“Feeding cities requires gargantuan efforts, which arguably have more physical and social impacts on our lives and our planet than any other activity we do. » Synthetic and accessible, the book by English architect Carol Steel provides an edifying assessment of the evolution of the food supply.
Probably never in the history of humanity have we maintained such a distant and ignorant relationship with food. Take the British: they devote barely 10% of their budget to it; they buy more than three quarters of their groceries in supermarkets; one in three meals they eat is a prepared meal; and half of those under 24 say they never cook raw products. Like most of us, they expect their food to be predictable, resilient and edible from January to December – the complete opposite of what food really is: seasonal, fragile, unpredictable. The agricultural world is a distant continent.
It was not always this way. Until the advent of the railway, the town was generally established in the heart of a generous land and contained within its natural limits. Dependent on their food supply for their survival, city dwellers have long paid extreme attention to it. “Transporting food was often more difficult than producing it,” writes C. Steel. Meat could reach the market on foot, but cereals and milk were not easily transported. These questions of supply shaped the appearance of cities, their squares, their streets and their ports. Markets were located in the heart of cities, and their specialties reflected those of the countryside to which they were directly connected by roads. These markets also influenced the political organization of cities. The agora, seat of Athenian democracy, was at the same time a market, a sacred enclosure, a court of justice and a gathering space.
For a long time the city lived in symbiosis with its countryside, and for a long time its inhabitants remained rural, cultivating the land when they had a piece of garden, raising chickens, cows and pigs in their yards. As C. Steel recalls, “the desertification of cities at harvest time persisted until XXe century in Britain: in Kent, hops were traditionally harvested by workers living in the East End of London, who considered this period to be something of a holiday.
With the railway, shopping streets developed to the detriment of markets, and with them a different relationship to food consumption, a new distance between producers and consumers. Allowing cities to be supplied with meat at a good price, the rail also provided workers in emerging factories with high-octane fuel: “if wheat created the ancient city, meat gave birth to the industrial city”. Rail also allowed cities to become independent from their hinterland and to grow well beyond a hundred thousand inhabitants. Like any living being, the city is what it eats.
The politics of the stomach
Anxious to ensure a constant and cheap food supply, public authorities have always regulated the food trade. Many cities have adopted laws against monopolies, prohibiting anyone from acquiring too large a market share in a commodity or controlling several links in the food chain. “This is why in Paris, before the Revolution, bakers could not grind their own grain while millers did not have the right to make bread,” explains the author, who also discusses the links between war and security food, at the origin of numerous political alliances in Antiquity.
In Paris, the political powers kept a constant eye on the wheat trade, going so far as to spy on the countryside to find out about the state of the crops, market conditions, gossip or the weather. In order to be monitored, all transactions had to be done in broad daylight. Which did not prevent the existence of a gigantic black market in which all the townspeople seemed to take part. At XVIIIe century, recalls C. Steel, “institutions authorized to store grain for their own use, such as convents and hospitals, served as clandestine granaries by allowing traffickers to store their merchandise in exchange for a share of the profits. Meanwhile, merchants, millers, and bakers vied for control of the supply: first the millers began selling wheat, thereby accumulating great wealth; then the bakers began to grind their flour, thus cutting the ground from under the millers’ feet. » The wheat police allowed this trafficking to take place due to lack of resources, but also for fear that a shortage would cause riots. Because the people then blamed the hunger directly on the King.
Food industrialization
At the edge of XXe century, large agri-food groups merged and concentrated in Europe and the United States. For example, United Dairies sold 80% of English milk in 1918. A century later, 30% of the world’s food is managed by only around thirty companies.
Not content with controlling the food supply of entire cities, these agri-food and mass retail multinationals are increasingly influencing the decisions of national and local governments, from which they obtain tax advantages, changes to land registers and much more. other undue advantages. As Tesco’s director of corporate affairs boasted in 2005, “we now think much more as a developer, not just as a retailer.”
Multinational food companies have also learned to use the media. In 1926, baking giant General Mills created a fictional housewife model, Betty Crocker, who dispensed recipes and household recommendations over the radio using her employer’s products liberally. Other food giants soon launched their own women’s magazines, which they filled with equally interested advice and recipes. Instead of two more conventional chapters on the table and waste, the author could also have talked about food marketing aimed at children and adolescents, which represents 10 billion dollars of expenditure each year in the United States. and who, as recently shown in a documentary HBOhas this worrying characteristic: it is the foods that are most harmful to the body that are promoted the most aggressively. Produced according to commercial criteria, doped with oil (in the form of fertilizers and pesticides), cultivated on land exhausted by intensive exploitation, the food offered to us is often the one that generates the most profits, but it does not It is neither the healthiest, nor the tastiest, nor the most nutritious, nor the most respectful of the environment.
The author describes, on the other hand, how our diets are increasingly uniform and standardized – even if she emphasizes that there was nothing perfect about them in the pre-industrial era, when fruits and vegetables were very expensive and poisoning was not common. not rare. Due to economies of scale, wheat monoculture has driven wheat and barley from our plates. Apple varieties are chosen according to whether they are easy to grow, store and transport; ideally, they grow in both hemispheres and are therefore available all year round, which saves the consumer the painful task of changing varieties once a year (the English supermarkets Sainsbury’s even impose a minimum and maximum diameter and a certain percentage of redness in the Cox apples they sell). Our diet – like that of our cattle, our pigs, our poultry – is based on a small handful of cereal varieties, 90% of whose global distribution is controlled by just five companies. 90% of American milk comes from the same breed of cow. A genetic mutation, a parasite, a disease or a malicious act could take on the appearance of an apocalypse: according to a study conducted at Stanford University cited by C. Steel, contamination by botulinum toxin of one of the silos of 190,000 liters supplying milk to American consumers could kill 250,000 people before the cause of their death is even discovered.
Agriculture has become a global market.
“Most of our meat now comes from Brazil, Argentina and Thailand, where its production is up to five times cheaper due to low welfare and labor costs. »
Parked in tiny spaces, castrated, toothless, beaked, deprived all their lives of natural light and even simple contact with the earth, the animals from which we get our meat live miserable existences – but at the same time, notes the author , we have no choice: we consume too much to treat them properly. A Dutch planning agency calculated, for example, that the Netherlands would have to requisition 75% of the country’s surface area if it wanted to properly produce its 16 and a half million tonnes of pork annually. It is also difficult to raise the 70 million chickens consumed each month by the British in the traditional way.
Added to the scandal of factory farming is a long list of injustices: as two researchers from the Center for Food Policy at City University of London point out, “essential nutrients such as calcium, iron, magnesium and vitamins B9 and C are more likely to be ingested by wealthier socioeconomic groups.” It is almost always the poor who eat poorly, too much or not enough (one child in four is stunted). Livestock farming and meat eating today generate more greenhouse gases than the transport sector (and we know how climate change affects the poorest the hardest), and a third of the world’s crops are used for animals and not humans. Instead of growing quality food at home, we prefer to transform our countryside into “heritage theme parks” while encouraging deforestation, intensive irrigation and industrial agriculture in low-wage countries.
As we will have understood, in addition to offering an original urban planning analysis of our relationship to food, this book offers a committed, useful and unvarnished assessment of our food consumption.