F E AT U R E By Carolyn Steel
How food can save the world Carolyn Steel argues that putting food at the heart of our thinking represents our best chance of creating an equitable, healthy and resilient society.
H
ow will we live in the future? More specifically, how can we thrive on our overcrowded, overheating planet? By 2050, 80 percent of us are expected to be living in cities. But what will those cities look like, and what effect will they have on their productive hinterlands, and the natural world in which both sit? The current pandemic has thrown such questions into high relief, raising fundamental issues concerning our relationship with nature, the urban-rural partnership, and our very idea of “a good life”. And at the centre of all these questions is one that often gets overlooked: that of how we are going to eat. Living in a modern city like London, it can be hard to see how profoundly food shapes our lives. Industrialisation has obscured the vital links without which no city could survive: those linking it to the countryside. The empty supermarket shelves that greeted shoppers at the start of lockdown were thus a wake-up call for many: the moment when the illusion of effortless plenty was shattered. For ecologists, of course, this was far from news as many had been warning for decades that our increasing encroachment on wilderness and loss of biodiversity was exposing us to a number of threats, such as climate change, mass extinction and zoonotic disease.
1.Building sitopia? Masterplan for Almere Oosterwald. © MVRDV Architects
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