Customer Reviews
Brilliant analysis of the risks inherent in the unrelenting growth of cities - By: nattsang - http://natsnoodles.blogspot.com, 15 Nov 2008 
Carolyn Steel has developed a well-exposed analysis of the inherent tensionin the relationship between cities & their sources of, consumption of, & ultimately disposal of food products. The book draws towards a final conclusion that we are getting closer & closer to the breaking pointin that tension as more people round the world continue their exodus to cities.
Throughout the book, she uses fascinating examples from our distant & not so distant history to illustrate the effects that she describes. The book is made rich by her examination of so many different aspects of the relationship between cities & food, from the role of government, to the architecture & structure of cities, to the role of cooking & the way that waste is treated.
Steel's analysis is an eye-opener, & has put into context for me the role of urban planning with regard to globalisation & sustainability.
It's not the despair - it's the hope... - By: housing hound, 15 Jun 2008 Whatever its mercurial promise of bright lights, shared experiences & multicultural exoticism, the city can be an isolating place. However: everyone's got to eat - & therein lies the opportunity both for life-enhancing human engagement & for equally life-sapping process-led commercialism. Carolyn Steel's book, which interprets the city through food, highlights both the despair & the hope implicitin the idea of the city. By her clever tracing of food's journey from land to urban table & thence to sewer, Steel makes us reflect on past & present social satisfactions & injustices which our most basic human need can inspire.
Contrast the image of joyless contemporary supermarket shoppers - strip-lit lone prowlers debating forlornly with themselves about which highly packaged factory offering to microwave tonight - with the heady possibility of outdoor urban market-goers discussing food, tasting & learning. It's clear which one we'd all rather participate in, & yet Steel urges us not to be misty-eyed about the turn of the 21st century emerging market culture either. London's Borough Market is described as `food tourism' - laudable, but not affordable - a middle class aberration rather than a sustainable way of life for most of us. This typifies Steel's approach to her two-pronged subject: she is not afraid to slaughter sacred cowsin her search for authenticity & meaning. This search takes her from London to the Middle East, from high flown ritual to domestic minutiae & from the mediaeval dining table to McDonalds without exhausting or overwhelming the reader.
As I read through Steel's journey, many similar food-inspired conflicts on the despair/hope axis spring to mind & make me feel at once revolutionary & impotent. Growing food locally could be such a positive collective activity, but the space to do it is scarce & prohibitively expensive. Selling & shopping for that food could rekindle the relationship between city dwellers & those who work the land, but the supermarket has become an unthinking way of life. Cooking & eating food are two of the few remaining waysin which urbanites can be hospitable, trusting & generous. But Steel's vivid descriptions of ancient cookshops & taverns offer a far richer vision of city-dwellers bawdily conversing over shared fare than Wagamama's ubiquitous but uneasy shared benches can ever do. Minimising waste is surely essential (and creative!) if we are to optimise increasingly meagre global resources. But as Steel points out, we currently throw away a shocking 30% of the food we buy. The massive reversals requiredin existing supply chains, educational priorities & even basic social interactionsin the city are horribly daunting. One cannot but feel that a pan-national crisis will be the only possible trigger for a new, sustainable food market.
Steel's concluding chapter tenders myriad ideas, both utopian & pragmatic, about bottom up behavioural change & top down political leadership on food that might seek to avert such a crisis. Whilst her book is certainly a campaigning one, it is also realistic & discursive & not given to promulgating slick solutions to complex agricultural & societal problems. Potential readers will know that there are already a host of excellent polemics about contemporary food culture (Shopped, Fast Food Nation et al) & an equal canon about cities. What Carolyn Steel's book achieves is to bring these two axiomatic subjects together for the first time with a hugely enjoyable melee of academic care, passion & a jocular, accessible style. You feel like you would like to have her round for dinner to discuss further. And she would probably accept...
Timely and pertinent - By: Big Jim, 15 Jun 2008 
As I type there are reports of food shortages around the country. There are also reports of cannabilism occurringin Essex.
OK I made that last bit up but this book serves as a reminder to those of us who livein cities as to where our food comes from & where it all goes. It also serves as a very interesting book on how cities of the past were fed & reminds us thatin fact cities are a relatively recent developmentin human history & that they could only exist with the explicit development of agricultural methods & markets. I am off to read "The end of food" now which may have more to say about food shortages elsewherein the world, but to be fair the author here makes it clear that her intention is to describe how cities have been & continue to be fed.
To sum up a very interesting & surprisingly readable book given the subject matter.
