The moment we restore food’s proper value, we begin to see where it belongs—not at the periphery of society, but at its heart. For example, “cheap food”—the apparent triumph of modern agribusiness—is an oxymoron, an illusion created by externalizing food’s true costs. Once you factor in all the fossil fuel consumption, rainforest destruction, soil erosion, pollution, water depletion, carbon emissions, loss of biodiversity, rural depopulation, animal suffering and obesity that result from cheap food, it doesn’t look quite so cheap. In fact, we pay a very high price.
It’s time to take back control of what and how we eat. Here’s why.
picture courtesy of Alexx Stuart
The short answer is: another war. The new food movement is an act of popular resistance against a system hardly less harmful to life and limb than military conflict. Food isn’t just something we need to shovel down our gullets each day to survive. It’s far more potent: the means, more than any other, by which we humans shape our planet and ourselves. Recognition of food’s true power demands we treat it in a completely different way. Rather than think of it as cheap fuel, we need to embrace food as a cultural force. We need to understand food in the way our ancestors did, before fossil fuel blurred our sense of its importance.
We need a new food manifesto—one that enables us to start thinking not just about food but through it. We need to understand how profoundly food affects every aspect of our lives, depending on the way it’s produced, transported, bought and sold, cooked, eaten and wasted. Food is much too important to be left in the hands of megacorporations. We must take back control of food, and start wielding that control positively and collectively as a tool to shape a better world.
For millennia, food has borne multiple meanings. Food is love, health and a gift from the gods. Food is friendship, identity, belonging and community. Food is desire, sharing and pleasure. Food is sex and sacrifice, reward and punishment. Food is the body of Christ. Food is fattening. The things food has been, or has represented, are as broad as life itself. Why, then, has food for so many become just a meaningless, tasteless commodity?
Before industrialization, food was the dominant priority of cities. No settlement was built without considering its sources of sustenance. Perishable food, such as fruit and vegetables, were grown as locally as possible, often on the fringes of the city itself. Meat and fish were consumed seasonally, with the excess preserved through salting, drying or pickling. Nothing was wasted. Leftover scraps were fed to pigs and chickens; human and animal waste was collected and spread as fertilizer.
With the arrival of the railway, all that changed. Once it became possible to transport fresh food quickly across large distances, cities were emancipated from geography, able to grow to any size and shape in any place. Cities began to sprawl, and as they did so, food systems became industrialized to supply them.
Our very concept of a city—inherited from a distant, predominantly rural past—assumes that the means of supporting urban populations can be endlessly extracted from the natural world. But can it? With at least 3 billion people living in cities, and a further 3 billion expected to join them by 2050, the assumption looks shaky.
Industrialization created the illusion that cities are independent, immaculate and unstoppable. Now, the illusion is wearing off. We urgently need a new dwelling model, one that recognizes the dominant role cities play in the global ecology.
Food is vital as we rethink our way of life. Many of the dilemmas we face—how to reconcile city and country, man and nature, prosperity and sustainability—can be addressed through food. Food is the common denominator: the one thing without which we can’t survive. What better basis, then, around which to order our lives? Together, we can harness food as a social and physical tool, both to interpret the world and to shape it.
My word for this approach is “sitopia,” from the Greek terms sitos (“food”) and topos (“place”). We already live in a sitopia of sorts, since the cities, landscapes and ecosystems we inhabit have been profoundly shaped by food. The problem is, our blindness to food’s influence has created a bad sitopia; one so bad, in fact, that it threatens to destroy itself—and us—if we don’t change it. So we must create a good sitopia, one that restores balance to our lives, to society and to our relationship with the natural world.
How might that work? First, we need to understand that sitopia is not utopia. We’re not trying to create an ideal world, but a way of thinking that allows us to create many different places, connections and relationships, using food as our tool.
Much of the mess we’re in is due to lack of respect for food. To create a good sitopia, then, we must restore to food its true value. This isn’t just a question of how much we pay for food, although that matters, but of what we understand it to represent. Ask a starving man what food means to him, and he’ll give you a frank answer. Food remains the most important shared element in all our lives.
The moment we restore food’s proper value, we begin to see where it belongs—not at the periphery of society, but at its heart. For example, “cheap food”—the apparent triumph of modern agribusiness—is an oxymoron, an illusion created by externalizing food’s true costs. Once you factor in all the fossil fuel consumption, rainforest destruction, soil erosion, pollution, water depletion, carbon emissions, loss of biodiversity, rural depopulation, animal suffering and obesity that result from cheap food, it doesn’t look quite so cheap. In fact, we pay a very high price.
When such externalities are taken into account, the debate about how to feed the world shifts. The pursuit of ever more “efficient” food systems is revealed as profoundly uneconomic. The false choices of industrial versus organic, high tech versus traditional, also disappear, replaced by an open debate about the farming practices and food systems that best match our aspirations for the future of the planet. Such thinking represents a reversal of the current trend, which treats food as a necessary yet somehow separate problem. In the ongoing food debate, the most vital question of all—What is a good life?—is rarely asked.
Of course, that question has no single answer; instead, it generates a spectrum of further questions. Being open to asking these questions, and realizing that there will be many different answers, is key to creating sitopia. Even if we can’t say for sure what a good life might be, we can describe some of its attributes. Most of us, for instance, would agree a good life is one in which people are generally happy, healthy, industrious, generous and loving; societies are tolerant, peaceable and sustainable; physical surroundings are diverse, bountiful and beautiful.
We know such a place can’t exist; that would be utopia. But that’s where sitopia comes in. Sitopia is contingent, partial, practical. It can be big or small, shared or personal. It can take many shapes and forms. It can be created by anybody, right here, right now. It can exist anywhere. Indeed, it already does.
Read more at http://odewire.com/48776/a-new-food-manifesto-2.html
We need a new food manifesto—one that enables us to start thinking not just about food but through it. We need to understand how profoundly food affects every aspect of our lives, depending on the way it’s produced, transported, bought and sold, cooked, eaten and wasted. Food is much too important to be left in the hands of megacorporations. We must take back control of food, and start wielding that control positively and collectively as a tool to shape a better world.
For millennia, food has borne multiple meanings. Food is love, health and a gift from the gods. Food is friendship, identity, belonging and community. Food is desire, sharing and pleasure. Food is sex and sacrifice, reward and punishment. Food is the body of Christ. Food is fattening. The things food has been, or has represented, are as broad as life itself. Why, then, has food for so many become just a meaningless, tasteless commodity?
Before industrialization, food was the dominant priority of cities. No settlement was built without considering its sources of sustenance. Perishable food, such as fruit and vegetables, were grown as locally as possible, often on the fringes of the city itself. Meat and fish were consumed seasonally, with the excess preserved through salting, drying or pickling. Nothing was wasted. Leftover scraps were fed to pigs and chickens; human and animal waste was collected and spread as fertilizer.
With the arrival of the railway, all that changed. Once it became possible to transport fresh food quickly across large distances, cities were emancipated from geography, able to grow to any size and shape in any place. Cities began to sprawl, and as they did so, food systems became industrialized to supply them.
Our very concept of a city—inherited from a distant, predominantly rural past—assumes that the means of supporting urban populations can be endlessly extracted from the natural world. But can it? With at least 3 billion people living in cities, and a further 3 billion expected to join them by 2050, the assumption looks shaky.
Industrialization created the illusion that cities are independent, immaculate and unstoppable. Now, the illusion is wearing off. We urgently need a new dwelling model, one that recognizes the dominant role cities play in the global ecology.
Food is vital as we rethink our way of life. Many of the dilemmas we face—how to reconcile city and country, man and nature, prosperity and sustainability—can be addressed through food. Food is the common denominator: the one thing without which we can’t survive. What better basis, then, around which to order our lives? Together, we can harness food as a social and physical tool, both to interpret the world and to shape it.
My word for this approach is “sitopia,” from the Greek terms sitos (“food”) and topos (“place”). We already live in a sitopia of sorts, since the cities, landscapes and ecosystems we inhabit have been profoundly shaped by food. The problem is, our blindness to food’s influence has created a bad sitopia; one so bad, in fact, that it threatens to destroy itself—and us—if we don’t change it. So we must create a good sitopia, one that restores balance to our lives, to society and to our relationship with the natural world.
How might that work? First, we need to understand that sitopia is not utopia. We’re not trying to create an ideal world, but a way of thinking that allows us to create many different places, connections and relationships, using food as our tool.
Much of the mess we’re in is due to lack of respect for food. To create a good sitopia, then, we must restore to food its true value. This isn’t just a question of how much we pay for food, although that matters, but of what we understand it to represent. Ask a starving man what food means to him, and he’ll give you a frank answer. Food remains the most important shared element in all our lives.
The moment we restore food’s proper value, we begin to see where it belongs—not at the periphery of society, but at its heart. For example, “cheap food”—the apparent triumph of modern agribusiness—is an oxymoron, an illusion created by externalizing food’s true costs. Once you factor in all the fossil fuel consumption, rainforest destruction, soil erosion, pollution, water depletion, carbon emissions, loss of biodiversity, rural depopulation, animal suffering and obesity that result from cheap food, it doesn’t look quite so cheap. In fact, we pay a very high price.
When such externalities are taken into account, the debate about how to feed the world shifts. The pursuit of ever more “efficient” food systems is revealed as profoundly uneconomic. The false choices of industrial versus organic, high tech versus traditional, also disappear, replaced by an open debate about the farming practices and food systems that best match our aspirations for the future of the planet. Such thinking represents a reversal of the current trend, which treats food as a necessary yet somehow separate problem. In the ongoing food debate, the most vital question of all—What is a good life?—is rarely asked.
Of course, that question has no single answer; instead, it generates a spectrum of further questions. Being open to asking these questions, and realizing that there will be many different answers, is key to creating sitopia. Even if we can’t say for sure what a good life might be, we can describe some of its attributes. Most of us, for instance, would agree a good life is one in which people are generally happy, healthy, industrious, generous and loving; societies are tolerant, peaceable and sustainable; physical surroundings are diverse, bountiful and beautiful.
We know such a place can’t exist; that would be utopia. But that’s where sitopia comes in. Sitopia is contingent, partial, practical. It can be big or small, shared or personal. It can take many shapes and forms. It can be created by anybody, right here, right now. It can exist anywhere. Indeed, it already does.
To see sitopia in action, go to a place where food is highly valued—such as India. Food is everywhere in India. The countryside is densely populated with more than half a million small farms. Close networks of villages trade with one another at busy food markets. In the cities, people cook and eat on the sidewalks; vendors sell snacks from carts and stands; and traders carry baskets of vegetables on their heads. Cows, goats and chickens wander freely, and even the temples are brimming with sweets, left as gifts for the gods.
Read more at http://odewire.com/48776/a-new-food-manifesto-2.html
Hi there,
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for sharing my manifesto. I created it last year in October and it's certainly been around the world! My copyright is at the bottom - if you had the time to change the text and say picture courtesy of Alexx Stuart, that would be awesome :-)
Sorry about that, guess I had the wrong attribution.
ReplyDelete