Story about How Food Shapes Our Lives
Book by Carolyn Steel “Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives” was first published in the UK in 2008 and now is translated into several foreign languages, including Russian (2016). Carolyn Steel on her private Internet page describes herself as an “architect, lecturer and writer” and is professor of architecture, head of the “City, Architecture and Engineering” program at the London School of Economics. While teaching there together with representatives of Architecture, Politics, Development, Sociology departments prompted her to describe the use of an urban organism through food. The author admits that the work “Hungry City” is the result of her great interest in the topic with the length of her life, materials for which she collected for a very long time. On writing the book in total she spent seven years.
Main themes of the book are food, city and relationship between them. It should be noted that such a study is innovative and surprisingly was not carried out previously, although it would seem that breweries, kitchens, canteens, markets, shops obviously and directly affect an urban landscape. The topic chosen by Carolyn Steel for research is very broad and required from the author to structure carefully her reasoning.
Steel stresses out that the “Hungry City” is not an encyclopedia, but an introduction to a certain way of thinking. The author using the example of her native London and several other Western cities analyzes the development of an entire urban civilization from America to modern China, from the Ancient East to Europe.
Chapters of the book are devoted to such topics as: agriculture, food transportation, food trade, cooking, eating, recycling and how all of the mentioned above processes change our planet and determine our life. In the final part of the “Hungry City” Steel leaves the reader with the opportunity to think about how food can help to improve cities, to rethink them, to teach them how to plan space and, as a result, to dramatically improve people’s lives. After reading this book you will undoubtedly change your view of many things and look at seemingly insignificant everyday activities with completely different eyes.
Text: ELIZABETH KLEPANOVA
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