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Carolyn SteelFeeding cities has a greater physical impact on the planet than anything else we do |
Your breakfast can change the world
01 August 2008
What did you have for breakfast today? Bacon and eggs? Muesli and milk? Coffee and toast? Whatever it was, it is sure to have come from somewhere we loosely term “countryside”, but was most likely a place more accurately described as a factory farm or industrial agricultural unit.
It might seem odd to be reading about food in a paper entitled Building Design, but for me it is the absence of food from such pages that is strange. Cities, like people, are what they eat, and 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, and that something similar must happen every day for every city on earth, it is remarkable that we get to eat at all. Feeding cities has a greater social and physical impact on our lives and planet than anything else we do, yet since food arrives on our plates as if by magic, we rarely stop to wonder how it got there.
No inhabitant of a pre-industrial city could have been so unaware. Cattle and sheep roamed the streets, pigs and hens lived in backyards, rivers heaved with fishing fleets, wagonloads of grain and vegetables trundled endlessly to market. Food once bound cities directly to land and sea, but with the arrival of the railways, all that changed. For almost two centuries, we have been building cities almost any place, of any size and shape, and relying on speedy transport, refrigeration and barrelfuls of oil to feed them.
We have enjoyed the luxury of not having to think about food. But with peak oil looming, global warming, and farmland increasingly scarce — to say nothing of a global urban population set to double by 2050 — that is a luxury we can no longer afford.
So where do we go from here? First, we need to recognise that we are entering a neo-geographical age in which stewardship of the land is as important for our survival as it was for our distant ancestors. Second, we need a new urban model that recognises the vital link between city and country. Third, we need to understand that every stage of the food chain is connected: that the way we farm, transport, buy, cook, eat and waste food is all part of one great organic cycle, that of life itself. We need to recognise the power of food to shape the world, and harness it to shape a better one.
Which is why the government’s approach to city-building is fatally flawed. Housing minister Caroline Flint states that with housing contributing 27% of carbon emissions, “doing nothing is not an option”. But what about the 30% contributed by food? Given its unrivalled impact on everything from climate change and environmental destruction to the way we build and inhabit cities, why isn’t doing nothing “not an option” for the way we eat?
Although food gets a brief mention in the eco-town standards under the “green infrastructure and biodiversity” banner, it is no more a government priority for eco-towns than it is for the future urban development for which they are supposed to act as “exemplars”. Which is, to put it mildly, a pity.
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Readers' comments
Do you get the feeling Ms Steel lives in Islington?
who cares where she lives? a recent study by christopher weber at carnegie mellon found that only 1% of the total emissions from meat are a result of it's transportation. or 11% for vegetables. the UN food and agriculture organisation estimated that agriculture is the second biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions after electricity. but seemingly, this is all just a bit too inconvenient. we'd rather blame the cars, even though they're not the biggest problem by a long shot. ruminant animals (like cows, sheep and goats) burp methane that is produced by the special bacteria that live in their enteric digestive systems. methane is a greenhouse gas that is 72 times more potent than co2 over 20 years and 25 times more potent over 100 years. to put this into some sort of perspective, the co2 equivalent emissions from 1kg of beef is 111kg over 20 years. this is the equivalent of driving 1067km in a prius or 224km in a lamborghini murcielago. why does it matter more over 20 years? because the next decade or two are the most critical in therms of avoiding catastrophic climate change. we must begin to reduce our emissions in absolute terms. but as yet we lack the technology to do it sufficiently quickly. reducing emissions from potent greenhouse gasses like methane now can buy us the time we need to scale up the technology that will ultimately reduce our CO2 emissions in the long term. and the easiest way to reduce our methane emissions is to eat less meat from enteric animals. so, how about pork chops instead of lamb chops? roast chicken instead of roast beef? easy.
I wonder what exactly we can do? How can we adpat? What are the suggestions for changing our cities to provide more local food ( I presume that is what the writer is getting at)