Carolyn Steel, Hungry City
Thursday 6 November 2008, 6:30pm
Hungry City – How Food Shapes Our Lives
Cities, like people, are what they eat. The effort necessary to feed them arguably has a greater social and physical impact on us and our planet than anything else we do – yet few of us are aware of the process. Food arrives on our plates as if by magic, and we rarely stop to wonder how it got there. But when you consider that every day for a city the size of London, enough food for 30 million meals must be produced, imported, sold, cooked, eaten and disposed of again, and that something similar must happen every day for every city on earth, it is remarkable that cities get to eat at all. Industrialisation has made feeding cities seem easy, but with food prices soaring and Peak Oil looming – to say nothing of the threat of climate change – that illusion is wearing off. With the world’s urban population set to double by 2050, we need a new urban model: one in which city and hinterland are treated as a single, organic whole.
Carolyn Steel, Hungry City
Carolyn Steel is an architect, lecturer and writer. Her work has focused on the everyday lives of cities, and she has run successful design units at Cambridge University, London Metropolitan University, and at the London School of Economics, where she was inaugural studio director of the Cities Programme. She was a Rome Scholar in 1995-6, researching the mundane order of the Rione S. Angelo, and her lecture series Food and the City is now an established part of the architectural degree at Cambridge University. A director of Cullum and Nightingale Architects, she has completed several major buildings for the Central School of Speech and Drama. Her media work has included presenting on BBC TV’s ‘One Foot in the Past’, and she is a regular columnist for Building Design. Her first book, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, was published by Chatto and Windus in 2008. It won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, and was recently featured on a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme.
