Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (6 page)

As Jean-Jacques Rousseau would later note, when men invest a lot of effort in land, they tend to want to own it. As marshes were drained and trees felled in England after the Civil War, the enclosure of common land was actively encouraged by Parliament, with the result that the traditional feudal landscape – large, open fields with village-based strip-farming – began to disappear under thousands of acres of neatly hedged, privately owned rectangles. The rural scenes that we think of today as typically English were the result of this particular land-grab, the like of
which had not been seen since the days of the Normans. The comparison was not lost on those who witnessed it, as one contemporary verse suggests:

The law locks up the man or woman,

Who steals the goose from off the common,

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from the goose.
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To make matters worse, this second dispossession of rural England was not being perpetrated by some foreign despot, but by the nation’s own parliament. Although the changes were arguably necessary in order to feed the expanding urban population, the speed of change, and the manner of it, was brutal.

The upheavals brought the ‘land question’ once more to the fore, with battle lines drawn between Sir Robert Filmer, champion of the ‘Divine Right’ school of thought, and John Locke, co-founder of the Whig Party and one of England’s foremost political philosophers. Filmer’s logic, published in his treatise of 1680,
Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings
, went thus: God had given the earth to Adam, and since Adam was the ‘first monarch’ of mankind, all monarchs who succeeded him inherited the earth by divine right. Stuff and nonsense, said Locke: Adam may have inherited the earth, but he did so on behalf of
all
mankind, not just on behalf of himself and his offspring. Locke’s refutation of Filmer took up the whole of the first of his
Two Treatises of Government
, written in 1690. Having demolished Filmer in the first volume, Locke spent the second pondering how, if the earth belonged to everyone, any individual could claim a piece of it for himself. The answer, he concluded, was by investing labour in it:

He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. Nobody can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask, then, when did they begin to be his? when he digested? or when he ate? or when he boiled? or when he brought them home? or when he picked them up? And it is plain, if the first gathering
made them not his, nothing else could. That labour put a distinction between them and common.
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It followed that if a farmer tilled the land, he earned the right to call it his own. However (and here was the rub), this was only true
provided each man took only what he needed
, and no more. A farmer could enclose his land, so long as he was not greedy, and left enough for others. Locke’s ideas – that each man had the natural right to liberty, freedom and subsistence – would form the basis of the social contract at the heart of liberal democratic thought; and they were about to be put to the test in America, where, theoretically at least, there should have been enough land to go round. As it turned out, there wasn’t. The invidious treatment by European settlers of the Native Americans (who, thanks to their hunter-gatherer lifestyles, had never felt the need to lay claim to their land by planting hedges around it) soon put paid to any notion that the New World might deal with the land question any more equably than the old one had.

Part of the problem, of course, was that Locke’s ideas were formulated from a farming perspective, not that of a hunter-gatherer. While Locke’s concept of liberty was eventually bound into the American Constitution through Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 Declaration of Independence, Native Americans forfeited their right to land because they lived
on
it, not off it. They trod too lightly to put down markers that Europeans might have recognised or understood. As it was, the concept of common land was as doomed in the vastness of North America as it was in the tiny island nation that sought to colonise it.

While Native Americans were being robbed of their land in the New World, the peasant dream of a plot of one’s own was fast disappearing in the old one. The process of enclosure in England accelerated rapidly during the eighteenth century, resulting in the annexing of some million hectares by the century’s end.
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Yet progress was still too slow
for the nation’s greatest champion of agricultural reform, Arthur Young. Surveying the country in 1773, Young declared the amount of land that remained uncultivated ‘a disgrace’, announcing his intention to bring ‘the wastelands of the Kingdom into culture’ and ‘cover them with turnips, corn and clover’.
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Although not raised a farmer, Young acquired an Essex farm in 1767, where he conducted a series of technical experiments, publishing the results in his
Annals of Agriculture
, which were so well received they ran to 45 volumes, and even enjoyed the occasional anonymous contribution from King George III. As his fame spread, Young took to travelling, preaching agricultural reform throughout Britain, France and Italy, lecturing to rapt audiences wherever he went.

For Young and his followers, the growth of cities represented a fabulous opportunity for farmers to modernise; to develop what Young called ‘agriculture animated by a great demand’.
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But his enthusiasm was not universally shared. To William Cobbett, gentleman farmer, political essayist and tireless campaigner on behalf of the rural poor, cities were ‘wens’: parasitical boils that consumed everything in their path. Those who lived in them were little better: they were the undeserving and ungrateful beneficiaries of others’ sweat and toil. ‘We who are at anything else,’ he wrote, ‘are deserters from the plough.’
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Cobbett, unlike Young, was the son of a Surrey smallholder, and he identified personally with the agricultural labourers he considered ‘the very best and most virtuous of all mankind’.
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He dedicated himself to their cause, publishing a stream of invective in his paper, the
Political Register
, against the systems and policies that were destroying rural life. Cobbett’s disgust for London was such that he could barely bring himself to mention it by name, dubbing it instead ‘the Great Wen’. Yet since his political life forced him to spend a considerable amount of time there, he put it to good use, going on a series of exploratory journeys to see the effects of urbanisation for himself. His subsequent account, published as
Rural Rides
in 1830, emerged as a bitter diatribe against cities:

Have I not, for twenty years, been regretting the existence of these unnatural embossments; these white-swellings, these odious wens, produced by Corruption and engendering crime and misery and slavery? But, what is to be the fate of the greatest wen of all? The monster, called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, ‘the metropolis of the empire’?
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Cobbett’s solution was simple. He wanted to ‘disperse’ all the wens in England: literally lance them like boils, and return the countryside to its former state. He would be far from the last person to have such a wish, but, sadly for him, the urban tide was already flowing unstoppably in the opposite direction.

Across the Channel, however, people watched the ‘English miracle’ with interest. While the Dutch and English had been engaging in land reform and inventing newfangled farming techniques, the French had remained mired in the past, with unimproved wastelands, crippling peasant taxes and convoluted patterns of ownership all serving to hamper agricultural production. Just as English farmers in the previous century had learned from the Dutch, French envoys now travelled to
England to gain desperately needed farming knowledge. Uneasy relations between the two countries meant that agricultural espionage was rife: in 1763, the French government defied the English ban on exporting animals, paying for three Lincolnshire rams and six ewes to be smuggled illegally into France; while English turnip seeds made an unexpected appearance at the Parisian Royal Agricultural Society in 1785, where they were distributed among its members.
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As enthusiasm for agricultural reform took hold, a new wave of pastoralism hit the French. Painters such as Fragonard and Boucher portrayed the countryside as a sort of idealised picnic-ground populated by creamy-fleshed nymphs, and Marie-Antoinette famously dressed up as a shepherdess to keep company with her sheep in Le Hameau de la Reine, a rustic retreat constructed for her in the gardens at Versailles.

But for one member of Parisian society, such pastoralist fantasies were symptomatic of a deep malaise. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was raised in the mountains around Geneva, but had moved to Paris as a young man, and found it not to his liking. For him, city and country were bound together on a path towards self-destruction, fuelled by the call to ‘progress’ that drove them on. His 1755
Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men
was a paean to man’s lost innocence:

So long as men remained content with their rustic huts, so long as they were satisfied with clothes made of the skins of animals and sewn together with thorns and fish-bones … they lived free, healthy, honest and happy lives … but from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops.
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By swapping the pastoralist fantasy for that of the noble savage, Rousseau’s
Discourse
was tantamount to a critique of civilisation itself. Like Seneca before him, Rousseau believed that the life of primitive man in the ‘vast forests’ must once have been happy, but Seneca, good Roman that he was, could hardly have approved of Rousseau’s
conclusion that it ‘was iron and corn which first civilised men, and ruined humanity’. For Rousseau, agriculture was as much to blame for man’s misfortune as cities were. He warmed to his theme with a series of romantic novels: thinly disguised polemical tracts whose innocent heroes and heroines led lives of exemplary purity in the mountains, living on fruit, milk and honey.
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Unsurprisingly, these forerunners of Heidi didn’t go down too well with some of Rousseau’s Parisian contemporaries, Voltaire among them, who greeted the author’s announcement that he was heading for the mountains in order to practise what he preached with howls of derision. But it was Rousseau’s view that would prove the more enduring. By disparaging cultivated landscape in favour of wilderness, he paved the way for Romanticism, creating a schism in the urban view of nature that helped to shape the modern world.

Any remaining pastoral fantasies in England were soon to be swept away by the onset of industrial farming. Half the iron produced during the eighteenth century went to make ploughs and horseshoes, and from the mid nineteenth century onwards, farm machinery began to transform English agriculture. Horse-drawn drills and reapers, and later steam-driven threshers, drastically reduced the number of people needed to work on the land, while various industrial by-products, such as the lime-rich slag created by steel production, allowed the manufacture of artificial fertilisers that could double farmers’ yields. Food was being produced in larger quantities than ever before, and by fewer people; and as rural workers headed to the cities, the social bonds that held rural communities together – and linked city to country – began to disintegrate. The gap between the feeders and the fed was widening, and it was about to get a whole lot wider.

Ten years after Cobbett’s
Rural Rides
came an invention that would render all resistance to urban expansion useless. In the space of a few years, the railways removed all the constraints that had hitherto chained cities to their rural back gardens. From now on, cities would be able to
get their food from more or less anywhere. The food economy was about to go global, and nowhere was the effect more dramatic than in the American Midwest, a vast prairie ripe for exploitation. By the mid nineteenth century there were some million and a half farmers in North America, most of them European settlers who had acquired their land along Lockean principles, by investing years of labour in it. Their combined grain-producing potential was enormous, but with the Appalachian Mountains in the way, there was no easy way of transporting the grain to the East Coast. The Erie Canal, a 360-mile-long, 83-lock ‘eighth wonder of the world’, completed in 1825, had shown the potential of such a connection, providing a water passage from the interior to New York. Thanks to its inland empire, New York soon outstripped its rivals Boston and Philadelphia, earning itself the nickname ‘Empire State’. But it was only when the Appalachians were breached by the railroads during the 1850s that the true impact of American grain would be felt on the global stage.