Sitopia - Carolyn Steel

Food is a basic requirement, and always has been. If we are to improve our world for both humans, nature and the planet it has to be part of any solution.

This informative, dense, deep and long book is a font of knowledge. Everything is linked from philosophy to economics to choice to the environment. It pulls together a mass of information. The stories are engaging and the writing flows. The problem is the huge quantity of knowledge. It became overwhelming, so that it had to be read in small chunks - so reading took a long time. In contrast the facts washed over you and were lost - if only I could remember everything I read.....

Food is complicated. Our diets now include industrialised products, from vegetables grown in degraded soils with low nutrient levels to Ultra Processed Foods. We have unhealthy relationships with food leading to disease and obesity, but are assailed on all sides by advertising. Shops prioritise processed foods with their higher profit margins and poor quality ingredients. Control of the food market is controlled by a small number of global companies, and with their need for profit and growth they need to lead the global consumer in the wrong direction.

We were reminded that the definition of sustainable development was defined in 1987 as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" .

A complaint of this book is that it does not give solutions, just emphasizes how much we need them. There are no easy answers. I ended up concluding that I needed to become a stoic and grow more of my own food (and then discovered that the deer had eaten my peas...)

This book is beautifully written and rewards the effort it takes to read. My enjoyment could be based on confirmation bias - being told to do more of what you are trying to do is always a nice feeling. But maybe dip in and out rather than try to remember it all at once.