Community Resilience, Self-Reliance, Renewable Energy & Cooperation
Sitopia - The City of Food
I've just finished reading Carolyn Steel's excellent book Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, and have been enlightened to some of the logistics of how a city as big as London can manage to function while producing so little food for itself. It's not often one considers just how a supermarket manages to create an atmosphere of unlimited supply on an island that only produces a fraction of it's fresh food. I abhor supermarkets and have weaned myself gradually of them in the last five years but this has really put the last nail in the coffin and I'm officially going on a supermarket ban. Sourcing everything from food to toilet paper from independent shops isn't going to be convenient or easy but I definitely don't want to be putting my money into a corrupt system based entirely on oil supply.
The best part of this book though was the way that she describes the history of cities and their relationship to food. Even as far back as the Sumerian and Roman cities has there been a problem of supply and demand, the latter usually outstripping the former potentially causing the collapse of the major cities in history. The food miles involved in providing Roman citizens with their food is astonishing: honey from Turkey, nearly all grain from Egypt and north Africa, and even oysters from Britain. She also uncovers some of the roots the UK's particularly strange relationship to food, not suprisingly perhaps most of the food fads and phobias here date back to Victorian times.
Steel ends with a vision of a city built with food at the heart of its development. It makes perfect sense to me to have our cities be as self reliant and resilient as possible, as called for by Transition movement. We can hope that it won't be too long that we will see the end of supermarkets altogether replaced by smaller producers, markets and food shops and a reskilling of the art of cooking and enjoying what we eat. I totally agree with her that the path to the revolution lies in our forks.
Comment
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Comment by Jae Leslie on July 21, 2010 at 11:38am -
This book seems to be bouncing around various circles, as I just saw some review linked on Facebook... by a film critic? whatever.
I've just finished reading a work of fiction by Sheri Tepper, The Margarets, that more or less proposes to solve the despoiling of the earth by radical population reduction, and extraterrestrial help, and the development of a racial memory. Failing that, though, we will have to make do with what we've got.
© 2010 Created by Rees Roberts.
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