In the opening passages of Sitopia, Carolyn Steel talks about the “Google Burger”, a €250,000 (£218,000) prototype piece of cultured meat, grown in a laboratory from bovine stem cells, with backing from, among others, Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin. This technology may, as George Monbiot has recently argued, help to save the world, but Steel is sceptical. She mistrusts the urge to find a technical fix, especially one that would put tech giants in charge of the world’s diets. Wouldn’t it be easier, she asks, if we just ate more vegetables?

To which the answer is both yes and no. Eating more vegetables is not difficult. The hard part is silencing all those cravings – biological, cultural, psychological – that urge people to eat a lot of meat. The still harder part, once some virtuous souls have disciplined themselves away from animal products, is to persuade billions of other people, for many of whom plentiful meat is a newlydiscovered and hard-earned luxury, to do the same.

Rather than apply technology to problems that modern society has created, Steel argues, it is important to address the patterns of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place. The issues are philosophical as well as technical, and personal and global at once. Food is “the substance that connects us to one another and to our world”. Food is also love: “for social animals like us, the sharing of food will always be central to bonding with others … Throughout our lives, the chance to show our love through food lies in every meal that we grow, cook and eat. It is the basis not just of a good life, but of being human.”

Steel is an architect by training, whom I have known since we studied the subject together at university, and her thinking reflects a lesson we both learned: that different forms of knowledge and experience – in a building or in life – should be considered not in separate categories, but together and in the round. The concept of “Sitopia”, a term coined by Steel in her earlier book Hungry City, is that if we can eat well (and cook well and farm well) we are on the way to living well. Where Utopia is abstract and impossible, Sitopia is both grounded in daily experience and achievable: “working with food is the perfect antidote to living in our virtual, dematerialised world”. It should also give pleasure. Food, in Steel’s world, is always to be enjoyed.

The beauty of food is that it is so many things at once: necessity and treat, nature and artifice, the subject of science, philosophy, etiquette and art. The book is accordingly multiple in its themes, an all-you-can-eat buffet of thoughts and facts about food, drawing on (for example) the philosophies of Epicurus and Aristotle, some fascinating information about microbes and foraging, and reminiscences of childhood visits to the author’s cousins’ old-fashioned farm in Finland.

Steel opposes those forms of science and economics that insist on division, thereby dismembering food’s ability to combine different aspects of life. Neoliberalism’s view of food as just another commodity, combined with mechanistic science, has, Steel believes, brought the world to its current state: one where food production contributes to climate change, where soil is impoverished, farm animals tortured and biodiversity ravaged, all in a desperate chase to produce food that, in developed countries, is often thrown away. Or, if it is not, it contributes to crises of obesity and related health issues.

Steel’s proposal is that food should be honoured by individuals and economies. From production to consumption, it should be given time, with a long-term view of such things as the quality of soil. What this means in practice is to some extent a return to old habits: sharing meals, more local distribution, smaller-scale production and more labour-intensive farming, although Steel does allow technology – the use of drones to survey crops, for example – some role. We have, she says, become dependent on cheap food, the price of which is only achieved by ignoring environmental degradation.

In all of this, a big and not entirely answered question is who, exactly, are “we”? Steel makes enthusiastic use of the first-person plural, wielding a protean pronoun that at different times means “we the human race,” “we inhabitants of the western world” and “we the educated and relatively comfortable people who are most likely to read or write a book like this”. Its slipperiness causes most trouble when she argues that “we” should pay the true cost of food, which might be double current prices. This will be bad news for those of “us” who already struggle to get enough to eat.

Steel spots the problem and tries to address it, by suggesting that the employment opportunities offered by Sitopian farming will generate incomes enough to pay for Sitopian food. She’s a little sketchy, though, as to how this new state of affairs will come about.

Steel is not an economist, nor an agronomist. Not very surprisingly, she doesn’t have all the answers to the huge questions she asks. But her instincts are profoundly right – food is indeed more than fuel – and this is a brave and ambitious book for stating them so strongly. She speaks, for sure, mostly to the privileged, but if the privileged can’t make a start in eating and living better, who can?

• Sitopia is published by Chatto (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15