Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  Hope for a greener urban future? Dongtan Eco-City.

  The first practical attempt to create a post-industrial city to exist in harmony with, rather than in opposition to, nature, Dongtan will create a new urban paradigm for the twenty-first century. Yet despite its eco-farms and food factories (not to mention its ready-made fishing fleet), there is one aspect of the city that its designers can’t do as much about as they would like. Although some of Dongtan’s food will be grown locally, the bulk of it will still have to come via conventional routes. The problem, according to the team’s sustainability analyst Neil Grange, is that even if it were possible for the city to grow all its own food (which is doubtful) there would be no way of stopping people from buying cheaper food from elsewhere. In other words, although Arup is designing the physical fabric of Dongtan in great detail, it has little input into how the city will be run. ‘Without being able to influence the management, there is a limit to what you can achieve,’ says Grange. ‘We would really like to make a greater link between design and operation – to have a sustainability management system in place – but that is up to the client, and the Chinese authorities.’3 But management is not the only problem facing Arup in its struggle to reduce Dongtan’s eco footprint. In order to build truly sustainably, Grange says, the team would need to be involved in the site selection process, so that it could analyse ecological efficiencies over an entire region.

  And there is the rub. However low-carbon and idyllic Dongtan gets, the city will still be hooked up to a global supply system that is anything but. The city’s residents will each have an ecological footprint of 2.4 global hectares: the area of land calculated to be necessary to provide all their food, water and energy needs, plus assimilate their waste emissions.4 Although that is a lot less than the estimated 5.8 hectares currently required to sustain the average inhabitant of a conventional city (and a vast improvement on the 10 or so needed per urban American), it is still more than the 1.8 thought to be available for everyone on the planet.5 Life in cities has always been more ecologically demanding than life lived directly on the land, not just because of our energy-hungry urban lifestyles, but because the food for cities necessarily has to come from elsewhere. The supply of food to European cities, for example, is currently estimated to account for up to 30 per cent of their total ecological footprint.6 If we are to make cities really ‘green’, we need to rethink not just their physical form, but the way they are fed – no easy task in a globalised economy in which the food system is a highly consolidated, well-established, virtually autonomous network. Until we address that, building experimental food factories, while not exactly window dressing, is at best only dealing with part of the problem.

  If even quasi-utopian cities like Dongtan can’t get us living within our means, we are in trouble, because most cities currently being built are about as un-Dongtan-like as it is possible to get. Take Chongqing, for instance. Situated 1,600 kilometres west of Shanghai on the Yangtze River, Chongqing is China’s fastest-growing municipality. With a population of 31 million it has more residents than Malaysia, and is gaining a further half a million every year.7 Drawing energy from the controversial Three Gorges Dam, the city is an industrial powerhouse, churning out cars and electrical goods as if there were no tomorrow – which, if cities like it are to be the urban future, there probably won’t be. Despite the nearby dam, many of Chongqing’s factories are run on coal, and the city is blanketed in a choking smog that causes thousands of premature deaths every year. None of the city’s 3,500 tonnes of daily rubbish is recycled, going instead to a vast landfill crater that swallows a volume of waste the size of two Albert Halls every week.8 Set against Chongqing, Dongtan seems about as significant as the tiny fishing village it is itself about to swallow up. Which is not to say that Dongtan is not a Good Thing. Clearly, in the general run of things, it is. It is just a very small good thing in the midst of an evolving ecological catastrophe so vast that it has got even the Chinese authorities worried. As Zhenhua Xie, China’s Minister of the State Environmental Protection Agency, put it, ‘China’s current development is ecologically unsustainable, and the damage will not be reversible once higher GDP has been achieved.’9

  It is not the urbanisation of China that is tragic, but the manner of it. All the mistakes of the West repeated, but on a vastly greater scale and at 10 times the speed. Of course, not everyone in the world will end up living in cities. Somebody, after all, will have to do the farming. But unless we find a new urban model, we are soon going to run out of planet. This brings us back to the question this book started with – the question people have been asking themselves ever since someone had the bright idea of trying to eat grass. How on earth are we going to keep this thing going?

  Utopia

  Born of a new kind of food, the first cities represented man’s emancipation from brute survival – the start of what we call civilisation. Yet the freedom they brought was never complete. Beneath the surface of urbanity, the contract between man and land never changed. As our chosen habitat, cities express the inner contradictions of the human condition. They provide us with shelter, but not sustenance. They give us space to dream, yet obscure our place in the natural order. Neither good nor evil, cities represent the messy imperfectability of human life. For better or worse, they are our common home, and it is up to us to make them work. Going back to living in forests is not an option.

  How to satisfy our basic needs while leaving space for higher pursuits? How to share the burden and rewards of labour equably? How to achieve individual freedom and collective justice? These are the dilemmas that have taxed philosophers since ancient times, and they remain embedded in Western political thought. As abstractions, they also find tangible expression in the utopian tradition. ‘Utopia’ is a philosophical ruse; a parallel universe whose chief purpose is to ask what an ideal society, unfettered by the constraints of the real world, might be like. By its very nature, utopia is an unachievable paradigm, but it can be used to inspire a vision of a better society, set within real conditions.

  The idea of utopia, meaning either ‘no place’ (from the Greek outopos) or ‘good place’ (from eu-topos), was first used by Plato, and was adopted by Sir Thomas More in 1516, as a deliberately ambiguous title for his fictional realm. More’s Utopia was an island kingdom, accidentally discovered by a Portuguese mariner, consisting of 54 city-states all more or less the same, each arranged so as to give plenty of room to its neighbours, yet close enough so as to be no more than a day’s walk away. The capital city, Amaurotum, was situated on a tidal river, and was square in plan, divided into quarters, each with its own market square. The city streets were broad and lined with terraced houses, arranged to form urban blocks with generous back gardens, in which the inhabitants loved to work:

  They’re extremely fond of these gardens, in which they grow fruit, including grapes, as well as grass and flowers. They keep them in wonderful condition – in fact, I’ve never seen anything to beat them for beauty or fertility. The people … are keen gardeners not only because they enjoy it, but because there are inter-street competitions for the best kept garden.10

  The utopian obsession with growing things did not end there. Children were taught the art of farming from an early age, and all citizens – men, women and children – took turns working in the fields, spending a mandatory two years on the land during their lifetimes. Those who enjoyed farming (which many did) could volunteer to do extra time if they liked. All land and property was held in common, and working hours were short: Utopians laboured for just six a day, leaving plenty of time for other pursuits. Local communities were close-knit, and families came together regularly for communal meals in community halls, in which adults and children sat next to one another in table messes.

  With its frugal work ethic and monkish dining arrangements, the monastic influence in Utopia is clear. But as well as being intensely religious, More was a humanist, and his Utopians were fond of a joke, regarding ‘the enjoyment of life – that
is, pleasure – as the natural object of all human efforts’.11 More’s mode of address – ironic, humorous and serious by turns – was partly a device to protect him. As he was well aware, questioning the status quo under Henry VIII was a potentially lethal pastime. Yet his Utopia not only succeeded in delivering a stinging critique of the injustices of his own day; it also painted a vision of a better society – compassionate, tolerant, communist in the broadest sense – that has influenced every utopian vision since.

  Paradise Lost

  One of the most intriguing aspects of utopianism is the consistency of issues under discussion. Land and farming, city and country, work and leisure – the basic building blocks of theoretical societies are universal. Yet there is one sort of utopia from which they are absent: the mythical lost paradise, which in its various guises (Arcadia, the Gardens of Eden and Hesperides) is common to all three Abrahamic religions and the ancient civilisations that preceded them. As an image of human dwelling, the idyllic and bountiful garden is clearly not of this world: it is a vision of man freed from necessity and labour. In short, it is a vision of the heaven he hopes one day to regain. That the mythical utopian timeline should start and end with a garden tells us a great deal about urban civilisation. At best, it has only ever been seen as a compromise.

  The tension between abstract perfection and imperfect reality underpins all utopian thought. Even Plato, whose interest in mundane necessity was never marked, divided his ideal city-state into urban and rural plots, so that each citizen would receive two patches of land, one in the city, the other in the country. Although neither he nor Aristotle had much truck with farmers (their ideal cities were fed, like the real one in which they lived, by slaves), both philosophers were concerned with urban self-sufficiency. On these grounds, Aristotle criticised Plato’s Republic for being too big, since it would require a ‘territory as large as Babylon, or some other huge site, if so many people are to be supported in idleness’.12 By this remark Aristotle did not mean to criticise idleness: on the contrary, both he and Plato considered an ideal community to be one in which citizens – but only them – were freed from the burden of labour, and so able to lead a contemplative life.13

  It was Christianity that put labour firmly on the utopian agenda, where it has remained ever since. The question for early Christians was not how to construct society so that a chosen few could enjoy a contemplative life, but how to combine toil and contemplation in a virtuous one. The change in attitude was articulated by St Benedict in his Rule: ‘Idleness is an enemy of the soul. Because this is so the brethren ought to be occupied at specified times in manual labour, and in other fixed hours in holy reading …’14 Work, sleep, study and prayer were the activities bound into the fabric of early Christian monasteries. However, since neither of the two founding fathers of Western monasticism (St Augustine and St Benedict) specified what physical form their monasteries should take, it was up to individual abbots to extrapolate their rules as best they could. Monastery design therefore became an act of personal interpretation; a series of attempts to reflect Heavenly Jerusalem on earth. In the St Gall Plan, a ninth-century ideal monastery scheme thought to be the work of Bishop Hatto, a leading figure in Charlemagne’s court, we see the search for perfection in progress. The parchment shows a rectangular precinct with most of the typical monastic elements: church and cloister, library, school and infirmary, kitchens, dining halls, guesthouses and cemetery. But surrounding them are a series of buildings that prompted Wolfgang Braunfels to call the St Gall Plan a ‘Noah’s Ark of a monastery’: cowsheds and stables for oxen and pregnant mares, sheds for goats, sheep, pigs, geese and hens, a barn, a threshing floor, brewery and bakery.15 The earliest surviving example of a planned utopia, the St Gall Plan represents the paradigm of a Christian life on earth to which medieval city-states would later aspire, presenting a vision for an ideal community that seemed, for a brief period at least, as if it might actually be attainable.

  Back to the Land

  For every utopian dream of an ideal city, there have been plenty more based on a rural existence. As we saw in the first chapter, the right to subsist on the land has always exercised political philosophers, particularly during periods of land enclosure, such as those of seventeenth-century England. While thinkers such as John Locke grappled with the problem in the abstract, another more practical kind of utopian simply grabbed a spade and started digging. In 1649, a group calling themselves the True Levellers (soon dubbed the rather catchier Diggers), announced their intention to ‘dig up, manure, and sow corn’ on a patch of common land at George Hill in Cobham, Surrey. As the group’s leader, Gerrard Winstanley, explained, their intention was to level not only the enclosures that were carving up the countryside, but the social divisions that they represented. Anticipating both Locke and Rousseau, Winstanley argued that since God had ‘made the Earth to be a common treasury, to preserve beasts, birds, fishes, and man’, and that ‘not one word was spoken in the beginning, that one branch of mankind should overrule another’, all men had a common right to land.16 He therefore proposed that the people of England should organise themselves into a series of self-supporting agrarian communes – an idea that, unsurprisingly, did not go down too well in Parliament after seven years of bloody civil war. The New Model Army was dispatched to deal with the Diggers, but after deciding they were relatively harmless, left it to local landlords to get rid of them.

  With land in England in increasingly short supply, a new breed of settler utopian began to look to the New World to found its ideal colonies. The Pilgrim Fathers’ 1620 landfall aboard the Mayflower was just the first of a series of invasions from all over Europe, many of them by extreme religious sects for whom the ‘virgin’ territories of North America promised the opportunity to build utopia for real. Although some, such as the Swiss Amish, founded successful agrarian communities, the majority found that having unlimited amounts of farmland at one’s disposal was not much use without a sufficient labour force to farm it. According to the historian Niall Ferguson, between one half and two thirds of all Europeans who crossed the Atlantic from 1650 to 1780 did so under a system of ‘indentured labour’, pledging a number of years’ service in exchange for the cost of the voyage.17 The New World might have seemed like paradise on earth to some, but, as Ferguson pointed out, it was built on the backs of settlers who were little more than ‘slaves on fixed-term contracts’.18

  With colonisation of the Americas creating the labour shortages that would eventually give rise to full-blown slavery, the onset of industrialisation back home was creating a new breed of manufacturing utopian. Foremost among them was Robert Owen, a Welsh craftsman’s son who made his father-in-law’s cotton mill at New Lanark on the River Clyde into a model working community. Within a few years of taking control in 1799, Owen had turned an unruly and unwilling workforce into an eager, efficient brigade, simply by reducing their hours, registering their performance on coloured ‘monitors’ mounted on looms, and rewarding their efforts with good-quality housing, a school, and a non-profit company shop. New Lanark soon began to receive a stream of illustrious visitors, and Owen’s pamphlets were read by world leaders including King George III, Thomas Jefferson and supposedly even Napoleon in exile on Elba.

  Convinced that he had discovered the answer to the relief of the urban poor, Owen presented plans to the House of Commons for a number of ideal communities, ‘villages of unity and mutual cooperation’ in which 1,200 people would live and work together, surrounded by 1,500 acres of farmland.19 The settlements were to be somewhat like secularised, industrialised monasteries, containing blocks of family houses, communal dining halls, a school, guesthouse, meeting rooms and library. Unfortunately for Owen, the official enthusiasm that had greeted his plans soon waned when it became a question of having to pay for them. Disappointed by this lukewarm response, Owen headed off on the well-worn utopian trail across the Atlantic, plunging most of his considerable fortune into setting up a prototype community, New Harmony in Indi
ana, incorporating 30,000 acres of land bought with his own money. Around 1,000 disciples went with him, but unfortunately most of them, unlike Thomas More’s farming-mad Utopians, were scientists and academics, who spent two years bickering about how their inappropriately named community should be run, before their founder finally ran out of cash.

  Owen’s experience was far from unique. His brand of utopianism, like those of his French contemporaries Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon, was forged in the afterglow of the Enlightenment, when it seemed that science and design could come together to create not just an ideal human settlement, but a perfect society to go with it. Their utopias were of a new kind, intended not merely as contemplative exercises or satirical critiques, but as blueprints for a better future.20 While Saint-Simon looked to science and industry to create a new social order, Fourier spent a (disappointed) lifetime refining plans for his phalanstères: large hotel-like buildings surrounded by farmland in which the inhabitants would be motivated purely by pleasure, only performing tasks that suited their personalities.21 All three ‘socialist utopians’, as they were later dubbed by Marx, would have a lasting influence on Western thought, yet for all their insights, their combined legacy was one of paradox. By seeming to suggest that paradise might be achievable on earth, they effectively folded the utopian timeline back on itself. Their optimistic formulations suggested that some transformational medium would come along – science, rationality, man’s rediscovery of his inner ‘noble savage’ – and resolve all the dilemmas of human existence. There was just one problem. What everyone seemed to forget in the rush to build heaven on earth was that it is only in the celestial variety that nobody has to do the farming.