular view, gazing out over the wetlands to the open sea, and I am looking forward to cooling off on its terrace. Opinions differ as to whether the giant offshore wind farm just to the north spoils the view. I must admit I was a bit shocked when I first saw it (the turbines are almost 70 metres tall), but now I am used to it, I find it rather beautiful. Somehow, when you visit Dongtan, you expect the unexpected. You know that you will be taking part in a working experiment: an exploration of low-carbon living never before attempted on such a scale. The first time I came, I remember some things seemed very strange – having to open the flat’s passive cooling vents every night, sorting out the rubbish into six different streams, watering the plants with special water – but I soon got used to them. Other aspects of Dongtan continue to amaze me: its quietness, the amount of wildlife on the doorstep, and, of course, the super-fresh seafood …

  OK, I confess. Dongtan doesn’t really exist – at least not yet. But very soon it will. By the time its first phase is completed in 2020, it will be the world’s first self-styled ‘eco-city’: an urban community of 80,000 souls, every detail of which will have been honed as far as possible to minimise its ecological impact. Commissioned by the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation (SIIC) in 2005, it is being designed by a London-based team at Arup, the engineering firm founded in 1946 by Ove Arup (the man responsible for, among other things, making the Sydney Opera House stand up), and now one of the largest interdisciplinary design consultancies in the world. In terms of scale and ambition, Dongtan is arguably the most challenging project the firm has ever taken on. Apart from having to imagine what a twenty-first-century ‘eco-city’ might look like, the team are determined to preserve their environmentally sensitive site as far as possible. The eastern tip of Chongming island, 25 kilometres east of Shanghai, is one of the last remaining rural districts in the region, typical of the sort of landscape (and way of life) daily disappearing under the bulldozers all over China. But that won’t be happening here. When Dongtan rises out of the ground, the farms, fishermen and birds are all staying put.

  Dongtan is being designed according to the principles of what Arup calls ‘integrated urbanism’: a new approach to urban design that tries to bal
ance the often competing demands of urbanisation – economic growth, social well-being, the environment – by creating ‘virtuous cycles’ that allow them to complement one another. A typical example is the ‘village clusters’ that form the basis of Dongtan’s city plan, intended to encourage people to live, work and shop in the same neighbourhood, so reducing transport demands, as well as engendering the sort of mixed-use street life typical of traditional city centres. Another is the ‘food factories’ that will produce at least some of the city’s food: multistorey buildings that will convert solar energy in order to power light-emitting diodes and grow several layers of crops at once, making use of nutrient-rich water recovered from the city’s sewage. That is the theory, anyway – trials are still underway to find out quite how these high-rise farms à la Gennevilliers might work. With residential buildings up to eight storeys high, Dongtan will be relatively compact, with an average density of 75 dwellings per hectare: roughly that of a typical residential neighbourhood in central London.1 The aim, in other words, is to make Dongtan both as eco-friendly and as pleasant to live in as possible, without sacrificing its essential urbanity: an aspiration that makes the city if not exactly utopian, at least a welcome contrast to the slash-and-burn approach to urbanisation taking place elsewhere in China and other parts of Asia.

  So, how different will life in Dongtan be to that in a conventional city? Will its residents have to learn how to ‘behave’ properly in order for it to work? Not according to Alejandro Gutierrez, leader of the Arup design team, because by the time the city is built, the world will have become a different place. ‘Two hundred years ago,’ he says, ‘people used to throw excrement into the street, and we laugh. In twenty years’ time, we will say “People didn’t have carbon credits?” and laugh.’2 Apart from being extremely quiet due to all vehicles being electric, the city will also be noticeably verdant. A third of the buildings will have ‘green roofs’: roofs covered with vegetation to improve their thermal performance and help reduce rainwater run-off. Streets will also be planted with plenty of trees to provide shade. There are also plans to have food factories right in the city centre, so that, as Alejandro says, ‘You will have agricultural workers coming into your building in the morning as you leave to go to work.’ With a large offshore wind farm and photovoltaic cells mounted on rooftops, the city is expected to generate much of its own power. It also aims to become the world’s first zero-waste city, with consolidation centres to strip out all incoming packaging and recycle it on the spot, and suburban eco-farms fertilised by municipal compost and waste water, the latter filtered through the gravel bunds that will fringe the coastal wetlands.