This week M+K sits across the table with Carolyn Steel, best-selling author of Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World, and Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. She shares the importance of cooking with love, her food philosophy and what’s keeping her hopeful through the pandemic.
1. My cooking inspiration…
Is my family. My paternal grandparents had a wonderful hotel in Bournemouth, the Miramar, where we spent most of our weekends and holidays in my childhood, so I grew up eating very good food! My father was very interested in cooking and learned how to cook, both from the hotel chefs and also from army cooks when he was in India during the war, where he learned to cook curries. He taught my mother (who was Finnish) to cook, and she became a total expert at making English roasts.
2. A meal that reminds me of home…
Is roast beef and Yorkshire Pudding as cooked by my mother, with the crunchiest roast potatoes ever! (She always used King Edwards and they were of course cooked in beef dripping). The other meal would be a delicious lamb or chicken curry, cooked by my father.
3. A life lesson cooking has taught me…
Is that there is no better feeling in the world than doing something with love for others. If you make a meal with care and love for your family or friends, you will feel love in return.
4. When I want to be creative I…
Often go into the kitchen and start chopping an onion – it’s amazing how many of my best thoughts have come while I am cooking! When I am cooking a recipe that I know very well, the process feels almost meditative – I often find myself involuntarily smiling when I start to cook.
5. The most transformational book I’ve read is…
Small is Beautiful by E F Schumacher. It was written in the 1970s, but it is as relevant today as ever. The opening line is brilliant: ‘One of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved’. Schumacher blows the inherent logic of capitalism out of the water and argues for a more humane economy that respects human dignity and treats nature as sacred.
6. The routines that keep me grounded are…
Cooking and eating – ideally with and for friends. I also have a small roof garden in my London flat where I grow large Danish pickling cucumbers called asier, tomatoes, figs and lots of herbs. Asier pickling day, usually in early August, is probably the nearest thing I have to an annual food ritual!
7. I recently learnt…
From a study by the Food and Farming Commission that 42 per cent of British people say that they value food more under lockdown and 38 per cent more are cooking from scratch. Only 9 percent want life to go back to the way it was before lockdown. As many as 85 percent want to retain some of the social changes, such as cooking with their children, growing their own food and having stronger social bonds with their neighbours. I find this very hopeful.
8. Favourite random act of kindness…
Last winter I was on a very slow cross-country train in Yorkshire without a buffet car. I had a terrible cough and had run out of water, and was feeling desperate – I asked the guard if there was anywhere on the train I could get water, and he said no – but then came back five minutes later with his own, unopened bottle and gave it to me. I was so grateful that I almost burst into tears!
9. To make a difference in my community I…
Try to support local shops and businesses as much as I can. Even though the prices are often higher than in the supermarket and the produce is sometimes not as good, I still buy food from my local shops because I believe that small businesses are fundamentally important to any urban neighbourhood. This has become even more obvious under lockdown!
10. Right now, I’m grateful for…
The great blessing of having just published a book, Sitopia, just before lockdown (in the week that the pandemic was declared!) that seems to be really resonating with people. I am so grateful for all the amazing conversations – like this one – that it has generated and for all the wonderful connections that I am making through it.
Carolyn Steel MA (Cantab) RIBA is a leading thinker on food and cities. A London-based architect and academic, she is the author of Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (2008) and Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World (2020). Her concept of sitopia, or food-place (from the Greek sitos, food + topos, place) has gained recognition across a broad range of fields in academia, design and ecology. A director of Kilburn Nightingale Architects, Carolyn studied at Cambridge University and has taught at several universities including Cambridge, Wageningen and the London School of Economics. She is in international demand as a speaker and her 2009 TED talk has received more than one million views. In August 2020, she was featured in a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme on sitopia.
To connect visit:
Website: https://www.carolynsteel.com
Twitter: @carolynsteel
