Tonight I took part in the Food Ethics Council World Food Day debate Fair Distribution in a Warmer World, held at the Royal Horticultural Halls in London.

My presentation consisted of a vision of what my London neighbourhood, Marylebone, might look like in 2020 if we lived in a fairer world that responded to climate change. Here is a transcription:

Marylebone 2020

I’ve lived in central London all my life, but I can’t believe how much it’s changed in the past fifteen years – in many ways it feels more like the London I knew in the 1960s when I was a child.

My street looks really different to the way it did then. The buildings are all made of brick, but since the Government passed its ‘Growing Spaces’ Bill in 2015, half of them have had growing-frames fitted to the front. People now spend hours out on their balconies, or on the flat roofs at the back, which used to be empty asphalt, but are now covered in raised beds for growing vegetables.

I know far more of my neighbours than I ever used to, partly because we meet at our local food shop, which used to be an estate agent. You never know quite what you’re going to find in there, but they have large seasonal charts on the walls with recipe ideas, so it doesn’t really matter.

Then of course there’s the big food market at Marylebone Station – it seems incredible there didn’t used to be one there! That was after the Government De-Beeching Initiative in 2012 kick-started its Rail Freight Programme. The market opened a couple of years ago, when the first phase of the Midlands-and-Chilterns Rail Lattice was completed. It’s turned my neighbourhood into a 24hour food hub, with far local more cafés and businesses than there used to be. The Lattice has really made a difference to motorway congestion too – I read recently that half of North London’s food now comes in by rail.

The other place I meet my neighbours is at our local Permaculture Centre in Regent’s Park, where I spend two evenings a week. It’s part of the London Canals Food Co-operative, and it’s run by my next-door neighbour, the first professional farmer ever to live in our street!

It’s great having animals living in the city again. Of course there was a lot of local opposition when they first came (and even more when they built the new Camden abattoir!) but people have got used to them now. We feed the pigs scraps from our local restaurant, and school kids love going to visit them.

Although I do grow some of my own, most of my seasonal fruit and veg. comes from the Thames Gateway. When we first set up Transition Westminster, a group of us formed a buyer’s consortium, and we have a stake in a network of Community Supported Farms there, who supply us through the year via the Thames Gateway Food Link.

Apparently almost a fifth of London’s seasonal veg now comes from the Thames Gateway – it’s amazing to think they were talking about building millions of houses on the floodplains there only 10 years ago!

The food comes in by rail to the Finchley Road Food Hub, on the site of what used to be an enormous Sainsbury’s, that closed after the Government introduced supermarket parking charges in 2010.

The deliveries come down my street twice a week by electric van, just like the old milk floats I remember from when I was a child. They carry milk too: the Hub also receives regular deliveries from the Buckinghamshire Dairy Co-operative. Funny how history seems to repeat itself…

I usually get my food deliveries left at our local grocery deposit box, where I can pick them up on my way back from work. I don’t eat much meat these days, but when I do, I still buy it from the Ginger Pig. That place has been going for over 25 years now – they were way ahead of their time: one of the first butchers in my area to source all their meat from their own organic farms.

For my tea, coffee and bananas, I go to my local Fair-Trade store, situated, ironically enough, in what used to be my local Tesco Metro. That closed down in 2012, after the Competition Commission finally got round to setting legal limits on grocery market share.

Fair Trade has really flourished since the International Agreement to Internalise Ethical Food Costs was passed in 2012. It was an amazing move that combined carbon costing with some of the other food costs – water depletion, social justice – that were never taken into account before.

In fact I think it was after the AIEFC was when the biggest changes came. That was when the Government finally scrapped its plans to build millions of new homes in the South East, and brought in its Regional Food Bill instead.

The Thames has been transformed by the Thames Gateway Food Initiative – it’s great to see so many boats on the river again, and Billingsgate once again being used as a live dock – not to mention all those yuppie flats in Docklands being converted into food processing units!

All the fruit and veg supplied to London from the Thames Gateway scores a perfect 10 on the Global Ethical Food Index, partly because of its low food miles, but also because of its zero-carbon production cycle, partly achieved through the barges bringing food waste back to the GLA’s anaerobic digesters in the Lee Valley – history repeating itself once again!

It’s fantastic that the old Olympics site was reconceived as a world-leading centre for eco-urban research. Apparently more people have come to visit it since the Games than when the they were being held!

My home life has changed a lot too. Now that my husband and I both work locally, we see much more of each other – we often come home for lunch. I think that started after the Mixed Communities Initiative, when the 2015 revision of PPS1 put food at the heart of urban planning. It’s amazing how my neighbourhood has changed as a result: sometimes it feels more like Barcelona than London – if it wasn’t for the weather, that is!

Twice a week, we eat food that my eight-year-old son has grown and cooked at school. He’s really changed since his classroom was made into a kitchen – he says that food studies is his favourite subject, and he wants to be a farmer when he grows up, which is great for us, since the pay is so good!

He often has his friends over for cook-overs. They love coming round to us, especially since we used our Government Kitchen Improvement Grant last year to put in our waste-fuelled ceramic hob and intelligent fridge. They love playing with the use-by indicator knobs!

London has always been a great place to live, but I really think it’s nicer since the Global Climate Change Initiative. Life has got simpler in many ways – slower, you could say – but it’s also far more rewarding – and varied.

The city feels more lively – more full of stuff. People have changed too. It’s amazing to think that Sir Terry Leahy used to run a global supermarket chain, and now he is an organic pig farmer. He’s apparently found his true vocation – and his Foundation for Rural Enterprise has really transformed the co-operative movements both here and abroad – talk about poacher turned game-keeper!

Note:

The place described above is what I call Sitopia (from the Greek sitos, food + topos, place). It’s a place made by food, which is nothing new – we already live in a world shaped by food. The difference with Sitopia is that we have recognised that fact, and have learned to use food as a tool to shape a better one.

Earlier this week I attended the Chatham House conference Food Security in the 21st Century, which opened with Hilary Benn’s announcement of a new Council of Food Policy Advisers, and never lost its grip from there, delivering up an astonishing parade of international politicians, scientists, economists and agronomists (Presidents, Chiefs and Directors-General all), a veritable Who’s Who of global food.

Merely to sit through the first day was a privilege, if a somewhat discombobulating one, so imagine my trepidation at being asked to chair the opening session on the second day, when the core of the conference (the findings of the two-year Chatham House Food Project) was to be presented. I owed this honour to Susan Ambler-Edwards, leader of the Project and a formidable woman whom I was fortunate enough to meet earlier this year at the Science Museum. All went well, I am happy to say, and the final report is due to be published next month. It’s a stark, deeply researched and potentially explosive piece of work – one that needs to be taken very seriously indeed.

You can see work in progress at the Chatham House Food Project here

I’ve been doing a lot of talking lately. That seems to be what happens when you write a book. First, (obviously) you do a lot of writing, then as soon as you’ve finished, you start talking. And talking. Trying to sum up what it was you just wrote about. Not that I’m complaining – far from it. I am of course delighted that so many people are interested in what I have to say, and very happy to say it in whichever medium they prefer. And the great thing about talking is that you also get to listen. You get to meet people, not just sit there in your pyjamas with a computer for company.

Over the past few weeks I’ve given talks at Cabe (the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment), Arup (the leading international interdisciplinary design firm), the Design Council, the Domus Academy in Milan, a group of international fresh food producers, and the Landscape Institute annual conference. What is exciting for me in all this is the huge range of people and territories that represents. Hungry City is a multi-disciplinary, ‘horizontal’ book, which made publishers wary of it and confused some reviewers, but what I am finding now is that it allows me to talk to many disparate groups in a common language – one they can relate to. As a result, it seems to be widening horizons and forging new connections, which makes me a very happy bunny indeed. With my sincere apologies to the donkey.

Publication last week of a ‘Fat Map’ showing the growing obesity hot-spots in Britain has once again sparked debate about the degree to which politicians should interfere in our lives for our own good. The Tories, predictably, are insisting that people should take responsibility for what they eat: ‘No Nannying, No Excuses’, as shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley put it charmingly last week. Meanwhile, the government is pressing for a more hands-on approach to tackling obesity, probably because it has finally realised that Fat is a Fiscal issue.

The government’s position is derived from its own Foresight report, published last year, which explained why obesity is a societal, rather than an individual, problem. The report argued that, thanks to ‘technological revolution…outstripping human evolution’, Britain has evolved into an ‘obesogenic environment’ in which, for an increasing number of people, ‘weight gain is the inevitable – and largely involuntary – consequence of exposure to a modern lifestyle’. Far from being something people can discipline themselves out of, obesity results from a complex range of causes that include ‘physiological factors, eating habits, activity levels and psychosocial influences’. Obesity, in other words, has become passive: the quasi-inevitable consequence of merely existing.

No-one disputes that computers, cars, burgers and bars are having a devastating cumulative effect on the nation’s waistline, yet last week’s Fat Map demonstrates something rather more disturbing. Indeed, the mere fact of its being a map is the key to its message. While communities as diverse at the Shetland Isles, rural Wales, the North East, Isle of Wight and Dagenham ponder why they have come out top of the tubby tables, the conclusion that where you live is directly related to how fat you are likely to become – and therefore how healthy, hearty and happy – is hard to ignore.

What the Fat Map shows, in essence, is those parts of the country where one is most likely to be born into relative deprivation – where the deadly hand of ‘passive obesity’ is most likely to strike. Like Charles Booth’s London Poverty Map of 1889, it charts far more than it says on the label. The Fat Map, in effect, is a Poverty Map by another name, which is why it is so politically explosive.

The health secretary Alan Johnson is right to say that ‘vilifying the extremely fat doesn’t make people change their behaviour’, and equally correct that, in order to tackle obesity, we are going to need ‘a fundamental change in the way we live our lives’. But how are we going to do that, exactly?

Obesity is not just a question of what we eat – it is the bodily manifestation of society itself – or rather, of our place in it. Those who are well educated, who can afford to buy healthy food, who have the leisure to play sports, to shop and cook for fun, suffer from it far less. The fundamental change we need is to extend those rights to everyone – which should, after all, be the core aim of socialism. Job opportunities, good schools, safe places to play, easy access to fresh food, communal sports facilities, well-designed and maintained neighbourhoods, are what is needed. That is why obesity lies within the remit of government – and of architects and urban designers, for that matter. Obesity is not a matter of individual choice. It’s the environment, stupid.

More on the Fat Map

I have just become a regular columnist for Building Design, which, for those of you who are not involved in the building trades, is a weekly magazine for those who are: chiefly architects, engineers, builders and designers. This is a great opportunity for me, since it allows me to further one of my main missions at the moment: to get those directly responsible for shaping our world to start seeing it – and doing it – more through food. It’s early days yet, but I am delighted that the editor, Amanda Baillieu, is keen for me to explore that topic in pretty much any way I like. As far as I am aware, it is the first time that there has been a regular column in an architectural journal devoted to food – which I must admit I find rather exciting.

Just back from Edinburgh, where I took part in my first ever literary festival – and very jolly it was too, apart from the fact that the deluge in which it took place rather dented the tented appeal of the site, which photographs reveal to be a laid-back place on more clement days, with people lazing about on the lawn reading, or chatting to one another in a casual literary manner, rather than dashing across slithery paths to shelter shivering in their yurts as we were forced to do.

Nevertheless, the howling gale provided a cosy atmosphere for my debate on the ‘Politics of Food’ in the Highland Spiegeltent, where I was slated to appear with Graham Harvey, the agricultural editor of the Archers, and Harriet Lamb, director of the Fairtrade Foundation. The Spiegeltent is an odd beast, circular in plan and internally styled like a Victorian boozer, replete with timbered alcoves, stained glass partitions and a deep wine-red decor. Whether it was a keenness to hear what we had to say or just the fact that the tent provided a handy place to shelter from the storm, the space was packed to the rafters (guide-ropes?) with beady-eyed pensioners and a few intense-looking young men and women, all highly attentive and articulate when it came to asking questions. One man in particular, an ex-sheep farmer, regaled us for ten minutes with his theories on life, farming, and why the country in general is going to the dogs. Harriet suggested, quite sincerely, that he might like to write his own book, which I thought was a splendid idea.

Afterwards we retired to the Authors’ Yurt – an extraordinary structure like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark (shaped like a canvas hobbit-hole) furnished with low sofas with patterned cushions to lounge on, exotic carpets and freely flowing food and drink. The fact that several paparazzi were shooting enthusiastically just outside the entrance suggested that there were probably rather a lot of famous authors there, but since I am about as good at recognising famous authors as I am at spotting architects, I didn’t have even 0.1 of a J.K.Rowling moment. And apparently Sean Connery pitched up the next day too. Oh well – maybe next time.

Whatever you think of Prince Charles, there is no denying his ability to stir up impassioned debate, and with his latest GM outburst, he has drawn the sort of response from the scientific community that inquisitive boys usually get when they stick their fingers into hornets’ nests. Which is a pity, because, as ever with Prince Charles, his ability to hack off the professionals is matched only by his knack of putting his finger on something rather important.

True, his apparent dismissal of GM as ‘the biggest disaster, environmentally, of all time’ has grabbed all the headlines, but if you look at what he is actually saying, it is not GM per se, but the idea that we can rely on what he calls ‘one form of clever genetic engineering after another’ to feed the world, that he is attacking. He has a point. If you put a hundred of the most eminent agronomists and scientists in a room today and asked them to vote on whether GM was the answer to the world’s future, they would be split down the middle. The point is that we simply don’t know yet. The only sensible route, therefore, is to keep all our options open.

Which brings us on to the Prince’s second point: that GM technologies tend to be ‘run by gigantic corporations’. As he rightly points out, it is ‘food security, not food production’ we should be talking about. Here, surely, is the nub of the matter. The GM debate is likely to run and run, for at least as long as the Darwinian one has – or the religious one. On matters of great import, it is rare for everyone to see eye to eye. Meanwhile, however, two things are clear:

- Plenty of food to feed the world is currently produced, yet 850 million still go hungry

- Whatever farming policy we adopt in the future, it must be based on stewardship, rather than exploitation, of natural resources.

Food is the biggest challenge we face today, yet its political, economic, social, environmental and cultural complexities tend to obscure its fundamental truths. But whatever our vision of the future, there is no doubt that the Prince’s dystopian vision of millions of small farmers being driven off the land to live in ‘unsustainable, unmanageable degraded and dysfunctional conurbations’ is already happening. Food, and and the way we produce and control it, is already shaping the world. What we need to find is a way of using food to shape a better one.

The Prince Charles Telegraph interview

The collapse of the latest round of World Trade talks is tragic, but the greater tragedy would be if it were to spell the end of any further attempts to reach a global agreement on trade. The reasons for the failure are familiar: a disagreement between developed and developing nations over farm subsidies. But with the global food crisis upon us, the old battle-lines are starting to look increasingly short-sighted – suicidal, even. The enormous challenge of feeding the world in the coming century should be bringing nations together, not pushing them apart. Let’s hope that by the time ministers reconvene in Geneva in December, they have had a change of heart.

Collapse of World Trade talks

Know that Guinness ad, ‘Good things come to those who wait’, or something like that? Well, I feel a bit like that about this review from The Independent. It took a while coming, and is far less wordy than some of the others I’ve received, yet it manages to capture something about the book that others haven’t, with a lot less effort than most.

The Independent Review

Mea Culpa. I have been a very remiss blogger of late. My only excuse is that things have been a bit hectic recently, and I’m not used to it. I know that’s a bit like saying ‘the dog ate my homework’, but there it is. I’m not used to blogging either. But I am trying to do better.

I did want to say a word or two about the talk I gave at the LFA last week, because it was a thrilling moment for me in many ways. It was my first ever public lecture, and it took place in a building – the Coin Street Neighbourhood Centre, by Haworth Tompkins – that is testimony to what can be achieved when people say ‘no’ to the forces of Mammon. A subject very close to my heart, and one that is a consistent thread through Hungry City.

In short, Coin Street, like Covent Garden (which I deal with in the book) is one of the most successful modern urban developments in London, yet would not exist were it not for a bunch of dedicated locals having kicked up a fuss when their neighbourhood was due to be bulldozed and turned into a faceless office precinct. I know I am summarising a complex socio-political problem in a few clichéd phrases, but I hope you get the picture. Cities NEED these nuggets of resistance: these knotty, belligerent, don’t-play-the-game, sod-you passionate pockets of identity that distinguish one place from another, provide the grit that allows the urban crystal to thrive.

So it felt great to be in Coin Street to talk about ‘How Food has Shaped London’, the subject of my talk. Even greater to be there with the fabulous Sheila Dillon in the chair (my dream come true) and such a fantastic panel of respondents, among them Arthur Potts-Dawson, a truly inspirational chef who was the ‘backroom boy’ in Jamie Oliver’s first Fifteen restaurant and has since set up two of his own – Acorn House and Water House – which between them have created an entirely new and vital category of eatery: the eco-restaurant. (I could go on, but won’t for now: Arthur deserves an entire post of his own). My other two respondents were equally august: the architect Sarah Wigglesworth MBE, who runs a pioneering practice from her equally pioneering ’straw-bale’ house in London; and George Nicholson, who might in this context be described as the ‘missing link’, since he was instrumental both in the reinvention of Borough Market and the Coin Street development.

To be standing in such a room, with such a chair and panel, in front of such an audience, talking about food and cities, felt extraordinary. Perhaps I can be forgiven for not blogging more now. These are amazing times, and I find it hard not to gush.