What if we truly valued food to save our world?

A dialogue between Carolyn Steel, author of Hungry City and Sitopia: How Food can Save the World, and Laureline Simon, founder of One Resilient Earth, on food, regenerative agriculture, climate resilience, philosophy, and lockdown as a pivot for transformation.

Laureline: Carolyn, I would like to first thank you for the book Sitopia. After months of being locked down at home without friends coming over to share food, laugh and drink too much wine, I had lost my appetite. With my French cultural heritage, preparing and sharing food in good company is one of life’s greatest joys, and it was all gone. Sitopia was a wonderful invitation to celebrate food again. The more I read, the hungrier I felt. The book is also very well-written, poetic, philosophical and funny. Having my appetite back while thoroughly enjoying the read was a great gift to me.

Carolyn: Thank you!

Laureline: Before getting into the relationship between food, climate change and resilience, could we start by introducing the concept of “Sitopia”? Can you tell us where the idea of Sitopia came from?

Carolyn: Yes. I invented the concept of Sitopia while researching utopia, which is the greatest tradition we have of thinking in a multidisciplinary way about how we should live. And I got really upset when I discovered that the “u” in utopia can either mean “good” or “no”. So basically, utopia is kind of joke word, it’s an ideal place, but it can’t exist. And I discovered this towards the end of writing Hungry City, my first book, which follows the journey of food through the city in seven chapters. It begins with the land, and then there’s the road, the market, the kitchen, the table, and the waste dump. I’d been spending about six years by that point asking myself the question of how you feed a city and had realized how profoundly food shapes our lives. So, I rang up some friends of mine who teach people how to teach ancient Greek, and said: “If I was an ancient Greek and I wanted a word meaning ‘food place’ what would it be?” And they said,

Sitos is the Greek for food and topos is the Greek for place. So it would logically be sitotopos or sitotopia. But that sounds ridiculous. So it’s sitopia.

But after Hungry City was published, the idea started growing. This idea of food as a lens, food as a tool, food as a way of thinking in a connected way about so many aspects of our lives. It got stronger and stronger for me. And I realized I would have to write another book about what Sitopia is. The book came out of a feeling that we needed to confront so many issues that we face in a practical way, in a way that’s easy to understand, and in a way that’s connected. And I’ve realized more and more that food can give us that. The more I think about this idea, the more powerful it gets. I really genuinely believe that food is at the core of everything. The fact that we don’t value food to me is like the enormous canary in the mine, because food is nature and food is sharing and food is life. And so if we don’t value food, we don’t value those things. And if we do value food, then we can actually restore so much of what is going wrong. It took me about eight years to write the book. I started with a drawing to figure out where food sits in our lives, and it became the structure of the book, expanding from food to body, home, society, city and country, nature, and time. Sitopia is a place with food at its center.

Laureline: What I find fascinating also is that more and more institutions and people are beginning to realize the major role played by food consumption patterns and land use in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change. I am thinking particularly of the Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Climate Change and Land Use (2019). Based on the research you did when writing the book, could you give us some insights into the type of agriculture that would be most beneficial in addressing climate change?

Carolyn: First,

I think industrial food has been a disaster, and particularly because it has created this illusion of cheap food, which doesn’t actually exist. Food consists of living things that we kill so that we can live. How could this possibly be cheap?

But we’ve created this illusion by externalizing the true costs of food, while, ironically, industrial farming increases the cost of food in incalculable proportions. It is actually destroying the planet. This is how unaffordable industrial food is. But because we don’t account for those costs within the cost of the food, we call it cheap.

So the first thing we need is to deindustrialize the food system. That’s a very radical thing to say. But it is what I believe. And when I say deindustrialize the food system, I’m not saying de-tech it… I’m not saying technology is bad. It’s about using technology to help us farm with nature, not against nature. We need to start farming regeneratively, which means, as I said in my nature chapter, that nature is the best farmer that we can learn from. And of course, we have to take from nature, because we are part of nature. This is the essential insight. It’s not that nature is some weird thing over there to be manipulated and exploited. We are part of it. So we have to learn to exist as part of the ecosystem. And there are literally thousands of ways of doing regenerative farming. It’s very site specific. You grow what the bit of land wants to grow for you. And of course, this is what traditional food cultures did. They adapted what people eat to what the land could grow. Today, someone can say: “I live in Britain, but I want to eat avocados and drink almond milk.” Well, sorry, but, you are actually destroying California and Peru and Mexico, both politically and ecologically.

And, the win-win that comes out of farming regeneratively, which means lots more farmers not fewer, and much more contact with the land and with nature, is that farming becomes a beautiful, rewarding, wonderful occupation, as anyone will tell you who farms in that way. But those farmers belong to an almost parallel food system in the industrialized nations today, catering to people like me who will go to a farmers’ market and pay fifteen pounds for a chicken or five pounds for a loaf of bread or three pounds for cabbage, because we want to buy food that has been grown in a way that is good for every part of the system. It’s good for the landscape, it’s good for nature, it’s good for the animals if you’re going to eat the animals. And as you know, I believe there is a place for animals in the food system.

Traditional farming is mixed farming because animals form a really good part of the mixed farming ecology as they can shift fertilizer around, shall I say, and eat grass and food scraps, which works well in a locally-based system. We stopped feeding food waste to pigs in this country because we had this massive outbreak of swine fever related to obscure supply chains of waste across Europe. But local farming really helps sort out this kind of problem, and makes it easier to recycle nutrients, which is a big part of what ecological farming does. It conserves water and nutrients, and also sequesters carbon, of course, because if you farm livestock in areas of grassland and particularly in marginal areas of grassland interestingly, you could turn desert back into grassland, which is amazing. This is what Allan Savory, for example, does. With cows, obviously there’s the issue of methane, but they are far from being the only methane emitters in our lives; for example rice production generates a lot of methane too – so it’s not all black and white. Besides, a recent study showed that if you feed seaweed to cows, that radically reduces the amount of methane they emit. So I would be very happy with the cows eating mostly grass and a bit of seaweed.

That’s what the world looks like in Sitopia, when we pay the true cost of food, when we value food. Food is expensive. It has to be for it to be good. And a new world can be rebuilt from this idea.

Of course, then you face the problem of how people are going to afford it. Well, then we have to have a new taxation system. We have to have a wealth tax. We have to have redistribution of wealth. We have to have land reform. There’s lots of very revolutionary things that come out of the idea. But as you know, my metaphor for a good society is one in which everyone eats well. And of course, if you grow your own food, then actually it doesn’t cost a lot. It costs you labor and time and love. It doesn’t cost you money. And that’s another thing: the importance of decoupling money from the value system.

Laureline: And what about diets? What are the diets that could be most beneficial for us, the regeneration of the ecosystems we are part of, and that would both limit and address climate change?

Carolyn: Regarding diets, we need to understand that we’re part of the ecosystem and that it’s about diversity and complexity in our diets, just as it is for regenerative agriculture.

What we actually need is wildness in our diets, thanks to organic farming and to some foraging.

Well, we can’t all be foragers; it takes us beyond where we can go. But diverse farming systems and just a much broader, richer diet is much better for us. And last but not least, natural foods rather than processed foods. Because numerous new studies basically show that it’s not so much about how much salt, sugar and fat et cetera there is in your food, but actually, how highly processed it is. That is what is making us sick, and one of the reasons why death rates from Covid are so high in industrialized countries. Our food is not nutritious, and our microbiomes are weak, which makes us weak.

So the most beneficial diet would be a plant-based diet, with meat and dairy as the luxury that they always were before industrialization, as unprocessed as possible, produced as locally and as seasonally as possible. This is not to say we’re going to stop trading food globally. But basically we’ve been through a period probably of 30 or 40 years when economies of scale have meant that it’s cheaper for us to import chicken from Brazil than to produce it in our backyards. And it’s all predicated on cheap soy and the rest of it, which we just have to dismantle today. Individual consumers can do a little bit about that, but governments have to act. It’s very, very rare that I read the news and get cheered up by anything but I actually read recently that the British government is bringing in a new law in which it is requiring companies, including food companies and indeed particularly food companies, to have totally transparent supply chains in terms of deforestation and to declare that there is no deforestation involved in their production. That’s amazing! So there’s a huge amount that can be done with political will.

Laureline: That’s exciting news, no doubt. I look forward to seeing how it’s implemented on the ground. Through our work at One Resilient Earth, we do promote regenerative agriculture and we could not agree more with you on all the human, social and ecological benefits you highlighted. One question we have though, as we are working specifically on resilience and preparing for the impacts of climate change, is how to ensure that this type of traditional farming model, which both depends on and contributes to the health of a local ecosystem, is not negatively affected by the direct and indirect impacts of climate change. We are thinking about changes in temperature and rainfall patterns, but also movements of invasive species.

Through your research, did you discuss with farmers how regenerative agriculture could best respond and/or adapt to an evolving climate and to a changing ecosystem? Would the scientific community need to get involved to make such forms of agriculture more resilient to climate change, based on the information you collected?

Carolyn: I remember a very interesting conversation with Martin Crawford, who has an experimental forest garden in Devon and whom I write about in the book. He said forest gardening is very climate resilient because basically you’ve got about two hundred and fifty species growing at once in one place. And as the climate changes, some do better than others, and you just adapt. You have the resilience of the forest. You can watch how the plants do from year to year, and you can basically plant more of one and less of another depending on how the climate is doing. So I think that’s one aspect of it : diversity is key to resilience.

The second thing is managing the boundaries between “productive” and “unproductive” landscapes. A lot of the problems we’re facing have to do with extreme weather patterns. Not enough rain and then suddenly too much rain. So we need to manage the margins of our farmlands, which could be hilltops and rivers. At the sources of our rivers, a huge amount can be done with reforesting, with reintroducing animals like beavers who actually sort of create local catchments. We can radically increase the water catchment capacity of landscapes by rewilding, reintroducing beavers, reforesting and so on, and other inventive management. And those areas don’t have to be unproductive, because you could also have semi-wild species there. There are very interesting models evolving where people are reforesting, and rewilding even very unproductive land, such as wheat fields that wereestablished on completely the wrong kinds of heavy clay soils, as for example at the Knepp Estate in the UK. Now a huge number of wild species have come back. The farmers have also introduced edible animals, pigs and cows, that are perfectly happy to wander through this kind of semi-wild landscape, and are totally fine on their own.

So all those regenerative approaches are actually very resilient, naturally, as compared to these enormous monocultures that are in fact incredibly fragile environments.

Say a third of the farms in the UK became something more like a forest garden. Well, let’s go halfway even to that and just call it agro-ecology. Say farmers started planting a lot more trees, which has many, many benefits. And also sort of mixing different kinds of landscapes on a farm so that you increase water retention and so on. This would massively increase the nutritional capacity of the soil, but also the soil’s capacity to retain moisture. Now, there are also scientists, who are talking about gene editing of plants so that they can survive drought better, or to improve the capacity of wheat to take up nitrogen in the soil, for example. I’m much more sympathetic to those genetically modified crops than earlier generations of GMOs. But I place more faith in a mindset shift about farming. We need far more farmers. And we need farmers who think and experiment and develop skills on a particular piece of land. And we need to pay them to do that.

Laureline: The gene editing question is complex, so I’ll park it for now. But what you last said ties in to the change of mindsets that the lockdown triggered as people were limited to their house and garden if they have one. Bruno Latour recently wrote that the Covid crisis showed us what is possible and what is necessary. In France, many people under strict lockdown spent a lot of time gardening, cooking and eating together, even via zoom, which suggests that food may have regained some place and recognition as an important part of our daily lives. Could Sitopia be even more relevant today?

Carolyn: Yes, I absolutely see lockdown as a potential pivot moment. Some people have had a really horrible lockdown, but others have actually really enjoyed it. There was a study carried out quite early on in the lockdown in Britain by the Food and Countryside Commission, and 42% of people who were interviewed said they valued food more as a result of lockdown, and only 9% said they wanted life to go back to the way it was beforehand. Britain was the most lockdown sympathetic country in Europe, weirdly. I mean, the British are weird in so many ways, but increasingly visibly so. But I think people have really valued having more time at home. And as you say, people have been growing food. They’ve been baking bread. They’ve been cooking with their kids. And it’s really interesting to me.

There’s been this new connection forged between local producers and consumers:  I think something like a third of the people who now buy directly from producers had never done it before lockdown.

There’s been a massive increase because all the people who used to go to restaurants are actually people with disposable income and they like eating good food. And as they were looking for ways to get good food, they suddenly discovered they can buy food directly from a fisherman in Cornwall, just like the restaurants used to do, and have it brought to their door.

Of course, this is just a small proportion of society. But what it tells me is that the old capitalist model of a good life, which is basically working 80 hours a week and running yourself ragged in order to get rich, which was always obviously bullshit to me, is being blown out of the water and it’s really interesting. I think people have discovered those things that have value that don’t register on GDP. And bizarrely, as you say, so many of the things that I write about in the book are actually now things that people are openly talking about: spending more time with your family, time with nature, time actually developing a skill and it’s all happening now. So it’s going to be interesting times. I mean, if our politicians had vision, they would be seizing on this and building on it because it’s a massive opportunity. It really is. And then we could start to build what I call a landscape for human flourishing, which is to rethink how we share and inhabit land. Because, again, it’s already happening in the UK. A massive surge of people have been investigating whether they can go and live in the countryside because they’ve realized they can work from home. So it is huge. And obviously, my vision would be for people not to just live in the countryside, but to farm the land also. I mean, it is the bit that we haven’t quite got to. But I think it could be a natural adjunct, and then, we would really start to see a lot of the things that I’m writing about, amazingly. So it’s really tragic when I hear politicians willfully ignoring what’s going on and hammering this crazy old model, which is so 20th century, and which is just over… Getting rich is just bullshit. A much better life is within people’s reach now that they’ve actually experienced it for the wrong reasons. But they have experienced it. And people are wanting to hang onto it.

Laureline: And some people may not have the choice either. Part of our team is based in the US, and in New York specifically, where so many professional opportunities are gone because of the lockdown restrictions. Most of the entertainment and tourism industry is gone. People cannot afford their rents any longer so that leaving the city has become partly a choice and partly a necessity.

Having a small plot of land to grow food now appears as a sound option, just because it reduces one’s dependence on a system that has recently failed so many people so dramatically.

And as the system does not show signs of ever going back to what it was before, people are likely to start considering a move more and more.

Carolyn: I think a bit of the old system will come back, but I think there is going to be a major reset in terms of the relationship between the city and the countryside, which is an entirely good thing. I mean, rents in city centers are insane, it’s all about greed. And it’d be good if rents fell through the floor and these shiny office buildings started to get reinhabited by artists and people who actually want to live in a city. I mean, this periodically happens anyway. It’s the social equivalent of the forest fire, and it is what we’re going through now. And forests need fires to be healthy. So I’m hopeful for that. Populism has swept the world recently. It’s all about the failure of capitalism. Because capitalism promises a good life based on wealth. And it was only delivering for 0.1 percent of the population. So this is a dead concept but they keep flogging it. And I think the reality of Covid is going to mean they can’t keep flogging it, because it will demonstrably not be happening even for the top one percent. Because you can only enjoy being wealthy if there’s a functioning society for you to be wealthy in. Which multi-trillionaires who have multi-million dollar flats in the middle of New York would want to go there now? There’s no restaurants, there’s no theatre. There’s nothing.

But cities will rebuild. And as I mention on page 162 of my book, where I talk about crises,

Life tends to be better after we have gone through a crisis, because people remember what actually matters to them in life. It helps us to go back to basics and rebuild. And I think we are living one of those moments. That does give me hope.

Laureline: I also really like the fact that your last chapter is about time, discusses the perspectives of several philosophers and talks about death, thereby putting things into perspective. As you mentioned in the introduction of the book, I fully agree with you that we need more philosophy today, not more technical solutions, to address the burning issues of our time. This idea echoes my personal history, which is somewhat circular. I went from studying literature and philosophy to studying political sciences and development because I believed back then we needed technical, political and financial solutions to address poverty, inequality and environmental degradation. Yet, after trying the technical way with international organizations for about 15 years, I am back to working with the arts, philosophy, and ancient wisdom traditions, including Buddhism and indigenous peoples’ knowledge systems, as I can see that the mainstream western mindset is in the way of the transformational change that we need. All this to say that talking about death today seems critical, especially to address the fears we have in moving towards a different system.

Carolyn: Yes, thank you. And then the pandemic came along… I enjoyed writing that chapter the most and I don’t think it’s only because it was the last one. The book took eight years to write, which is a very long time. What I discovered half-way through is that there is a symmetry in the structure of the book, which starts with food and ends with time. Food is life and time is death, so the first and the last chapters match each other. The second chapter on the body is really about how we are out of synch with nature which again is matched by the sixth chapter, which is about how we can regain our place in nature The third chapter about home is really how we used to do useful stuff and now we don’t, which is echoed in the fifth chapter about how we need to go back to that in the way we inhabit the land. And the fourth chapter in the middle is about society and how we share, and as you know, what I argue in that chapter is that we need to go back to sharing through food, instead of sharing through money, which is the way we evolved as a species.

So, in the first chapter I’m talking about how we’re in denial of death, and in the last chapter, I basically say that the way to get over this is to embrace death, which is basically the core idea of the Stoics. But it did feel like everything that I had been saying in the book came together in that last chapter.

So the conclusion is literally that we need to learn to live in time, because living in time is so fundamental to a good life. We need to know that our span is limited and precious. If we can learn to be in the moment, then we can feel like it lasts forever.

And again, food brings us into that moment. It’s about the idea of the mundane, which came from some work I did 30 years ago when I was studying in Rome. I studied everyday life in a part of the city over the course of two thousand years, just looking at how people were born, cooked food, shared food, slept, had sex, died. I looked at the continuity of ordinary life, that’s very often invisible because people don’t bother to record it. They record that a new emperor has been anointed or that there’s a war, not: “Look, I just had bread and cheese for breakfast – again.” That’s the stuff we call mundane, which we use to mean ‘every day and boring’. But the root, “mundus”, means ‘cosmic and of the universe’. So that was a massive insight for me: that the act of eating is an everyday act, but it’s also a ritual. It connects us to cosmic time. And I think that what we need in order to feel really at home is obviously to have people we love around us, but also to feel connected to cosmic time. To feel that we really reside on a planet that revolves. To feel bound up in earthly rhythms. Food gives us that in a way that nothing else does.

Banner photograph by: Lau Cabantous