Sitopia - Food And A Good Life
“The reset we need, therefore, is nothing less than a reimagining of what a good twenty-first century life might look like. Rather than pursue a consumerist lifestyle we know to be undeliverable, we must imagine other ways of life that are just as appealing, yet which everyone on the planet could enjoy. What we need, in short, is a vision of a good life based on a totally opposite set of parameters: zero carbon, ethical and ecological food, finite resources, a low-carbon economy and global justice. Is such a mission possible?”
By Carolyn Steel, architect and author
Photo: Rob Potter/Unsplash
The question of how to live has never been as complex as it is today. With global threats such as climate change, mass extinction, wars and pandemics proliferating, we live in times of unprecedented social and ecological peril. Yet, as the creation of an effective vaccine within a year of the Covid outbreak demonstrates, we humans also possess remarkable technological skill. In this sense, the vaccine is in many ways the perfect symbol for our times. Thanks to remarkable technological advances, we’ve created a way of life that now threatens us and our planet – a threat we fight with yet more technology.
Scientific breakthroughs have saved us many times in the past, yet no amount of technological prowess can hide the fact that our lives today are dangerously out of kilter. Hurricanes, forest fires, floods and droughts are now commonplace, as are acts of military aggression, religious extremism and political populism. Global protest movements such as Black Lives Matter and Fridays for Future are testimony to a growing public unease about our modern way of life. Never before have so many challenges presented themselves on so many fronts, and rarely has the need for a reset been greater.
A reset of what, though? It is here that the complexity of our times can make it hard to act. So much needs to be done, and so quickly, that it can be difficult to know where to start. Our way of life in the West was built on a set of premises – cheap fuel, cheap food, cheap labour, limitless resources, constant growth – that we now know to have been illusory. For those of us in the industrial north, this is tough to accept, since our very idea of a good life is predicated on them. Industrial capitalism, the socio-economic system that gave us modernity, depends on such presumptions, as does our idea of our place on earth and the sort of life we think we deserve to lead.
In the absence of alternatives, this capitalist idea of a good life is spreading around the world. With few exceptions (hunter gatherers seem to be largely immune), the high-octane, urbanised, consumerist lifestyle beloved of the West seems to have a fatal allure. The fact that such a lifestyle would be impossible to maintain for even a fraction of the projected global population in 2050 is an inconvenient truth that we – and corporate advertisers – prefer to ignore. Indeed, much of the social unrest now unfolding across the globe stems at least partly from the profound disconnect between capitalism’s promises and its reality. For many of those who depend on global markets for their livelihoods – including plenty of those in the industrial north – the question is not how to buy into the capitalist dream, but simply how to afford food or somewhere to live.
The reset we need, therefore, is nothing less than a reimagining of what a good twenty-first century life might look like. Rather than pursue a consumerist lifestyle we know to be undeliverable, we must imagine other ways of life that are just as appealing, yet which everyone on the planet could enjoy. What we need, in short, is a vision of a good life based on a totally opposite set of parameters: zero carbon, ethical and ecological food, finite resources, a low-carbon economy and global justice. Is such a mission possible?
We already know part of the answer, since some people have been pursuing just such an alternative way of life for at least half a century, through a range of practices that include organic farming, vegetarianism, communal living, renewable energy, localism and a circular economy. For those old enough to remember the 1970s, such ideas may be forever associated with the hippy movement, along with tie-dyed cheesecloth, obscure album covers and the enthusiastic smoking of weed. Partly due to such associations, the alternative movement was long dismissed as ‘wacky’, yet what mostly strikes one today is its prescience. Hippydom didn’t spring out of nowhere; rather it grew out of a remarkable post-war flourishing of political, economic, ecological and philosophical thought that produced such seminal works as E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Mollison and Holmgren’s Permaculture One and Dennis and Donella Meadows’ Limits to Growth; books that laid the foundations of the modern green movement.
Today, despite the global reach of such ideas and the growing call for a Green New Deal, the green movement remains outside the cultural mainstream. Despite the protestations of global leaders at international forums such as COP, the cognitive dissonance between the prevailing idea of a good life – based on GDP and growth – and a green transition remains fundamental. The question thus arises: how can we create a vision of a good life based on sound social and ecological principles that the vast majority of people might willingly adopt? Part of the answer, I believe, lies in offering people opportunities and pleasures that the current system denies them, many of which are linked to the substance around which our lives already revolve, food.
Photo: Pascale Amez/Unsplash
Sitopia
Whether or not we realise it, we live in a world shaped by food. Our minds, bodies, homes, cities, landscapes, economies, politics, environment and climate are all shaped by it. I call this food-shaped world sitopia (from the Greek sitos, food + topos, place).[1] We live in a sitopia, yet since we in the West no longer value food, we live in a bad sitopia; one so bad, indeed, that it threatens our very future.
Over the past two centuries or so, industrial farming and food production have created the illusion of cheap food, but in reality, no such thing exists. Climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, soil erosion, pollution, antibiotic overuse, diet-related disease and zoonotic pandemics are just some of the externalities of the way we eat today. And since the way we eat and the way we live are intimately connected, it follows that revaluing food is by far the most direct and comprehensive action open to us to change our lives for the better.
Food’s transformative power stems from the unique place it occupies in our lives. The product of nature (albeit often heavily modified), it represents our closest link with the natural world. When we eat, we ingest a piece of the living planet that will constitute our future body: we are, quite literally, made out of food. The act of eating thus not only reminds us of our dependence on nature, but of our inseparability from it. Since all humans have to eat, furthermore, food connects us directly to one another. As our most vital shared resource, food symbolises our commonality; a bond we celebrate in the most symbolically powerful ritual we all still perform, the shared meal. Food thus sits at the nexus of our two most vital relationships – with nature and society – connecting us with all the humans and non-humans with whom we share the earth.
This central position in our lives makes food a natural tool of political philosophy. Sitopia is, in effect, a food-based, practical alternative to utopia, our greatest tradition of thinking holistically about the question of how to live. At the core of this dilemma is that of how to balance society and nature; a relationship that utopians have long sought to reconcile. Both Plato and Aristotle grappled with it when they attempted to describe the ideal city. Since both men lived in the city-state (polis) of Athens, they naturally assumed that any city should be able to feed itself from its own hinterland, thus assuring its political independence. Such a city would need to remain relatively small, with the additional benefit of allowing all its citizens to know one another. For Plato and Aristotle, the ideal polis was thus large enough to provide all the functions of the state, but no larger, expressing the perfect mean between the competing needs of society and nature.
The Greek ideal has had an enduring impact on Western utopian thought, not least because it addresses a core dilemma of urban civilisation. As civilised (urban) beings, our needs can only be met by both society and nature, represented by city and country. As the urban and rural halves of our inhabited landscape, these territories complement one another, yet are also frequently at odds. I call this phenomenon the ‘urban paradox’. Although those of us who live in cities think of ourselves ‘urban’, the fact that most of our food, energy and resources come from distant lands and seas means that, in reality, we all dwell in a kind of patchwork global hinterland. I might live in London, for example, but if my boiled egg comes from a hen fed on Brazilian soya, my coffee is made with Kenyan beans or my muesli contains Californian almonds, where is it that I actually dwell?
The question is central to the dilemma of how we should live, since it raises the issue of how we should use, share and inhabit land – not just with our fellow humans, but with all living beings. If we are to thrive in the future on a biodiverse, climatically friendly planet, then addressing the urban paradox will be crucial – and in this challenge, food is key.
The Urban Paradox
The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch. Since food was highly valued in every society before the modern era, we have a plethora of examples of how it can shape the world for better or worse. As we’ve seen, the Greeks were the first to consider how to feed a city as a practical question, concluding that the polis should remain small enough to be able to feed itself from its own hinterland. In his Politics, Aristotle described an ideal arrangement in which every citizen would have a house in the city and a farm in the countryside from which to feed it. Scaled up many times, such household management, or oikonomia (from Greek oikos, household + nemein, management) would render the polis self-sufficient, thus creating a stable dynamic balance between city and country. Such a balance was ‘natural’, Aristotle argued, since there was a natural limit to how much people could eat. The arrangement was in stark contrast to an economy based on the pursuit of wealth, chrematistike, which Aristotle said could never bring happiness, since there were no natural limits to monetary greed.[2]
Photo: Phillip Larking/Unsplash
Although few if any cities met the Greek ideal, most did in fact practice some form of oikonomia, since most had highly productive local food economies. Towns and cities of every size were invariably surrounded by market gardens, orchards and vineyards, whose fruit and vegetables could benefit from ‘night-soil’ (human and animal waste), that was carefully collected to be used as manure. Many households kept pigs, chickens or goats, feeding them up on kitchen scraps for slaughter on feast days. Food was generally grown as close to the city as possible, but since cows and sheep could walk, they were often reared many miles away, travelling down drovers’ roads for weeks before arriving in the city outskirts, to be fattened up on spent brewers’ grain before being brought to market. Fresh meat in the pre-industrial city was a seasonal luxury that few could afford, and most people relied on small helpings of dried meat or fish, cheese and pickles to add a little flavour to their staples of bread, rice or potatoes. Thanks to the dual constraints of geography and biology, pre-industrial menus were generally simple, while cities themselves remained mostly small.
For maritime cities however, it was a different story. The ability to import food from overseas allowed cities such as Venice, London and Istanbul to grow to a far greater size than their land-locked neighbours, and their inhabitants to develop a taste for exotic foreign foods. The prototype for this sort of approach was ancient Rome, the first city to grow to a population of one million by the first century CE; an astonishing size for the time, equalled only by a handful of medieval Chinese capitals before the ascendancy of nineteenth-century London. At its height, Rome was importing most of its food – including grain, oil, wine, ham, honey and a fermented fish sauce dear to the Roman palate known as liquamen – from all across the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and North Atlantic coasts. Rome, in short, fed itself through what we would now call ‘food miles’: a strategy made possible by slave labour and mastery of the seas, over which it was far easier and some 40 times cheaper to transport food than it was overland.[3]
With such staples as grain and oil pouring into Rome from abroad, local farmers were free to concentrate on producing foods for the luxury urban market such as fruit and vegetables, poultry and game, song birds, pond fish and nut-stuffed dormice. So-called villa farming (pastio villatica) made farmers a fortune, yet not everyone was happy with the practice: commentators including Pliny found it symbolic of the imperial city’s decadence. As the poet Martial noted dryly, Rome had once grown its own grain and imported roses from Egypt; now it merely grew roses and relied on Egypt for its bread.[4]
As the first city to fully outgrow its local hinterland, Rome in many ways created the blueprint for the modern metropolis. By relying on imported foods, it broke the golden rule of oikonomia, extracting nutrients from distant lands that were never replaced. As Roman citizens demanded ever more exotic fare and their rulers strained ever harder to supply them, an ecological time bomb was ticking. Eventually, when the North African soils of the capital’s breadbasket began to fail in the third century CE, it signalled the beginning of the end of the world’s first consumerist empire.
Two millennia on, it’s not hard to see parallels between Rome’s fate and our own. Rome exemplified the urban paradox and the dangers of ignoring the need to balance city and country. No matter how technically enabled we are or sophisticated our lives become, our needs can ultimately only be met by the natural world. As Aristotle observed, we humans are ‘political animals’, meaning we need both society and nature in order to thrive. This duality lies at the heart of our dilemma, since the more we gather in cities in order to be sociable, the further we get, both physically and mentally, from our sources of sustenance.
Lessons from Letchworth
Although utopians of the past didn’t face the same global threats as we do today, the technological limitations of their time, plus the constancy of the utopian question, meant their dilemmas were much the same. It is no accident, therefore, that two of the most influential utopian tracts – Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516 and Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-Morrow of 1902 – are effectively copies of the Greek original, arguing as they do for a return to the city-state model, with its promise to create a network of self-reliant, independent, close-knit communities with close ties to the land.
More’s Utopia – a thinly-veiled critique of Tudor London under Henry VIII – describes an imaginary kingdom of fifty-four city-states, arranged a day’s walk from one another. The cities are divided into large urban blocks with generous back gardens, where the inhabitants love to grow fruit and vegetables.[5] Children are taught from an early age to farm, and citizens of all ages take turns working in the fields, spending a mandatory two years on the land, while those who enjoy farming (which most do) can choose to do it permanently. All land and property are held in common, and working hours are short, leaving plenty of time for other pursuits. Local communities and families come together regularly for communal meals, in which children and adults eat together.
Photo: Pascale Amez/Unsplash
Utopia is remarkable for the degree to which it revolves around food, without ever overtly stating the case. Why might that be? One answer is that food’s significance was so obvious in the pre-industrial world that it didn’t need to be stated. Even as late as 1898, when Howard first described his garden city, the centrality of food was something he simply took for granted. It is only in the past 50 years or so, as the illusion has taken hold in the West that we’ve solved problem of how to eat, that food’s importance has been forgotten – which is why, now the illusion is wearing off, utopians of the past speak to us so directly.
Recognising our human need for both society and nature, Howard dubbed his garden city a ‘Town-Country Magnet’, arguing that a network of communities of 32,000 residents surrounded by countryside could provide the benefits both of urban and rural living, while negating the downsides of each.[6] The garden city was, in effect, a prototypical city-state, occupying 6,000 acres of land, of which 1,000 would be built on and the rest farmed. Crucially, all land was to be owned by the residents in the form of a public trust, so that when land values (and thus rents) rose, it would be the community, rather than private landowners, who would benefit. This idea of a community land rent, or land value tax – first proposed by the US economist Henry George in his influential 1879 book Progress and Poverty – would not only help to fund public services, said Howard, but would crucially preserve the agricultural land around the city, which private owners might otherwise be tempted to develop.
Unusually for a utopian, Howard actually got the chance to see his dream realised. In 1903, a group of leading industrialists including George Cadbury, Joseph Rowntree and W. H. Lever backed him to build a prototype garden city in the village of Letchworth, Hertfordshire, 34 miles north of London. All went well at first: architects Parker and Unwin were hired and plans drawn up reflecting Howard’s vision. But the project soon struggled to attract investors at the low rates of return on offer, leading Howard’s backers to renege on their promise to cede all land rents to the city, prompting Howard himself to resign from the board. Despite falling short of Howard’s utopian vision, Letchworth nevertheless represents a milestone in urban and social planning, possessing the world’s first protected ‘green belt’ (which never fed the city as Howard intended) and a community trust that derives its funding from local land rents, which, after a century paying off the original debt, have finally turned to profit.
Letchworth remains a global inspiration and a popular place to live, yet its failure to fulfil Howard’s vision ultimately stemmed from its inability to overcome the prevailing economic ideology of its day, capitalism. Oikonomia was trumped by chrematistike, and the local nurturing of ecology and community was sacrificed to the accumulation of profit. One lesson from Letchworth is therefore this: social cohesion and sustainable food systems are at odds with capitalist principles. If we’re going to build flourishing communities through this century and beyond, therefore, it follows that we’re going to need a new kind of economy.
Et in Sitopia Ego
This realisation is far from new: back in 1970, the Club of Rome commissioned a team of MIT scientists led by Donella and Dennis Meadows to examine the implications of exponential human growth on global natural resources. Their resulting 1972 report The Limits to Growth conveyed a sobering message: regardless of technical advances, if human development and population growth remained unchecked, the world would run out of resources by 2100. Their findings were echoed the following year by the economist E.F. Schumacher, who opened his seminal book Small is Beautiful with the statement that ‘One of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that “the problem of production” has been solved’.[7] The problem, Schumacher argued, was that capitalism treated nature – the source of all human wealth – as though it came for free, whereas in reality it was beyond price. What was needed, said Schumacher, was an economy that treated nature as sacred; a sort of ‘Buddhist economics’ that would lead us, not to plunder the natural world, but rather revere and preserve it.
Fifty years on, the wisdom of such thinking could hardly be clearer. What is puzzling is why so little in the intervening period has changed. Some of the answers are obvious: capitalism rewards those who exploit it to gain wealth and power, so those best placed to change the system tend to be those with a strong incentive to maintain the status quo. Then there is the matter of inertia: our current idea of a good life is predicated on capitalist principles, and humans, like super-tankers, take a long time to change course. But perhaps the most potent barrier to action has been the fact that we lack a clear vision of what an alternative good life might look like.
Photo: Vincent Erhart/Unsplash
It is here that food can help us, since Buddhist economics and sitopianism have much in common. To value food is to respect nature, to believe in social justice, to seek to create meaningful work and to avoid needless violence. By valuing food and putting it back at the heart of our thoughts and deeds, therefore, we can create practical, desirable, rewarding ways of life that fit within the planet’s natural limits. The centrality of food in our lives means that if we aim for a future in which everyone eats well, the odds are that we’ll all be living well too. In this respect, utopian models of the past provide us with an invaluable resource. Conceived at a time when food’s value was obvious to everyone, they lay out the principles by which we’ll need to live in the future, conserving resources, recycling nutrients, building social cohesion and ecological resilience. Since such utopian models all have food at their heart, they provide a guide to the kinds of circular, collaborative, steady-state economies that we’ll need to adopt.
What might the industrialised world look like if we were to rethink our lives through food? Long banished to the periphery of our existence, food would once more occupy centre stage. Architects and planners would no longer design flats without kitchens, neighbourhoods without allotments or cities without farms and orchards. Instead, the race would be on to post-fit our homes, public spaces and places of work with the life-giving animation of food. Home life would revolve around kitchens and gardens, cooking, shared meals and community compost heaps. Markets and highstreets would flourish, gardens and balconies would burst with produce, and networks of small producers and suppliers would once again connect cities with their local hinterlands. Farmers would be incentivised to work with nature, not against it: industrial feedlots and ‘Big Ag’ would be replaced by networks of smaller-scale, mixed-use, regenerative farms prioritising soil health, biodiversity and carbon and water capture. The end of industrial livestock farming would mean that meat would once more become a luxury, while acres of land released from growing cattle feed could be re-wilded. Food chains and businesses would morph from the often dehumanised, exploitative operations of today to become ecologically sound, crafts-based and social.
If this all sounds a tad utopian, it is because food is life, so whenever food is valued, sitopia tends towards utopia. Yet such a transformation is far from fantasy; on the contrary, it is already happening all over the world, as millions who recognise food’s value set up alternatives to the industrial system and preserve traditional cultures and practices. The Food Movement is an international assembly of farmers, producers, groups and organisations, such as Via Campesina (the global peasants’ movement) and Slow Food, who recognise the value of food that is, in the words of founder Carlo Petrini, ‘good, clean and fair’.[8] A plethora of schemes in the developed world, from community gardens and CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) to box schemes and farmers’ markets have demonstrated how valuing food can transform lives, economies, cities and landscapes. Regenerative farmers, meanwhile, are showing that productiveness and wildness are not mutually exclusive. At Knepp Castle Estate in the UK’s West Sussex, for example, a 3,500-acre swathe of once intensively farmed land has been rewilded with spectacular results, with the return of a profusion of insects and birds including nationally threatened species.[9] Today, Knepp is a rich, diverse, yet still productive landscape in which longhorn cattle, red deer, wild ponies and Tamworth pigs roam freely in a habitat that is rapidly recovering its former biodiversity.
Similar transformations are taking place in the Global South, as awareness dawns of the superior resilience, productivity and social benefits of indigenous farming practices and food cultures over the one-size-fits-all, supposed techno-fix of ‘Big Ag’. One 2002 study by Essex University found that, when farmers in developing nations converted their farms back from westernised, chemical-based practices to indigenous, ecological ones, their yields increased on average by a remarkable 93 per cent.[10] Such methods, the authors pointed out, tend to be more productive in these regions, where they are more suited to the smaller-scale, lower-input, mixed farms typical there. In our past, perhaps, we are starting to see our future.
The Light of Covid
Such transformations reflect the growing realisation that the industrial-capitalist ideal created and exported by the West is not the path to universal happiness, still less the answer to how all humans can flourish on earth into the future. Even those living in such capitalist heartlands as North America, Europe and Australia are waking up to the fact that the model may be beyond its sell-by date.
The recent pandemic put this realisation into even sharper focus. Under lockdown, millions in the industrial north worked from home for the first time, discovering joys that the capitalist treadmill had long denied them: spending time with their families, going for walks in the local park, engaging in crafts and hobbies or growing, cooking and sharing food. What such pleasures have in common is the degree to which they involve primary activities such as making, learning, sharing, caring or just noticing things. In the UK, for example, people reported the wonder of observing spring unfold in their local park for the first time, something most had never noticed as they rushed, coffee in hand, to the station. Empty supermarket shelves also prompted many to start growing their own food, leading to a surge of interest in allotments and seed catalogues. Many people also discovered a new sense of community, looking out for vulnerable neighbours or volunteering in vaccination centres. Restaurant chefs fed hard-pressed hospital workers and local pubs became food hubs for their local area.
Although this experience was far from universal and crucially excluded key workers who were forced to risk their lives to keep others safe, many of those able to work from home discovered a way of life they preferred to the old one. A UK survey carried out in June 2021 found that 85 per cent of those who had worked from home during lockdown said they wanted to continue, adopting a hybrid approach to work in the future.[11] The phenomenon took on an even stronger expression in the USA, where millions of workers handed in their notice in a so-called ‘Great Resignation’, quitting office and factory jobs to pursue more flexible, independent careers. Although the global recession is now forcing some to reconsider, the general dissatisfaction with life in the ‘Land of the Free’ is clear.
Although few political leaders have yet grasped it, there may never be a better time to argue for a Plan B. While most politicians focus their efforts on finding ever more desperate ways to reboot the engine of growth (which, were it a real engine, would long have been consigned to the scrap-heap), an alternative approach is hiding in plain sight: a vision of a good life based, not on ever-greater consumption, but on providing things that actually make us happy: activities which, as we discovered in lockdown, tend to be remarkably simple: spending time with friends and family, being close to nature, meaningful work, good health, having time to pursue hobbies and dreams. A good life based on such goals is not only achievable, but would, unlike our current model, fit within planetary boundaries. Although not everyone wants to spend their days baking sourdough, building shelves, farming or writing novels, we could create a world in which everyone would at least have the chance.
By shifting the emphasis away from the dualistic drudgery/compensation capitalist model towards an economy based on delivering ways of life people actually want to lead, we could build a much fairer, more resilient, happier world. Some of the cultural shifts necessary to such a transition are already in place; the advent of Zoom, for example, is challenging the ancient supremacy of the city, as commuters and professionals discover they can work from home and thus increasingly seek to live further away from city centres, even deep in the countryside. Whether such a shift ultimately turn out to be positive or negative will largely depend on whether, as a society, we wake up to its significance and adjust our legal and economic frameworks accordingly. A countryside full of lawyers and bankers where locals can no longer afford to live or farm is clearly dystopian; if we want to build a more regionally-based, equitable, low-carbon society, we’ll clearly need to rethink how we use, share and inhabit land, which in turn means confronting the twin elephants in every revolutionary room: land and tax reform.
The greatest test of our future resilience, however, lies in the extent to which we can come together to face global threats such as mass extinction and climate change. In this sense, the pandemic has in some ways been a test-run for greater challenges that lie ahead. When it comes to the crunch, will our sense of global solidarity be enough to overcome local concerns and conflicts? On this front, the war in Ukraine is far from encouraging, although it has at least had the effect of uniting those opposed to Putin’s aggression. Around the world, however, simmering tensions remain, from China’s mounting hostility towards the West to the UK’s unresolved Brexit issues to libertarian fury in the USA, fuelled by perceived infringements of personal freedoms under lockdown, masking the true source of people’s rage: the fact that capitalism is no longer delivering.
Land
The pandemic has given any politician worth their salt plenty on which to build, demonstrating the potential for bottom-up transformation, as well as giving us new insights about what most people want out of life. Yet the task of recasting society around a new set of values will require political intervention at every level, from local to global. Only governments can adjust the levers of power in ways that help or hinder cultural movements, and in order to do so they must take on corporate power; another effort in which international cooperation will be vital. In a world in which money has effectively come to stand for the good, the battle to wrest control away from political and corporate monopolies and to render power hierarchies (and their handmaiden, wealth) transparent and accountable again will arguably be most critical of all.
Photo: Pascale Amez/Unsplash
At the heart of any struggle for power and wealth is always the question of how we use, share and inhabit land. Since land and sea are our only sources of sustenance, access to them is a prerequisite for any kind of life, and we humans also need land on which to live. It is thus for good reason that political theory has been so bound up with the land question, and history so bedevilled by territorial disputes. Most fatefully for our modern era, the seventeenth-century philosopher and ‘father of liberalism’ John Locke argued that everyone deserved to own enough land in order to feed themselves; an observation adopted by Thomas Jefferson in his American Declaration of Independence, which cemented the right of Europeans to seize Native American land, on the basis that indigenous people didn’t farm. Jefferson’s agrarian vision of a good life (based on the seemingly limitless quantity of land available) formed the kernel of the American Dream, with its promise of individual freedom and the right to ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. Today, that promise has been diluted to the point of absurdity; just two percent of Americans now farm, while some 42 million others rely on food stamps. The time has come, one might suggest, to take the Declaration seriously.
The fact that, whether or not we farm, virtually all of us rely on farmers to keep us alive is one of those facts that, once confronted, seems almost surreal in its clarity. The invisibility of food and farming is arguably the most disorientating and destructive characteristic of modernity, since it blinds us to the reality of what it means to be human. Ignorance of how our lives are sustained renders us incapable of acting responsibly or compassionately towards those who feed us, let alone towards the species we choose to eat.[12] In many ways, our lack of respect for such species leads to a lack of respect for our own; when we treat life as cheap, it is, to use an apt term, brutalising.
Once you forget the value of life, it’s hard to get it back; yet no act could be of more significance to us now. Our profound disorientation in the industrialised world is directly linked to our distorted values, which in turn stem from the early days of capitalism and the assumption that nature was infinite and came for free. That view was strengthened by Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes, whose objectification of nature effectively made the case that it was ours for the taking. Such ideas had the effect of distancing us from the natural world and led to our increasing dependence on, and obsession with, money. As Aristotle observed, an obsession with money can never bring happiness; yet since the possession of money is now a prerequisite for surviving in the modern world, we are locked into a value system that is ultimately based on nothing.[13] The dilemma has not escaped economists; indeed, for half a century at least, some of the world’s finest economic minds have tried to address the problem of how we can root our values back in the real world.
Part of that reality is the fact that, as political animals, we feel more comfortable living in societies in which most people enjoy roughly the same standard of living as we do.[14] As leading economists including Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz have pointed out, however, that is the opposite of what capitalism produces. This is because the ‘trickle-down’ theory envisioned by Adam Smith – in which factory owners would invest their profits into building more factories, so creating more jobs – gradually morphs into a system of trickle-up, in which rentier capitalists (the ‘one per cent’) use their wealth to get richer still while producing absolutely nothing – for example by owning property and charging rent – thereby sucking all the wealth out of the system at everyone else’s expense.[15] Mature capitalism, in other words, is a mechanism for generating inequality, since it concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands. For both Piketty and Stiglitz, a prerequisite to building a peaceful and resilient future must therefore lie in some form of wealth redistribution, for example through the institution of a global ‘Jubilee’, in which all developing nation debt would be forgiven.[16] As it turns out, climate change could provide the perfect forum for such reparation: at Cop 27 in 2022, an historic agreement was reached declaring that the Global North should compensate the South for the general loss and damage caused by decades of historic carbon emissions.
Whether or not such payments are eventually made, what seems clear is that our chances of thriving in the future will depend on our capacity to share planetary resources fairly, which in turn brings us back to food – and land. For the past two centuries or so, our relationship with land has been increasingly dominated by capitalist logic, which decrees (in a distortion of Lockean principles) that those with money can buy as much as they like, whether or not they need it.[17] Instead of providing people with the means to feed themselves, therefore, land has increasingly become a proxy for wealth. The problem is that money and land belong to entirely different ontological categories: while money is fictional, fluid and limitless, land is essential, material and finite.
The sort of Jubilee we’re going to need is thus not so much a redistribution of money – helpful though that would be – but rather one of land. If we are to replace our current capitalist economy with one geared towards providing everyone with the means of living well, then access to land will be key. This is not a call for everyone to go back to farming, but rather recognition that, as Locke himself realised, we all need land in order to live; and only with access to it can we in any sense be free. The land that sustains us need not be our own; on the contrary, millions of people already lead perfectly happy lives in rented flats eating food grown by others. The point is that land, and all it represents – our right to a home and to food – should not be subject to political or corporate monopoly. As Locke himself saw, democracy itself rests on the equitable sharing and accessibility of land.
The question of how to effect land reform is, of course, the rock upon which many a fledgling revolution has foundered. Yet plausible models do exist: Henry George’s idea for a land value tax, for example, now forms part of the Green Party’s policy in the UK. By levying a community charge matched to the value of land, such a tax would have the effect of neutralising property values, thus making land more affordable. A combination of policies including such a tax, plus planning laws aimed at preserving farmland close to cities and strengthening urban-rural infrastructure, true cost accounting in food (for example ‘polluter pays’ penalties for environmental damage) and tax incentives to encourage regenerative farming, would together make a transition towards a more regional, ecologically resilient food system not just possible, but inevitable.
Apart from ensuring everyone’s basic right to food, the democratisation of land would ensure that anyone who wanted to farm, either to feed themselves or others, could do so. Such an ability will be critical to our transition towards a low-carbon economy, since such a shift will require that we farm in a nature-friendly way, which in turn means we’ll need far more people working on the land. The transformation of the agricultural landscape away from industrial monocultures back to a tapestry of smaller-scale, mixed use, organic farms will not only help us to rebalance our lives with nature, but will provide millions of people with a rewarding way of life. Ask any farmer fortunate enough to be farming in this way and valued for what they do, and you will find a dedicated – if often exhausted – fully-rounded human who has a passion for their work that is rare in any field. Contrary to popular myth, far more people in the industrialised world want to join them than are currently able to do so, due chiefly to lack of land and the limited size of the quality food market. To expand this market by valuing food properly and making more land available to farmers would not only transform the landscape; it would transform society.
Effects of Good Government
Moving away from ‘Big Ag’ towards regenerative farming will also allow us to readdress a question that two centuries of industrialisation have obscured, namely: what might a landscape for human and non-human flourishing look like? As good political animals, we might answer that, whatever form such a landscape might take, it should seek to balance our human needs with those of the non-humans with whom we share territory. How this is achieved will obviously vary from landscape to landscape, but the principles remain the same.
Far from being new, this is of course an ancient idea whose time has come again. By framing the question of what makes a good life in the land, we ground our values, politics and economics back in the physical world, where they belong. And what emerges from such an exercise is the realisation that, in the five and a half millennia we’ve been experimenting with urban life, nothing essential has changed. We still depend on nature for our sustenance, and our greatest collective responsibility – and that of our leaders – is to maintain a balance between our lives with the natural world, of which, despite appearances, we are part.
Perhaps the greatest depiction of this principle is Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s 1338 fresco, The Allegory of the Effects of Good Government, to be found in Siena’s great council chamber, the Sala dei Nove. A detailed evocation of daily life in the medieval city-state, it shows a bustling city and similarly industrious countryside, whose joint prosperity is clearly based on mutual cooperation and trade. Uniquely for such a painting, city and country get equal billing, with each occupying precisely half the image. As its title suggests, the ‘effects of good government’ are to find a perfect balance between the urban and rural halves of the state. Today, we recognise a third element, wildness, which must also find its place in the picture. The question of how this is to be incorporated is currently the subject of heated debate: can wildness (as distinct from wilderness) find its place in our modern towns and countryside, for example if we farm regeneratively, or must we withdraw into cities and farm as intensively as possible, thus leaving as much space as possible for wild nature?
Whatever the answer – which, as ever with such questions, is likely to be a mixture of both – there is no question that a radical rethinking of our landscape will be essential to our chances of thriving in future. As the ancient Greeks and medieval Italians realised, that comes down to a question of balance. The Greek polis and Italian city-state represent two urban epochs when this principle was well understood. For most of history, however, the relationship between city and country has been anything but balanced, with cities firmly holding the upper hand. Today, as we hurtle towards an increasingly urbanised future, such imbalance spells disaster. If we are to survive, we need to put the oikonomia back into our economics, politics and planning. As the Scottish planner and ‘father of regional geography’ Patrick Geddes put it, we must ‘make the field gain on the street, not merely the street gain on the field’.[18]
Photo: Olivier Mary/Unsplash
Countless examples abound of how we might do this. Geddes himself proposed an alternative to the ‘green belt’, suggesting that strips of countryside could be preserved radiating out from city centres to create star-shaped cities in which urban and rural areas would remain in close proximity. The 1952 Japanese Agricultural Land Act achieved something similar, preserving an unlikely patchwork of organic farms in the core of Tokyo that still feed their local communities today. Modern efforts to reconcile city and country include MVRDV’s Almere Oosterwald masterplan, which incorporates a mixture of farms, factories and housing in a deliberately fluid design, while British-based architects Viljoen and Bohn’s propose re-greening underused urban spaces such as car parks and verges to create Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs), fertile green corridors linking city centres to the countryside.
Revaluing food can not only help us to rebuild our damaged landscapes, but to re-humanise them too. When some Brooklyn hippies decided in 1973 that they didn’t much like the way the US industrial food system was heading, they set up their own alternative: Park Slope Food Coop. Now one of the biggest community food networks in the world, it has 17,000 members and a successful 45-year record of long-term contracts with local farmers in New York State. Coop members work a 4-hour monthly shift in a well-stocked shop that feels like an ordinary supermarket, yet is full of high quality food from a network of trusted local producers.
Countless similar projects exist and new ones are being created every day. Wherever people value food and come together to produce, cook and share it, the world changes for the better. In our increasingly complex and frenetic lives, food can be our guide and anchor. By thinking through food, we can reset our idea of a good life and start building a flourishing future. Sitopia can never be utopia – indeed, that is the very point of it – yet by learning to harness food’s power for good, we can come close to the utopian dream of creating an equitable, healthy and resilient society for all. Food is life, and so has magical powers. It is, you might say, the most potent tool for transforming our world that we never knew we had.
[1] See Carolyn Steel, Sitopia: How food can save the world, Chatto & Windus, 2021, p.2.
[2] See Aristotle, The Politics, T.A. Sinclair (trans.), Penguin, 1981, p.85.
[3] See Neville Morley, Metropolis and Hinterland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.65.
[4] Ibid., p.88.
[5] Thomas More, utopia, (1516), trans. Paul Turner, Penguin, 2003, p. 53.
[6] Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, (1902), MIT Press Paperback Edition, 1965.
[7] E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. London: Vintage 1973, p. 2.
[8] See Carlo Petrini, Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food should be Good, Clean and Fair, Rizzoli, 2007, pp.93–143.
[9] See Isabella Tree, Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm, Picador, 2018.
[10] J.N. Pretty, J.I.L. Morison and R.E. Hine, ‘Reducing food poverty by increasing agricultural sustainability in developing countries’, Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 95 (2003), pp. 217–234.
[11] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/businessandindividualattitudestowardsthefutureofhomeworkinguk/apriltomay2021
[12] The exceptions are those humans who still farm or hunt, many of whom retain a profound respect for the beasts, fish and birds they hunt or the plants and animals they care for, even when the societies to which they belong no longer do.
[13] The recent meltdown in bitcoin is an excellent example of the problem.
[14] See Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why equality is better for everyone, Penguin, 2010.
[15] As Stiglitz put it, ‘Those at the top have learned how to suck out money from the rest in ways that the rest are hardly aware of.’ Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, Penguin, 2013, p.40.
[16] Jubilee is a Hebrew term and refers to a periodic event during which all debt was forgiven.
[17] Locke said that people could take as much land as they needed in order to feed themselves, but no more. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government (1690) (Two Treatises of Government), in Ernest Barker (ed.), Social Contract, Oxford University Press, 1971, p.18.
[18] Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (1915), Routledge 1997, p. 96.
Photo: Pascale Amez/Unsplash