Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (12 page)

However many gizmos they employ, there is no doubt that supermarkets have got the business of food supply down to a fine art. Advanced preservation techniques and transport technology have combined to create the illusion that feeding cities is easy. It isn’t. Yet the better the food industry gets at what it does, the more we forget how much we depend on it. The reality is that supermarkets have a stranglehold over not just the grocery sector, but the entire infrastructure that supplies our food. Without them, we would
struggle to feed ourselves; and that makes their position close to unassailable.

One of the reasons it can be hard to appreciate the effort it takes to feed a modern city is the sheer invisibility of the process. Not many of us make casual trips to food hubs like Crick. Even if we wanted to, visitors are about as welcome there as they would be at a top-secret military installation. The food industry is a highly secretive operation. We live in ignorance of the 24-hour effort that keeps our lasagnes coming, and that suits the industry just fine.

Before the railways, it was a very different story. Transporting food was often harder than growing it in the first place – no more so than for grain, every city’s staple food. Grain was too heavy and bulky to carry more than a few miles overland: a 100-mile journey by cart in Roman times is estimated to have cost half the value of the load.
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Transport by water was easier, but the grain was then exposed to the risk of rotting. Grain was also difficult and dangerous to store, prone to weevil attack and explosive if its temperature rose too high. One solution was to convert the grain to flour before it reached the city, but this added a further logistical problem, since mills ran on wind or water power, and were often inconveniently located in order to make best use of the elements. Several famines that hit Paris during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were caused not by failed harvests but by severe winters that froze the Seine and prevented the city’s watermills from operating.

In terms of transport, meat had one great advantage over grain. Cattle could walk themselves to market, which made it possible to raise them far from the city. Many of the sheep that fed ancient Rome were pastured 500 miles away in Apulia, while the cattle that fed the cities of medieval Germany and north Italy came from as far afield as Poland, Hungary and the Balkans, travelling westwards in herds up to 20,000 strong. The landscape all over Europe was criss-crossed by networks of drovers’ roads that ran separately from those carrying human traffic,
along which sheep, geese and cattle were driven by highly skilled (and highly paid) men. Sir Walter Scott described the task of driving cattle from Scotland to London in the early nineteenth century:

They are required to know perfectly the drove-roads, which lie over the wildest parts of the country, and to avoid as much as possible the highways, which destroy the feet of the bullocks, and the turnpikes, which annoy the spirit of the drover; whereas in the broad green or gray track which lies across the pathless moor, the herd not only move at ease and without taxation, but if they mind their business may pick up a mouthful of food by the way. At night the drovers usually sleep along with their cattle, let the weather be what it will, and many of these hardy men do not once rest under a roof during the journey on foot from Lochaber to Lincolnshire.
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After their three-week cross-country marathon (or biathlon, in the case of cattle from Skye, since they had to swim the first leg of their journey), animals bound for London could lose up to 100lb in weight, and had to be fattened up again before slaughter. Fattening was a specialist occupation in the suburbs, and breweries had a nice sideline in feeding cattle on spent grain. Many counties close to London combined fattening with dairy farming, and Islington, conveniently placed on the route south to Smithfield, specialised in both. But the most troublesome stage of the cattle’s journey was the last. In order to avoid the meat going bad, the animals had to be slaughtered as close to the markets as possible. That meant driving them through the middle of the city, which could cause chaos at busy times, and occasionally led to the trampling of a passer-by (several fatalities were reported at Smithfield in the nineteenth century). The animals were then slaughtered in the open, or in makeshift cellars beneath butchers’ shops. The sights, sounds and smells of death were some of the least charming aspects of life in the pre-industrial city.

Fresh fish was the other main source of protein for many cities, especially during the winter when there was little fresh meat to be had. The problem was to find a means of keeping the catch edible before bringing it ashore. The range of London’s fishing fleet at Barking, for
instance, was limited by the distance it had to sail up the Thames, which made the discovery in 1837 of a sole spawning ground just off the Norfolk coast particularly vexing, since it lay just out of reach. It took a Barking fisherman by the name of Samuel Hewett to come up with a solution. Ever since Roman times, winter ice had been collected from low-lying fields and stored in thick-walled ice houses for use during the summer. Hewett’s idea was to station a fleet of trawlers out at sea for weeks on end catching the fish, and use another fleet of high-speed cutters to bring it back to Billingsgate packed in ice. The business was so successful that in 1862 Hewett moved his fleet to Gorleston on the Norfolk coast; a move that signalled the end of Barking’s dominance in the supply of London’s fish.
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Fruit and vegetables did not figure greatly in the diets of most pre-industrial city-dwellers, largely because they were so expensive to produce. Even the humblest pea, carrot or bean was considered a high-maintenance crop, needing careful tending, plenty of manure, and gentle handling. Fruit and vegetables were grown as close to cities as possible, in order to benefit from the manure and ‘nightsoil’ (human waste) that the town could provide, as well as to minimise the bruising journey to market. That meant paying high land rents, which had to be offset by high profits, the pursuit of which led to the production of speciality crops, such as ‘forced’ vegetables, made to ripen weeks before their natural season by being grown under glass in ‘hot beds’ – pits filled with manure.
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City-dwellers then, as now, were prepared to pay absurd prices for out-of-season produce; and then, as now, they were often disappointed with what they got. Today the complaint is that the food tastes of nothing; 300 years ago, it was that it tasted of the dung it had been grown in. Nevertheless, market gardens always thrived on the edges of cities, catering to the luxury urban market. ‘Oh! The incredible profit by digging of ground,’ as the London gardener Thomas Fuller exclaimed in 1662, unconsciously echoing the Roman agronomist Varro’s enthusiasm for specialist suburban farming,
pastio villatica
, 2,000 years earlier.
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Perhaps the food that best illustrates how hard it was to feed a city the size of London before the age of steam is milk. Although its nutritional qualities were well recognised, the speed with which milk
went off meant that it had to be produced more or less on the spot, either in insalubrious inner-city cowsheds (an estimated 8,500 cows were kept in late eighteenth-century London) or in suburban dairies. The suburban herd, which was 20,000 strong at its peak, was milked at 3 a.m. each day by milkmaids, who carried the liquid into the city in open pails to ‘milk cellars’, basement rooms where it was left to stand in order to separate out the cream, after which the remainder was sold (often watered down) as milk. As Tobias Smollett’s description in
Humphry Clinker
suggests, on every stage of its journey the milk was exposed to some peril or other. Even if it was free from disease, it was often adulterated, going sour, or both:

But the milk itself should not pass unanalysed, the produce of faded cabbage-leaves and sour draff, lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings, discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot and tobacco quids from foot-passengers, overflowings from mud-carts … dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke’s sake … and finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milk-maid.
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Even allowing for Smollettian hyperbole, there is little doubt that London milk in the eighteenth century was far from the fresh ‘pinta’ we pour over our cornflakes today. No wonder the majority of Londoners never touched the stuff.

Given the physical difficulties of getting food into town, it is hardly surprising that most pre-industrial cities were compact by modern standards. A day’s journey by cart, a distance of around 20 miles, was the practical limit for bringing in grain overland, which limited the width of the city’s arable belt. The simple laws of geometry meant that the larger a city grew, the smaller the relative size of its rural hinterland
became, until the latter could no longer feed the former. Of course cities on rivers could bring in grain from a greater distance, but even then the grain still had to be carried to the river first.

Little surprise, then, that few cities reached a population greater than 100,000 in the pre-industrial world, and most were considerably smaller than that. Even a city as powerful as fifteenth-century Bologna peaked at 72,000, before plague reduced its numbers again to around 50,000. Had plague not intervened, the city might well have struggled to feed itself. As early as 1305, the council recognised the strategic importance of being able to supply itself with food ‘from its own possessions’, something larger cities were unable to do.
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With a population of 90,000, fourteenth-century Florence was already having to import much of its grain from Sicily; no mean task, given that the city was 60 miles from the coast up the River Arno.

The transport of food in the pre-industrial world also determined the way in which cities’ rural hinterlands were arranged, a phenomenon first analysed by the German landowner and geographer Johann Heinrich von Thünen, in his work of 1826,
The Isolated State
. The eponymous ‘state’ consisted of a ‘very large town’ in the middle of a featureless, fertile plain, the latter inhabited only by rational, profit-seeking farmers.
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Under such conditions, postulated von Thünen, the farm belt around a city would organise itself into a series of concentric rings, like ripples from a pebble chucked in a pond. The innermost one would consist of market gardens and dairies, whose profits would be high enough to pay the rent and whose activities would most benefit from the city’s manure. Beyond this would be a ring of coppices for firewood; and beyond that, arable land where the city’s grain would be grown, close enough to the city to make its transport feasible. Beyond that, there would be grazing for livestock, and finally, wilderness: land so far from the city that it wasn’t worth exploiting. (The question of where the inhabitants of the
Isolated State
might want to spend their weekends did not arise.) If the city was on a river, von Thünen argued, the low cost of water transport would distort its rural hinterland, stretching it along the river’s banks in a series of linear strips.

Despite its disregard of politics, culture and most forms of geography, von Thünen’s land-use model mirrored the pre-industrial world rather
well. Of course it was essentially a mathematical rationalisation of the way most cities had been fed up until his day – cities, that is, without recourse to the most important influence on food supplies in the pre-industrial world: the sea.

Those who use the metaphors of war when they talk about food are often more accurate than they would care to admit.

It can be tempting to hark back to a golden age when all food was produced and consumed locally, with no more than a short trip ‘from field to fork’. But of course no such age ever existed. Although small cities in the pre-industrial world were able to feed themselves locally, ‘food miles’ featured in the feeding of larger ones from the start.
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Before the railways, sea transport was the only way cities could transcend geography, and although not every great European city was a maritime power, those that were not – Paris, Florence and Madrid among them – all eventually faced the same fate. The larger they grew, the harder they found it to feed themselves, while their maritime rivals flourished.

Athens began importing grain from the Black Sea as early as the seventh century
BC
, since the local soil (a light, sandy loam) was unsuited to growing it. The city managed to turn its weakness into a strength, developing a powerful fleet that would later become a decisive weapon of war. Indeed, war and food were never far removed in the ancient world: many of Athens’ political allegiances, such as those made with Cyprus and Egypt against Persia in the fifth century
BC
, served the dual purpose of increasing the city’s political security while giving it access to those countries’ grain reserves. Critical supply routes were also heavily protected: the Hellespont, the narrow stretch of the Bosporus through which all Black Sea shipping must pass, was protected in times of war with a special army. Even in times of peace, such as that following the Persian defeat in 480
BC
, Athens made sure it maintained
superior naval power in the eastern Mediterranean in order to secure its grain supplies.