BooksReviewWe are out of step with our planet, so how should we live? Cheap food is an oxymoron and anarchism’s time may have come, argues this wide-ranging, stimulating book
“Civilisation is in crisis,” warned the EAT-Lancet international commission of food scientists last year. “We can no longer feed our population a healthy diet while balancing planetary resources. For the first time in 200,000 years of human history, we are severely out of synchronisation with the planet and nature.” We face climate crisis, ecological destruction, record obesity rates and rising hunger: food is threatening our future.
Carolyn Steel recognises these challenges, but she also sees food as “by far the most powerful medium available to us for thinking and acting together to change the world for the better”. By reconfiguring our relationship with food, she argues, we can find new and better ways of living that will arrest the damage we are doing to ourselves and the Earth.
Our world, Steel writes, is a “Sitopia”, a “food place” – from the Greek words sitos and topos – where everything from our environment to our societies to our bodies has been affected by our relationship with food, which “preceded us, anticipates us, sustains us”. It shapes our lives, but since its influence is so pervasive, we often fail to notice it. Thinking about its realities can also make us uncomfortable. We don’t want to know about the vast cruelty of industrialised meat and dairy production, the exploitation of migrant labourers, the deforestation and drought that are eating into the landscape of the global south, or how our addiction to processed foods is making us fat and ill.
The toxic core of our current conundrum is the lack of value we place on food. “Cheap food is an oxymoron,” Steel argues – low supermarket prices hide the costs of pollution, ecological destruction, poverty and obesity. She calls for a revelation of the true cost of food that will make industrial agriculture unaffordable and invigorate ecologically produced organic food, creating a “virtuous cycle” in which “the market would favour foods that nurtured nature, animals and people”.
Steel’s range is vast and the book’s breadth of subjects reinforces her conception that food influences everything, and that our troubled modern relationship with it reflects deeper existential problems. She argues that a loss of culinary heritage has created “a deep confusion about what and how to eat”. At times, this can drift into excessive nostalgia for the traditional (“if you want to eat bhel puri and aloo tikki the traditional way, you had better get yourself off to India quick”) or a lost past: “while life in a pre-industrial household was tough”, she writes, “it had qualities that modern life also lacks: a clear sense of purpose and belonging”.
But she is well aware of the long history of anxieties over how we should eat and live, and moves skilfully through the answers offered by Greek Stoics, Enlightenment philosophers, clean-living crusaders and many in between. By moving away from asking ourselves such questions – “We don’t have time for that!” an exasperated businessman told Steel – we have forgotten where value really lies. A new “Sitopian contract” would “establish the right of every human and non-human to eat well”.
Such shifts would require enormous change and Steel sketches a “Sitopian economics” that would put food and its intrinsic value at the heart of economic life. In the slow food movement, “slow money” social investing and “guerrilla localism”, she sees the roots of new and democratic ways of reorganising commerce for a society whose new golden rule would be “Feed thy neighbour as thyself”. This radical revolution is unlikely to come from government, and anarchism’s time, Steel writes, has arguably come. While truly anarchist societies would be “near-impossible to build or sustain”, Steel feels its core message is perfect for an age squeezed by “the fatal duality of neoliberalism and totalitarianism”. She draws inspiration from Peter Kropotkin and Pierre‑Joseph Proudhon in their desire for a third form of society between communism and capitalism, in which communities are freed from excesses of property and authority.
Wealth taxes – “It is not necessary to confiscate land,” Henry George wrote, “only to confiscate rent” – would “re-establish the land as the true source of our common wealth”, Steel believes, diminishing the value of property in ways that would free urban and rural communities to create vibrant and innovative new ways of living together. She highlights the Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZED), vertical urban farms, the “Preston model” of urban regeneration, and the Basque country’s Mondragon cooperatives: alternatives are possible.
Steel is an architect by trade and training, and her expertise shines on the urban environment. Her previous book, Hungry City, explored how our vast conurbations feed themselves, and here she traces food’s role in urban development from Sumerian Uruk to Renaissance Siena, industrial Chicago to postwar garden cities. Urban planning, she argues, is one of our most urgent tasks – to replace the wild sprawl of megacities with more considered urban forms that rethink how we can create socially and environmentally sustainable cities. She imagines city and country brought into harmony, with urban and rural dwellers enjoying commonly owned forest gardens and wild farms.
She wonders if “such a vision is hopelessly utopian”, and indeed it is hard to see how such change could be extended to the societies of totalitarian China and rapidly indutrialising India, to the conflict-ridden Middle East, or to the diversity of Africa. Certainly doing so would require culturally specific considerations of the way food intersects with inequality, race and power. In the age of Trump and Brexit, Putin and Bolsonaro, it is difficult to see how food-focused anarchism can help us create “a new stratum of global governance, a polycentric network of nested local groups and international bodies based on the shared management of common resources”.
Utopian thinking, however, is by its very nature unrealistic by the standards of the world it seeks to transform. It is the industrialism and imperialism of the west that created many of today’s crises, Steel argues, so it is the west’s collective duty to explore alternative models of what she calls “social maturity”. The deepest message of this ambitious book is a philosophical one, a vital call for us to rediscover the way that food binds us to each other and to the natural world, and in doing so find new ways of living.
Christopher Kissane’s Food, Religion & Communities in Early Modern Europe is published by Bloomsbury. Sitopia is published by Chatto (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
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