On food, (super)markets, streets, and smell & co.

Is the local market dead?

I got very excited about some of the passages I read today in one my favourite books, which I have already mentioned previously - "Hungry City: How food shapes our lives" by Carolyn Steel. So I decided to share a "flavour" of it here...

.... on markets:

"Borough [market] feels odd because it exists in a country that has lost touch with its food culture - where the vast majority of us do most of our shopping in supermarkets. [...] Borough is not really about buying food at all, it is about celebrating it. [...]

At Borough, food has become an end in itself. It has become fetishised, as if it were invested with some cathartic power to transform lives. The people who come here, although plainly enjoying themselves, seem to be searching for something more: for roots, for meaning, for salvation, even. [...]
Wherever food markets survive, they bring a quality to urban life that is all too rare in the West: a sense of belonging, engagement, character. They connect us to an ancient sort of public life. People may always come to markets in order to socialise as well as to buy food, and the need for such spaces in which to mingle is as great now as it has ever been - arguably greater, since so few such opportunities exist in modern life."

... on supermarkets:

"[Supermarkets] support individual lifestyles, not sociability; a characteristic they share with iPods and computers. The internet may be a great communicative tool, but it can't replace the connection we feel when we meet people in the flesh.

That is where food is so powerful. It brings us together in physical space, forging bonds other media can't reach. [...]"

... on streets:

Steel describes a little of what Jane Jacobs wrote about in her 1961 study "The Death and Life of Great American Cities": 

"Jacobs argued that the myriad of personal exchanges that took place every day in the street created a strong sense of local identity; a sense of communal ownership that encouraged people to look after the street, and by extension, one another. [...] Local shopkeepers acted like neighbourhood policemen: they knew everyone and made it their business to know what was going on. [...]

Jacobs didn't emphasise the role of food in forging social bonds, but without it, her beloved Hudson Street would have been a far emptier place. She took food's role in urban life as a given - something too obvious to mention. Yet 40 years later, that role is not only under threat in America and Britain, but routinely undervalued or ignored. [...]"

... on smells and co.:

"Street life isn't the only casualty of food's disappearance from cities. Another seemingly trivial loss, but one that contributes a great deal to a city's character, is smell. [...] Most of London's homely (and less homely) smells are now gone; expelled to factory complexes well outside the city. London is off the olfactory map - and a good thing too, you might think. [...] The thing is, so many other things have disappeared along with those smells. Without anything to compare them with, it can be quite hard to realise quite how dead British cities have become - until you go abroad, that is. [...]

India assaults your senses, but you soon get used to it. After India, it is Europe that is the real shock. The streets seem positively deserted; the cars and buses impossibly large and shiny; the spaces between buildings huge and empty. Everywhere you look, there seems to be an absence of something: people, animals, vegetables, smell, noise, ritual, necessity, death. The juxtapositions of human life have been designed out of our cities, leaving us to live in an empty shell." 

I hope I will be forgiven for quoting so extensively. Of course, to get a real flavour of this book and to really share my excitement, you need to read the whole thing!