Sound Affects: How Sound Shapes Our Lives, Our Wellbeing and Our Planet

By Julian Treasure

12 min read

Why does it matter? Because the city you live in was built by what you eat — and you've never been shown the blueprints.

Walk down almost any old street in a city and you're reading a menu. Poultry. Bread Street. Cornhill. The names are fossils — remnants of the one force that actually built the place. Not the architects, not the emperors, not the merchant banks. Food. Every day, a city the size of London requires thirty million meals to materialize from thin air — grown, moved, sold, cooked, eaten, disposed of — and somehow, in the modern West, almost none of us can see it happening. That invisibility isn't accidental. It took centuries of engineering and economics to pull off, and something else too: a collective forgetting so thorough we no longer notice the shape of the hole it left. The amnesia has consequences — in our streets, our politics, our bodies, our soil. Once Steel shows you the backstage door, you can't unknow what's behind it.

Thirty Million Meals a Day, and Almost Nobody Notices

A child pushes through a green baize door in a Bournemouth hotel and finds herself in another world. On one side: polished antiques, pressed linen, the careful manners of the dining room. On the other: worn tile floors, copper pans seething with stock, grease-clouded enamel walls, and the industrial hum of a kitchen feeding dozens of strangers. The architect Carolyn Steel spent her childhood summers slipping between these two worlds, and that threshold became the founding image of her thinking about cities. Every metropolis, she came to understand, is divided exactly like that hotel — a presentable face and a hidden digestive system, separated by the thinnest of doors.

The digestive system is enormous. On any given day, London needs thirty million meals fed into it — produced, moved, sold, cooked, eaten, cleared away. That number sounds manageable until you trace even one meal backward: through the restaurant kitchen, the distribution warehouse, the dock, the cargo hold, the farm on another continent. Hundreds of unseen people and thousands of miles of infrastructure stood behind your lunch. Multiply that by thirty million and you have the largest coordinated undertaking in human civilization, running every single day, in every city on earth.

The Street Names Are Still There — We Just Forgot What They Mean

What do the streets named Poultry, Cornhill, and Bread Street in the City of London actually record? Not quaint medievalisms kept around for atmosphere — they are the fossil skeleton of a food supply system. They mark where the stalls stood, where the animals came in, where the grain changed hands. Walk that part of the city and you are reading, without knowing it, the anatomy of how a pre-industrial metropolis fed itself.

Most people read those names as mere decoration. That's the tell. The evidence of food's role in shaping cities is still inscribed everywhere — in the layout of streets, in the names of neighborhoods, in the orientation of market squares — but the meaning has gone opaque. We've stopped knowing how to decode it.

To see how recently this was otherwise, consider the Athenian Agora. We tend to remember it as the birthplace of democracy, the place where Socrates held his audiences and citizens debated the fate of the state. What we forget is that Socrates gathered his crowds specifically near the food-sellers and money-lenders — fishmongers who deployed something very like the colorful abuse of a London fish market to distract buyers from the staleness of their wares. Philosophy and rotten fish, side by side. The Agora was not a civic space that happened to tolerate commerce; it was a food market that also discovered it could hold a political argument.

That connection between the business of eating and the business of governing a city was explicit right through to medieval Europe. In Padua, the council chamber — a soaring hall with the largest vaulted wooden roof built to that date — was constructed directly above the city's food market. Councillors debated civic matters on the upper floor while vegetables and grain changed hands below. The vertical arrangement was not coincidence. It was an architectural statement about how cities actually worked.

Dirty business and elevated discourse were not competing uses of the same space. They were the same thing.

The Turkey Calculation That Explains the Whole System

Imagine you want to do the right thing at Christmas. You've seen the television exposés — the crowded sheds, the turkeys so heavy their legs give way — and you've found an alternative: a farmer named Andrew Dennis who raises his birds two hundred at a time in woodland, on organic feed, in something recognisably close to a natural life. The turkey tastes better. The animals suffer less. The arithmetic, however, is fatal. Britain eats roughly ten million Christmas turkeys a year. Raise all of them the way Dennis does and you'd need — crunching the numbers — around 34.5 million hectares of land: nearly double every hectare of farmland the entire United Kingdom possesses. The pastoral dream doesn't scale. It can't. The industrial system isn't a corporate conspiracy that better intentions could dismantle; it's the answer to a mathematical problem whose terms are set by the sheer number of mouths that need feeding.

The disorienting thing is that the system which looks most monstrous is also the one that makes current urban life arithmetically possible. And that forces a sharper question than 'how do we fix the food industry?' The sharper question is whether the scale itself — the density, the urbanisation, the expectation that food costs 10% of household income (down from 23% in 1980) — is the actual variable nobody wants to touch. We've driven the price of food so low that the true costs had to go somewhere, and they went to the Amazon basin, to the water tables of the Central Valley, to the climate. The cheap turkey isn't cheap. Its real price is just paid by people who weren't in the shop.

The turkey calculation doesn't close a door — it opens one. If artisanal farming can't rescue us at current scale, then the question becomes what kind of cities, and what kind of appetites, a genuinely sustainable food system could actually support — and how much brittleness we've quietly built into a system that depends on everything going right at once.

One Depot Fire Away from Empty Shelves

The supermarket system looks, from the outside, like a triumph of coordination. Pull into any car park on a Tuesday morning and the shelves are full: cereal, eggs, milk, fresh meat — an apparently effortless abundance. But that fullness is maintained by a supply chain so tightly wound that a single fire at a fuel depot can empty shelves within days.

Here is what that system actually looks like from the inside. At Junction 18 of the M1, a few roundabouts from the village of Crick, stand a series of vast warehouses clad in off-white corrugated metal — buildings so featureless that only the lorries crowding their loading bays, packed together like piglets at a sow, give any sense of their scale. This is one of around seventy national food hubs that collectively manage the majority of Britain's food supply. Inside, forklift teams run around the clock, receiving pallets from supplier lorries and dispatching them to supermarkets in a precisely timed sequence. The trigger for the whole operation is the barcode scanner at your checkout: the moment you buy a box of cereal, an automated order fires back to the warehouse to ensure its replacement arrives the next morning. There is no buffer, no stored reserve. When a fire hit a single distribution centre in Hemel Hempstead in 2005, the disruption was immediate. One shed, one fire — and food stopped moving.

What looks like efficiency is the deliberate elimination of redundancy. Every slack in the system has been removed in the name of cost. The genetic base of that supply has narrowed in parallel: ninety percent of American milk now comes from a single cattle breed, the Holstein-Friesian. That uniformity is what makes the supply so consistent — and so brittle. One novel pathogen with an appetite for that particular genome and almost the entire American dairy supply goes down together. A system that once had thousands of overlapping redundancies — local suppliers, regional warehouses, seasonal variation — has been replaced by a single taut wire. It delivers remarkable cheapness. It also means that almost any serious shock, a fuel strike, a disease outbreak, a cyber-attack on logistics software, hits the entire network at once, with nothing in reserve to absorb the blow.

The pre-industrial city had no such fragility. Its supply chains were inefficient, slow, expensive — and therefore diverse. Disrupting one route left dozens of others intact. Modern cities have traded that resilience for the illusion of permanent, frictionless plenty.

When the Market Left the City, the City Lost Its Heart

In 1956, an Austrian-born architect named Victor Gruen opened a mall in a Minneapolis suburb and believed, sincerely, that he had given America back something it had lost. Southdale Center had fountains, trees, a café, a birdcage — everything Gruen remembered from the Viennese streets of his childhood. He called it a town center for the automobile age. What he had actually built was a sealed fantasy that would spend the next half-century draining the life from every real town center near it.

Steel's argument is that this is not a retail story. When food moved from the market square to the out-of-town shed, something more than shopping habits changed. The market had always been where the business of eating and the business of living in public were the same activity — where you argued about the price of herring and, almost incidentally, ran into your neighbor, heard the news, and became, briefly, a citizen rather than a consumer. Strip that out and the square that remains is just a gap between buildings.

The people who feel this most sharply are not the ones browsing Borough Market on a Saturday, sampling artisan cheese. The Saturday Borough Market scene is quietly devastating in this light — Steel calls it food tourism, a heritage performance staged for those with the leisure and income to treat lunch as an excursion. The real political fact is forty miles away, in Sandwell: a post-industrial stretch of the West Midlands where low-income residents have no fresh food within five hundred meters of their homes. Picture what that radius looks like on foot — a ten-minute walk in any direction that turns up a parade of betting shops and fried chicken counters but no greengrocer, no butcher, no market stall. That gap exists because supermarkets became urban developers, trading football stadiums and affordable housing for planning permission, then building stores whose scale requires the kind of land only available at the edge of town. The desert is not an accident of the market. It is the market's product.

What Gruen wanted — the square where commerce and civic life pressed together in productive friction — was not a design ideal. It was what cities had always been. Its absence is not nostalgia. It is a measurable loss, paid for in unequal access to food, in the slow hollowing of public space, and in the replacement of citizens with customers.

The Sign on the Wall of the Savoy's Fish Room

Deep in the bowels of the Savoy Hotel, past the sandwich room where chefs trim crusts off hundreds of loaves and consign the offcuts to the bin, past the butchery with its ancient chopping board worn into a topography of years of use, there is a fish room — a dim, damp cave of a space where a lone chef stands shucking oysters beside a cold store full of sleeping lobsters. On the far wall hangs a yellow notice in red paint: NO BANGING OF SALMON CARPACCIO AFTER 7.30 — THE THEATRE REQUIRES SILENCE. The D'Oyly Carte stage is just the other side of the wall. The audience sits in candlelit hush while, inches away, someone is assembling something exquisite from raw fish. Two worlds, one partition.

That partition is the book's argument in miniature. But the Savoy version of it — artisanal skill hidden behind a glamorous performance — has itself been hidden behind a second door. A few miles from Sheffield, a food factory employing a thousand people turns out 740,000 ready-meals every week, managed by someone whose previous job was in nuclear power. This is where the Savoy experience goes when it gets scaled up: where duck à l'orange failed not because it was made badly but because consumers tested it and preferred what the team called 'ducky, orangey gloop' to proper crisp skin. The kitchen's judgment, honed over centuries, was submitted to a preference survey and lost. What was lost wasn't the recipe. It was the cook.

The physical kitchen shrank in parallel. The average new-build British kitchen now measures around six and a half square metres. Grete Lihotzky designed the original engineered kitchen in 1920s Frankfurt to make housework efficient; what her descendants produced was a room that makes cooking feel like a chore, which makes convenience food feel like relief, which means the factory's judgment replaces yours. Six and a half square metres. The architecture made the decision before you did.

We Built Cathedrals for Our Sewage — Then Stopped Talking to the Soil

Imagine you could visit the engine room of a civilization's decision. It would look like this: a Victorian hall in southeast London so ornately decorated with emerald cast-iron foliage, interlocking arches, and gilded detail that visitors mistake it for a church. They are not entirely wrong. Crossness Pumping Station was built in 1865 to house four beam engines — named Victoria, Prince Consort, Alexandra, and Albert Edward — each capable of lifting six tons of liquid sewage at a single stroke, eleven times per minute. The Victorians could have built a utilitarian shed. Instead they built a cathedral, and the grandeur was intentional: a monument to the civilizational choice those engines embodied.

The choice was this: instead of returning the city's organic waste to the soil that had produced its food, London would flush everything into the Thames estuary and out to sea. Joseph Bazalgette built 450 miles of sewer to make this possible, and it worked magnificently as a public health intervention — cholera retreated, the Great Stink ended, London survived. But something was also lost in that moment, and the Parisians, briefly, showed what it was. In the 1870s, engineers at Gennevilliers outside Paris tried the opposite approach, irrigating sandy, exhausted farmland with the city's sewage. Within years the fields were producing asparagus and watercress for the city's finest hotels — crops that require exactly the nitrogen and phosphorus London was pumping into the North Sea. The experiment was never scaled up. The one-way model won.

We are still living inside that choice. The UK now discards 6.7 million tonnes of household food every year — roughly a third of everything purchased — while the farmland that grew it is dosed with synthetic fertiliser to replace the nutrients we chose not to return. What the Victorian engineers also did, without knowing it, was design a city that treats the food cycle as a straight line: in at one end, out the other, the debt deferred to the soil, the dead zones spreading in the North Sea, and the phosphate reserves we are now mining to replace what we threw away.

Sitopia: Food Place, Not No Place

The reintegration of food into cities is not a fantasy requiring utopian engineering or inherited wealth. It is a proven emergency response, demonstrated at scale in exactly the conditions that expose what is actually possible — when the comfortable option disappears and you either adapt or starve.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba lost the oil-dependent imports that had fed its cities. Havana had no buffer, no stored reserves, no industrial alternative — the kind of fragility any modern city would face under a serious supply shock. The response was to turn every vacant lot, rooftop, and strip of unused ground into a farm. Within a few years, these neighbourhood growing plots, called organopónicos, were producing enough fresh food to rescue the city from collapse. The farms are still there.

This is not a story unique to crisis socialism. During the Second World War, allotments spread across London with such speed that by 1943 they covered the parks around the Albert Memorial. A tenth of Britain's food came from gardens and growing plots. The reconnection of city and food production happened, here, within living memory, because it had to.

Steel's argument is built into a word. Thomas More called his ideal society Utopia — 'no place', a name that contains its own admission of impossibility. Steel's alternative is Sitopia, from the Greek sitos, food, and topos, place: not an imagined city but the one you already inhabit, redesigned around the acknowledgment that food shapes everything. Havana didn't achieve Sitopia by reaching for perfection. It achieved something more durable: a city that stopped pretending its food came from nowhere.

The direction is available now, in every city with a vacant lot and a broken supply chain. The decision is simply whether to take it.

The Green Baize Door Is Always Swinging

The green baize door is still swinging. You've walked past your version of it a thousand times — the supermarket's steel service entrance, the restaurant alley stacked with crates at dawn, a lorry changing gear on a slip road at 3am, carrying something you'll eat by Thursday. None of this is hidden, exactly. We've simply made a collective agreement not to look. Sitopia doesn't ask you to romanticize what's behind the door — the grease, the noise, the scale of it aren't romantic. It asks you to understand that the polished world out front is only possible because of what happens in those unglamorous rooms. Havana figured this out when it had no choice. London figured it out during a war. You have a kitchen. A windowsill. A city with vacant ground in it. The reconnection doesn't require a revolution. It requires, first, the decision to look back through the door.