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How do you feed a city?

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It's one of the great questions of our time.

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Yet it's one that's rarely asked.

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We take it for granted that if we go into a shop

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or restaurant, or indeed into this theater's foyer in about an hour's time,

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there is going to be food there waiting for us,

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having magically come from somewhere.

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But when you think that every day for a city the size of London,

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enough food has to be produced,

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transported, bought and sold,

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cooked, eaten, disposed of,

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and that something similar has to happen every day

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for every city on earth,

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it's remarkable that cities get fed at all.

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We live in places like this as if

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they're the most natural things in the world,

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forgetting that because we're animals

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and that we need to eat,

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we're actually as dependent on the natural world

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as our ancient ancestors were.

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And as more of us move into cities,

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more of that natural world is being

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transformed into extraordinary landscapes like the one behind me --

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it's soybean fields in Mato Grosso in Brazil --

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in order to feed us.

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These are extraordinary landscapes,

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but few of us ever get to see them.

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And increasingly these landscapes

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are not just feeding us either.

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As more of us move into cities,

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more of us are eating meat,

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so that a third of the annual grain crop globally

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now gets fed to animals

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rather than to us human animals.

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And given that it takes three times as much grain --

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actually ten times as much grain --

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to feed a human if it's passed through an animal first,

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that's not a very efficient way of feeding us.

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And it's an escalating problem too.

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By 2050, it's estimated that twice the number

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of us are going to be living in cities.

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And it's also estimated that there is going to be twice as much

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meat and dairy consumed.

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So meat and urbanism are rising hand in hand.

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And that's going to pose an enormous problem.

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Six billion hungry carnivores to feed,

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by 2050.

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That's a big problem. And actually if we carry on as we are,

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it's a problem we're very unlikely to be able to solve.

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Nineteen million hectares of rainforest are lost every year

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to create new arable land.

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Although at the same time we're losing an equivalent amount

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of existing arables to salinization and erosion.

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We're very hungry for fossil fuels too.

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It takes about 10 calories to produce every calorie

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of food that we consume in the West.

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And even though there is food that we are producing at great cost,

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we don't actually value it.

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Half the food produced in the USA is currently thrown away.

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And to end all of this, at the end of this long process,

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we're not even managing to feed the planet properly.

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A billion of us are obese, while a further billion starve.

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None of it makes very much sense.

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And when you think that 80 percent of global trade in food now

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is controlled by just five multinational corporations,

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it's a grim picture.

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As we're moving into cities, the world is also embracing a Western diet.

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And if we look to the future,

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it's an unsustainable diet.

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So how did we get here?

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And more importantly, what are we going to do about it?

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Well, to answer the slightly easier question first,

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about 10,000 years ago, I would say,

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is the beginning of this process

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in the ancient Near East,

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known as the Fertile Crescent.

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Because, as you can see, it was crescent shaped.

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And it was also fertile.

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And it was here, about 10,000 years ago,

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that two extraordinary inventions,

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agriculture and urbanism, happened

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roughly in the same place and at the same time.

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This is no accident,

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because agriculture and cities are bound together. They need each other.

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Because it was discovery of grain

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by our ancient ancestors for the first time

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that produced a food source that was large enough

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and stable enough to support permanent settlements.

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And if we look at what those settlements were like,

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we see they were compact.

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They were surrounded by productive farm land

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and dominated by large temple complexes

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like this one at Ur,

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that were, in fact, effectively,

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spiritualized, central food distribution centers.

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Because it was the temples that organized the harvest,

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gathered in the grain, offered it to the gods,

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and then offered the grain that the gods didn't eat back to the people.

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So, if you like,

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the whole spiritual and physical life of these cities

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was dominated by the grain and the harvest

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that sustained them.

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And in fact, that's true of every ancient city.

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But of course not all of them were that small.

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Famously, Rome had about a million citizens

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by the first century A.D.

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So how did a city like this feed itself?

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The answer is what I call "ancient food miles."

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Basically, Rome had access to the sea,

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which made it possible for it to import food from a very long way away.

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This is the only way it was possible to do this in the ancient world,

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because it was very difficult to transport food over roads,

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which were rough.

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And the food obviously went off very quickly.

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So Rome effectively waged war

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on places like Carthage and Egypt

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just to get its paws on their grain reserves.

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And, in fact, you could say that the expansion of the Empire

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was really sort of one long, drawn out

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militarized shopping spree, really.

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(Laughter)

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In fact -- I love the fact, I just have to mention this:

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Rome in fact used to import oysters from London,

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at one stage. I think that's extraordinary.

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So Rome shaped its hinterland

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through its appetite.

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But the interesting thing is that the other thing also

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happened in the pre-industrial world.

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If we look at a map of London in the 17th century,

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we can see that its grain, which is coming in from the Thames,

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along the bottom of this map.

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So the grain markets were to the south of the city.

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And the roads leading up from them

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to Cheapside, which was the main market,

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were also grain markets.

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And if you look at the name of one of those streets,

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Bread Street, you can tell

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what was going on there 300 years ago.

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And the same of course was true for fish.

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Fish was, of course, coming in by river as well. Same thing.

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And of course Billingsgate, famously, was London's fish market,

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operating on-site here until the mid-1980s.

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Which is extraordinary, really, when you think about it.

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Everybody else was wandering around

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with mobile phones that looked like bricks

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and sort of smelly fish happening down on the port.

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This is another thing about food in cities:

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Once its roots into the city are established,

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they very rarely move.

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Meat is a very different story

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because, of course, animals could walk into the city.

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So much of London's meat

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was coming from the northwest,

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from Scotland and Wales.

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So it was coming in, and arriving at the city at the northwest,

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which is why Smithfield,

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London's very famous meat market, was located up there.

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Poultry was coming in from East Anglia and so on, to the northeast.

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I feel a bit like a weather woman doing this. Anyway,

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and so the birds were coming in

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with their feet protected with little canvas shoes.

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And then when they hit the eastern end

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of Cheapside, that's where they were sold,

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which is why it's called Poultry.

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And, in fact, if you look at the map of any city

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built before the industrial age,

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you can trace food coming in to it.

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You can actually see how it was physically shaped by food,

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both by reading the names of the streets, which give you a lot of clues.

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Friday Street, in a previous life,

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is where you went to buy your fish on a Friday.

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But also you have to imagine it full of food.

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Because the streets and the public spaces

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were the only places where food was bought and sold.

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And if we look at an image of Smithfield in 1830

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you can see that it would have been very difficult to live in a city like this

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and be unaware of where your food came from.

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In fact, if you were having Sunday lunch,

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the chances were it was mooing or bleating outside your window

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about three days earlier.

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So this was obviously an organic city,

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part of an organic cycle.

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And then 10 years later everything changed.

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This is an image of the Great Western in 1840.

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And as you can see, some of the earliest train passengers

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were pigs and sheep.

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So all of a sudden, these animals are no longer walking into market.

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They're being slaughtered out of sight and mind,

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somewhere in the countryside.

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And they're coming into the city by rail.

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And this changes everything.

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To start off with, it makes it possible

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for the first time to grow cities,

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really any size and shape, in any place.

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Cities used to be constrained by geography;

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they used to have to get their food through very difficult physical means.

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All of a sudden they are effectively emancipated from geography.

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And as you can see from these maps of London,

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in the 90 years after the trains came,

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it goes from being a little blob that was quite easy to feed

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by animals coming in on foot, and so on,

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to a large splurge,

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that would be very, very difficult to feed with anybody on foot,

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either animals or people.

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And of course that was just the beginning. After the trains came cars,

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and really this marks the end of this process.

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It's the final emancipation of the city

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from any apparent relationship with nature at all.

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And this is the kind of city that's devoid of smell,

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devoid of mess, certainly devoid of people,

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because nobody would have dreamed of walking in such a landscape.

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In fact, what they did to get food was they got in their cars,

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drove to a box somewhere on the outskirts,

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came back with a week's worth of shopping,

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and wondered what on earth to do with it.

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And this really is the moment when our relationship,

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both with food and cities, changes completely.

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Here we have food -- that used to be the center,

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the social core of the city -- at the periphery.

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It used to be a social event, buying and selling food.

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Now it's anonymous.

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We used to cook; now we just add water,

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or a little bit of an egg if you're making a cake or something.

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We don't smell food to see if it's okay to eat.

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We just read the back of a label on a packet.

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And we don't value food. We don't trust it.

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So instead of trusting it, we fear it.

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And instead of valuing it, we throw it away.

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One of the great ironies of modern food systems

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is that they've made the very thing they promised

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to make easier much harder.

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By making it possible to build cities anywhere and any place,

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they've actually distanced us from our most important relationship,

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which is that of us and nature.

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And also they've made us dependent on systems that only they can deliver,

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that, as we've seen, are unsustainable.

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So what are we going to do about that?

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It's not a new question.

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500 years ago it's what Thomas More was asking himself.

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This is the frontispiece of his book "Utopia."

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And it was a series of semi-independent city-states,

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if that sounds remotely familiar,

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a day's walk from one another where everyone was basically farming-mad,

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and grew vegetables in their back gardens,

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and ate communal meals together, and so on.

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And I think you could argue that

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food is a fundamental ordering principle of Utopia,

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even though More never framed it that way.

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And here is another very famous "Utopian" vision,

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that of Ebenezer Howard, "The Garden City."

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Same idea: series of semi-independent city-states,

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little blobs of metropolitan stuff with arable land around,

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joined to one another by railway.

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And again, food could be said to be

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the ordering principle of his vision.

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It even got built, but nothing to do with

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this vision that Howard had.

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And that is the problem with these Utopian ideas,

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that they are Utopian.

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Utopia was actually a word that Thomas Moore used deliberately.

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It was a kind of joke, because it's got a double derivation from the Greek.

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It can either mean a good place, or no place.

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Because it's an ideal. It's an imaginary thing. We can't have it.

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And I think, as a conceptual tool

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for thinking about the very deep problem of human dwelling,

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that makes it not much use.

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So I've come up with an alternative,

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which is Sitopia, from the ancient Greek,

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"sitos" for food, and "topos" for place.

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I believe we already live in Sitopia.

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We live in a world shaped by food,

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and if we realize that, we can use food as a really powerful tool --

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a conceptual tool, design tool, to shape the world differently.

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So if we were to do that, what might Sitopia look like?

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Well I think it looks a bit like this.

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I have to use this slide. It's just the look on the face of the dog.

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But anyway, this is -- (Laughter)

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it's food at the center of life,

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at the center of family life, being celebrated,

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being enjoyed, people taking time for it.

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This is where food should be in our society.

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But you can't have scenes like this unless you have people like this.

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By the way, these can be men as well.

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It's people who think about food,

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who think ahead, who plan,

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who can stare at a pile of raw vegetables

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and actually recognize them.

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We need these people. We're part of a network.

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Because without these kinds of people we can't have places like this.

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Here, I deliberately chose this because it is a man buying a vegetable.

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But networks, markets where food is being grown locally.

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It's common. It's fresh.

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It's part of the social life of the city.

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Because without that, you can't have this kind of place,

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food that is grown locally and also is part of the landscape,

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and is not just a zero-sum commodity

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off in some unseen hell-hole.

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Cows with a view.

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Steaming piles of humus.

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This is basically bringing the whole thing together.

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And this is a community project

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I visited recently in Toronto.

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It's a greenhouse, where kids get told

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all about food and growing their own food.

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Here is a plant called Kevin, or maybe it's a

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plant belonging to a kid called Kevin. I don't know.

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But anyway, these kinds of projects

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that are trying to reconnect us with nature is extremely important.

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So Sitopia, for me, is really a way of seeing.

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It's basically recognizing that Sitopia

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already exists in little pockets everywhere.

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The trick is to join them up,

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to use food as a way of seeing.

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And if we do that, we're going to stop seeing cities

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as big, metropolitan, unproductive blobs, like this.

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We're going to see them more like this,

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as part of the productive, organic framework

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of which they are inevitably a part,

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symbiotically connected.

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But of course, that's not a great image either,

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because we need not to be producing food like this anymore.

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We need to be thinking more about permaculture,

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which is why I think this image just

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sums up for me the kind of thinking we need to be doing.

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It's a re-conceptualization

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of the way food shapes our lives.

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The best image I know of this is from 650 years ago.

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It's Ambrogio Lorenzetti's "Allegory of Good Government."

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It's about the relationship between the city and the countryside.

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And I think the message of this is very clear.

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If the city looks after the country,

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the country will look after the city.

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And I want us to ask now,

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what would Ambrogio Lorenzetti paint

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if he painted this image today?

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What would an allegory of good government look like today?

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Because I think it's an urgent question.

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It's one we have to ask,

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and we have to start answering.

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We know we are what we eat.

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We need to realize that the world is also what we eat.

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But if we take that idea, we can use food

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as a really powerful tool to shape the world better.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)