The Hungry City
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The Hungry City
Author: Marie A. Kelleher
language: en
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Release Date: 2025-01-15
The Hungry City is the story of medieval Barcelona, retold through the lens of food and famine. Between the summer of 1333 and the spring of 1334, severe weather-related grain shortages spread throughout the Mediterranean, and Barcelona's leaders struggled to bring food to the city as its residents grew increasingly desperate. Employing the perspectives of historical actors whose stories are drawn from the records of that catastrophic year, Marie A. Kelleher uses Barcelonans' varied responses to crisis in the food system to present multiple ways of understanding the city—as a physical space, as the center of a network of Mediterranean commerce, as one powerful entity within a broader monarchy, as a site of religious encounter, and as a complex social body. Even as the central figure in each chapter offers their own version of the city, the separate strands of these multiple Barcelonas intertwine to reveal the fabric of the city as a whole. The medieval city was defined by its network of human relationships—between its rulers and ruled; its merchants, artisans, and laborers; its religious and secular authorities; its insider and outsider groups—and by its overlapping local and regional geographies. Barcelona in the fourteenth century was no different, and The Hungry City draws together multiple lives and narrative strands to focus on a single point in time, what one Catalan chronicler referred to as "the first bad year," providing a dynamic new perspective on the history of Barcelona and the medieval Mediterranean.
Hungry City
'Cities cover just 2% of the world’s surface, but consume 75% of the world’s resources’. The relationship between food and cities is fundamental to our everyday lives. Food shapes cities and through them it moulds us - along with the countryside that feeds us. Yet few of us are conscious of the process and we rarely stop to wonder how food reaches our plates. Hungry City examines the way in which modern food production has damaged the balance of human existence, and reveals that we have yet to resolve a centuries-old dilemma - one which holds the key to a host of current problems, from obesity and the inexorable rise of the supermarkets, to the destruction of the natural world. Original, inspiring and written with infectious enthusiasm and belief, Hungry City illuminates an issue that is fundamental to us all.