Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World, by Carolyn Steel Charles Foster
CHARLES FOSTER Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World
The world is sick.
Most of its organ systems (economic, environmental, political) are affected. There are signs of an immune response but, at the moment, the prognosis is grave.
Part of the problem is that although there have been consultations with many eminent specialists, each has examined only the organ in which he or she
specialises. No one addresses the body’s problems rather than the problems of a particular part. There’s no point in improving your liver function if you ignore your fatally diseased kidneys.
None of the specialists has a coherent view of what constitutes health. The nephrologist says that it is the absence of symptoms caused by kidney disease; the cardiologist that it’s to do with heart function.
In Sitopia (from the Greek sitos, ‘food’, and topos, ‘place’ – ‘food place’), Carolyn Steel defines health as a philosophical idea to do with thriving in the Aristotelian sense of eudaimonia.
She proceeds to a thorough clinical examination of the planet, missing little that pertains to the risk of mortality and serious morbidity. The therapy she suggests is holistic. We can’t go on as we are. That is a simple statement of fact, not a campaigning slogan. Continue as we are, and we die. Gaia will exact lethal revenge for all those millennia of abuse. She might use any number of agents to deliver the coup de grâce: climate change, air pollution, epidemic disease, antibiotic resistance, the loss and impoverishment of soil and consequent collapse of harvests, or unrest and war resulting from inequality.
And even if we could survive in the world we’re creating, would our lives be worth living?
Humans, whatever the reductionists say, are very complex creatures. Is there one lens through which we can adequately see them and their relationship with the non-human world? The answer for Steel is food.
We all need to eat, and all our food is animal, vegetable, or mineral.
Our relationship with food is deeply and revealingly dysfunctional. Some 850 million live in hunger; more than twice that are overweight or obese.
The US produces nearly double the calories that can be safely consumed and in 2019 the US diet industry was worth $72 billion.
Worse, we choose to eat rubbish. Nearly 51 per cent of our food is ultraprocessed and in the United Kingdom we eat half of all the ready meals consumed in Europe. Post-war British carrots lost 75 per cent of their copper and magnesium. Beef, an omega-3-rich superfood if it comes from pasture-fed cattle, is a nutritional disaster when cows are grain-fed. When Jamie Oliver took disadvantaged children to pick fresh strawberries, many of them gagged at the taste.
Previous generations would be horrified that we have drained food of its symbolic significance, dignity and social healing power. One-fifth of meals in America are eaten in a car. Family meals around a screenless table are regarded as a reactionary anachronism.
Yet eating together is well known to make us happy. It boosts our endorphin and oxytocin levels. It bonds us. Regularly eating alone, on the other hand, is more strongly associated with unhappiness than any factor except mental illness. We live suicidally, homicidally and unhappily. How did we get here, and how do we change?
Money got us here; recovery will be hard because the world is transfixed by the idea of economic growth, and thinks it can be sustainable. This idea is oxymoronic and moronic.
Adam Smith falsely assumed that raw materials were inexhaustible and their extraction and use cost-free. This is nonsense, as a moment’s reflection would reveal. But we’re not good at reflection. Indeed, we outsource so much of our mental lives to algorithms that it’s not clear that we’ll be capable of it at all for much longer. Let’s reflect for a moment, while we still can.
We are technological wizards, but philosophical dunces. We have forgotten Epicurus’s recipe for human thriving: freedom from mental anguish, achieved by moderate consumption and the promotion of human relationships. That is also the recipe for the politics and economics that can save us from ourselves. We need a steady state and a zero-carbon economy. Epicurus can deliver it. Joy is what satisfies. If junk food is comfort, comfort and joy are opponents.
Steel brilliantly uses food to demonstrate our ills and their causes. She shows, too, that food, if we value it properly, can heal us. There are initatives that show this can be done; look up UK Sustainable Food Cities, or the Transition movement, or the C40 Cities programme.
But before you do that, look at this remarkable, prophetic, and desperately urgent book.