Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

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

In 2005, British supermarkets sent half a million tones of edible food to landfill.

The relationship between food and cities is fundamental to our everyday lives. The gargantuan effort necessary to feed cities arguably has a greater social and physical impact on us and our planet than anything else we do. Yet few of us are conscious of the process and rarely stop to wonder how food reaches our plates.

Hungry City examines the ways modern food production has damaged the balance of human existence, creating a whole host of problems, from obesity, the inexorable rise of the supermarket, to the destruction of the natural world. Carolyn Steel follows food on its journey — from the land (and sea) to market and supermarket, kitchen to table, waste-dump and back again — exploring the historical roots and the contemporary issues at each stage of food’s cycle. She shows how our lives and our environment are being manipulated but explains how we can change things for the better.

Original, inspiring and written with infectious enthusiasm, Hungry City illuminates an issue that is fundamental to us all.