Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives
By Carolyn Steel
Chatto and Windus

The End of Food: The Coming Crisis in the World Food Industry
By Paul Roberts
Bloombury

Hungry City is a sinister real-life sequel to Animal Farm with the plot turned upside down by time in ways even George Orwell could not have foreseen. Its key image is the Pig Tower, a 21st-century Dutch invention for producing pork in custom-built city blocks, each 76 floors high, designed to house pigs in comfortable apartments with lavish bedding and ample rootling space on large, open-air balconies. “The towers would be powered by biogas digesters run on pig manure and connected to a central abattoir to which pigs would be moved by lift.”

This perfectly rational project would deliver a lifestyle not essentially different, as Carolyn Steel points out, from the conditions enjoyed by many urban human beings. She calculates that 1,000 huge, mixed “vertical farms” constructed in and around central London could feed the entire city. The savings (zero food miles, on-site waste disposal, no hidden pollution costs) take us back to something like the old sustainable style of farming still practised in England in 1945, when Animal Farm came out.

Orwell’s quaint old Farmer Jones had no machinery on his farm, nor any means of generating the electricity to work it. 60 years later the industrial production, preservation, packaging and transport of food for the UK uses four barrels of oil per person per year; the US needs nearly twice as much. London consumes the produce of a global hinterland more than 100 times its size, roughly equivalent of the whole of Britain’s currently cultivated farmland.

The speed of this transformation and its unprecedented scale and secrecy make it difficult to grasp. For the first time, supply no longer has any clear relation to demand. Output, and the complex international infrastructure that supports it, is controlled by profit. Chronic overconsumption with its attendant ills (obesity, diabetes, heart trouble) keeps pace in one part of the world with starvation in others.

The figures are staggering. Wal-Mart dominates the global grocery trade with profits reckoned by the UN at the start of the century to be “bigger than the gross domestic product of three-quarters of the world’s economies.” Today those profits have doubled. Five companies control 90% of the global grain supply. The world tea market is in the hands of three. Four giant processing companies own 81% of American beef. None of these companies are answerable to anyone but themselves. They are ruthlessly anti-competitive, largely above the law and more than able to impose often ruinous conditions on the countries that supply them.

Commerce permits no deviation from corporately determined norms; 90% of milk in the US now comes from a single breed of cow, and the same proportion of commercial eggs from a single breed of hen. British supermarkets have reduced well over 2,000 varieties of locally grown apple for all practical purposes to 2 (Bramley and Cox). This concentration makes the food chain permanently vulnerable to contamination, disease of terrorism (“I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply,” said Tommy Thompson as he resigned as US health secretary in 2004, “because it would be so easy to do”). It also means that whole species face imminent extinction.

The corporate world meanwhile diverts attention by its ability to mimic the variety and individuality it is suppressing. Local shops sucked out of British high streets in what Steel calls the “superstore tsunami” of the 90s are being replaced with chains of mini-stores offering fake diversity. Markets that traditionally operated as rowdy public spaces are giving way to controlled and sanitised private shopping malls. Now that our countryside no longer feeds us, it too can be ”prettified and petrified” into a marketable commodity, with leisure, retail and tourist zones.

The process of commercial collectivization has gone largely unregulated and unopposed, if not actively encouraged, by local and central government; partly because it is so lucrative, but partly also because so many of its more worrying operations take place out of sight on other continents, or parts of them, that most people never see. The food nearly all of us eat comes from plastic poly tunnels big enough to be visible from space, cast feedlots each holding tens of thousands of identical cattle, and gigantic uniform plantations of corn or soybean stretching from one horizon to the next. It pillages finite resources, pollutes water supplies, eliminates wild life, generates corrosive manure lagoons and exhausts and erodes the ground on which it grows.

An architect by training, fascinated by the practicalities of siting, building and supplying cities, Steels says that one of the strangest things about feeding the modern urban world is “the sheer invisibility of the process”. Its paraphernalia litters the landscape but is not at all easy to see. She describes an illicit visit to one of the 70 regional distribution centres or RDCs, a nameless “national food hub” in England. The place was not only anonymous but so inconspicuous as to be virtually indescribable: a collection of huge sheds, “vast boxes clad in crinkly-white tin, so featureless that only the dozens of lorries crowding their loading bays, like piglets at the belly of some monstrous sow, give any idea of their true scale”.

Places like this embody the secretive side of agribusiness. In China, where the whirlwind transition from ancient to modern lifestyles is a cause for pride rather than concealment, the process takes tangible shape in the swirling white mists of pollution or brick dust rising over every town.

The world’s population became for the first time predominantly urban last year. Another 400 million people are expected to urbanise in China in the next quarter-century. In 1962, the average Chinese ate 4 kg of meat a year. That figure is well over 50 kg now, and rising fast.

Paul Robert’s The End of Food documents our eating patterns, the global economy that supports them and the morality behind it in exhaustive and authorative detail.

These two books reach broadly similar conclusions, and both are Orwellian in their implications. The quantity and quality of food we have come to take for granted in the West can’t last much longer.

The dream of plenty realised daily on supermarket shelves piled high with cheap, colourful, convenient and reliable produce turns out to be a nightmare. It denies the nature of food (“seasonal, squashable, bruisable, unpredictable, irregular”, in Steel’s words) and it is unsustainable and destructive in the long run. It rests on coercive, conformist and monopolistic policies openly dedicated to the suppression of individuality, autonomy and free choice. “Our competitors are our friends,” said the retired president of one of the major US grain companies. “Our costumers are the enemy.” – Observer, May 4, 2008


Reprinted from Utusan Konsumer, May-June 2009, Vol. 39 No. 3.