Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World

by Carolyn Steel

of all mammals on earth, 60 per cent are now farm animals, 36 per cent are human and the rest (just 4 per cent) are wild.9

Nowhere is the transition more pronounced than in China, where 80 per cent of the population were rural in 1980, yet 53 per cent now live in cities and 70 per cent are projected to do so by 2025.18 Back in 1982, the average Chinese ate just 13 kilos of meat per year; today the figure is 60 kilos and rising. Although this is only half what the average American eats, it still means that the Chinese today consume one quarter of all the world’s meat and twice as much as the burger-lovin’ USA.

the ethics of lab meat are rather murkier than he makes out.

do we really want our food to be made and owned by the same global corporation that controls how we access and share information? And if we don’t, who else do we imagine might own the technologies required to make in-vitro beef? Not your friendly local farmer or butcher, that’s for sure.

The fact that growing muscle tissue in a lab could seem a better idea than simply eating more vegetables reveals the nature of our human dilemma.

In a post-industrial society it is virtually impossible to lead a truly good life, since, merely by existing, we participate in a host of social, political and economic systems that, among other things, oppress workers, abuse animals, poison oceans, destroy ecosystems and churn out greenhouse gases like there’s no tomorrow. Heaven help you if you drive a car, fly on holiday, eat steak or own a smartphone. Almost every move we make in the modern world has some distant, negative impact. Just engaging with life’s multiple dilemmas requires vast knowledge and effort, as we examine all the implications of our actions on countless people, creatures, structures and organisms, most of which we barely know exist. Needless to say, few of us are equipped for such a task.

Sitopia is essentially a way of viewing the world.

the French ‘philosopher of taste’ Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin noted in his 1825 treatise La Physiologie du Goût, eating is our most reliable and enduring joy: ‘The pleasures of the table belong to all times and all ages, to every country and every day; they go hand in hand with all our other pleasures, outlast them, and remain to console us for their loss.’33

Artificial nitrogen is the key ingredient in chemical fertilisers commonly known as NPK, so named since they also contain phosphorus (P) and potassium (K).35 Today, the so-called Haber–Bosch process (Carl Bosch industrialised Haber’s idea) is credited with feeding an estimated two out of every five people on the planet.36

the Old Testament establishes the right of humans to be omnivores, an assumption that still prevails in the West. Other traditions, however, have viewed things very differently. In India, for example, vegetarianism has long been customary, since Buddhists, Jains and Brahmins all reject animal slaughter, while Hindus avoid both beef and pork, and Muslims eschew the latter. India’s sacred cows are a striking symbol of this different belief system: revered for their life-giving milk, the animals wander freely and are fed by people as they pass.

According to Oxford University Professor of Physiology John Stein, ‘The lack of omega-3s in our diet is going to change the human brain in ways that are as serious as climate change.’

the UK came top of the chart, with 50.7 per cent of the average shopping basket consisting of ultra-processed foods, compared to just 14.2 in France and 13.4 per cent in Italy.42

Zak found, the latter experienced a surge of oxytocin, prompting them to respond in kind.8 Dubbed the ‘moral molecule’ by Zak, oxytocin prompts us to obey the golden rule ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ It helps us to trust, in other words, that if we refrain from helping ourselves to a large slice of pie, others will do the same and we’ll all end up with seconds.

Migrants can feel such nostalgia for home that they try to replicate it in their adopted one, a habit that can have unintended consequences. Early Swedish settlers in North America, for example, replicated the farms and villages of home by building log cabins in the woods. Such dwellings are now considered archetypically American, usurping the portable tepees and grass wigwams in which Native Americans actually lived.11 For them home was never a building, but rather a carefully curated territory that, because of its lack of farms, fields and fences, went unrecognised by Europeans.

Farming’s most fateful effect was arguably to alter our relationship with nature. Wilderness, once home to every human, became the enemy.

Home changed too: no longer a sanctuary within nature, it became a territory wrested from it, transformed through hard work. As people began living in buildings, home became indoors instead of outside, warm rather than cold, private, not public. Home, in short, became a realm set apart from the world: a household in the true sense.

Over the same period, two million acres of commons and wasteland (public woods, marshes and moors free for all to use) were brought under cultivation.60 Such enclosures not only deprived peasants of land to farm, but robbed them of the commons that had formed a vital part of the rural economy. Constituting one third of all land in England and Wales in 1688, commons were used to graze livestock, to catch a bird or rabbit for the pot and to gather materials such as wood or peat for furniture and fuel, moss and bracken for bedding, as well as rushes, wax, honey, wild plants, berries and herbs.61 They were, in short, the shared resource that made oikonomia possible. Without them country life was cut off at its roots.

Children started to be seen in a new light: while the poorest still contributed up to half of a family’s income, middle-class children became little treasures to be educated, cosseted and adored.

Domestic tasks were reclassified as ‘housework’, a form of labour which, by virtue of being cut off from the income stream – like an economic oxbow lake – was no longer valued.

In the industrial economy, only labour rewarded with wages would be considered work.

As one member of Lloyd George’s government put it, ‘To let them (our heroes) come home from horrible, water-logged trenches to something little better than a pigsty here would, indeed, be criminal …’76 The result was the first and greatest house-building programme that Britain has ever seen.

The post-war domestic crisis on both sides of the Atlantic was a boon for the food industry, which leaped into action, producing convenience foods that housewives could pass off as their own. US food companies led the way, making everything from Betty Crocker’s cake mixes (available in a packet near you from 1940) to entire pre-cooked turkey dinners that could be reheated and served.

increasing numbers of us are resorting to buying ready meals: in Britain we love them so much that in 2017 we ate half of all those consumed in Europe.86

Could we take this resurgence of interest in food to rethink our idea of home? Some have already done it. BedZED, a pioneering mixed-use sustainable development completed in 2002 in the London Borough of Sutton, included generous gardens, balconies and allotments as part of the original masterplan, in order both to minimise residents’ carbon footprints (BedZED stands for Beddington Zero Carbon Energy Development) and to help foster a sense of community.

The idea is that, by combining high-quality eco-design with generous public and private spaces to live, grow, work and play, we can recapture the sense of community that once animated rural villages and urban neighbourhoods, creating a way of life that people actually want to live.

Everything about Rungis is big. Its 234-hectare site is comfortably larger than the Principality of Monaco. In 2018, it employed 12,000 people and supported a further 102,000 jobs throughout France, generating an annual turnover of €9 billion – 0.33 per cent of France’s total GDP.2 Its eight fruit and vegetable halls provide a total of 3.7 kilometres of linear selling space, shifting 1.2 million tonnes of fruit and veg a year – around half of Parisians’ five a day. Delivering all this produce generates 1.5 million vehicle journeys every week.

Rungis is a leading example of an institution increasingly rare in the West: a market that plays a key part in feeding a major city.

From the Athenian agora and Roman forum to London’s Smithfield and Amsterdam’s Dam Square, markets have shaped history.

As Tim Jackson argues in Prosperity Without Growth, Schwarz’s findings show why the pursuit of economic growth (chrematistike) can never make us happy. In a modern democracy, says Jackson, the state tries to ensure stability and prosperity by managing the economy, which it does by balancing precisely the tensions identified by Schwarz. But when the government’s goal is recast as pure economic growth, selfishness and novelty will always triumph over tradition and altruism, putting society in a state of self-defeating conflict. In order to thrive, Jackson suggests, we need to bring altruism and stability back into economics. Only then will our economy have a hope of delivering what, deep down, most of us really want: to live in a society that balances innovation with tradition and which is both prosperous and fair.

What went wrong? In truth, the project was flawed from the start. Even as they were demanding independence from Britain, the colonists were busy snatching land from the Native Americans, an act of theft that, although it concerned Jefferson, he couldn’t help but see from a Lockean perspective. He was similarly blind to the other flagrant injustice towards ‘others’, slavery. A slave owner himself, he did move to end the international slave trade in 1808, yet failed to ban the practice outright, and even brought his favourite domestic slaves from Monticello to the White House. All men are born equal, it seems, but some are born more equal than others.

In order to finance their voyages, the merchants of Venice needed to borrow large sums of money that they could only hope to pay back once their silks and spices had, with any luck, been safely landed and sold many months later. Due to the hazardous nature of seafaring, merchants paid lenders interest on their loans to compensate them for the risk they were taking. This created a further problem, however, since lending money at interest (usury) was banned by the Church. It therefore fell to the Jewish members of the community to act as moneylenders, a role that made them enviably wealthy. A new breed of financial service was born that took its name from the wooden benches – banci – from which the lenders conducted their business: banking.58

Although the buccaneering Dutch pioneered most of the instruments of capitalism, it fell to the Swedes to finish the job. Unlike the Wisselbank, which simply allowed merchants to shift deposits from one account to another, the Stockholms Banco began lending them out at interest. This practice, known as fractional reserve banking, is the cornerstone of modern finance.59

When Daniel Defoe toured the kingdom in 1720, he was in no doubt as to what was creating all the buzz: The country send up their corn, their malt, their cattle, their fowls, their coals, their fish, all to London, and London sends back spice, sugar, wine, drugs, cotton, linen, tobacco, and all foreign necessaries to the country … London consumes all, circulates all, exports all, and at last pays for all; and this is trade.65

Liberalism and capitalism are so fused in our minds today as to be virtually indistinguishable. Their principles are fundamental to our ideas of prosperity and freedom, so much so that we have barely noticed as Homo sapiens has morphed into Homo economicus and economic growth has become synonymous with our idea of the good.

No society prior to that of Georgian England had conceived of such a thing as economic growth, let alone associated it with a good life. For most people, earning a decent living had been enough to be content; from now on, however, mere subsistence would not suffice. In the market society, one’s primary goal in life had to be getting rich.

A principle was established that remains central to capitalism: when starvation is the alternative, people will work for almost nothing.

‘Those at the top have learned how to suck out money from the rest in ways that the rest are hardly aware of.’

Never mind that GDP ignored the real cost of manufacture and made no distinction between, say, money spent building bridges or the cost of clearing up after a crime; from now on, any economic activity would count as good.

The absurdity of this, said Schumacher, is that ‘man-the-producer’ and ‘man-the-consumer’ are one and the same person, whose happiness could be just as easily secured at work as at home. He cited an industrial farmer who admitted that he wouldn’t dream of eating his own food and felt fortunate to be able to buy organic produce grown ‘without poisons’ instead. When asked why he didn’t simply grow organic food himself, the farmer replied that he ‘couldn’t afford it’.121

What, Schumacher wondered, might an economy that valued land and labour look like? An economy, for example, based on Buddhist beliefs? Since Buddhists revere nature, such an economy would aim to minimise consumption, helping to preserve the natural world. Because Buddhism also recognises the importance of good work in nourishing the human spirit, such an economy would also seek to make work more fulfilling, not to dehumanise it.

What we know, however, is that we’re far better at collaborating in times of crisis. It’s no accident that the most visionary social programmes to come out of the US and UK in the past century – the New Deal and the welfare state – came in the wake of the Wall Street Crash and Second World War respectively. When we experience common hardship, we naturally pull together, becoming more empathetic, altruistic and visionary. Crises make us realise how precious our everyday lives are to us, so for a time at least, we appreciate what we already have. Crises, in short, give us the chance to readjust our values, which is why our failure to change course after the 2008 crash may turn out to be the greatest missed opportunity of the century.

In reality, ‘cheap food’ is an oxymoron – an illusion created by industrial producers and governments keen to disguise the true cost of living. While externalities such as deforestation, pollution and climate change are accounted for elsewhere, industrial farmers who would otherwise struggle to make a living from the low prices we pay for food are subsidised by the state. So what might the world look like if, instead, we were to internalise the true cost of our food? The answer is that industrial farming would rapidly become unaffordable, while ecologically produced organic food would emerge as the bargain it has always been. Buying food would become a virtuous circle, in which the market would favour foods that nurtured nature, animals and people. Ethical, ecological producers would sell more produce, so gaining some of the economies of scale now reserved for industrial agri-food giants. Schumacher’s farmer could afford to grow organic food as well as eat it.

One stumbling block to creating a sitopian economy is the fact that we’ve got used to spending so little on food. In 1950, the British spent between 30 and 50 per cent of their income on it; today we spend just 9 per cent (the least in Europe), compared to 13 per cent in France and 25 per cent in India. Americans, meanwhile, spend just 6.4 per cent, the lowest figure anywhere in the world. This is not to say that American food is cheap to produce, however; on the contrary, at an average annual cost of $2,273 per head, it is the world’s most expensive, costing more than ten times what it costs to feed the average Indian.127 Affordability is a key reason why food is an area where politicians fear to tread. We can’t raise prices, the argument goes, since it would push millions into hunger. Yet surely the problem is the other way around? Shouldn’t we be asking why, in some of the richest nations on earth, millions are living below the breadline? The real taboo here isn’t food, but our refusal to face the dark heart of neoliberalism. The irony is that the solution lies in the problem: by valuing food, we could create many good jobs that could lift people out of poverty. Food and farming remain by far the largest employers on earth, providing work which, when valued, can be hugely rewarding. For numerous reasons – stewardship of the land, maintaining biodiversity, boosting rural communities and simply eating better – we need more people working in food, not fewer.

corporate Big Ag on the global food system that just four companies – ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus – control more than 75 per cent of the worldwide trade in grain.129 These agri-food giants use their power to push commercial crops like corn and soy onto local farmers at the expense of native produce.

In 2018, the German seed company Bayer won approval to buy rival Monsanto for a cool $62.5 billion, creating a company (nicknamed Baysanto) with more than a quarter share of the global seed and pesticides market.

While local producers thrived, however, Rome’s distant hinterlands suffered: by the third century AD, the soils of North Africa were exhausted, and observers wrote despairingly of the white, caked earth, a sure sign of fatal salinisation.34 By relentlessly extracting its nutrients from distant lands, Rome effectively ate itself to death, yet it was far from the first or last great civilisation to do so. Indeed, the pattern has been remarkably consistent. The Sumerians, whose genius for irrigation wasn’t matched by an equal talent for drainage, met a similar fate.35 The Greeks’ obsession with self-sufficiency didn’t help them much either: their clearance of forests during the fourth century BCE in order to grow more wheat on steep fragile slopes led to widespread soil erosion.

Feeding cities has never been easy. Yet, despite their agricultural mishaps, our urban ancestors held the land in deep respect. Cultivation and culture, as we saw earlier, were powerfully connected in the Roman mind. Like the Greeks and Sumerians before them, the Romans considered cultivated land (ager) a rural extension of civitas, the civilised realm of the city.37 Wilderness, in contrast, was viewed with disdain bordering on dread, the home of unruly barbarians who were the very opposite of civilised life.38

As the metropolitan carpet began to spread in the UK, a matching agricultural one was rolled out in America’s Great West, where swathes of previously inaccessible prairie (cohabited by Native Americans and millions of bison) were linked to the East Coast for the first time. The 1830 opening of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad signalled an era of economic expansion and ecological destruction on a scale never before seen. First to go were the bison, slaughtered for their hides or just for sport from moving trains, a massacre so relentless that the southern herd was wiped out within just four years.44 With the bison gone, their human companions soon followed, scattered or removed to reservations, leaving the plains and prairies open for conversion to grain production.

With ice-houses spaced along his route, he was soon able to sell his beef in Boston, nearly 1,000 miles away. What Swift had invented was the chill-chain: refrigerated delivery routes that were the last piece of the food logistics puzzle. With aggressive marketing and cut-throat prices, Chicago meatpackers soon persuaded Bostonians and New Yorkers that factory beef slaughtered hundreds of miles away was better than fresh meat from their local butchers. Industrial food – and cheap meat – had arrived.

Although the local estate agent had farms for sale, these were residences at exorbitant prices for ‘Amsterdammers who want a farm but don’t actually want to farm’.98 The irony, said Koolhaas, was that wealthy urbanites were moving to the area ‘attracted by its aura of authenticity’, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the very quality that drew them was being eroded by their own ‘urbanising presence’.99