 I am indeed going to attempt in 25 minutes to put the big picture of why food matters and why this is such an exciting and inspiring initiative for me. Now many people ask the question how are we going to eat in the future and let's hope it's not like this. But of course there are many, many ways of approaching this question and in fact I would say there's divergent kind of trends in the way we tend to think we're going to eat in the future on the left. You can see a beautiful young college student slugging down soylent which some of you may heard of. It's a kind of total food substitute invented in the US. Basically the idea is you don't have to eat anymore because we have far more important things to do. So it's the ultimate life hack essentially. On the right hand side we see this trend that we're seeing a return to craft, to fermenting, to pickling, to making your own bread and so on. This is also very strong and it's kind of weird but these things are both very, very prevalent trends that are happening as it turns out right at the same time. Now of course they didn't come from nowhere and I would say they come from two very clear relationships with if you like the problem of being a human on earth and how to eat. So on the top we have a kind of trajectory of what I would call the tech approach to feeding ourselves. So on the left we have the harbourbosh process. How many people in this room have heard of that just out of pure curiosity of three, okay roughly. You're shy, shy harbourbosh experts in the room. Well we'll bump that up to five. Okay I mean I think there's probably about a hundred people here tonight, maybe more. But if I told you that 40 to 50 of you in this room would not be here without the harbourbosh process that might sound interesting. The point is that this is the process by which we fix atmospheric nitrogen and therefore make nitrogenous fertilisers which feed quite a lot of the world. Of course this approach has led us on to things like GM. On the right hand side we see what I call the Google burger just because it's the first lab-grown meat and it was actually funded by Google, pioneered in Maastricht in the Netherlands and now coming to a supermarket near you via Tyson and other major meat producers pretty soon. Good luck with that. And on the bottom strand we have if you like again an opposing trend. This is actually the 1970s. You know the idea that we have to actually start working back with nature again. Organic, I don't have to tell you what that is. It's about working with the soil, with nature and ideas like the chef Dan Barber in the United States who's saying instead of kind of saying I fancy eating chicken and chips tonight who can give me chicken and chips. You kind of go out to the landscape and you say what can the landscape grow, I'll eat that. So it's kind of turning that question on its head again to opposing trends. Now these actually as it turns out map on to also to opposing strands of philosophy. On the top we have a quote from Rob Reinhart. Rob Reinhart invented silent. The kind of food substitute I just showed you. This is Rob Reinhart worrying about something as simple as food in the digital age is weird. OK, so we've evolved beyond this. Come on food we can just sort this out. That's that's Rob for you and and silent is his product. On the bottom we have Epicurus. Now you may have heard of Epicurianism. It's a kind of term that's quite common in our world. It means gourmet and somebody who really appreciates good food. Actually this is a complete misunderstanding of what Epicurus was really saying. In fact he says the opposite. This is very often the case with philosophers I find. They're totally misunderstood. Basically self-sufficiency is freedom. What Epicurus is saying is we have to eat and actually satisfying hunger is the biggest pleasure we're ever going to get as humans. So let's eat and enjoy it. So it's a kind of opposite end. Again it's let's embrace the necessary and get pleasure out of it. So two opposing strands of philosophy. Now embedded in all of this as you may already have noticed is a kind of relationship with technology question. What is our relationship with technology? The answer is it's completely disassemblable. We wouldn't be here without technology. I mean I have a laser pointer here so watch it. But on the other hand we've been using technology for at least three and a half million years. And this is a technology that arguably is the most fundamental to how we've evolved as a species. Because it was with the control of fire maybe 1.8 million years ago that humans first kind of took the whole business of how to eat up to a whole new level. Not only because fire allowed them to control the landscape and to start burning certain areas down to the ground to increase grazing areas for wild animals. But also of course because they could cook. And therefore this made hunting a much better proposition because you could risk hunting because if you came back unsuccessful the women focus it turns out would have cooked some tubers for you. You can fill up on cows easily and go out the next day. So if you like you hunt I cook is the oldest social contract in history. It's also the basis of our economy. It's also been remarkably resilient as many of us know. But also the fire is the beginning of the home of society. The sharing out of the hunt was the beginning of economy and language. The shared meal I would argue is the most sophisticated economy that human species has ever come up with because we share really well through food. So there is no human life without technology. And of course over time we've got better and better. We've invented cleverer and cleverer ways of feeding ourselves. So we moved on from hunting and gathering to farming. You know we're plowing the land. I think David might have something to say about that shortly. We've invented the internal combustion engine which means we can use tractors and so on. This has kind of evolved us. We've kind of moved the problem of how to eat down a line where it's appeared to get easier. And we think of this as progress and we call it progress because we've gone from living in the lard or as I call it. I.e. just living somewhere where there's food and plucking it off trees and then moving on when we've eaten everything. I kind of follow the food type existence to living in artificial landscapes that we've created and that we enrich and that we actually sit on top of that provide our food otherwise known as a farm. And eventually to living in these things called cities where actually you don't tend to feed yourself at all. Somebody else does it magically for you. Hurrah! That's all marvellous. And what's interesting is what we actually do all day has shifted of course with this progressive approach to feeding ourselves. So hunter-gatherers don't have any concept of work because all they do all day is kind of solve the problems of life and of course how to eat is the major one they have to solve. So there's no need to kind of divide the day up into work and something else. They just kind of do stuff. And they seem to be very happy by the way. Then of course there's a whole set of actions and crafts and skills that come along with farming that we tend now to think of as a little bit arcane because actually surely anybody who could choose to sit at a desk pumping away at a computer would choose that rather than stirring cheese in a smelly old cabin, wouldn't they? Or would they? And the interesting thing about this vision of progress of excluding the human, of ditching skill etc. is that this as we all know is the next step along the line. Great, they look actually really happy so that's I'm very happy for the robots. The question of what we're all going to be doing all day is quite interesting at this point. And of course the other thing is that actually by slugging down food that we don't work to produce and that we don't really know what's in it is not leading us all to look like gorgeous blondes wandering around college campuses sadly. As we know the end result looks a lot more like this. This is an amazing film called Wally. I don't know if any of you know it. Basically Planet Earth is totally destroyed. Humans are living in a kind of bubble in space. Elon Musk bear witness. There are two factor walks that are on kind of flotation lilos. They're staring into screens and they're slugging on whatever. So this robot called Wally is very worried about humanity. Rightly so. And of course as we know the world is turning into a hamburger. Why? Because well you know this is a whole lecture in itself but essentially the reason is we've evolved this kind of food which is kind of lowest common denominator food which has salt sugar and fat in it and our brains can't resist it you know because some trigger goes off because in the nature you don't get salt sugar and fat all in one food item and we kind of go into lockdown and we just turn into Homer Simpson and can't stop. And of course the other thing to say is this huge amount of embedded power in this kind of food. So it's kind of bad for us and it's bad for the planet is the essence of that. Now it's not going well. And I think at this point it's very interesting to as it revisit the question that we began with i.e. how are we going to eat in the future. And this is a wonderful architect, British architect called Cedric Price. Actually he hardly builds anything because he was too busy thinking. Doing and thinking do they go together discuss. But anyway he's a fantastic philosopher and he asks this question. He said technology is the answer but what was the question. And I think we've forgotten to ask this question in our rush to solve the problem of living. And the question of course is what is a good life. Now we wouldn't be the first people to ask that of course. In fact the first people to ask this systematically with the Greeks. His Aristotle with his ethics. And Aristotle is really interesting because he says what is the primary function of a human. And he says well what humans can do that no other animal can do is think to reason. So he says surely the primary function of the human ought to be to maximize our capacity to think. And just balance our lives out so that you know we're just cruising along nicely through the seas of life. So it's kind of a very nice calm vision. And interestingly it extends out beyond the human as well. So Aristotle famously called us political animals. He said there's no such thing as a good life lived individually. You can only understand a good human life if it's lived in the context of society. And therefore any solution has to be political. Now I find this term very very fascinating because on the one hand it tells us that we have a fundamental duality as humans when we're trying to solve the problem of how to live. Because we need society because we're political but we need nature because we're animals. And this means that the idea that humans can never be urban is a kind of misconception because we may live in cities to be near each other but the more we crowd together to be political or social guess what the further and further away we get from our sources of sustenance. Now for Aristotle and Plato in fact the key was you had to keep your food close. So Athens was a polis as most ancient cities were which meant it was a kind of concentrated blob of urbanities surrounded by productive farmland essentially. Not that productive again as David wrote in one of his books but productive enough. And for both Plato and Aristotle the ideal was that every citizen would have a house in the city and a farm in the countryside and the farm would feed the house. And this is called economia household management from Ecos the house and nomos management. Does that remind you of any modern words we have? Okay it's the basis of our word for economics which is kind of ironic because Aristotle went on to say the ideal for any state is to be totally self-sufficient. So lots of citizens with houses and lots of farms would make the state self-sufficient. And he actually went as far as to say self-sufficiency is both the end and perfection of the state. Now he warned against this other evil thing called crematistic care which was the making of money for its own sake and he said you can never find peace or balance in this because you can never have enough money so you can never find balance. Now most cities followed the Athenian model but of course one city famously blew the trend all together out of the water of Rome, had a million citizens by the first century AD. Of course it didn't feed itself from its local hinterland, au contraire. In fact you may have heard of the term food miles and you might think it's a modern phenomenon, it's not. The only way you could have fed a city the size of Rome in those days was to have access to the sea because it was 50 times cheaper to bring the food in over water than over land. They sequentially conquered Sardinia, Sicily, Carthage and Egypt, very prime grain producing regions and then those became the super tankers of the day. And the politicians were involved in feeding the people as well. Glancing at this and in fact I mean I would love to have an hour to chat to you about Rome now and again David I know knows all about this. They're sucking nutrients out of the vast area that are never going back into the soil in essence, I'll leave it at that. Anyway Rome eventually collapsed and it was about a thousand years before they started trying to build cities again in Europe and when they did, guess what they went back to the economia model, the city state and this is my favourite image in the world when I'm talking about food and cities because it sums up not only the essential balance that's critical to all civilisations between the city and the countryside but the fact that this is an allegory of the effects of good government. In other words it doesn't happen on its own, you actually have to want this to happen and make it happen. Now of course as we know today we don't look out of the window and see olive groves and vineyards that feed us sadly. What we have instead is a situation more like this where the landscapes that feed us could be thousands of miles away. So food is out of sight and out of mind and I call this the urban paradox because as I said earlier although we think of ourselves as urban we still need something that looks a bit like that or ideally does not look like that to feed us but of course we don't see it because food has become invisible and it became invisible principally about 200 years ago when this thing was invented because up to now the geography of a city had determined how big it could grow, the ease of getting the food in with the coming of the railways all of a sudden you can basically build cities any size, any place and anywhere and two other critical things happen as well. Food becomes invisible because it's now travelling down specialist logistical routes and last but not least politicians who here the two have had some control over the food system, give it over to the food industries and we're still living with the consequences of that. So stuff starts to happen like this, this was the American Midwest before the railways came along within 10 years it looked like pretty much that. So it goes from being grassland, being raised by bison to being a multicultural grain production by the way a mass slaughter for far along the way. So landscapes are transformed at a scale never before seen, there was a global grain glut for the first time in history, what do you do with grain if there's more than you can eat, you feed it to cattle, what does that produce, a thing called cheap meat and by the way we're biologically programmed to want to eat meat so that's another added complication in the mix. This is the Chicago Union stockyards who kind of pretty much pioneered a lot of the elements of the modern food system. And in fact this whole invention of cheap food is an illusion and that's really what I guess I want to get across to you is that society, our economy, our politics is all based on an illusion that cheap food exists but if you look at the externalities of food, the degradation of soil, emissions, climate change emissions, use of water, what it's doing to our health systems and our bodies, eutrophication except for on-offs from fertiliser going into lakes, the waste of food because we don't value it, the feeding of grain to animals rather than eating it directly, the amount of calories we're spending for every calorie consuming and of course as we all know imminent mass extinction as a result of the use of pesticides and climate change. So cheap food doesn't exist. And really this is what we need to think about when we look at the stuff that we eat and this is a brilliant book I highly recommend called Hungry Planet where two journalists from New York Times just went around the world photographing families of the weeks worth of food and said, what do you eat, who cooks, do you eat together and then set that alongside a whole load of stats about life expectancy, number of McDonald's and the vicinity and so on. And of course what we discover from this is that again the question of how we should eat is really the question of how we should live and I don't think those two questions are very far apart and when you think that food consists of living things that we kill in order to live it becomes fairly obvious that there could never be such a thing as cheap food because if you're going to call food cheap, you're actually calling life cheap. So we have a set of options for how to eat. We can either have cows eating grass which we can't and have beautiful landscapes or we can have CAFOs, concentrated animal feeding operations where the animals eating grain are getting sick by the way because they're not designed to eat grain. Walking around in their own poo being pumped full of antibiotics and which is giving us another health crisis in the wings. Do we animate public space in the city by going to buy food and meeting a human or do we externalise the problem and just go to a box outside the city and speak to a kind of bleeping machine or indeed do we just dial up a curry on our delivery iPhone? And do we actually meet together round a table to eat which is how humanity evolved or do we just kind of eat on our way to doing something more important? And when I tell you that 20% of meals eaten in America now are estimated to be eaten in a car just gives you some idea of the really weird place we've got to basically because this is how you learn how to converse, to listen, to share as I say to be a member of society. So the question really is not how should we eat in the future but what is our vision of a good life in future and which of these choices actually feeds into that. Now when you look at utopian thinking actually it turns out this is not a new idea. In fact many utopians bang on and on about food they just don't kind of have food dead centre. So Plato and Aristotle as I said worried about the size the city should grow so that it could be self-sufficient. Thomas More suggested London should be really replaced by a series of semi-independent city-states going back to that idea and Ebenezerhau's Garden city idea is really Thomas More with railways in essence. It's actually trying to broach the urban paradox and to give us a way of living as political animals that gives us one foothold in society and one foothold in nature. But the trouble with utopia is it doesn't exist. It's an ideal and in fact it's a joke word and I remember being really upset by this when I was researching utopia because I'd quite like to have a vision of a good life we can actually live. Which was why I invented this word sitopia. It just means food place. We live in a sitopia. We live in a world where our bodies, our homes, our landscapes, our cities, our economies, politics, bodies, ways of thinking even are shaped by food. But because food is so ubiquitous it's too big to see. We can't see it. What happens if we take food from as it were here and stick it here? And the answer is a lot. We discover that there's no such thing as a silver bullet. You can't solve the problem of life by inventing a sludge. And I find it very amusing that as soon as they've done that people start saying could we have strawberry flavour and chocolate flavour? In other words they're trying to turn it back into food again. That wasn't the point guys. We have to work with complexity and no silver bullets especially with nature. We are part of nature and we have to respect it. Luckily I've got David following me. He'll tell you all about the importance of working with soil. So I can skip merrily along my way. The other thing is it's also about a good life. Remember those robots? What are we going to be doing all day? If we value food, if we really put food back at the centre of our lives again and pay for it, then guess what? Instead of cheese looking like this, I promise you this is what British cheese looked like in 1970. I'm not even exaggerating. We can have this. That's lots and lots of happy farmers and happy cows and happy landscapes and happy eaters. And it comes down to Carlo Petrini's idea of co-producing. Instead of sitting there like kind of blobs, checking out Deliveroo and just letting it waft like a magic carpet through our window, we can actually go out and meet the farmers. We have a community supported agriculture farm, food co-ops, food boxes, gorilla gardening and so on. We become active in the food system. We can make space for food in the city again. We can do urban growing on roofs. We can embed it in our politics. We can make space for farmers markets. We need infrastructure to join the city to the countryside, food hubs, patchwork farms. You can't feed a city from within itself. That's the urban paradox. Bringing food into the city again brings nature back into the city and it enables us to reconnect with this beautifully powerful magical thing which is the growing of food and nature. In terms of food planning, which is a new discipline, they drop the ball for 200 years, it's coming back. It's what I call maximising the urban rural interface. Instead of just clustering in cities and letting the food come from some random space we don't know about, we don't have ways, not just with the city state, but also, for example, Patrick Geddes' plan of conserving countryside, so the city evolved in a star shape, post-fitting the city with productive agriculture, that's the continuous productive urban landscape, assessing the productivity of a region and saying how can we maximise the connection that's the sort of study done of New York, or embedding food in our planning processes. This is a really interesting scheme in Almera, where you get a house, but you also get a farm, and it's really successful. To go back to these two competing philosophies I began with, I'm kind of with him. I think food is our great opportunity to come up with a good life that is fit for the 21st century where pleasure is not something that you just have to buy in the form of some commodity, but we can actually engage primarily with nature again with one another, with making and with valuing what it does take to support our lives. Most importantly of all, and this is something that Epicurus had an amazing insight on, you don't need much for a happy life. You need good food, you need shelter, you need safety, and you need companionship and friendship. You can do it all around food made with love and shared with people you love. This for me is the best metaphor for society by the way. It's a society in which everybody eats well because we share really well through food and we share really badly through money. So it's about seeing the world through food. This is not just about food, it's about using food as a lens. It's the most powerful, amazing, magical, collaborative tool we have to shape a better world together. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.