"How Food Shapes Our Cities" a TED Talk from Carolyn Steel

One of my personal goals for a very long time has been to one day find a topic and an occasion to deliver an impactful TED Talk. While that project is still very much in its planning stages, I have started working time into my days to view some of the most watched and most well-known TED Talks as inspiration. I love TED Talks because it is very simple to find one on a topic you are very interested in, but it is also possible to branch outside your comfort zone and take no more than 20 minutes of your day to learn about something you may have never anticipated. Because my blog has been centered around food this semester, I decided to look at how humans need and relationship with the natural world has evolved in the last 10,000 years in a talk given by architect Carolyn Steel, delivered in 2009, entitled “How Food Shapes Our Cities.”

https://www.ted.com/talks/carolyn_steel_how_food_shapes_our_cities?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare

While it is almost impossible for me to believe that 2009 was over a decade ago, I found much of what Steel discussed in her talk both thought-provoking and still relevant. With such unequal distribution across countries and different socioeconomic statuses, feeding the population of the world, especially in major cities, seems to get more complicated each year. One statistic I heard a few years ago that has stuck with me for years is that enough crops are produced in Africa alone to feed the entire world population. Since learning this statistics, I have realized that the real problem with global hunger does not even remotely have to do with how much food the world is producing, but it is rather entirely due to those in charge of distributing it.

Through various history classes I have also learned about this, but Steel specifically examines the relationship between agriculture and cities. Humans realized that if they were able to plant and harvest then they could retire the life of hunters and gatherers and settle down in permanent settlements that functioned as, among other things, centralized food distribution centers. She goes as far as to denote that the Romans raged war on places like Carthage and Egypt to get their hands on their grain reserves. My favorite quote of the entire talk is “So Rome shaped its hinterland through its appetite.”

Borough Market, London

Something interesting Steel states is that

"Once [a given foods] roots into the city are established, it rarely moves.”

I have seen this firsthand from studying abroad in London. One of my favorite places in the entire city was Borough Market, an open-air food market that has been functioning and serving a variety of different food and food needs, like fish market and slaughterhouse, since the 13th century. In London specifically, it is easy to see how food shaped the city, as much of the major food spots that still exist today are right off the Thames or off of other major water ways. It is a simple idea but it really does show that as humans we have completely molded our lives, the ways in which we live, and even some of our biggest, most metropolitan cities, around how easily it is to get food to those who live there.

Humans physical dependency on cities to function solely as a way for food to come in and out began to shift in 1840, with the growth of trains. It gave humans a way to much more easily transport livestock and food, and allowed cities to expand greatly into the suburbs that what beforehand had to function as arable farmland to feed the population of that city. The widespread of trains followed by automobiles led from food being the social core of a city to ending up on its periphery, as Steel states. I quote I love from Steel is

“By making it possible to build cities anywhere and any place, they've actually distanced us from our most important relationship, which is that of us and nature. And also they've made us dependent on systems that only they can deliver, that, as we've seen, are unsustainable.”

We are living in a system we have created to be unsustainable, yet we keep using it, without making the major changes necessary. While there are people trying to break this cycle, like the greenhouse in Toronto she discusses, the majority of us have become a slave to the system that can only be fixed by repositioning how we think of food and its function in our world. We really are what we eat, and we need to realize that food and the way we produce, interact and distribute food is one of the most powerful tools shaping our world.

While this talk is over ten years old, the history it provides and the explanations it shows on how we are still able to see remnants in many of our most developed cities of how food came in and was sold, from street names to physical geography, prove Steel’s claim that for much of history cities have been physically shaped by the food we consume. I think since this was delivered, we as a world have become even more so slaves to the unsustainable food production system we have created. I think from a public relations standpoint one of the greatest challenges of the next 20 years will be finding a way to encourage the public to buy into a new, innovative global food distribution system that helps us all get back to realizing we are what we eat, so why not distribute well, eat well, and feed the whole world?