If you are interested in how the food system works in the developed world, and how it could or should work, allow me to recommend Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. I was very hyped to read this book, and when I finally acquired my own (second-hand) copy, it was just as thought-provoking as I hoped it would be. The author, Carolyn Steel, has also given a TED Talk on the subject, which I had seen before I began reading, so I went in with a very condensed idea of what the book would discuss.
Hungry City is about the relationship between food and cities. How we eat in today’s urbanised society says a lot about how we live, and it needs some rethinking. Hungry City was written in 2008, but the issues it deals with, like food miles, ultra-processed food, urbanisation, the dominance of the big supermarket chains, climate change, etc are all still relevant today. The book is organised around the different steps involved in food’s journey into a city: producing, importing, selling, cooking, eating, and disposing of (read: wasting) food.
Historically, the process of supplying a city with food was more visible and the question of where the food came from wasn’t such a mystery. The earliest cities were built around where the grain could be grown, harvested, and stored, and even into the twentieth century, animals would be right there in the city, market gardens were right there at the edge of the city, the market was right there at the centre of the city and civic life. Now we think mainly about how much the food costs, without really questioning where it has come from. The supermarkets provide us with the food, in a very out-of-sight-out-of-mind way, driven by the need to somehow make this food cheap and convenient, and yet it does not have to be this way. I made so many notes as I read, but I want to just pull out a few ideas that really resonated.
We are so out of touch with food and where it comes from that we devalue it – I agree. I’m getting echoes of King Charles’ book Harmony here: we see ourselves as separate from nature, but we need to see ourselves as part of nature, which includes how we produce our food, and then we might value our food more. ‘Where does the food come from?’ is, I think, an absolutely vital question for anyone to ask. Local food production is sustainable, but it is neither constant, cheap, or predictable, which makes it more expensive. The industrial food production that keeps the supermarkets stocked up, however, is constant, cheap, and predictable, which means it dominates the market with its economy of scale. The supermarkets make it seem like supplying a city with food is easy, because we don’t see any of the process and therefore don’t realise how dependent we are on supermarkets.
It would be very hard to eat anything without the supermarkets, and yet the first thing I thought when I read this was ‘I want to try’. I was determined to shop at the local shops, buy the locally grown stuff, and eat what I could grow or forage. It can be done, but cost and time make it more difficult. In practice, I go to the independent shops and local markets were I can, get what I can from the community gardens I help maintain, and if I do have to set foot in a supermarket, I can at least look at where the food was grown: do I need to buy the leeks that were grown in Spain, at the time of the year when leeks are in season in the UK? Absolutely not! And yet importing the food from abroad which we could grow locally is alarmingly common: just in the UK context, ‘more than half the food we import into the UK is indigenous food in season: in other words, we could have grown it ourselves’: the UK produced 62% of its own food as of 2005 (DEFRA), down to 58% in 2007; as of the UK Food Security Report 2021, this number is still hovering around 60%. Cities have always had to incur some food miles, as food is grown outside the city and transported in, but we are taking food miles to a ridiculous level. One farm producing food is not necessarily going to feed a whole city. But imagine if there were lots of local producers, all growing food on a smaller scale: that could add up to a lot of food.
This book finally made it click for me why food from abroad is often cheaper than food grown locally: a country like the UK can grow a lot of produce, but not as easily or consistently as somewhere with a warmer climate, and lower labour costs, and it is this that makes some food more expensive. So yes, paying for sustainably grown local food is going to be more expensive, but at least we would be paying for something good, something that aligns with the local landscape and the changing seasons. We would probably have more variety, too: supermarkets stock a tiny fraction of the varieties of fruit and vegetables that exist and can be grown locally. They stock the things that will travel well and look nice and uniform, ignoring and erasing the rich proliferation of fruit and vegetable varieties that have been bred and developed over the years, each with their own story and history. Where do we want our money to go? What do we want to support?
This isn’t to say ‘never shop at a supermarket ever again’, but more to say that we can go to them sometimes, but be aware that they cannot possibly be producing all of their food sustainably or pricing it in a way that is fair to the farmers who grew it. Buy some things at the supermarket and some things from the farmer’s markets or local independent shops, as best your means allow. I think this is probably the most fascinating section of the whole book, outlining our alarming reliance on large chain supermarkets.
The choices we make of where to shop can have a big impact on the food system, so if we’re cutting back on going to the supermarkets, let’s be like the French, this book argues, and go to the local market regularly, because that is where you get your food. So many food markets in the UK disappeared in the 1970s and 80s, because they no longer had that key role in feeding the city, while French markets still do have that role and therefore still exist.
Across Europe, market squares and town/city halls historically had a close relationship: food supply was a source of civic pride! Why is it not a source of civic pride today? ‘We can feed our city sustainably’ needs to become a source of civic pride, it needs to be one of those things politicians promise to deliver, yet according to this book, even someone like the Mayor of London cannot control London’s food supply, because their civic authority clashes with the financial might of the supermarkets, which are always thinking about money, and who can pay for food. Governments don’t currently control the food system, but what if they did have more power over it? Should something as important as the food system not be more transparent in terms of how it operates? It is currently about money, about how cheap the food is, rather than the farmer being fairly paid for their work, and ‘governments could insist upon [this] if they had the will’.
This tyranny of the supermarkets is a factor in the formation of food deserts: local shops close, and if these shops were in lower-income areas, supermarkets often don’t want to move in as it isn’t lucrative for them, and thus those communities become a food desert, defined as having no fresh food within 500 metres (what you could cover on foot about 15 minutes). While people struggled to feed everyone in the past, the concept of the ‘food desert’ is a modern thing. We produce so much more food than we ever did before, and yet people still go hungry: how does this make any sense?
Food waste, of course, is a huge problem in the modern age. When we waste food, we waste all of the effort that went into producing it and growing it. We have food deserts, but also ruinous amounts of wasted food. We need to value food more, but also let go of the idea that it needs to be perfect. It is living and natural and a farmer has grown it somewhere: give it the respect it deserves by not letting it go to waste. The statistics in the book are very disheartening, and they are from over a decade ago: as of 2005 UK households threw away 6.7 million tonnes of food per year. The book’s source for these numbers, WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme), now estimates that figure at 10.2 million tonnes for 2025.
The food waste chapter gets us thinking about urban waste in general, and how far attitudes have changed historically in terms of what can be allowed in a city. A smaller city in the past could reuse something like animal waste, whether in industry or as fertiliser. We just don’t do this now, because we don’t even have the animals living in the city any more, because it would be seen as contaminated and dirty, because we’ve made laws that say so, laws that say making compost or collecting manure would be disgusting, but somehow encourage all of the pollution involved in food production and distribution. Just like being able to feed a city, how a city deals with waste can also be a source of civic pride.
Hungry City ultimately arrives at two main conclusions: the first is that ‘if we all simply considered food more, that would be a start.’ Just start by connecting the stuff on the plate with where, and in what season, it might have been grown. The second is that we need to make the city-country relationship more equal, and make food-related decisions with the local area in mind, growing things that make sense for that area, and not just acting with politics and greed in mind. Think about what kind of food should be local to that city (it’s like the concept of terroir, i.e. what can be grown in a particular place that is local to, and the product of, that place). This is the ‘sitopia’ concept, the topic of the book’s final chapter.
The city and the local countryside would have strong links, which would affect the kinds of shops and markets and general ‘food identity’. Houses would have proper kitchens, children would learn about food, food would bring people together and be celebrated. City planning decisions would be led by food. I’m on board with this vision. It’s all connected: so many of the world’s problems have to do with food in some way. The author is from an architecture background herself, and clearly recognises the interconnectedness of food with other elements of how we live: ‘food is all about networks…whether or not we care about food, the consequences of the way we eat are all around us. The global food system is a network in which we are all complicit’. The food system is embedded in other systems: for example, how is a town really going to be ‘zero-carbon’ if it is part of the same food system as every other town? It’s not just about how we build the towns, but also about how people live in them, and about the kind of government support they get, and food is an essential element in all of this; it is a lens through which we can learn about and demystify the world, as well as a way of shaping how people live.
It was a task and a half to cut this down to something of a manageable length, because Hungry City gives us so much to think about. I highly recommend it. It is a wide-ranging look at the whole food system, which is connected to so many other aspects of how we live. I’ve focussed on just a few elements here, which particularly spoke to me, but I encourage you to read it yourself, and see what speaks to you and makes you think differently about food.
Further Reading
Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, by Carolyn Steel, Chatto & Windus 2008.
Search YouTube for ‘Ted Talk Carolyn Steel’ and her talk is the first thing to come up, ‘How food shapes our cities’ (Warning: the picture quality deteriorates and starts flashing about a minute in; it’s only for a few seconds but it is quite intense)
I mentioned Harmony: A New Way of Looking at the World; I have written about that in another post and I recommend it (the book and the post): https://howitwasbecause.wordpress.com/2025/01/31/the-new-is-in-the-old-concealed-the-old-is-in-the-new-revealed/. There is a TV programme about the ‘Harmony’ concept, and I would like to see it but I haven’t seen it because it’s on Prime and that’s Amazon and I’m not paying for that, am I?
See a previous post on this blog, ‘Where Does the Food Come From?’ for some more thoughts on the general ‘food production’ topic. https://howitwasbecause.wordpress.com/2023/12/05/where-does-the-food-come-from/
P.S. I, too, want to go to the National Fruit Collections in Brogdale, Kent, described in Chapter 2. Over 3000 varieties of fruit trees are grown and bred there. It was set up by the Horticultural Society in the early nineteenth century, moving to its present location in the 1950s. The then Prince Charles helped to save the site in the early 90s when the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food (later DEFRA) decided a national fruit collection wasn’t important. What sort of plebs decide a national fruit collection isn’t important? Each apple variety (and this is true of other fruit too) represents ‘a tiny universe; a culture rooted in time and place, unique and irreplaceable. And just like languages, apple varieties are dying out all over the world. There is no place for them, it seems, in the global food economy.’ For more on the subject of fruit and vegetable varieties that have died out, or are in danger of doing so, I recommend Forgotten Fruits: The stories behind Britain’s traditional fruit and vegetables, by Christopher Stocks.
How It Was Because 