Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

(Paperback)

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A passionate, important and visionary book about how our cities are fed, and how this affects our lives and our planet. *According to the Trussell Trust, food bank use between April and Sept 2018 was up 13% on the same period in 2017.* *Every year in the UK 18 million tonnes of food end up in landfill.* Why is this the case and what can we do about it The relationship between food and cities is fundamental to our everyday lives. Food shapes cities and through them it moulds us - along with the countryside that feeds us. Yet few of us are conscious of the process and we rarely stop to wonder how food reaches our plates. Hungry City examines the way in which modern food production has damaged the balance of human existence, and reveals that we have yet to resolve a centuries-old dilemma - one which holds the key to a host of current problems, from obesity and the inexorable rise of the supermarkets, to the destruction of the natural world. Original, inspiring and written with infectious enthusiasm and belief, Hungry City illuminates an issue that is fundamental to us all.

Reviews

Exuberant, provocative... her desire that we understand better and think more about our food, how much we waste, how much energy it consumes and how we dispose of it... It is - in the real sense of the word - vital -- David Aaronovitch * The Times *
Hungry City is a sinister real-life sequel to Animal Farm with the plot turned upside down by time in ways even George Orwell could not have foreseen * Observer *
Lively, wide-ranging, endlessly inquisitive... Hungry City is a smorgasbord of a book: dip into it and you will emerge with something fascinating * Independent *
Absolutely crammed with eye-opening facts and figures, a hugely readable account of the part we individually play in a global problem. Highly Recommended * Publishing News *
She can prcis her specialist sources briskly, and her own direct research (e.g. a mega kitchen for cooking ready meals) is lively -- Vera Rule * Guardian *

Author Bio

Carolyn Steel is a London-based architect, lecturer and writer. Since graduating from Cambridge University, she has combined architectural practice with teaching and research into the relationship between food and cities, running design studios at the LSE, London Metropolitan University and at the Cambridge University School of Architecture, where her lecture series on Food and the City was the first of its kind. A visiting lecturer at Wageningen University and director of Kilburn Nightingale Architects in London, Carolyn has been a Rome Scholar, presented on the BBC's One Foot in the Past, and gave a talk at TEDGlobal in 2008. Hungry City won the RSL Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction (for a work in progress) in 2006.