Geoff Andrews of the Open University was one of the panellists at the recent Festival of Economics. He and Lynsey Hanley were two non-economists contributing to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation sponsored session on poverty and place, along with economists Paul Gregg and Paul Johnson. It was illuminating, as the recording shows, to have the different disciplinary perspectives. We invited these two people to take part because Lynsey has written a book [amazon_link id=”1847087027″ target=”_blank” ]Estates[/amazon_link] about these types of place where poverty clusters, and Geoff was involved in the wonderful BBC2/OU series, Secret History of Our Streets, many of whose selected locations had been poor decades ago although many were now rapidly gentrifying.

I picked up at the Festival (the second will take place on 22-23 November 2013) Geoff’s (2008) book [amazon_link id=”0745327443″ target=”_blank” ]The Slow Food Story[/amazon_link]. It’s a description of the Slow Food movement which has spread from its origins in Piedmont, in Italy, with the publication of the original Slow Food Manifesto in 1987, to reach many countries and span the production chain from farmers in developing countries to consumers in Italy, the UK, US and elsewhere.

The book is really interesting; there’s a lot in it that I didn’t know about the movement. It’s also impossible not to be sympathetic to concerns about the effect of fast food on human health, on the one hand, and the poverty of small farmers on the other hand. I also wholly agree about the importance of preparing food for family and friends and sharing meals together. Just recently, I came across this American report on the beneficial effect of family meals on young people – highly plausible.

However, [amazon_link id=”0745327443″ target=”_blank” ]Slow Food[/amazon_link], the book, and the Movement, fail to even pose what seem to me some rather obvious and important questions about the political economy of food.

One is about productivity in farming/food processing and price. There are seven billion people now, and feeding us depends on technological revolutions in farming, including the use of fertilisers and pesticides, and genetic modification (the practice is ancient, only the techniques change). Achieving what the Slow Food people call ‘clean’ food production seems to involve abandoning these techniques. What will we eat? Will Slow Food require much higher prices? The book protests that the Slow Food movement is not characterised by nostalgic romanticism. I’m not persuaded of that.

Another is why the only issue for farmers’ livelihoods is consumer habits. Neither the book nor the movement seem to have anything to say about the concentration of the world agricultural commodities markets in the hands of a few huge trading companies, or for that matter retail concentration in specific markets. Nor about the impact of biofuels on agriculture and food prices. Nor about the growth of speculative trading in agricultural commodities in making prices higher and more volatile. While I want to share really good food with the people I love, these are the questions I’d start with in thinking about the economy of what we eat and the fast food business.

[amazon_image id=”0745327443″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure[/amazon_image]

I’m pondering what to write about Erik Olin Wright’s [amazon_link id=”184467617X” target=”_blank” ]Envisioning Real Utopias[/amazon_link], for a debate in the New Year over at Crooked Timber. The book has a few examples of ‘real utopias’ – the Mondragon co-operative, Wikipedia – but only a few. It set me pondering about putting utopianism into practice. Of course, the internal contradiction of ‘real utopias’ is intentional. Thomas More knew no such societies were possible when he wrote the original [amazon_link id=”0140449108″ target=”_blank” ]Utopia[/amazon_link]. As in so many socially progressive movements, the Victorians were the real pioneers. Robert Owen is one of my favourites, manager of a Manchester mill and a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society before going on to turn New Lanark into a ‘real utopia’.

I’ve not read much of Owen’s work, and that a long time ago, but found certainly in my youth found it hard to disagree with any sentiment he expressed in [amazon_link id=”0140433481″ target=”_blank” ]The Social System[/amazon_link] (1826): “To train and educate the rising generation will at all times be the first object of society, to which every other will be subordinate”. And in New Lanark he put into practice his view about the importance of early intervention, more than a century and a half before this truth was rediscovered in modern policy: “The Institution has been devised to afford the means of receiving your children at an early age, almost as soon as they can walk. By this means many of you, mothers and families, will be able to earn a better maintenance or support for your children; you will have less care and anxiety about them, while the children will be prevented from acquiring any bad habits. and gradually prepared to learn the best”. (Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark, 1816). New Lanark didn’t close as a working mill until 1968.

Although I can think of other utopias, imagined ones of early modern times and actual ones in Victorian times, existing modern ones are hard to find examples of. Any suggestions?

New Lanark in the 1950s, from http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/lanark/newlanark/index.html