Hungry City

I have just ploughed through Carolyn Steels 'Hungry City' inspired from my Transition Town participance. The book, in a very tiny nutshell, explores through history until the present day the following:


- The land
- Supplying the city
- Sitopia
- Market and supermarket
- Waste
- At the table
- Kitchen

It paints a relatively dismal picture of western, but particularly UK food culture and the detrimental effects our cheap food culture has imbued within out society, issues such as food education, social/cultural decomposition, the demise of many once charming aspects of the city...

"Those who control food, control us, and when you consider that that 80 percent of the grocery trade in Britain is controlled by just four supermarkets, that gives them incredible power, not just over our wallets, but over our bodies too. The latest trend is for large supermarkets like Tesco to become urban developers, offering local councils incentives to allow them to build large chunks of city with mega-stores at their core – effectively creating captive markets for their business."

As a consequence of reading this book, I decided to jaunt off down to London's Borough Market and embrace the atmosphere that cities now seemingly bare little witness to. I intended to understand and experience first hand the types of market that would have at some point in the not too distant past imbued social integrity and identity within the people. The animated conversations, the energetic debate, the bartering, the laughter, the nagging of children, the eating, the mess, the life and the vibrancy. Carolyn highlights in her book that market places were once the social beacons of the city, going not just back to ancient Greece or Rome but to periods as recent as that of Victorian Britain.