 Hello everyone and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast, the bi-weekly meeting where we have in-depth discussions with researchers, policymakers and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our cities, or in other words their resource use and pollution emissions and how to reduce them into a systemic, socially just and context-specific way. I'm your host Aristide from Metabolism of Cities, and on today's episode we will look about one of my newfound loves, urban environmental history. More specifically, today we will talk about how food cycle and the shape of our cities where we're and still are intimately connected. In fact, we don't seem to care that much about it, but every day food travels from around the planet to our plate and we have no idea how. While in the past, the main preoccupation of our cities was to supply enough food for its citizens, else they were riots, today we consider this as granted. As we will see, this happened through a sequence of technical inventions, economic incentives and planning regulations that transformed this urban slash food nexus. To talk about this topic today, we have Caroline Still, an architect, lecturer, speaker and author who has spent the last 20 years investigating the relationship between food and cities. She's the author of two books, Hungry City, How Food Shapes Our Lives and Sidopia, which I enjoyed to read very much, mostly Hungry Cities, and it resonated very much with the topic of urban metabolism research that I enjoy very much through this study, this socio-ecological transition study. Just before keying off this episode, I'd like to make a small request from you. If you like these episodes, please share them around with your colleagues and friends and tell us what you have liked or learned. If you're watching this on YouTube, please make sure to subscribe to our channel and leave a comment with your thoughts. With all that being said, hi, Caroline, and welcome to this podcast. Hi, Ariste, great to be with you. Thanks a lot for being here. Could you perhaps explain a bit the trajectory of an architect becoming a food scientist in a way? Yeah, that's a long one. That's a bit like saying, tell me the story of your life. I'll try to keep it fairly short. I mean, basically, from a very young age, I wanted to be an architect, and I don't know why, by the way, because none of my family are architects. In fact, they're all medical, so it made no sense really. But from a very young age, I was fascinated by buildings. And then I studied architecture at Cambridge, actually. And I would say almost immediately, I began to realize that there was something that interested me about architecture, which wasn't what was being taught to me. So for an obvious reason, architects talk a lot about buildings. They talk about kind of Corinthian columns and gutter details and U-values through walls and all this sort of stuff. And I thought, well, okay, this is all fine. But there was something else for me that began from that point. I was going, oh, but there's something else that I'm interested in, but it's not being talked about. What is it? What is it? And this feeling just grew in me. And to cut an incredibly long story short, I think the reality is that what was missing for me was life. I think what was missing was literally that. And of course, architects, what they're trying to do is build buildings or cities or spaces in which people can thrive. So that is the intention. But buildings are so complicated, and it takes so much to sort of get all the bits right and the kind of air flows and the water flows and whatever it is. I think for me, from quite early on, I sort of thought, well, but what about actually us? What about our relationship with the buildings? And of course, I'm post-rationalizing all of this. But anyway, I think that's basically what it was. Now, for the moment I started feeling that, which is probably when I was about 18 years old, to the moment that I had the idea of writing about a city through the lens of food, which was when I was 40 years old, you can see this was a long time. And it was like an illness in me. It was like a sort of a burning thing that became stronger and stronger and stronger. And of course, during that period, I qualified as an architect. I started teaching architecture and urban design. I actually was a Rome scholar. I went to Rome. And in my study and in my work, very often, I would put food into either my students' projects. I would give them food related things to design. Or when I went to Rome, I actually studied the market area. And looking back, I think I was drawn to food because it was where life was. You know, if there's a market or something, there's going to be lots of people around. And if you're studying a kind of historical area, then it's the market where you're going to have evidence of daily life being led rather than just a which emperor, one which battle, one sort of thing, which is the kind of history that just caused me rigid. Again, long story short, I then went to teach at the London School of Economics. Actually, I was the first design convener of the city's program there. And this was kind of heavenly for me because, you know, I had the first time sociologists, anthropologists, traffic people, housing people, economists, and so on, all talking about the city in one room. And this is what I've been missing was the sort of a much broader discourse about what the city was and all the rest of it. But even then, I found that people were still stuck in their silos, you know, and the politicians thought, thought like politicians and the architects thought like architects and so on and so on. So it's actually after I was the LSE and it was in conversation with a colleague of mine from there called Roda Zagolovich. And I was really desperate by this point because I knew I was so close to something but I couldn't feel what it was. It's actually in a conversation with him. I actually propositioned him, I said, let's write a book together about cities. And we were chatting and during that conversation, and this was April 2000, by the way, I had the idea suddenly how would it be if you were to describe a city through the lens of food. And this was just like the biggest light bulb of my life going off. And I still now, even now I get, you know, chicken skin when I tell this story because it was just huge. I knew instantly, okay, this is my thing. This is what I've been searching for. And of course food had been there for years and architecture had been there for years, but I hadn't been able to put these things together. And I literally almost ran out of the room, you know, that moment when I knew and started working. Pen and your paper, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it was just like, oh my God, this is my thing at last, you know. And then I began working immediately. I mean, that that week, I joined the London Library, I typed the word food into the subject index, I took the first 10 books out that came up. Very luckily for me, the very first book I read was a wonderful book called The Culture of Food by Massimo Montanari, which is just a wonderful book. And I was so excited. And within a week, I had the structure of Hungry City, which as you know, is the journey of food through the city because I'm an architect. So I think spatially, I think in terms of, you know, sort of what I can see. And, and really also within a week, roughly, I thought, um, hang on a minute, you know, asking the question of how do you feed a city is a bit like saying, what is civilization? You know, this is an absolutely huge question. And I'm not qualified to ask this question, you know, let alone answer it, you know. So I had this weird thing then, and that's never left me of why is it me asking this? You know, why, you know, I think I just said to you, you know, sort of I thought there must be a whole section in the library about this. And I was looking desperately, do you have a section on feeding cities and people would look at me and know what are you talking about? You know, and it's just the weirdest thing. And so the whole way through writing Hungry City, which took seven years, by the way, because it's a big subject. I'm, I'm a slow writer and researcher, obviously as well. I thought I had this dual feeling of I found my thing. I found my thing at last, but also who am I to do this? It's so huge. And that, as I say, has never left me that feeling. It's still with me now, except I've been doing it now for 22 years. Nobody seems to stop me. You know, and I think actually maybe only an architect with a kind of brain like, like I have. So I have what I call a cloud brain, you know, so I don't remember fact very easily. I see things spatially and I see connections. It's all like a big cloud in my head. And I think that is why the enormity of the subject never scared me. You know, I had the journey of food, as I say, from the beginning as my structure. So I knew what that was. And of course, I remember the day, I mean, literally it's going to make you laugh. But I remember the day when I thought, oh, oh God, I don't know anything about farming. You have to learn about farming, you know, it's just this kind of the craziness of it, you know, but of course, I needed to learn about farming and everybody needs to learn about farming. And it just, it took its own course. But of course, every time I came across something like that, I knew where in the book it should go. But and that was the value of having, as I say, this structure from the beginning is it was never like, oh, where do I put, you know, table manners or where do I put a beast? Actually, obesity was interestingly difficult because that could could either go in the eating chapter or the waste chapter, because in a way, obesity is a form of waste, you could say anyway, anyway. I'm talking a lot, but you know, it was an extraordinary thing. As I say, it's an extraordinary transformation in my life. And that is the short version I just skated by the way. Of course, of course, we're talking about the 20 year old. Yeah, indeed. But that's kind of how it happened in a way. Yeah, so for the ones that haven't read the book, there are seven chapters, if I remember well, starting from the land supplying the city, the market and the supermarket, the kitchen, at table, waste and sitopia. And over there. So it's funny because you say this is an architect approach of taking things, but if you were environmental engineer, probably you would have taken the same elements or the same processes to study. If you were an urban environmental historian, you would have probably taken the same one. So it's funny how even if I think, even if you say this is from an architect point of view, I mean, I don't read it and see architecture, let's say hints in it. So let's say if we want to develop this and describe a bit this extremely complex relationship between food and cities. And you go through these life cycle stages of food through cities. And you also provide a historical element to it, a bit like Brodell does in his old books. I love Brodell. I mean, you know, what I hear is amazing. Amazing. I use those books a lot. Incredible books. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, correct. I mean, it seems like a staple to have someone describe what civilization was over centuries, right? But we don't have this element. So I'm wondering how do you like to start off or how do you start off this complex relationship? Do you start it by a figure, by a statistic, by how do you begin to explain this complex relationship? Yeah, the enormity of this. There are so many ways of doing this. I mean, actually my most, my favorite most recent way of saying it is that in a bowl of soup or a bowl of pasta or it doesn't matter, any bowl of food in front of you is the universe. It's really that simple and that complex. Because if you think about what goes into a bowl of soup, there are vegetables. What are vegetables? Well, they're living things. They've evolved over thousands, possibly millions of years. They've grown somewhere. They've grown in a landscape. What was that landscape like? What was the soil like? Who grew those vegetables? Were they farmers? Were they producers? Did they work in a shed? Did they work in a field? Were they paid enough? Who paid them to bring the leeks and potatoes, whatever it is? How did it get from wherever it was to the city? How was it kept fresh? Was it chilled? Was it gassed? Was it driven? Did it go on a ship or a train or a plane? Where did it end up? When did it change hands? When did money change hands? Who paid who and when and who got the profit? And how was it grown anyway? Did they use machines? Did they use oil? Did they use their hands? Did they use hose? Did they use tractors? Did they use horses? What technologies were used? What skills were used? What culture was used? Who decided to grow these things at the first place? And then here they come. Did you cook it yourself? Did you go to a market? Did you meet other humans when you bought these, the leeks or potatoes, whatever it was? Or did you go to a supermarket? Or did somebody deliver it to you? And what does all that mean? And then why did you decide to cook this in the first place? What is your culture? Did you value it? How much did you pay for it? Is it organic? Is it not organic? Did it destroy the soil or nurture the soil? And then how did you cook it? Did you have a saucepan? Was it a nice one? Who made it? Who designed that saucepan? What gas did you use? What energy did you start with a wooden spoon? Where did the wood come from? It just goes on and on and on. And then there's the soup. Did you eat it on your own? Did you eat it with someone else? Did you have a nice conversation while you ate the soup? Was it cooked with love? Did somebody else cook it for you? Was it your parent, your friend or whatever? And then did you eat all of it? And if not, where's the waste going to go? And is the waste going to go back in the cycle again? And by the way, who made the bowl that you ate the soup out of? What was the bowl made of? Was it made of ceramics? Was it made out of metal? Who made that? Who designed that? It goes on, it goes on. And then, you know, so this is what I say. It's sort of, if you think about food, food is us. I mean, by the time you're about 25 years old, there are no atoms in your body that you were born with. All the atoms in your body are food you've eaten. We are literally made of the meals that we've eaten in our lives. So that slightly blows my mind. And, you know, we know what you are, what you eat, but it's actually at a more profound level than we realize. And, you know, our connection to the world is through food, you know, it's a physical connection. So basically, when I eat my leek and potato soup that I'm just using as an example, I am literally eating nature. I'm eating a landscape. I'm eating a piece of the living world. And by the way, that was a living thing, that leek or potato was a living being that somebody killed on my behalf so that I can live. So food, that chain is the chain of life, you know, which is of course why there is no such thing as cheap food. So we are indeed talking about because, you know, to cheapen food is to cheapen life. So, and, you know, of course, at a certain level, as I say, you know, the sort of microbes in this soup that we will never even know what half of them are probably. But, you know, those came directly from the soil. You know, they then end up in our gut. They're part of the plants immune system that becomes part of our immune system. And there's an amazing sort of synergies between our microbiome and the plant's rhizosphere, you know, and we're only just learning about this stuff by the way. And I get much more interested, you know, when they invent these new microscopes that can just look sort of closer and closer at what's going on, you know, in us and in our world. And I do about, of course, it's exciting to be able to see the big bang as well. But, you know, just in an exactly analogous way, just as we're getting better and better at sort of seeing into the distant past in the universe, we're getting better and better at seeing into the essence of life on earth. And, you know, so that is food to me food is life. It's all of life. And and and you can and the beautiful thing is even though it's unbelievably complex, we understand it intuitively because we all eat because we wouldn't be here if we didn't eat. So that bowl of soup or pasta or whatever it is that you know intuitively because you've eaten it many times in your life, the universe is in that bowl of soup. So this is the power of food as a way of thinking. It's just a phenomenal medium for understanding connectivity and value and everything you need to really know about is in that bowl of soup. But in in your work, you go a step further. So you don't only look at the relationship of human civilization and food, you also look at cities and their relationship with food. And it's kind of more or less we can guess that you say that the birth of cities coincides with the birth of agriculture. Yes. And and it's whenever you think about it, you kind of think is this a chicken or egg situation? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, by the way, you know, I just read an amazing book that I think everyone who's interested in these kinds of issues would really enjoy reading. It's called The Dawn of Everything. It's by the late lamented David Graver, who some people might know from his amazing work on debt, for example, and also on bullshit jobs. I mean, you know, it's just his tragic that he died last year. But anyway, he's he's left a lot of amazing work behind. You know, what's amazing about that book is that what it really tells you about is is the fact that, you know, things, things like cities evolved over time and and activities like agriculture of all time, but they didn't necessarily do them in the same place at the same time. You know, so there's an incredible complexity that, you know, out of, I mean, what I will describe as a 10,000 year period, let's say roughly, of people experimenting with agriculture and experimenting with living in static settlements that may or may not have been fed to a lesser or greater degree by a thing that we might call farming. You know, we do arrive at a point where you get large enough settlements that actually the only way of feeding be through a form of farming. So for example, you know, I live in London, you know, there's no way that you could feed a city the size of London through hunting and gathering. I mean, this is sort of blindingly obvious. So, you know, we have reached this point. And, you know, I think there's a sort of there's a key moment in the fertile crescent and elsewhere in the world, by the way, but, you know, it seems to have happened first in the fertile crescent, which is, you know, so cool because it's, you know, fertile and crescent shaped an area of the ancient Near East, where many plants and animals were domesticated for the first time. And the interesting thing about domestication is that, you know, if you think about a wild plant that you might just kind of, you know, we all kind of maybe I'm in England, you know, we still eat black grids, that's probably the only foraging anybody does anymore, you know, you sort of pick a blackberry on the way that happens to be on the side of the road. But I mean, a wild plant doesn't need us, it just gets on with its life, basically. Whereas when you start to domesticate a plant, what happens is that you start to select plants for certain characteristics, and it's probably things like bigger fruit or bigger seed or, you know, more edible bits, shall we say. But the more that you select for those kind of more edible plants, the less the plant tends to keep its own natural defensive systems. And the comes a point where it when it's domesticated, when it relies on us. And that's the point where our relationship with food basically completely changes because, and there's a brilliant term that I absolutely love in Dawn of everything of the book I did, where they talk about play farming. So they say for about 3000 years, you know, in the fertile crescent, people understood about domestication, they had the techniques to do it, but they chose not to do it. Now, why could that possibly be? And the answer is, well, once you domesticated a plant or indeed an animal, it relies on you, you have to feed, you have to water it, you have to protect it. And critically, you have to stay next to it, you know, you can't just wander off. So I think there's something very, very fascinating here about, you know, our evolving relationship with the plants and the animals that we eat, which is that we make them sort of suit us better by domesticating them, but then they rely on us. And this alters the way we live. So we go from being, shall we say, predominantly sort of wandering people, you know, most hunter gatherers, one, I mean, some have semi static settlements, but you know, or they stay encamped in a particular place for a certain amount of time. But generally, you're not stuck in any one place you can wander off if you want to, you know, and what changes with farming or, you know, sort of proper farming, as I would call it, you know, farming where it's to do domesticated crops, and actually, you know, sort of watering, protecting and all the rest of it, you have to stay by the food. So you get stuck. Now, the advantage of this, of course, is that, you know, you evolve sources of food like grain, for example, which are very easy to produce, well, easy is the wrong word, which is possible to produce with a lot of hard work and skill. Quite a lot of, in fact, more than your local population needs. And we actually see this with the first cities, for example, you know, in ancient Mesopotamia, settlements that are complex enough that everybody agrees they can be called proper cities. Those cities very rapidly got to the point where they were able to grow more grain than their population needed. And that was great. Then they began exporting it. So you're almost from the very beginning, you start to get food trade, you know, and amazingly, you know, Sumerian cities like Eurica and Ur and so on, they were exporting grain as far as India, you know, 2000 years, BC sort of thing. So I mean, it's really phenomenal that immediately that you get the evolution of cities, and as you say, the co-evolution of agriculture and cities, which although complicated is nevertheless a thing, and absolutely grain is the food of cities. And that's a very important take away when you come on to talking about, for example, industrial meat, you know, and what that, you know, the impact of that ecologically. It immediately becomes a money making operation, as well as a feeding a population operation is what I'm saying, you know, and then you start to get a very interesting political division between cities that struggle to feed themselves, and, you know, like Paris, for example, and cities that don't struggle to feed themselves like London, and that becomes, you know, a very, very powerful shape of politics. Because basically, you know, if you have access to the sea in the ancient world, then you can generally feed yourself easily because, of course, the feeding cost about producing enough food, it's also about transporting the food to the city. And in the ancient world, the sea or water was how you did that. It's estimated to have been 42 times cheaper to transport over water than over land, or by sea than over land, which, of course, is why, you know, how it was possible, for example, for a city like Rome, to grow to the size that it did because it just expanded its empire to include, you know, the whole of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the North Atlantic, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, you're always talking about geography, you know, when you're talking about the sort of evolution of cities, you're talking about a lot of things immediately, of course, because I've already mentioned politics, I've already mentioned economy, I've already mentioned trade, you know, you're talking about everything always with food. But the critical thing, absolutely, is that you cannot have a city without countryside. And this is, you know, something that those of us who live in cities and think of ourselves as urban, as you said in your introduction, who just, you know, dial up a curry at two in the morning and it arises if by magic. We might not necessarily think about, but somewhere, you know, wherever there's a city, there is a productive hinterland that may or may not be visible that is feeding it. And it's often, by the way, about 100 times bigger than the city, obviously, depending on the density of the city. But yeah, and I call this the urban paradox, by the way, the paradox being that as political animals, which is a sort of term that Aristotle used, you know, there's a sort of inherent duality in us now that we live in cities. Because if you think about a hunter-gatherer, I call it living in the larder, they literally live in a world that directly feeds them. Whereas if we live in a city, you know, we need sustenance that comes from a place that we even know exists or may not have any consciousness of at all. And so the paradox is how do we create, you know, access for political animals to, you know, politics, which refers to society, the fact that we need to live together. We are social animals, but we're also animals, which means we need access to nature. So it's how to square those two things, how to give us access to society and nature, or if you like city and country, which is a very, very ancient question. I mean, it actually goes back to the beginning of us having lived in cities. So we've been asking this question, shall we say, for five thousand years, without necessarily finding all the answers? You have a, yeah, indeed, that was one of the questions I had, this duality between city and country. Well, there is the romantic side of countryside. There is the barbaric side of countryside. There is the productive side of countryside. So there is so many elements about how we see, well, productive hinterlands, as you called them, but also the place where some aristocrats also have a secondary home for some, yeah, for some cases. Yeah. I mean, this is something that interests me a lot. So obviously, as you say, there's a huge amount to say about the countryside. I mean, probably the sort of the primary thing to say about the countryside is that it's an urban construction. And, you know, it's really modified nature. And it's something, you know, it's an artificial landscape, if you like, which is modified in order to feed the city. So there's always a sort of unevenness in the relationship between the city and the country from the beginning, because the power and the narrative and the money all tend to reside in the city. So even though we have, you know, wonderful examples like the incredible Ambrogio, Lawrence Seti, Fresco that I always talk about in Siena about, you know, the relationship between the city and the countryside, which is obviously ideal and is a utopian ideal. In fact, the power has always resided in the city. And that's, of course, always been one of the issues, you know, through history, if you like, is that, you know, although there's a theoretical partnership between city and country, and certainly a lot of economists and politicians talk about it as a partnership. And of course, the countryside benefits from the existence of the city, because it can make goods for the city, you know, and Adam Smith writes about this, for example, you know, that even though the sort of the city doesn't actually produce raw materials or energy, it does manufacture. And, you know, this is the basis of the economy, for example. But I think we know where most of the money tended to end up. And of course, that sort of imbalance between city and country side has only got greater over time. And as the sort of, you know, as I say, if you look at, again, at that Lorenzetti fresco, which shows Sienna and it just shows the landscape that feeds Sienna together. And it's, you know, it's an extraordinary image. You know, today, of course, we don't look out of our windows and see the landscapes that feed us. And this, of course, is a huge issue. And because it means that we are both physically and mentally separated from this necessary other half of our urban lives. And of course, as we know, as that distance has grown greater, so has the artificialization of the landscape, you know, so I often show in another image, sorry, I'm trying to give you a lecture without slides now, but you know, I often show another lecture of that incredible shot that you have of a Brazilian soil field, you know, with this kind of phalanx of I'm sure lots of people have seen it, you know, phalanx of combine harvesters, you know, guided by a drone, you know, and often there's a phalanx of sea drills coming behind, you know, so the land gets half an hour of downtime before it gets re-sewn, you know, we know that this is completely unsustainable over time, you know, and again, I come back to this thing of, you know, the artificiality of cheap food, the fact that we've chosen to create the illusion that there is such a thing as cheap food, whereas in fact there is not, there can never be, because as I say, food is life. So yes, the countryside's urban construction, I mean, in Hungry City I write about the way, you know, you go through periods in history when urban people, they start to fantasize about the countryside and you get all these kind of pastoral traditions, I mean, particularly interestingly, I find it's hilarious actually, it's happening again now of course, but you know, usually at times when some quite vicious agricultural transformation is taking place, and I say vicious because it usually means pushing people off the land so you can be more quote-unquote efficient in how you farm, you know, so for example, this is what happened, you know, with the English, explicitly English agricultural revolution was that you had enclosure, land enclosure, and the peasants were all pushed off the land, but of course they needed the peasants to go and work in the factories shortly afterwards because the agricultural revolution was followed by the industrial revolution. But at the same time that's going on in the city, you get this kind of, you know, these paintings of this beautiful bucolic scenes and you know, people are kind of having picnics, you know, sort of under the trees and birds tweeting and wearing everything, and you get this sort of really weird sort of cognitive dissonance about sort of the fantasy of the countryside that, you know, city people like to have and the reality and there's always been a mismatch between those two things and of course today we see it because we know, for example, if you buy, you know, a liter of milk or something, you will have a happy cow on it, you know, with grass and of sun shining and everything, but we know that the vast majority of the cows that produce our milk never go outdoors, you know, they live their whole lives inside. So again, the sort of the fantasy that we want to have about the countryside and the reality are often very different and of course this allows the, if you like, the sort of the degradation of the countryside to take place because we just don't see it. You know, it's terrible to sort of to invoke the Ukraine war that's going on at the moment in this sense, but you know, you can see that if people are given a certain story, as in people in Russia are told, you know, they're given nothing but propaganda, they just don't see it and actually we're also fed propaganda about food the whole time. Even, you know, even with total access to the internet, you know, if there's a strong enough cultural narrative that things are a particular way, most people choose to believe it because it's more comfortable and, you know, most people just want to get on with their lives, you know, and those people don't want to spend their entire time like you do and I do worrying about the world and trying to find out what's really going on. You know, it's a sort of, it's a kind of state of mind you might even call a sickness that most people don't have. So I would say there's a sort of, there's a narrative that's a bit like propaganda about what food is and how it's made that is, that conceals the truth. Yeah, I mean, we had a previous episode, this was in French on the urban rural relationships and how mainly, of course, they're predictive in terms that the city takes rather than gives back. But I'm wondering how did we go about this? Because beforehand, we knew the value of food. If food was not supplied, it meant civil unrest, it meant, you know, empires clashing. It's still dollars, by the way. You're right, you're right. That's what's interesting. You know, that hasn't gone away. We pretend it's gone away. But I mean, even during lockdown, you know, I mean, I'm ashamed of my own country, but you know, the things that people were literally fighting each other over were things like cans of tomatoes and dried spaghetti because, you know, this is in Britain, but nobody really cooks. You know, so there were grown men wrestling grannies to the ground for the last, you know, packet of spaghetti. I mean, you know, and that's when there wasn't even a food shortage, because actually there were plenty of fresh vegetables left, but people didn't didn't know what to do with this. So, so, yes, I mean, sorry, I interrupted you. But, but no, absolutely. I mean, I write a lot in the book, as you say, about the fact that, you know, that the value of food was well understood in history. And this is because, you know, it's, it's availability was extremely precarious always, you know, and, you know, I mean, I remember being astonished when I read that, you know, one in three harvests in Europe used to fail. This is in the early modern period, you know, so I mean, just think about it, you know, and, of course, this then becomes, I don't know whether you want to talk more about the whole Paris London thing. But, you know, I mean, Paris always struggled to feed itself, because the Senate is not navigable. So again, geography, geography becomes politics becomes economics becomes potentially war, and ultimately did become, of course, revolution. You know, the city struggled to feed itself. So it literally went into the countryside and extracted food from, you know, cut rural folk by force to feed itself. This was, as you can imagine, a very popular policy, not. And I mean, you know, you cannot disassociate food from politics. And it's certainly true that, you know, it's with industrialization. And one can absolutely understand why, you know, when I mean, and there's so many things to talk about here, but you know, the railways are critical in this, because of course, what the railways do is they allow food to be transported rapidly over long distances, which to a certain extent, as I put it, emancipates cities from geography for the first time. But you know, also the sort of on the ruthless processing plants. So for example, Chicago, which effectively, you know, pretty much invented the modern food industry in many ways, because it was very strategically placed in the middle of the, the Great West. If you think of all those cowboy movies you used to see with all those great cattle drives, that's Texan longhorns coming up through Texas. They're getting to Chicago, which used to be a depot, because it was at the bottom of the Great Lakes geography yet again. And of course, the the market was the Eastern Seaboard, which is where all the big cities were. But then when the railways came, Chicago immediately became the, you know, the network hub of the, you know, the whole of that, you know, not just the Midwest, but actually ultimately, the whole of the North America. And what happened was, well, let's just make mention the Native Americans who used to live there alongside millions of bison on all of this extraordinary grassland. They got either slaughtered or removed into reservations. The bison were killed. And then this actually became the world's first vast monocultural grain producing region. And for the first time in history, there was more grain than people could eat, you know, I mean, just, just, just millions of acres of the stuff. And so what do you do with grain when there's too much to eat, you feed it to cattle. And this is the beginning of, you know, sort of what we now know is, as basically the predominant, unfortunately, you know, so-called factory farming or the predominant way of producing livestock or rearing livestock globally. And of course, we could be eating the grain. And of course, you know, cattle, we had co-evolved with cows because they can eat grass, and we can't eat grass, but we can drink their milk and we can eat their meat. So, you know, that's, there's a beautiful ecology about our relationship with cattle that got destroyed by this. In fact, there's a wonderful author of the UK called Simon Fairley, who wrote a great book called Meet a Benign Extravagance. And there's a lot of complex argument in it, but what he's basically saying is that we do need meat in the farming system, because basically, sorry, I'm saying lots of different things, but this is the thing about food, they all connect, you know, that's what I love about it. You know, if we want to farm regeneratively, which clearly we do, we have to now, it's beyond choice now, then we need animals in the system, because what regenerative farming does is it mimics what nature does and hello, natural ecosystems have animals in them for a reason, you know, because they're part of the system and because they're great, you know, sort of transmit, you know, they shift the nutrients, they help push the nutrients around the cycle and so on. Anyway, but of course, if you interrupt that, and if you just feed cattle grain that we could easily be eating, I mean, it's just, I mean, Simon Fairley calls it, you know, the greatest ecological catastrophe of our age, basically, because A, we could be feeding, you know, 10 times as many people if we just date the grain directly, B, it makes the cattle sick, you've probably covered this in other episodes, you know, this whole thing, and C, you know, the animals actually have a constant sort of case of indigestion because they weren't designed to eat grain, they'll eat it like really, you know, fast food, you know, but it's not good for them, so we pump them full of antibiotics, so we then have a antibiotic crisis, blah, blah, I mean, it's just insane, basically. Anyway, but this is where all of that was really invented and critically also, interestingly, the chill chain, you know, so I've talked before about, you know, the difficulty of transporting food into the city, basically, it was the Chicago and meatpackers who, you know, they had all this grain pouring into Chicago, they had all these animals that fattening them up amazing, their market's a thousand miles away on the East Coast, because America's a big place, so what do they do, and what they did, and I love this actually, it was a beautiful fact. Gustavo Swift, which is one of the biggest meatpackers in Chicago, he built his own railroad to the East Coast along the edge of the Great Lakes, and they used the lakes to cut ice out during the winter, so he built a series of ice houses along the route, and then he could hang blocks of ice at either end of his rail cars and hang his meatpackers in between, and that basically invented the chill chain, that basically meant that the meat could stay fresh, it could arrive fresh on the East Coast, and then of course, again, he just ruthlessly undercut all the local butchers because he had efficiencies of scale on his side and so on and so on, which of course is another aspect of the modern food industry that was pioneered in Chicago. I can't even remember what we started talking about that ended me up there, but anyway, whatever it was. No, I think the, so it's funny because there are so many parallels to be done with other flows as well, so you mentioned Paris and, and, and how actually it froze a couple of years in a row, and that couldn't, they couldn't transport wood for fuel, and that's precisely also the moment when they start using coal instead of wood, so it's funny how the same story of a mega transition happens due to, as you say, a transportation or an infrastructure, so I'd like to perhaps, if we can summarize this, this orchestration of changes that happen in the 18th to 20th of century, so there, there is a change in fertilizers, there is a change in transportation, there's a change of making food, there's a change of eating habits, everything, everything, I remember, one century or so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean a century and kind of a century and a half, almost getting on for two centuries because for me it begins with the railways actually, which is kind of 1830s, but no, you're absolutely right, I mean, you, you asked me about value actually, I now remember, and it's a really important thing to say is that, you know, in the old days, as you rightly said, you know, people knew the value of food because it was difficult to produce, and what industrialization did effectively, and I've talked about the negative side of it, obviously the positive side of it is that it produced massively more food at costs that were not immediately apparent, but then started to become apparent. So for example, the Midwest turned into the famous dust bowl, you know, because you can't just, you know, change a kind of a grassland that's being, I mean, you know, as I said, nature puts animals in ecosystems for a reason, so the reason there were so many bison grazing the grasslands, you know, of the American Midwest is because, you know, bison nibble the grass, keeps the grass nice and short, they trample the soil with their feet, which keeps the soil nice and stable, and they poo on the land, which keeps it fertile, so that's just a beautiful ecosystem, and of course what regenerative herdsmen are trying to do now is recreate that process, you know, and they move groups of animals around, and it's, and also, you know, animal dung is just a much more available form of nutrition to plants, and you've again probably covered this in other conversations that you've had with other people. Anyway, so, but of course, as I say, it created the illusion of cheap food, which doesn't actually exist, and as you said, fertilizer was another one that came along, so Justus Liebig was this brilliant German chemist, he was the first chemist who, I mean, actually interesting, he was the first person to really look at human nutrition at all, and he was the one who came up with the sort of the broad categories of protein, carbohydrates and fats that we still use today, but he also looked at what plants needed and worked out that, you know, what they predominantly needed was potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen, you know, hence NPK, not necessarily in that order, and of course that was really the beginning of the awareness that, you know, sort of putting artificial chemicals on the soil, I mean, people had done that for centuries, they'd put, you know, guano on the land for centuries without really knowing why, so it was Liebig, who really sort of began to do the chemistry of working out why, but the real game changer was when two other German chemists called Fritz Haber and Karl Bosch, he may have covered in other podcasts as well, on wastewater, so just to give you a context. Fascinating. Well, basically they came up with a way of basically artificially recreating a lightning strike. Now, why would you do that? The reason is that nitrogen is the critical element for plants and most of it is in the air, most of it's in the atmosphere, so there's only two ways that nature can get nitrogen into the ground. One is through leguminous plants, which have special nodules on their roots, which can actually transfer, they can capture the atmospheric nitrogen and turn it into nitrates and so on, and then the plant can take it up, which is why, of course, again for centuries people, you know, sowed leguminous crops, you know, crop rotation that we all started in geography and without understanding what on earth it was all about, you know, it's actually about getting nitrogen in the ground, but the other one is a lightning strike, and that's what the Haber-Bosch process reproduces, and the really mind-bending thing I think is that, and there's a brilliant book by a guy called Vaclav Smil, S-M-I-L, called Enriching the Earth, where you know this book, which he talks about all of this stuff, basically, you know, he estimates that two out of five people would not be on the planet now, were it not for the Haber-Bosch process, so that gives you some idea, and I think the number is even greater now, it may be half, so let's just say somewhere between, you know, sort of 40 and 50 percent of the global population are now fed on a chemical, you know, on the sort of the industrial chemical model, which uses not only fertilizers, artificial fertilizers, but also pesticides and herbicides, because once you're starting to chop chemicals on the land, everything goes out of balance, and this is what organic farming is trying to counter, so I just need to now tell you a little bit about how organic farming works, because it's really, really important to understand, and actually Albert Howard is really the, if Justice Liebich, in a way, is the father of chemical farming, then Albert Howard is the father of modern organic farming, of course, organic farming's the only farming we had until chemical farming came along, but anyway, he was the agronomist, he's an English agronomist, he actually was the first person to really start to understand what goes on in living soil, and what he worked out was that what happened is that the plants roots form living connections with soil fungi in the soil, and plants, of course, as well as we all learned in our biology lessons, and again didn't mean anything, photosynthesis, what does that actually do, creates sugar out of sunlight and water, and what you can do, so the plants can create sugar, which is why they're the basis of the global food system, they feed the sugars to the soil fungi, what can the soil fungi do, they can extract minerals directly from rock, so basically all the micronutrients that both the plants need, and also we need, because of course, plants are the basis of our food system too, are based on living soil and these living connections, and 80% of cultivated plants in the world depend on these connections, now if you imagine what you do when you plough the land every year, is that you break all those connections up and they have to form again, now imagine, this is even more spooky, what happens when you feed those plants, the plant equivalent of fast food, which is a nice little dose of MPK, they don't bother to form those living connections at all, because like feeding your kids McDonald's every day, they think they're full, they think they're well nourished, they're not, so the plants don't form those living connections, which mean they don't get the micronutrients from the soil fungi, which mean that the complexity of their diet is reduced, which reduces their health, which is why you have to start pumping more herbicides and pesticides onto them, because they lose their own defensive system, but guess what, we eat the plants and it depletes our defensive system as well, so that's the problem with chemical farming at the level of human health and plant health, but of course that doesn't even start getting into the territory of what happens when you put all those chemicals on the ground to insect life, bird life and so on, which of course is now the source of a sixth mass extinction in all the chemically farmed areas of the world, so I think that argument is over, so we're now in a position where half the world is fed on a system that we can no longer carry on using, so then the big question becomes, oh, can we shift to organic farming? The good news, by the way, is yes, we can, but we have to do two things, so I don't know whether you want me to talk about all this stuff, but again, it's just sort of, as I say, one thing leads to another leads to another. I'm taking notes, don't worry, we're gonna circle back somewhere. We can get back to cities at some point, but of course, a very, very critical part of all of this is that more than half of us now live in cities, and the vast majority of the increased expected population by 2050 is going to be urban, so again, these problems of how you feed people only get deeper over time, but basically, all I was gonna say is the good news is that if we globally halve the amount of meat and dairy that we eat, and of course, in the West, that means reducing it a lot more because we already eat crazy amounts of the stuff, but globally reduce it by half, and of course, stop industrial livestock production, which is just bonkers, and so move to a plant, much more plant-based diet, but with some meat and dairy, because of the regenerative thing I've already talked about, and we halve the amount of food that we waste, which again, if you value food, you don't waste it, so in the West, that's incredibly doable. In the global South, it's harder because actually, food waste in the global South is a lot more to do with lack of infrastructure than actual people not valuing food. They absolutely do value food, so it's a different set of problems. Tristram, Stewart's book on waste is the Bible to go to for all of that stuff, just in case. Anyway, so we can then feed the world on current form, as it were, taking by the way climate change effects, assuming that all the predictions going down the middle, so from the best prediction to the worst, going down the middle, we could feed the world, as it currently stands, 80% organically, without increasing the amount of farmland we currently use, so this is a really important statistic, I think. Now, what about that 20% gap? That 20% gap is all about nitrogen, interestingly, so I mentioned before, nitrogen is the key, but guess what? We've invested absolutely zero research into growing organically, fixing nitrogen naturally, and so on, because there's no money to be made in this for the big corporations and so on, so other studies predict that if we actually just invested in working out how to fix nitrogen regeneratively and that they're amazing, I could just talk to you about these incredible projects going on at the moment, they're showing how possible this is. We can close the so-called a yield gap within a decade, so then we can be doing it, so yes, we can do it, is the happy headline I'm here to share with you. Well, I have good news for you, because so I had another guest working on closing the loops of nitrogen and phosphorus within the cities, and mainly through urine, because it's within urine that most of them come not through feces, and so back in the day, I think it was in Paris, we recycled 50% of nitrogen, today it's like less than 5%, and he estimated that if we reused urine from Paris today, we could fertilize grain and produce like 25 million baguettes per day or something like that. You have to do the marketing very carefully, I mean we can do this is the point, we can absolutely do this is the point, and that's very good to know, and of course I'm not a plant scientist, you know, but again, I mean what I love about food as a subject is that it leads you absolutely everywhere, and you have to learn a little bit about everything because it all joins up, you know, so that's good to know that someone who really knows what they're talking about is telling you, is basically agreeing with what I'm telling you, excellent. And it's the same, so he's looking at the same stuff as you're doing, but from a different angle, and so for instance, nitrogen or the hyperbosch is responsible for 5% of global carbon emissions as well, you know, so there's so many co-benefits if we think about it. Exactly, exactly, yeah, because imagining a lightning strike, that's not a trivial event, a lab, yeah. Funnily enough, Leibich, so you kind of said that he opened the Pandora Box, but he also coined the term metabolism, right, right, and 20 or 30 years after Leibich came Karl Marx, and he used the word metabolism, saying that, you know, it's the way that we, how you call it, the way that we extract the capitalism system, extracts from nature that has this metabolic point of view, and this is how urban metabolism kind of arrived as a discipline through all of this Leibich, then Marx, then a number of other people, so yeah, it's interesting to see that there is an nexus between all of this, the systemic use of nitrogen, of water, of all of this kind of arrived at the same time, you kind of touch upon it during the waste chapter of your book, about the linearity of waste, but this linearity goes again through nitrogen, through phosphorus, through energy, because energy was renewable also back in the day, right, and it was wood as well, so it's fascinating, yeah. It is really fascinating, and I mean, I think there are, as you absolutely said, there are direct connections between food and energy, you know, and other things that are necessary for life, all raw materials, you know, I think, you know, we move from an era when people thought nature was inexhaustible, basically, and it's very understandable that they thought that, you know, and I often say this about Adam Smith, you know, I think he gets it in the neck a lot, you know, for having kind of, as it weren't being the father of capitalism and so on, but you know, you forget that he's writing in the 1760s, you know, I mean, it's a time when, you know, the idea that we could run out of nature just seemed completely inconceivable, and also, at the same time, that, you know, he wrote this other very famous book that nobody ever talks about, called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he said that, you know, of course, any economic system that we come up with has to be balanced by human empathy, you know, and the two things have to work together, so I think, as you say, there's a sort of dawning awareness of the circularity of things that happens at the same time, and I mean, again, as you say in my book, I write about, you know, the sort of, in fact, Victor Hugo of all people, who, I mean, I just, I find it absolutely astonishing that, you know, in the middle of, you know, arguably one of the most sort of famous books of the 19th century, Les Miserables, there's a sort of 70-page essay on sewers, you know, you know, he just, he just, you know, he sends his kind of his hero down the sewer, and then he just stops talking, the story stops, and then he starts talking about sewers, you know, and how important it is, and how, you know, you can judge a society by what it throws away, because that's what it doesn't value, and all these amazing quotes, like, the sewer is a cynic, you know, the sewer sees everything, and I just found that utterly, utterly fascinating, and of course, he also wrote to the English parliament to try to stop them from building the London sewers, because he said, you're throwing all this valuable nutrition away, you know, and of course now, as you say, we're realising, oh, there's such a thing as peak phosphorus, and actually the most readily available source of this stuff is, you know, what we're kind of omitting from our own bodies every day, so yes, I think that that's a super, super interesting concept, and I think, you know, for me, it becomes, I mean, again, you know, one of the books that I read more recently that I found really fascinating in this respect is, I don't know whether, you know, Timothy Morton's work at all, and his book Dark Ecology, he'd be super interesting to talk to actually, but he writes about the fact that, you know, we find it really difficult to deal with the fact that we live on a planet where, you know, nothing ever goes away, there is no throwing things away, it's always still lurking there somewhere, you know, and how we can come to terms with this sort of psychologically, because, you know, of course, you know, we had, as you say, capitalism is a very sort of linear idea, ironically, sort of coming out of a time when absolutely everything was circular, I mean, you know, the sort of the medieval city is an absolutely beautiful example of circularity, and, you know, again, to come back yet again to the subject of human and animal manure, you know, it was absolutely seen as this precious thing to be saved, and then sort of matured, and then put, you know, on the fields around the city to fertilize them, so you've literally got this going on, you know, and it's exactly when we started doing this and preaching nature as free, grabbing it and just throwing it over there, that the problem started, and I mean, this is actually why I often talk about the fact that we are living in what I call the neo-geographical age, so I think, you know, when the railways came, you know, that was, and I often sort of say, that was the moment when we said goodbye to geography, because railways appeared to emancipate us from all of these issues that we've been facing in terms of how to feed a city and where you could build cities and just moving stuff around, you know, and it was, I mean, very disturbing to people at the time as well, it took a lot of getting used to that you could just travel very rapidly, but of course, again, now, we've seen, you know, I mean, through lockdown as well, we've seen how much we've come to rely on just being able to travel everywhere all the time, and it's now very difficult for us to understand that no, we can't, just travel doesn't come for free either, you know, because it costs energy and therefore actually we're going to have to learn to live more locally and regionally and seasonally again, which I think can all be presented as positive things, by the way, but I think we have to sort of, and this is why I think, you know, one of the things that I say is that we need a sort of vision for what a good life looks like in what I call the neo-geographical age. So the neo-geographical age is the age where, you know, as Timothy Morton says, we realize, oh, there is no throwing stuff away, you know, there's a plastic ocean gathering in this, you know, in the Antarctic and, you know, nothing that we use goes anywhere. We live in a circular world, and that is a sort of a mental adjustment we have to make, but if you then see that as, you know, sort of as it were cultivating your own patch as a positive thing, you know, and again, I mean, it's not a new idea, I mean, through cradle to cradle, you know, this idea that you sort of everything that you create, you create with the view of its entire life cycle, including its rebirth as it were, which of course is our condition as humans as well, you know, which is something we also struggle to understand is that we will go back in the soil and we will become part of, you know, new life eventually. It can be presented as an incredibly exciting positive thing, but we have to sort of unpick our idea of a good life. I often say our idea of a good life is still mired in the 20th century, you know, we're still addicted to consumerism, we're still, of course, addicted to capitalism, which need us to be addicted to consumerism or it fails. So we need to uncouple us, I know you've talked to Kate Rayworth, so I don't have to bang on about that, luckily, but you know, we need to uncouple ourselves from, you know, that the whole, it's not just an economy, it's a whole psychology of what it means to exist on the planet. And I think we have to, as I say, construct it, you know, in terms of a vision of a good life, which I believe is absolutely possible. And this is really what I write about in my book, Cytopia, which I should explain what it is, by the way. Yes, please do. And if I'll do it, I'll show you, I might have to switch myself for you on so I can actually see whether you can see what I'm showing you. But I don't know whether you can see there, the definition of Cytopia, it just means food place. And I invented the word as an alternative to utopia, that's why I went Greek. And the reason is that, you know, I think we clearly desperately need a multilateral connected way of asking all the big questions, you know, asking what is a good life? What is a good society? How do we coexist with nature? How do we coexist with each other? Which of course is what utopianism is, except utopianism aims at an ideal and therefore can't exist. And it was actually, when I read this, you know, the you in utopia can either come from the Greek word for good or the Greek word for no. So it's a good place, but no place, you know, and I remember that really depressing me when I read it because I thought, you know, this is our greatest tradition of thinking in a sort of holistic way about how to live and it can't exist. And that is when I had the idea of inventing this alternative word, Cytopia. So, you know, we live in a world shaped by food. But we live in a bad Cytopia because we don't value food. But if we did value food, we would live in a good Cytopia. And a good Cytopia, by the way, comes quite close to utopia. So what does Cytopia look like if we manage somehow to build that to reconcile the two pressing challenges of tomorrow feeding and housing the global population? I have a sort of bad drawing for you. It kind of looks like this. I mean, this is actually the structure of Cytopia, the book. You remember my bowl of soup I was banging on about, that is at the heart of everything. And around it, you've got people sharing. And we evolved as a species through the sharing of food. We're very good at sharing through food. So that's fundamental. So you have love, connection, often family, of course, somebody cooked the food. Cooking is often done with love as well. It's quite difficult to cook well without love. Feeding and nourishing is a very natural act. So that might be a parent figure, a mother, a father, whoever, other sexes are available. So that becomes, if you like, the space of the home. But of course, most people's food doesn't come from the home. So where does it come from? It comes from a market. So the cook figure will have bought the food from someone. So there you have economy, you have trust, you have knowledge exchange, you have all sorts of connections there. Where does the market sit in the city? Where does the city sit in this thing called countryside we talked about before? Where does the countryside sit in a thing called nature, which we can also discuss because we are, of course, part of nature. And where does all that sit? Well, sort of on a planet whizzing through the universe very rapidly. So actually, if you turn that sort of on its side and draw a line through it, that's the structure of my book. But it's also what Satopia looks like. It's a sort of, it is a system. Everything is connected. Everything affects everything else. It's all about the living world and it's about how we encounter it every day because we eat and about how it creates sort of loving connections, connections of power, connections, political economic, but how it ultimately defines our relationship with nature and with the natural world. So obviously, depending on where you live, it's going to look different because, ultimately, this bit, the nature bit is different from, in France, you would say, from one field to the next because of terroir and so on. But those sets of connections are constant everywhere and of course, the countryside has farmers in it and this is inhabited by companies and it's inhabited by power structures, all of which are invisible to us, but all of which shape our world. But actually, because we eat and because we don't grow most of our own food, most of us, and therefore we pay to eat, it shows you that the act of eating is always a political act. It's always an ecological act. It's always an economic act. It's always a social act. It's always a cultural act. It is the thing that I often say is too big to see because it shapes everything. That's what sitopia looks like. It's a food-shaped world, but we can shape it by how we eat and how we vote. Yeah, and I can imagine that the cities based on sitopia would look very much differently as well. Yeah, I mean, interestingly, quite a lot of cities in the global South look quite like, my idea of a sitopian city because of course, they haven't stopped growing food in the city, which historically we did. I mean, I talked endlessly about the market gardens that used to surround cities. Most people kept pigs and chickens in their houses. Why? Because pigs and chickens are omnivores. They can eat our food scraps and then I'm afraid we can eat them, but that's why we curve over with pigs and chickens. So they'd be highly productive and I write a lot about Patrick Geddes, the father of regional geography, if you like. He talked, I mean, his wonderful phrase, we have to make the field come to the street as well as the street come to the field. And he was arguing, and of course, all utopians do this. This is why, again, I felt inspired to create the word sitopia. All utopians talk about how to bring city and country together. As I said right at the start, that's what the Garden City tries to do. And it does it by what I call the Fried Egg Urban Model. So the Fried Egg Urban Model is another way of seeing the city state. So the yolk of the egg is the city, and the white is the countryside. And that's what early cities were like. You know, there were literally blobs of urbanities surrounded by the land that fed them. And then the Greeks start to talk about explicitly about, you know, how to feed the ideal city. And they say, well, you have to keep the city small because, you know, the ideal thing is economics. Now, economics, which means household management. And again, I'm sure you talked about it. You talked to Herman Daley, didn't you? And you know, one of my absolute heroes, you know, I mean, this is so exciting. So I didn't have to tell you about economics because he would have told you all about it. You know, household management, you know, the idea that each citizen has a farm that feeds the house and therefore they're self-sufficient. And if all citizens have the condition, then the city can feed itself. It is economic. And of course, economics gives us a basis for our word economics. It's just rather tragic that we didn't take the actual meaning that Aristotle had when he talked about it for our economics, which is basically the city and country find a natural balance because surprise, surprise is a limit to how much any of us can actually eat. You know, and he distinguished it, well, anyway, Herman Daley covered all that for you. So I don't have to cover that for you. But no, I mean, basically, that is the sort of the Setopian city has a lot of food growing in it. And the Setopian countryside, by the way, has a lot of people living in it. You know, I mean, I absolutely, I'm a sort of somebody once said to me in an interview recently, you've turned into an anarchist. I mean, I am an anarchist to the extent that I think Peter Kropotkin's ideas of, and again, I don't know if somebody's talked to you about all of that. But you know, the idea that, you know, a good life is one in which we get to do more than one thing, you know, so it's not being in Adam Smith's factory, just putting the heads on the nails all day to create wealth. It's actually maybe growing some potatoes in the morning, making furniture in the afternoon and writing poetry in the evening or something. So what does a landscape look like that supports that kind of life? You know, and if it's a city, it needs lots of nature in it. And if it's nature, it needs lots of an infrastructure in it. So I'm not saying everything's just a sort of carpet of, I mean, you know, he famously wrote this book called Fields Factories and Workshops. I'm not saying everything's just a carpet of, you know, Fields Factories and Workshops, but I am saying that it's about bringing society and nature together much more in a variety of ways and at a variety of scales so that you and me and all other political animals who have a need for society and for nature can lead these fully rounded lives that have so much primary satisfaction in them that we don't have to be consumers anymore because we're also producers, you know, and this is if you like the vision of life in Satopia is we're growing more of our own food, not all of it. We're making or mending more of our own stuff, you know, we're swapping more, we're living more locally, more seasonally, but we're doing real things, you know, and therefore we just have more meaning in our lives. And I think, you know, again, some people discover this under lockdown that, you know, there was a way of life that didn't involve just being in a Sardine camp for four hours a day to go to a place called the city to earn, do a really boring job sitting at a desk to get rich to lead a good life that you're apparently going to have when you're 65. But actually having more time now makes us happier, you know, but capitalism destroys time. So we have to destroy capitalism, or at least the kind that is not regulated by moral sentiments as Adam Smith said. Before we finish this, there is something I really wanted to talk to you about because I love this. You talked about this work of George Dodd's that had very good accounts of the food flows of London at the daily rate almost. And like last year, we were doing this work for, oh, you have a book of his then. That's the book. Oh, fantastic. I mean, you know, I said at the beginning, I'm just interrupting you, but you know, I said at the beginning that when I had the idea of writing about how a city feeds itself, I was looking, looking, looking for the section in the library where this would be. I didn't find anything for about two years maybe. And then I found this book and it's written in 1856. And it was the only one I found, but it is absolutely incredible. And as you say, he literally lists, you know, how many cattle kind of got sold in, you know, Smithville market on a particular day. And it's an amazing book. Anyway, sorry, carry on. Yeah. No, I mean, you know, how wonderful. Well, I'm very biased, right? But how wonderful this book is because last June or so, we were accounting for the flow, the food flows of London actually for, for real London. It's full of things like this. And we can't do that today, right? If we have to, to, to, to account for them, it would be impossible. And back in the day, he was writing, we don't know how much needs to be supplied every day, yet it happens. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is, I don't know, breathtaking. And yeah, on the one side, because we accounted for it. And on the other, because we have no idea. Yeah, sorry, before we close the episode, I had to talk about this. That was absolutely. Yeah, no, to me, I mean, this is an absolutely brilliant book. And I, I use the quote of his right at the beginning of, of my book. I mean, you can see here the first opening sentence, the supply of food to a great city is a remarkable phenomenon, full of instruction on all sides. It teaches much concerning the substances when the food is formed, the processes of formation, the communities whose industry develops the edible treasures, and so on and so on. But I mean, it's just it, you know, and then as you say this bit, which I think is absolutely amazing. Perhaps the most wonderful characteristic is that nobody does it. No one assumes the responsibility. It is useless to ask by what central authority or under what controlling system is a city such as London supplied with food. Nobody does it. No one, for instance, took care that a sufficient quantity of food should reach London in 1855 for the supply of two millions and a half of human beings during 52 weeks. And yet such a supply did reach London. So he's really talking about free trade and the fact that it just does it. I mean, it's just it's brilliant. It is brilliant. So I mean, you know, I wasn't the first person to ask this question. There's another one. I mean, food fanatics like me and all food and city fanatics like me all revere this book like a Bible, but it's not known. And as I say, I just happened to be lucky enough to get this reprint of it. I mean, it's not a widely known book, but it is a brilliant book. So thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, the thing is that how on earth are we surviving when we don't know how much we need? I know. And yet it's supplies. This is mind boggling. I don't know how. Yeah, I mean, if you said that thanks to Haber Bosch, there is perhaps that many million of or a billion of people that survived. Still, how do we survive if we don't know these numbers? We overproduce, of course. I mean, Marion Nassel famously in her food politics books, you know, said that there's over 5000 calories of food available every day to every American adult and child and baby. You know, so literally there is double the amount of food that could be safely eaten available every day in America. So the only way the food companies can make money is by overselling food, which is why Americans are all the size they are. Well, not all of them. But, you know, so this is insanity, total insanity. And again, this is why, you know, people like Tristram Stewart, who writes so brilliantly about waste, you know, he says it's not about not being able to produce the quantities of food we need. We can do that. It's all about readers. It's all about distribution. It's about where the stuff actually is and where it ends up. And therefore it's about economics and therefore it's about politics and about trade and about all the stuff we started talking about right at the beginning. You know, you cannot, I mean, to ask how are we going to feed the world is the most stupid and idiotic phraseology and it drives me nuts. Yeah. A, who is we? B, who is the world? C, does it want us to feed it? You know, and it's just it's the kind of it's the big ag mentality that kind of puts it like that. You know, the question we should be asking is, how can we as a species, you know, as humans live good lives on a limited planet with a bunch of non-humans without which there is no life? And what does that good life look like? And then what kind of food system would actually create that kind of life? It's literally the other way up, you know, which is why I always say, you know, food is the greatest medium for asking the big questions like how should we live? What is a good life? What is a good society? What is our relationship with nature? What is our relationship with our fellow humans? And food just sits at the heart of all of those questions that matter. That's that's why I love it. That's why I wake up every day, 22 years later, still excited to learn more and to think about it more, because it just really is an extraordinary medium for thinking and acting. So if we have to say, what do you still want to learn? What will you learn in 2022? And what are your plans of, you know, continuing this obsessive research of food and cities? I mean, my subject is life. So I will never run out of things to learn about. I mean, it's very interesting. I mean, as I said to you, I mean, the books I read at the moment, I mean, every, there's so many incredible books being written at the moment, like The Dawn of Everything I Mentioned, Braiding Sweetgrass is an amazing book, I'm reading at the moment, I don't know whether you know it, Robin Wall-Kimmerer, incredible book, the Timothy Morton book I mentioned. I mean, all of these incredible, you know, just people discovering more about, you know, the way soil works and the way our microbiome works. I mean, probably I'm most motivated ultimately at the moment to be honest by politics, because the politics at the moment I mentioned the war in Ukraine, I just, I can't get my head around the fact this is going on. I mean, it's just so horrific. And, you know, in a way, I mean, I think my, my, my, my search has become a search for just, as I say, understanding what a good human life looks like and what it is that makes us happy. Because, you know, if we can understand that and if we can provide that for people, then I think that's our best chance of avoiding the kind of appalling, you know, political meltdowns that we continually see happening. You know, if you, if you, if you look at the sort of the, you know, when stuff goes wrong to put it in a very, very kind of, you know, childish way almost, it's because people aren't being provided with the wherewithal to lead good, meaningful lives, you know, and I guess that turns me into a utopian. Despite my efforts not to be one, but, you know, I just, I just, I think we know what makes us happy and I think we can provide it for people and I think it's really, really simple things. You know, it's, it's obviously enough to eat good food. It's obviously a safe place to live, a nice place to live. It's peace. You know, it's a sort of supportive community. It's meaningfulness, you know, so people have real stuff to do. And it's one of the great, you know, ironies and tragedies of human history that, you know, people tend to sort of become their better selves during crises. So I think, you know, we're seeing it in Ukraine now. I mean, I think the whole world is just, you know, falling in love with Ukrainians. They're just extraordinary people, aren't they? And I mean, the way they're reacting, you know, and just, they're just remarkable people. And, you know, I think, you know, actually probably part of why they are so remarkable is that because their lives have been under threat for so long. And I think when you don't take life for granted, then you live life to the full, you know, and this is the Stoic philosophy. I mean, again, which I sort of write about in Sotopia, you know, if you realize that life is precious and fragile, then you tend to take, you know, more care to live it well and enjoy it. And I think, you know, part of the problem of the whole Western capitalist model is that it sort of tried to take all the pain away, take all the work away, take all the struggle away. Oh, there's a pill for that. Oh, you know, there's an answer for that. You know, it's like what I call the kind of the life hack, you know, the life hack of life hacks. We can life hack everything. But then there's nothing left to do. You're not even human anymore. You know, so I think bizarrely, actually now, I mean, facing these incredible global threats that we do, everything from climate change to mass extinction to, you know, war and not just in Ukraine, of course, but you know, pawling political catastrophes unfolding everywhere, it's a wake up call. You know, this might be humanity's last, you know, throw of the dice. Can we please wake up? Can we please, you know, realize that we can share this planet, you know, well, we can live well, and there is space for everyone. And remember what makes, you know, what makes a good life. And of course, good has two sides to it. It's good for us, i.e. it makes us happy. But it's also good for all the humans and nonhumans with whom we share the planet. So it has to be ethically good as well. And again, I come back to food, you know, I mean, my vision of a good society is one in which everybody eats well, because you can't eat well if there are bombs falling on your head. You can't eat well if somebody else is eating badly. You can't eat well if the food you eat, you know, is destroying a landscape somewhere or involve cruelty or slavery or, you know, so, so much is held again. And I'm coming back to bowl of soup again, you know, but if that bowl of soup is a good bowl of soup and everyone has a good bowl of soup and they can share it in peace, then then you're pretty much there. You know, and it's a really simple idea in a really complex world. And I think in a complex world, we need simple ideas that have complexity within them. Well, I think there is no better way to end this, but I'm going to go have a bowl of soup, which is true. That's what I'm eating tonight, which is butternut. But yeah, well, thanks so much, Caroline. I think, yeah, you've transported me with food, with cities a bit as well, but mostly with food. We have a lot in common, but through different angles. And I will try to get a copy somehow of this George book. Well, as I say, there are these facsimiles that exist. I mean, the one I had was actually in original 1856 edition. So I got it from the library and I was very, I looked after it very well. So they are out there. You will be able to get a copy. And indeed. Yes. Thanks again so much. I think we have still so much to talk about, but I want to thank you and everyone for listening and watching until the end. And please don't hesitate to share with us, you know, your thoughts and your comments and what does Sitopia look for you as well. I'm pretty sure we're going to be surprised and we're going to have some some good insights from you as well. Thanks, everyone. I look forward. I look forward to it. Thanks so much, Aristides. It's been a pleasure. Thanks a lot.