Translator: Mabel Carrascal Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Civilization is based on a paradox.
Increasingly, more and more of us
are living in these places that we still call cities
in order to be sociable,
in order to benefit from the company of other people and their ideas,
and all the kinds of networks we've been talking about this morning.
But increasingly as well, we're becoming disassociated
from the other very, very, necessary part of our lives
which is food and sustenance,
and the kinds of landscapes that are evolving in order to feed us,
which is just getting further and further away from us,
both mentally and physically.
This funny, little, sort of hourglass-shape thing,
I'm going to refer to again, in about seventeen and a half minutes time,
but it's pretty sort of fundamental to what I'm talking about.
Now, this urban paradox goes back, as I was saying,
to the beginning of what we now call urban civilization.
Farming and cities co-evolved.
In this area here called the Fertile Crescent
around about 10,000 years ago, people discovered farming,
a new source of food, which was grain,
and they built encampments next to these grass fields
in order to benefit from this new source of food,
and in fact, cities and agriculture co-evolved.
You can’t have farming without cities, and you can’t have cities without farming.
And grain is the only food we've ever discovered so far,
capable of feeding urban populations.
Now, as you probably remember from your Bible and other readings,
farming, historically, has been seen as a punishment.
It’s something we have to do
because we got expelled from the Garden of Eden, for instance.
Feeding cities is extremely difficult,
and it’s something that almost as soon as people began to build cities,
they began to worry about.
'How are we going to keep this thing going?'
People like Plato over 2,000 years ago, looking at his hometown of Athens,
was going: 'I don’t like the look of the hills over there,
they're losing all their soil,' was sort of 'there's something wrong.'
And he actually talked about limiting the size of the city
so that it could be ideally surrounded by its own countryside,
and it could feed itself.
So right from the beginning, this idea of there being an ideal state
to do with an ideal size of a city,
and that to do with its ideal hinterland has been in the consciousness.
And that's why when you look at the evolution of our urban society
and the beginning of what we would now understand
to be the European urban tradition with the early modern Italian city-states,
the relationship between the city and country
was seen as in this fantastic image,
my favorite image as it happens, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti,
called The Allegory of the Effects of Good Government,
and it adorns one wall of the Sienese Town Hall,
in the Siena, in Italy, painted in 1338,
and it's talking about the absolutely fundamental relationship
of civilization, that which exists between city and country,
and the good government bit comes in because you make darn sure
that the city and the country exist in balance, in symbiosis.
This is what this image is really telling us.
And in order to make sure of that, Italian cities built,
and indeed, you can see this all over the world,
they built their political spaces
- this is il Salone in Padua - literally on top of the marketplace.
So you had in the very center of the city the fundamental civic relationship
between politics overseeing commerce, and the commerce was the space of food.
It was absolutely fundamental
to people's understanding and belief about what a city was.
Now, the politics of food are very tricky,
and actually feeding cities is very difficult.
It's not just that grain is the only source of food we've ever found
capable of feeding cities,
it's also transporting food into cities is a major problem.
And if you look at the contrasting rivers belonging respectively to London and Paris
in the 17th and 18th centuries, you get some idea
about why the politics of Britain and France today are so different.
London, you can see on the left, had a navigable river.
It had a river that could sail ocean-going vessels up.
Paris did not, as you can see on the right.
These are just river barges, they haven't been to sea.
What this means is that London, when it started to run short of food,
just sent a couple of ships out and got it from somewhere else,
like probably Hungary, actually, or somewhere in the Baltic.
But the Parisian king had a problem because there was nowhere he could go to
outside the immediate vicinity of Paris to get food.
And the results of that was that while at the end of the 18th century,
people in London was happily guzzling on things like syllabub,
brought in from sugar from the Caribbean
and busy building an empire while they were at it, by the way,
poor old Louis the 16th was arrested outside Paris trying to escape the city
because he was held directly responsible for having failed to feed the people
when there was a series of bad harvests.
So taking political control of the food supply is a very dangerous thing to do,
because food is inherently very, very difficult to control.
Which is why, when industrialization came along and the railways came along,
everybody embraced it with open arms,
it was (Whew) sort of a respective wipe of the collective brow.
We don't have to worry about feeding cities anymore.
We can leave it up to the commercial guys, the experts.
And really, this kind of industrialized food production took over big time.
It didn't really get noticed that the way we were starting to feed cities
as these large, monocultural landscapes were evolving,
that were feeding the animals, that were feeding the cities,
tended to kind of turn what had been good farmland into a desert.
That was, if you like, just one of the inconvenient truths
that people ignored because they were so sold on the industrial paradigm
and so happy not to have to worry about food production anymore.
Of course, it wasn't just the lanscapes that were being turned into desert
by industrial production, it was cities as well.
Actually, if you look at this map, it's a very recent map of New York.
You can see the food is now moving out of cities,
and in fact, because we've left the supply of food
up to commercial interests, the food only goes where the money is.
If you look at this map,
you can see the bottom half of Manhattan's pretty well served;
the top half is not.
Guess where the money is?
So commercial food systems don't feed people, they feed people with money.
And what's happened to cities?
Well, again, if you look on the left, the Paduan model,
politics, commerce, food, sociability, slap-bang in the middle of the city.
If you look at we've got now,
we've actually taken the food out of cities and put it on the edge,
we've put it in boxes called supermarkets, incidentally,
and they serve the global food system, and basically if you want the food,
you have to go out to the box and get it yourself.
In fact, I noticed a Tesco opposite this theater which worries me intensely,
because basically, Tesco are the guys designing cities in Britain now.
It's coming to a place near you soon.
Why have we let this happen?
Well, we've evolved another myth, we've just been hearing about myth.
The myth is that you can have such a thing as cheap food.
There is no such thing.
The only way you can create the illusion of cheap food,
is by externalizing the true cost of food.
So with industrial food we have,
for instance, a third of global greenhouse gas emissions
being produced by industrial food systems,
deforestation, the loss of soil fertility, obesity,
a huge number of costs that are external to the food that you buy in the shops.
And in fact, there was a study done recently in India
that reckoned that if you pay the real cost of a hamburger
raised on recently-felled rainforest,
you should be paying $200 for it and not $2.
And of course, as we know,
the world is turning into a vast hamburger guzzling globe.
Why is this?
Because the hamburger was the invention of American mixing,
all sorts of cuisines coming into one place,
finding each other's special ingredients like chili a little bit offensive,
and so inventing a cuisine that had nothing in it but salt, sugar and fat,
and vast quantities.
The only flavour enhancers, and indeed ways of pleasing ourselves,
that was offensive to nobody.
So this is spreading all over the world and it's a huge problem.
What do we do about it?
Well, as I said at the beginning, this is not a new question.
Plato was worrying about it over 2,000 years ago,
and in fact, the utopian tradition is based on worrying about this problem.
How we are going to feed cities in the future?
Here are a couple of examples:
On the left you've got the garden city idea of Ebenezer Howard.
Let's have intense, little blobs of urbanity surrounded by farmland,
and just join them up in a network.
And then on the right you've got Broadacre City,
Frank Lloyd Wright's idea that we've got to stop building cities altogether
and all go back to farming, just become farmers again.
Now, if you look at those,
if you place them in a sort of set of possibilities, if you like,
you can understand the urban paradox as a kind of distributional problem.
So at the top you've got, 'let's all be farmers,'
and let's live in sort of social groups of, say, less than ten.
In the middle you've got 'let's have intense blobs of urbanity,'
say, up to 30,000 people with farmland round and just join them up.
And at the bottom you've got basically what we are doing now,
which is all moving to enormous metropolitan areas
with thirty millions or so people living in them,
and just expecting the food to come in from somewhere else,
some vast monocultural blob of productivity
somewhere else on the planet.
Now, the trouble with that is what happens
is that if you all turn into farmers, at the top,
you need private helicopters in order to be sociable.
In other words, there is no sociability, so that actually doesn't work.
The middle shows you that what Ebenizer Howard actually ended up with
when he tried to build the garden city was suburbia
because the land reform that he imagined that would create farmland around cities,
never took place.
And at the bottom, as we know, what we are doing at the moment
is just turning the world into a hamburger,
and the problem is, as I've indicated at bottom, that Utopia doesn't exist.
However, what demonstrably does exists
is Sitopia, a place that we live in that is shaped by food.
My belief is if we understand how powerfully food shapes our lives,
we can actually take food and make it a really, really powerful tool
to shape the world better.
How do we do that?
Well, it's obviously about the urban food cycle,
it's about food being produced somewhere,
traveling into the city,
being bought and sold, being cooked, eaten, and then going back onto the land.
But it's far more complicated than that
because every single one of those stages of food's journey through the city
is linked to every other stage,
by beliefs, habits, customs, rituals, as we were just hearing, myths and so on.
It's hugely, hugely complicated.
It's actually food culture that we're talking about.
If you look at these fantastic images
from Hungry Planet, Peter Menzel's photographs,
you can see families from around the world
sitting, smiling most of the time, in front of a week's worth of food.
They're really powerful images, because from these,
you can tell a huge amount more about the world that these people inhabit.
You can tell, for instance,
what kind of landscapes they're creating through their food.
You can tell, whether they probably spoke to somebody
or even know the person that grew their food or sold it to them.
You can pretty much tell whether they're likely to be able to cook or not.
One in three meals in Britain, for instance, is a ready meal.
One in ten students more or less cooks; the rest don't ever cook from scratch.
Do people eat together?
Nineteen percent of meals in America are now eaten in cars,
and if you look- I mean, really, I love that statistic,
or, you know, hate it because it's so frightening -
but basically if you look at the space at the table and how civilizing
eating together is, that's a really, really worrying statistic.
How much are we wasting stuff?
There's all sorts of forms of waste, you know, obesity, we know about.
Do people save waste?
That beautiful-looking group of food in Britain, for instance,
was rescued from a supermarket dumpster waste bin.
So, you can tell a huge amount.
What I'm trying to say is we need to learn to see through food
and see that food is not just about the stuff on your plate,
it's about the kind of world we're creating,
it's about the kind of social lives that we're constructing together,
it's really about a lot more than food itself.
I mean, I probably don't have to tell you that that's an egg,
that's kind of basic food knowledge that we all share.
But depending on where you are the egg can mean many things,
it carries meaning, it carries symbolism.
This is a very powerful thing.
You know, food is complex, yes,
I've been trying to describe how complex it is,
but it also carries meaning, cultural meaning, values.
And actually, if we want to design a good food system,
the first thing we've got to do is remember this:
remember, as Plato said, the whole point of living in the cities,
of being sociable, is to have ideas, is to be philosophers.
We got very, very good at doing practical things
like producing lumps of food and transporting them,
and very bad at remembering why we're bothering.
So one of the things you discover if you start to see through food,
is that food gives you permission to ask bigger ideas again.
And to say what kind of society are we actually trying to produce here.
It's about remembering that we have hierarchies of needs
as Abraham Maslow said, not just physiological ones,
not just how to feed ourselves, but also spiritual ones,
we want to feel good,
we want to have a sense of meaning and purpose in life.
There's a sort of verticality to us
and to the societies we need to be thinking about and creating.
When people talk about food systems,
this is pretty much all they ever talk about.
They talk about how are we going to feed the world?
They never say what kind of world it is that they want to feed.
So they got it the wrong way around.
Now, I'm going to propose that since food shapes our lives,
we need to think through it.
It's not just seeing food, it's seeing the world through food,
and I think we need something I'm currently calling a Sitopia matrix.
It sounds complicated but it isn't.
What it really means is that if you look at the apparent dilemmas that we face,
and there are many, many of them - everything is paradoxical in life.
Do we feed the world? Do we farm by monocultural production?
Or do we have small-scale people working on the land?
Do we have enormous blobby metropolitan areas or do we go back to being farmers?
How do we trade? What should we eat?
These are enormous dilemmas that we're all facing every day,
and they're very, very important in terms of the longevity of the planet,
let alone our own well-being.
How do you sort through all of those dilemmas?
Well, the thing is, what you do is to start off with you recognize
that all of those apparent paradoxes or dilemmas are the wrong question.
If they're seen in isolation, they're wrong.
You have to connect them all
and see that they're all part of the same question.
So that is the wrong question, 'How should we feed the world?'
The right question is, which of those food systems
fed through your Sitopia matrix,
ends up giving you the good life that you're trying to create?
And it's the same with 'Should we eat meat or should we not eat meat?'
Again, huge debate going at the moment because of, of course,
the ecological damage done to the world by industrial meat.
Well, feed it through the sieve.
Obviously constructing a sieve's difficult but this is recognizing
how powerfully food can show us that things are not only complicated
but also connected.
Because food values are life values.
When you talk about food, you're talking about life,
and you're talking about the kind of spaces,
and the kind of world, and the kind of society that you're creating
every time you talk about food.
Which means you can use food as a tool to see things that are indeed complex,
but you can see them in beautiful colour,
you can smell them, you can taste them, and you can share them.
They're very, very palpable.
That's the power of food.
Now, people very often say to me: 'What does Sitopia look like?
Does it look like this?
Does it look like a city with farms on top?'
And I often go 'Well, no, it doesn't look like that.'
Because this is the urban paradox that I'm talking about.
You cannot put farms on top of cities because, basically, there's no space,
you know, that you're trying to have two things co-existing.
Yes, you can grow food in cities; that's different.
You can grow certain kinds of food.
You certainly can't feed the entire city from the city,
or it wouldn't be the city anymore, it would be a farm.
The way you discover that is simply by doing a bit of maths,
and looking at how many thirty-story high buildings 100 meters by 100 meters
it would take to feed London.
It just doesn't add up.
My vision of Sitopia is that through food we can understand how we all share
the same question and we need all to collaborate in working out
not just how we're going to feed the world
but how we're going to make a better world through our food values.
That hourglass thing I showed you at the beginning,
that is about consolidation in the food system.
It's about a tiny number of supermarket buyers controlling
what should be an extremely complex process.
And if you look on the right,
Christopher Alexander's famous essay A City Is Not a Tree,
he's basically saying we can't design society like this,
having lots of producers and lots of consumers
joined by just a few people.
In fact, if you look at it in terms of politics, you're talking about power,
you're talking about the difference
between a monopolistic control of the food system and a democratic one.
If you ask the question, What kind of society you want?
that starts to tell you what kind of food system you want.
Your question is my question. This is about the entire world.
It's about the global North and the global South.
It's about what we are, how we eat, but also how we respect each other,
the kinds of lives you want to create.
And our food values are a beautiful collaborative tool available to us now
that we can share to create a better world.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)