Food and

Symposium of Gastronomy

Sydney 1996

Alan told me that the area that might receive the least attention at this symposium was the future. In fact I think we’ve talked about the future a great deal at least by implication. I have got the sense that we mostly share an urgency about certain environmental issues that have a strong bearing on gastronomy and I’m going to be part of the group concentrating on the power relations that inform agriculture, sustainability, and in this case, the urban landscape.

So as a part of the discussion of food and power I want to talk about some aspects of the role food could play in ensuring a sustainable future for convivial urban life. For me this is absolutely a question of political power relations. And its a topic that does, I think, follow on from some things said by other speakers and participants in developing themes about location, ecology and sustainable food production around in the face of agribusiness and an increasingly global economy.

First of all I want to share a few facts about growth. By understanding what is going to happen to cities, it is also possible to define who will have the power to affect that process, and thus to shape food production and consumption arrangements for all of us into the 21st century.

Potentially unsustainable levels of population growth within the next fifty to one hundred years are forecast to be concentrated within vast urbanised regions stretching across much of the globe. These regions have been given many names among which are: megacities megalumps technoburbs megalopolis heterotopia the fully urbanised region the non place urban realm the high tech growth pole and the softopolis

Page 1 There are many more. But whatever they are called, its likely that these huge urban conurbations will follow a similar trajectory, growing into even bigger megalopoli which will finally interconnect into still larger megalopolitan networks of urbanised regions across many of the earth’s coastal strips and inland plains.

But while size matters, it is not just a question of the dimensions but of the shape of what is emerging that is of concern. A new kind of city is forming. Already up to 86% of the population of the USA lives in such “post urban” regions (Gottdiener, 1994), edge cities without traditional centres or urban functions that are often literally closed communities; residential enclaves with locked gates patrolled by guards and off limits to those who can’t afford to buy in. In this “post modern kitschscape” (Wilson, 1991) suburban expansion expresses a paradigm shift; invoking an urbanism without producing a city (Sorkin, 1992).

Already we have seen this process operating in Australia as autonomous regions centred on megamalls replace city centres which have not only lost their dominant role in many regional economies but may, in certain regions, disappear altogether (Gottdiener,1994). .

As megalopolis becomes the world’s dominant settlement form the fear is that its development may be linked to a "crisis of place" representing the end of any direct connection perceived between personal wellbeing and the physical environment. Peter Calthorpe (1993, 11) has described this process succinctly in an American context: “The placeless evolution of the suburban megalopolis is the inevitable and desirable expression of our new technologies and hyper-individualized culture”.

And this urban future gives rise to a number of food related anxieties: the debilitating environmental effects of rapid and uneven economic development across cities, regions and nation states; the implications of unconstrained urban expansion on fringe agriculture, the emergence of increasingly polarised communities in cultural, economic, environmental and gastronomic terms; and the decline of the civic realm.

There isn’t time today to get into the part played by the car, or of information technologies, in shaping the gastronomic results of this process of urban transformation. Suffice it to say both preferred transport forms and evolving communications technologies have a powerful role, among other things, in hastening the decline of the traditional centre and thus the public realm; elements of cities that have been up to now critical to a vibrant, sustainable food culture.

But what I do want to spend a little time on is the political and especially the economic power relations that govern the interaction between this vast urban growth, agriculture and the countryside because this is one of the key sites for urban gastronomy in future.

Its already well known that urban incursion into the city's regional surrounds is a serious environmental problem but one that expresses seemingly intractable power relations, driven, in gastronomic terms, by skewed,

Page 2 even irrational economic values and priorities. In many places it seems that urban expansion is pursued by governments, developers and business interests apparently in contradiction to broader regional food health.

It is fairly evident that, as far as much of our food production is concerned, a perverse energy system is in operation in which resources are taken from the country, through industrialised agriculture occurring at huge environmental cost, exploited for city needs and then expelled as waste into a hinterland constituting a polluted sink for urban excess. In failing to maintain a community of interest with the countryside, in pursuing an ethic of constant growth, urban development has not only powerfully emphasised the artificiality of the city, but allowed the sense of stewardship towards the land to decline.

Yesterday and on Thursday the agricultural scientists and the nutritionists gave us a frightening glimpse of an anti gastronomic world in which “the real confrontations with nature take place in the laboratory and factory, and the natural landscape is increasingly sanitised” (Ravetz, 1986, 125). Paradoxically it may be that in spatial terms, “As agriculture becomes increasingly industrialised, a lover of the countryside in the future will be more likely to find it in the old city and its fringe than in the land beyond” (Simmonds, 1993, 101).

I don't look forward to the brave new world of functional foods. I fervently hope that the technical fixes that fail to address real gastronomic issues and concerns can as much as possible be avoided but to do that we need to seize back power over our future. Moreover we need to conceptualise what exactly it is that we want to do with our urban and rural resources, and how best we can direct our actions towards a more environmentally and gastronomically informed production and planning.

A Canadian ecologist, William Rees, has developed an important tool in this work: the notion of the ecological footprint, to try to define the carrying capacity of regions in food production and consumption terms. Where a place has an ecological footprint bigger than its geographical region it is appropriating some other place’s carrying capacity. In other words it is taking more than its share of resources and producing more than its share of waste. The power of the developed world in food production terms has been the power to appropriate capacity and to export the environmental consequences to other places and to the future. This is why a place like the Netherlands, understood in the context of traditional economic measures like GDP to be a marvel of productivity and cheapness, is in fact a supremely costly ecological disaster for the rest of us and for the future. Its why the cost benefit analysis of economists which says that private allotments, or as they are officially known community leisure gardens, (Don, The Observer, 17.3.1996) are expensive to run, is wrong. Its perhaps no surprise either that unsustainable Dutch agricultural methods produce tasteless food while vegetables from allotments taste good.

To get back to cities, the problem is that food production arrangements within supposedly advanced systems perpetuate an apparently cost free urban expansion in which there is no clear nexus between use of resources and their finite nature, or between polluting practices and damaging effects (Hough, 1984). The attitudes that

Page 3 underlie unsustainable approaches to food production reflect the way in which our dominant view of landscape has become detached from notions of ecology.

In most Australian cities the adverse signs are all around for those who wish to look:

-loss of market gardens,

-decline of small centres on the urban fringe,

-long distance shipping of vegetables to urban markets,

-gardens devoted to conspicuous consumption of leisure as a status good,

-soil erosion/land degradation, and

-storm water runoff and effluent pollution.

City growth has built over the open spaces necessary for private vegetable gardens; public green space is unproductive and energy profligate; and agricultural production technologies used for urban fringe production are wasteful, polluting and finally unsustainable. In broader terms, we have yet to come to grips with the implications of resource depletion, land degradation, toxins in the food chain, the energy waste of farming for animal protein to overfeed the north and stockpile that overproduction, in a context of mass malnourishment and starvation in the south. It is tempting to believe that we continue this contrary pattern of urban growth and agricultural profligacy because we are without a sense of the adverse consequences, in turn without this consciousness because ill effects are not yet sufficiently pronounced in our personal lives. This is known as the problem of lag times and it is a key issue in many areas of .

So what can be done about all this? I suggest that how we deal with city edges - the rural urban fringe - is critical to rethinking these unsustainable approaches. The importance of these peripheral areas for ecology, agriculture and our future gastronomic health is often undervalued and I think there are some important reasons for this. For example, while the countryside around cities has continued to be seen as possessing desirable qualities for "the good life", with many wanting to achieve a melding of rural and urban in their lives, the urban hinterland is no longer broadly perceived in many regions as necessary for such fundamental land uses as sustaining a city’s food supply. That speaks not only of broad housing preferences but of the power of agribusiness, the vertical integration of the transnational food industry and supermarket dominated retailing which says you can grow, ship and consume anywhere at any season without adverse ecological or cultural consequences.

Page 4 Agricultural land on city fringes, in Australia at least, is often the location for high value adding food production. It is this capacity to add value rather than any necessity perceived to actually feed local populations that is the basis for the retention of such rural land uses.

Experts on the dilemmas of the rural/urban fringe, argue that there is a “presumption of primacy” for urban development, and a failure of planning agencies to “own” the fate of farming, which amounts to an inherent contradiction in the work of those agencies as they seek to balance competing rural and urban expansion needs on the urban periphery (Bunker and Houston, 1992). “Although disguised somewhat behind a widespread denunciation of urban “sprawl”, strong population and household growth and a culturally-ingrained preference for low-density living have led both to continuous urban expansion and widespread rural living activity” (Bunker and Houston, 1992, 24). At base there is “an unspoken yet powerful” (ibid) assumption that urban development will occur, emphasising the farmer's sense of impermanence. So, “despite the fact that agricultural surveys show the areas adjacent to Australian cities as generally being the most productive, an “impermanence syndrome” has emerged which leads to a progression of self-reinforcing changes in the way that farmers invest in, manage, and use their land. These include reversion to low input farming systems, perhaps to the extent that land becomes idle or is used just for agistment; cost-cutting on management of land, farm operations and capital items; ultimately sale of land for hobby farms or residential purposes” (Bunker and Houston, 1992, 24)..

In two European places, one in Italy around Florence, and the other in Southern France around Montpellier, I believe some of these problems of urban power are being avoided or at least tackled in more productive ways. I went to both places to study how issues of urban growth and alienation of agricultural land were being handled. I was keen to research places where wealth had traditionally come from agricultural and viticultural products located at city fringes and which had responded successfully to challenging market conditions by improving product quality and clever spatial planning. I wanted to find out about the ways in which valued landscapes, ways of life, local ecologies and regional economies were being protected and enhanced in the face of rapid urban growth and economic change. In other words how were two smallish regions dealing with powerful global economic forces like the internationalisation of capital, the power of multinational food and wine companies, and the decline of manufacturing and traditional markets for low cost high volume products and at the same time protecting their gastronomic advantages?

We have tended I think to undervalue and even disparage European models as somehow elitist and inappropriate to Australian conditions. I do take Tim Flannery’s point yesterday about differences in the intensity of cultivation we can expect given our varying soil conditions but I also believe that the range of points of comparison I found were so broad as to easily balance out these considerations. Obvious similarities I’d point to between the regions I worked in and in the southern Australian states include the Mediterranean climate, and the lifestyle it promotes; the relationship between high quality fringe agricultural production and up-market tourism; and the landscape and ecology of the urban fringe terrain with its cool microclimates.

Page 5 Neither Tuscany or Languedoc Roussillon has been untouched by the difficult economic changes that have been occurring globally. However, in each case study area the rural-urban fringe has been transformed without losing its key strengths from a gastronomic perspective. Both places have revitalised the economic capacity of the city periphery as a place of innovation while maintaining or renewing the natural environment. Food and wine production have played a central part in this process. New farm-related activity and new non-farm land uses - evolving in two quite different styles in the two places studied- have produced positive results spatially, economically, culturally and environmentally. Each area has exploited the associated benefits of agricultural production and agritourism, and each has melded rural and urban business activity in a way that supports the regional economy, culture and environment. Both have shown that urban and rural land uses need not undermine one another but can produce a symbiotic relationship at city peripheries that plays a key part in revitalisation, innovation and most critically toward conviviality.

I reached a number of conclusions, which I’ll try to convey as briefly as possible:

Both regions worked with their physical terrain and tried to re-establish a fine grain of land uses at city fringes; this grain is really important for diversity, in turn good news ecologically and gastronomically.

Both places concentrated on producing and marketing - at home and beyond the region - the best of their high value adding gastronomic produce in food and wine areas; they weren't into mass volume production (avoiding the madness Tim Flannery talked about in relation to Australian wheat production).

Both concentrated on linking agriculture, viticulture, and agritourism by protecting landscape quality; and it was landscape quality that made the regions more attractive to invest and live in.

Both linked their built and cultural heritage, urban and rural, to food production and gastronomic tourism; from artisan producer through to traditional central market place.

Both were flexible about mixing farm and non farm uses on rural holdings especially near their cities and did not discriminate through planning policy or elsewhere against boutique producers but saw them instead as important to innovation and product development; for example Professor Cianferoni, the most eminent member of the agricultural economics department at Florence University told me he not only made olive oil but also ran a B&B.

Both regions sought to move “up market” in terms of product quality and used region and location guarantees to ensure recognition of high quality products; they were very anti generic labelling, we might not punt for appellation contrôlée or DOCG systems but the stress on location labelling is still critical.

Page 6 Languedoc, in particular, linked high technology industry sectors spatially and economically to the quality of its agricultural base; this had an economic pay off as, for example, people who came to Montpellier to work in the computer and other technology industries invested in boutique viticulture.

Tuscany was notable in protecting its olive trees which were seen as not only a gastronomic but also a cultural and ecological landscape device demarcating city from countryside; I think South Australia, my home state, could learn a lot from this approach.

Both case studies showed that the wider benefits of maintaining rural urban fringe agriculture cannot be adequately defined in terms of strict sectoral accounting, although even within the agricultural sector value- added commodities were increasingly critical to regional economies. We need to persuade state treasuries that cross sectoral accounting that takes into account the real cost benefit equation of gastronomy is worth while.

Support for supposedly “marginal” small-scale production was important because of its flow-on effects in terms of tourism, landscape protection, social cohesiveness, and regional ecology. Conversely, as we heard yesterday, our agriculture departments and planning systems want to fit new producers into rigid categories and overlarge scales of production that just aren't appropriate anymore. Producers who don't fit that profile are discouraged. We need to work on that.

Both regional governments had a highly developed gastronomic consciousness or sensibility and this showed in policy terms; bureaucrats I interviewed really thought food was central to public life as well as private pleasure, and finally and perhaps most importantly from the visiting researcher’s point of view they conducted business meetings in cafes.

I think it is clear that unless we want to hasten agricultural, economic and gastronomic decline we must take note of these kinds of regional imperatives and approaches. As urban development moves inexorably forward into city hinterlands it will only give way to other land uses if they are perceived as valuable. Productive land that is necessary for economic health will be one of these. This is a truism of political power. So a diversity of value-added commodities, produced within an ecologically conscious framework, will become ever more important to the health of regional economies and protecting the rural nature of the landscape on the urban fringe.

I believe that the evidence suggests that cities which do not support sustainable, gastronomically informed production and consumption arrangements are going to be increasingly marginalised within a global market place. Just think of current British circumstances and the likely cost of the mad cow cull if you disagree with this argument.

Page 7 Following on from this discussion of the need for gastronomically informed production I really wish I had time to pose the related question of whether we - as gastronomers - probably have to think hard about the composition of high quality production more closely than in the past. Should we, for example, take vegetarianism or at least proto-vegetarianism seriously in future as a component of having functioning convivial cities?

Some landscape ecologists argue that current western practises of food production, exchange and consumption, by concentrating on meat, are accentuating their lack of sustainability. This analysis would suggest that the cracks in the system are already beginning to show in widespread aridity, erosion, contaminated soils and so on, leaving aside consideration of the costs in terms of personal wellbeing through over consumption of meat. And that is not to mention the gender aspects of the issue, explored in books like Carol Adams’ Sexual Politics of Meat or the spatial planning implications of meat eating.

Unfortunately there isn't time to get into any of this today.

It seems to me that the powerful forces of demography and political economy propelling urban growth will inevitably reshape our cities into the fully urbanised country of the 21st century. It is up to us to look to positive models for gastronomically mixing the rural and urban patchwork that is emerging. There are plenty of models about. John Newton has written about some of them in the Sydney Morning Herald this week.

I believe that gastronomic answers are to be found in a return to regionalism, to limitations on production based on location, diversity and small scale, which more truly reflect ecological carrying capacity. In my preferred scenario we would not be able to afford to truck food stuffs into our cities and towns from anywhere, anytime, be profligate with local and regional land resources needed for food production, or need or want to rely on the technological fixes the food industry promises (or is it threatens?) us with.

Finally, unless understanding of the need for urban and agricultural development to respect the constraints and opportunities imposed by climate, topography, soils and water supply is improved, food production will continue to suffer from its proximity to cities. Unless acknowledgement of the political, economic and cultural forces that govern urbanisation is broadened, then we are faced with serious questions about food sustainability and quality in and around cities in future. Were these considerations to be seriously addressed, they would have fundamental implications for future practice and ones that would reshape cities and regions to be more sustainable and more convivial.

This is the powerful challenge of food and megalopolis.

Page 8 Susan Parham Sydney April 1996

Page 9 BIBLIOGRAPHY

BRYANT, C (1992), Agriculture in the City’s Countryside, Belhaven Press.

BUNKER, R, and HOUSTON, P (1992), “At and Beyond the Fringe: Planning Around the Australian City with Particular Reference to Adelaide” in Urban Policy and Research, Volume 10, Number 3, Melbourne.

CALTHORPE, P (1993), The Next American Metropolis, Ecology, Community and the American Dream, Princeton Architectural Press.

CIANFERONI, R (1979), Il Chianti Classico fra Prosperita e Crisi, Edagricole, Bologna.

DOGAN, M (1988), The Metropolis Era, Volume One, A World of Giant Cities, Sage, Newbury Park.

DON, M (1996), “Lost in the Plot”, The Observer Life Magazine, 17.3.1996, .

FISHMAN, R (1987), Bourgeois Utopias, The Rise and Fall of Suburbia, Basic Books.

GOTTDIENER, M (1994), The New Urban Sociology, McGraw-Hill.

HALL, P (1992), Cities of Tomorrow, An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, Blackwell.

HOUGH, M (1984), City Form and Natural Process, Towards a New Urban Vernacular, Croom Helm.

HOUGH, M (1990), Out of Place, Restoring Identity to the Regional Landscape, Yale University Press.

SIMMONDS, in HAWARD, R, MCGLYNN, S eds (1993), Making Better Places, Urban Design Now, Butterworth Architecture.

SORKIN, M (1991), Exquisite Corpse, Writing On Buildings, Verso, London, New York.

RAVETZ, A (1986), The Government of Space, Faber.

WILSON, E (1991), The Sphinx in the City, Virago Press.

Page 10