How Food Shapes Our Lives

Hungry City

A passionate, important and visionary book about how our cities are fed, and how this affects our lives and our planet.

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

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

Lively, wide-ranging, endlessly inquisitive... Hungry City is a smorgasbord of a book: dip into it and you will emerge with something fascinating

Absolutely crammed with eye-opening facts and figures, a hugely readable account of the part we individually play in a global problem. Highly Recommended

She can précis her specialist sources briskly, and her own direct research (e.g. a mega kitchen for cooking ready meals) is lively

A superb account of the uneasy relationship between the city and its means of sustenance, charting the historical rise of urban areas and the monopolisation of the food chain by conglomerates

this is for the person who knows everything about food but nothing about its source

dense with details, rippling with insight an easy to read... This is everything we need to know.

An intense, fluid, intelligent, highly absorbing text that provokes vital questions about sustainability

It's one of those rare books dense with detail, rippling with insight, and easy to read...This is everything we need to know

In bringing food more directly onto the 'plate' of those who think about buildings and cities, she has done us all a great service

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.

*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.

Carolyn Steel

A vital call for us to rediscover the way that food binds us to each other and to the natural world, and in doing so find new ways of living

Steel's ideas have become a matter of urgency

Essential reading!  A visionary look at how quality food should replace money as the new world currency

Steel offsets the obviously weighty subject matter with a lightness of touch and twinkling eye for luminous details… an unambiguously essential read

The beauty of food is that it is so many things at once: necessity and treat, nature and artifice, the subject of science, philosophy, etiquette and art. The book is accordingly multiple in its themes, an all-you-can-eat buffet of thoughts and facts about food...a brave and ambitious book

No writer asks more interesting questions about food than Carolyn Steel because no one takes more seriously the profound role of food at the heart of human life. Every time I read her or hear her speak, I can almost feel my mind expanding. This hugely ambitious and beautifully written book shows that the way we eat now is at odds with the way we ate for thousands of years. But so far from being pessimistic, Steel suggests that learning to value food again can also point the way to more fulfilling and sustainable ways of living. Sitopia is a book destined to become a modern classic

Steel’s future society would be one in which we felt in tune with nature and were less addicted to consumerism

Steel’s first book, Hungry City, explored how the feeding of cities shaped civilisations over time; with Sitopia she extends her reach. Food shapes our world and the way we live in it. It determines our daily routines, it defines national cultures

Following her award-winning Hungry City, Carolyn Steel serves us up a second helping of food for thought with Sitopia, which poses the really big questions about food that we should all be asking ourselves right now. Foodie or not, this philosophical call to arms is essential reading for those who want to save the world, one meal at a time

Steel brilliantly uses food to demonstrate our ills and their causes. She shows, too, that food, if we value it properly, can heal us… [A] remarkable, prophetic, and desperately urgent book

In this compelling and positively framed book, Steel the author of the influential Hungry City, draws on insights from philosophy, history, architecture, literature, politics and science as well as those working to remake our relationship with food, to show how we might reform its production and distribution to avoid irrevocable climate change

Steel's exhilarating...journey through political, cultural, economic history will agitate sluggish imaginations to see new possibilities for nourishing a loving common life

How Food Can Save the World

'A visionary look at how quality food should replace money as the new world currency' Tim Spector 
 
'Hugely ambitious and beautifully written...destined to become a modern classic' Bee Wilson 
 
How we search for, make and consume food has defined human history. It transforms our bodies and homes, our politics and our trade, our landscapes and our climate. But by forgetting our culinary heritage and relying on cheap, intensively produced food, we have drifted into a way of life that threatens our planet and ourselves. 
 
What if there were a more sustainable way to eat and live? Drawing on many disciplines, as well as stories of the farmers, designers and economists who are remaking our relationship with food, this inspiring and deeply thoughtful book gives us a provocative and exhilarating vision for change, and points the way to a better future. 
 
'Utterly brilliant' Thomasina Miers 
 
WINNER OF THE 2021 GUILD FOOD OF WRITERS AWARD FOR BEST FOOD BOOK 
 
*Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize 2020*

Carolyn Steel

Praise for Sitopia

A vital call for us to rediscover the way that food binds us to each other and to the natural world, and in doing so find new ways of living

Steel's ideas have become a matter of urgency

Essential reading! A visionary look at how quality food should replace money as the new world currency

A vital call for us to rediscover the way that food binds us to each other and to the natural world, and in doing so find new ways of living

Steel's ideas have become a matter of urgency

Essential reading! A visionary look at how quality food should replace money as the new world currency

A vital call for us to rediscover the way that food binds us to each other and to the natural world, and in doing so find new ways of living

Steel's ideas have become a matter of urgency

Essential reading! A visionary look at how quality food should replace money as the new world currency

Books by Carolyn Steel

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