michael – Page 33

Q&A with Carolyn Steel

In Architecture and building, Environment on July 24, 2011

A few weeks ago I interviewed writer and architect Carolyn Steel, author of Hungry City: How food shapes our lives, who visited Melbourne last week for the State of Design Festival.

Soon, I’ll publish a Greener Homes column in The Sunday Age based in part on our conversation, but here’s a longer, edited version of the interview. We chatted for so long, we even spoke about Masterchef. Carolyn loves it and loathes it. Read on to find out why…

Why do we need to think about cities and food?

In trying to describe a city through food, I’ve come to the conclusion that food – which is the most important thing in all our lives – has been sidelined, culturally, politically, economically and mentally. We’ve constructed this bizarre idea that food should be cheap and convenient, which it clearly isn’t and shouldn’t be. We’ve lost our sense of the true value of food basically. We externalise all its true costs.

It’s also the case that about a billion people globally don’t have access to food. They’re hungry. But actually a large proportion of that is directly attributable to the globalised industrial food system. Demonstrably there’s more food available globally at the moment than we need, but it’s not reaching everybody.

Because I’m an architect, I’m interested in how those iniquities of the food system relate to cities. I talk about what I call the urban paradox, which is essentially that as humans we have two key needs: sociability (each other) and sustenance (all the natural resources necessary to sustain us, of which food is a key element). The urban paradox comes from the fact that if we live together in large blobs in order to be sociable, if we gather in cities, then we get further and further away from the sources of our sustenance and there’s no solution to this.

What’s the role of architecture and design in responding to this problem?

Is it right that we design houses that don’t have a kitchen, as we now do in the UK? Because, basically, people aren’t cooking, so don’t bother to get them a kitchen. That’s a design issue. If you start saying food is important, you start asking: How do we design the food system so that it is equitable? How do we design the whole journey of food, from the producer to the consumer?

In the case of the pre-industrial world, the countryside was basically a short little chain where you had multipurpose farms and people living nearby and you walked and got it. Now we have these global systems. That’s a design problem because frankly the way we’ve got it set up at the moment has been designed by people who are not designers of society, they’re designers of food systems. I’m saying we have to bring the question of how food travels, how food is produced, how it is bought and sold, directly into the architectural and urban design frame.

People talk about eco-cities and they go on about the u-values and saving water, but the food comes from the supermarket. That’s not an eco-city. If you want to design an eco-city, food is central to it. We have to eat every day – where’s it coming from? Food and agriculture, together, account for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions currently, so if you’re talking about the environment, you have to be talking about food.

I’m not saying that cities should grow all of their own food inside the city, because that is the definition of the countryside. But what is that balance? There are so many models that begin to address how you get a balance between urbanity and rurality.

What model are we using now, and what alternatives are there?

At one end of the possibilities is that we all move to Shanghai and we make Brazil the farm. Behind the global industrial food system model is the logic that you live in urban blobs of up to 30 million people and the farm is thousands of miles away and it uses mono-cultural production.

At the other end, we all go back to being farmers, which is what Frank Lloyd Wright was suggesting with his Broadacre City concept. He said we’ve got to stop building cities altogether, we’ve got to cover the whole of America in little farmsteads and everybody has got to go back to growing their own food.

I’m very interested in solutions that somehow look at the middle ground. In Ebenezer Howard’s garden city model, people would live in urban blobs of up to 30,000 people, with productive farmland around and then a network created with railways, and that gives you the urbanity.

So what kinds of things can people do to make change?

There’s a series of things that can be done at all levels. If you live in suburbia, grow your own. When you think about it, low-density suburbia is fertile land that has just had houses built on it. So there’s capacity for people to do fairly serious home food production in their gardens, which they probably don’t use anyway.

If you have a compact urban core, with farmland nearby then you can create networks that allow producers and consumers to come together. This is the Slow Food ‘co-producer’ idea. Carlo Petrini talks about consumers becoming co-producers. You become aware of food and where it’s been produced, and through your choices you actively promote ethical, local, seasonal good food.

If you go to one supermarket and get all your food from there, it’s got an unacceptable level of control over your life. In the middle aisles of the supermarket, where all the packaged and processed food is, it’s very likely that unless it says explicitly on the label that it is sustainably and ethically sourced, that it isn’t. Once you start to understand that the food you’re buying is not good, you actually start looking for other sources.

There are many models for how can we get together and use our buying power to create alternative, better food networks. In the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn every member works a four-hour shift every month. And so the people own the supermarket. Now it’s got 14,000 members and it’s been going for 38 years.

It’s a model that’s now being copied in London by The People’s Supermarket. These are the models that hopefully will start to scale up. But it is about people getting interested in food – not just what is in the food, but the social and political implications of the way we eat food, and becoming proactive about changing it.

If you’re operating at the global scale, which all cities do, then you begin to use your city-wide power to question the international food system and the political and economic frameworks that allow it to have such free reign.

Toronto has a food policy council, which means that any law that is passed in Toronto it has to go through the food policy council first and the implications for the food system are addressed before that legislation is passed.

Masterchef has been hugely popular in Australia, but a supermarket sponsors it. Can these kinds of shows help change the food culture?

I’m a Masterchef addict – I’ve watched every episode that’s ever been broadcast. I always call programs like Masterchef ‘food porn’, because people go to the supermarket, buy the cheapest possible, hideous ready-meal and then they sit in front of these programs eating crap and watching somebody cooking incredible food.

I’m afraid the more cookery programs are on television, the more it’s a sign there’s something wrong in the food culture. There’s a complete disjunction. If you go to countries like France or Italy, where there’s still a reasonable cooking culture, people don’t sit and watch chefs on television because why on earth would you do that? They just do it themselves. It’s a symptom of the problem, really. I do still love the program, but I also cook.

Repair

In Greener Homes on July 24, 2011

Repairing old things creates something new

A few years ago, Scott Mitchell began accepting busted iPods from all-comers, offering to open them up and tinker with their bits. He dubbed the experiment the iPod Social Outreach Project.

“I fixed over half of them without access to any spare parts, just by taking them apart, cleaning them, seeing if the connections were still ok,” he says. “At the start I had no experience – and that was the point.”

Mr Mitchell is one of the expert fixers involved in The Repair Workshops, which are open to the public on July 30 and 31, as part of the State of Design Festival.

Coordinated by design consultancy Eco Innovators and jewellery-repair project The Treasury, the event comprises two parts. First, a group of artists and technicians will create new artworks from broken items that had been donated to charities; and second, the team of fixers will repair or repurpose goods brought in by the public. (Numbers are limited, so you must pre-register on the website to be involved.)

For his PhD research, Mr Mitchell has studied the way people modify mass-produced goods. Over the last decade, he says, products have become increasingly sealed up and un-repairable – designed for the dump, not for longevity.

“But because of this restriction in consumer access, there’s been a parallel movement to reclaim those rights,” he says.

One example is The Repair Manifesto, which was one of the inspirations for the upcoming workshops. Conceived by Dutch collective Platform 21, the manifesto’s tagline is “Stop Recycling. Start Repairing.”

“The idea is that we’ll save a lot more energy and consumer waste if products are designed for repair before recycling,” Mr Mitchell says. “The manifesto contends that repair is a productive and positive way to engage with the world – and it’s a lot of fun.”

Wil Campbell, an industrial designer and another of the collaborators in The Repair Workshops, agrees. He says the need to save virgin resources will only grow more pressing as oil becomes more scarce and expensive.

“Each product existed as resources before it was turned into a product and, in most cases, it’s going to continue to exist for many thousands of years after you’ve finished with it. It’s good to make the brief window of usefulness as long as possible.”

And you don’t need to be an engineer to try; mending household items is well within reach of the average person.

“You can go online and find out how to fix almost anything – so many people are willing to give it a go and post instructions on forums, or videos on YouTube and websites like ifixit.com. You can skill yourself up on a situation by situation basis,” he says.

Mr Campbell argues there’s a deeper benefit to the practice. The beauty of repair, he says, is that it not only saves money and resources, but also shifts the way we think about products, the way they work and the effort involved in their creation.

“Repairing forces people to engage with the stuff of their life. When you fix something, you develop a relationship with it,” he says. “It gives you a story to tell. People like telling stories about products – about the way they use their grandmother’s old cookware – and it’s that type of thing that is so rewarding.”

Read this article at The Age online

Sourdough starter

In Blog on July 13, 2011

I’M besotted with baking at the moment, so over the coming weeks, I’ll write a couple of posts about my sourdough and me.

Today, I’ll start – where else? – with the starter. If you’d like a soundtrack, I suggest The Loaf, by Darren Hanlon.

For those of you who haven’t come across the makings of sourdough before, the starter – otherwise known as the culture, plant or mother dough – is a kind of wild, bubbling, gurgling yeast. It’s the thing that makes the dough rise and contains the bacteria that make it sour. To my understanding of yeast, what happens is this: as the mix ferments, the yeast eats the sugars in the flour and releases carbon dioxide, which leavens the dough.

You can make your own starter in a week, by fermenting flour and water. I have a beautiful book called The Handmade Loaf, by Dan Lepard, in which he suggests adding raisins and yoghurt to the recipe.

But if you’ve got a liking for narrative – or convenience – I suggest you prevail on a friend for a portion of their culture. To keep it alive, you must feed it regularly with fresh flour and water (or you can store it for a while in the fridge or freezer and revive it later). This bakery in San Franscisco has been using the same “mother dough” since 1849.

While I was away hitch-hiking last year, my old starter died. I discovered the jar recently, toppled over under our kitchen bench. When I peered at the jar’s congealed innards, it I realised that both of us – the culture and I – were petrified.

Its death was apt. Over the last few years, I had made a number of half-hearted attempts at baking bread, but gave up, not really knowing what I was doing.

But then I fell in love with Les Bartlett’s small bakery near Maleny on the Sunshine Coast. There I met Penny, a fellow Melbournian, who was staying there to learn Les’s craft. Earlier this year I saw Penny again and she brought me a sample of his sourdough plant. For most of this year, I’ve been baking twice a week. I am only beginning to learn.

This is what my jar looked like the other day:

Last week, I was talking with a good friend whose grandmother died recently. He was driving to visit her one morning, when he received a call saying she’d passed away. While we talked, I began to think about my family.

Two years ago my grandparents on my mother’s side died within a week of each other. At that time I gained solace from the wisdom of another friend, Daniela from Argentina.

Daniela is the person who first showed me how to bake bread, while I stayed for weeks at her remote camping ground – Ecocamping Ñorquinco – on the edge of a lake, in a national park, in northern Patagonia. Here she is by the lake, with bread for morning tea:

She told me that while she did not believe in an afterlife, she knew that her relatives, generation upon generation, lived on through her and through her children: not only in their minds – for memories rarely surpass a few generations – but also in their bodies. Her ancestors lived on, physically, through her.

I find this profound; it seems both soulful and scientifically valid. I think of generations stretching back in time, each of us given our substance by those before us, even as we must make our days, minds and bodies our own.

Sourdough is like that. Whenever I open my jar of culture to begin a new batch, I call upon a living portion of the past. The mother loaf goes back to Les, and maybe beyond. Its family tree extends through all those with whom he’s shared it, and on and on, in turn.

Choir hits a high note in Europe

In Culture, The Age on July 13, 2011

CALEB Foster-McLachlan could barely contain his excitement yesterday, the eve of his departure for the ancient cathedrals of Europe where he will perform with the Australian Children’s Choir.

”I’m so excited I can’t get to sleep at night any more. I just want to go,” the 17-year-old said.

Foster-McLachlan, who has high-functioning autism, said he tends to worry too much: ”I get stressed about expectations and results a lot of the time. Sometimes I think I’m going from one stressful thing to another.”

That made his first night in the choir after his successful audition particularly nerve-racking. ”It was very scary at first,” he says. ”I was so nervous my voice wobbled and the conductor commented that I sounded like a pregnant turkey being strangled.

”But I learnt quickly and the last comment I had from him was a few months ago – he said I had too much of a cheeky grin, which was off-putting from a distance!”

The choir’s tour of Europe has been two years in the planning. For just over three weeks, 50 children – aged from 10 to 18 – will sing in several cities across Germany, Austria and England.

The schedule culminates with a performance at Canterbury Cathedral, where the group will take part in the International Children’s Choir Festival, singing with young choristers from six countries.

Choir director and conductor Andrew Wailes says he has been able to organise for the ensemble to perform in some remarkable venues – places far removed, and not just geographically, from the children’s normal base in Mitcham.

”It’s mind-blowing just to walk into some of the glorious Gothic cathedrals in Europe and know they are between 500 and 1000 years old,” he says. ”And when you go in there to sing, it’s the most inspirational setting. These spaces were designed all those years ago to make the human voice sound its best.”

Wailes says the tour party is excited and nervous – and that goes for the accompanying adults, too. Last week, he held the final briefing for parents.

”Suddenly one of the kids looked up to me with these forlorn eyes and said, ‘We’ve only got one rehearsal left!’ And I said, ‘Yes, you betcha. I’m acutely aware of that, young man’.”

The choir’s repertoire for the trip comprises 43 songs, including a Latin Mass and a few pieces in German, all learnt since the beginning of the year at twice-weekly rehearsals.

”It’s a huge amount of music for the kids to have prepared in six months, but they’ve got there. We’re ready and raring to go,” Wailes says.

”They’re going to come back different people, with a whole lot of experiences and wonderful memories to inspire them.”

Foster-McLachlan has felt restless for the past two weeks, but this time it’s out of anticipation, not anxiety. He has been daydreaming about walking in German forests, descending upon mediaeval castles and singing in thousand-year-old chapels with gilded walls.

”I could have spent my sleeplessness productively, packing my bag,” he admits, ”but instead I sit there imagining being inside the Canterbury Cathedral or how I’m going to talk with the American choirs we’ll meet.”

The year 11 student’s mother, Brenda McLachlan, says being in the choir has helped him understand the subtleties of communication and socialising in a group – scenarios that can be challenging for autistic people.

”Singing in the choir is calming and therapeutic because at times he can get quite wound up,” she says.

Wailes said the benefits of singing are clear for the young and the old.

”It’s the basic human form of relaxing that doesn’t require gym fees or expensive equipment,” he said. ”When you’re singing, that’s all you think about, you don’t worry about anything else. It’s good for the soul.”

Read this article at The Age online

Bathtub wormfarm benchseat

In Blog on July 11, 2011

ANDY and I ventured north on a sunny Saturday, to hold a UBC workshop at a Permablitz for the Reservoir Neighbourhood House.

We were asked to adapt our previous bathtub wormfarm design into something much lower to the ground, to fit a convenient spot near the kitchen and double as an outdoor bench. We scavenged timber from our own ramshackle stocks, including some gorgeous old hardwood floorboards that Tall English Stephen had earmarked for his own chook shed. He put on a brave face when he found them missing.

Despite the trouble we were in with a miffed Stephen, this was my new all-time favourite Urban Bush-Carpenters workshop. A large group of enthusiastic volunteers did all the work while we watched, imparted wisdom and ate cake. Many of the participants hadn’t had any experience using a saw or a drill, but with a few small pointers and much gusto, we produced a beautiful object.

It is a constant source of wonder to me that we always seem to have just the right amount and right kind of timber on hand, not more or less – but I guess that’s about making do with whatever we’ve got.

I was so excited by the way it looked, that if it were me, I’d be inclined to keep it inside.

We’ve got our next workshop at CERES on this Saturday July 16, at 10 am. We’ll be building bench seats, like this:

If you want to take part, shoot us a message.