Hungry City, and What You Can Do About Food

One of my winter break reads was Hungry City, by Carolyn Steel. I’ve been looking forward to reading this; I had to get it through interlibrary loan. It’s a comprehensive look at the relationship between cities and food. The author explains how food got from the country to the cities in various historical periods, and how the food relationship has broken down between city and country during the industrial age.

Though it is Britain-centric, Hungry City is applicable in the U.S. and other industrial countries. In the last section the author describes her vision of “Sitopia”, her ideal of how food should be the center of our lives, and how the relationship between our food production and us should work. I didn’t, unfortunately, get a very clear picture of how this would work. I was hoping she’d expand more on what she said in her TED talk, but she still wasn’t very forthcoming with details or plans. I suppose that’s just me expecting too much, though.  In reality, we’ve got to work these things out in our individual communities.

I did see a video recently, however, in which Dr. Vandana Shiva (author of Soil Not Oil) talks about what specifically people in the global north can do to help those in the global south.

A Transition Town movement in the North needs to shrink its ecological footprint on areas where it is shrinkable. And it needs to generate more livelihoods locally, increase more production, and the first candidate, in my view, for this is fresh vegetables.

Why?

Fresh vegetables are the reason Third World people are losing their land. Fresh vegetables do not get exported by small peasants; giant companies take over the land, put green beans and lettuce onto flights and ship it to the North. So if you reduce your consumption of long distance flights for vegetables, and increase your local production ecologically, you are reducing the pressure on the South; you are making sure families don’t go hungry in the South.

So how do we do this?

• We can grow our own. I know that’s not for everyone. I do a little, but not as much as I’d like to. It’s hard to fit the gardening in with everything else.
• We can also buy directly from farmers, through a CSA or from local farmers’ markets.
• You may be able to choose locally grown items at a supermarket, although apparently “local” is used loosely in some cases.
• If you garden, or if you buy in bulk during the growing season, you can preserve your own food so that you have fruits and vegetables for the winter. Learn to can, freeze, and dry your own produce. You’ll also be avoiding the BPAs present in steel cans from the grocery store.
• Communities can help with this too. Can your neighborhood association help set up a food co-op or farmers market? Or a community garden? What about a canning kitchen?

Maybe this is one thing we can figure out.