Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The Culture of Food is a summary of European food culture; what these cultures are, and where they came from. An example of the kind of thing Massimo Montanari talks about is how the Romans became farmers. Because they had an urban civilisation they were forced into creating an agricultural economy because that’s the only way you can really feed a city.
How did you be become interested in food and the city?
The way I teach architecture is basically that architecture is to do with everything: it’s not just buildings but it’s also cities and everything else in our environment. My question was, how can I get students to engage with the mess and reality of building? The answer that suggested itself to me was food: food shops, markets and so forth. I have always been interested in food, reading books about food history and so on, so it seemed obvious. I realised that this was an idea I wanted to explore in more detail, and so finally I decided to stop teaching to try to explore cities in this way that I felt was relevant. I thought, what would happen if I tried to explore cities just through food. And the minute I struck upon this, I was just phenomenally excited. I joined the London Library and typed ‘food’ into the subject index and took out the first ten books which came up.
Tell us about your first book, The Culture of Food?
This was the first book I read, and it’s a summary of European food culture; what these cultures are, and where they came from. An example of the kind of thing Massimo Montanari talks about is how the Romans became farmers. Because they had an urban civilisation, and a lot of urban ideas, they were forced into creating an agricultural economy because that’s the only way you can really feed a city. They couldn’t understand why the Germans in the north of Europe didn’t become farmers. Montanari explains that this is because the Germans were forest dwellers who prioritised hunting, and therefore meat eating. This difference generated profound cultural differences. For the Romans the cultivated land around the city, the ‘Ager’, was seen as sacred, and also a part of the city, and they saw the wilderness as a bit dangerous and basically useless. The reverse is true of the Germans, who saw the wilderness as their home: they lived there. There was a complete clash of conceptions of land, identity and even gods. It’s just such a fascinating thing that there are these extraordinarily powerful, deeply buried understandings of who we are and what we are that can be understood through how we feed ourselves. I was unbelievably lucky to have come across this book first.
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Carolyn Steel is an architect, writer, lecturer, and director of Kilburn Nightingale Architects. She has taught at London Metropolitan University, at the London School of Economics where she was inaugural studio director of the Cities programme, and at Cambridge where she ran her own lecture series on Food and the City. Her book, Hungry City, which won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, examines the relationship between food and the city.
