Near a Thousand Tables (39 page)

In some ways, early in the period, from the time of the introduction of the
levée en masse
in the French Revolutionary Wars, armed forces, on a scale unexperienced in the recent history of Europe, had anticipated the trend. Like cities, these, too, were immense concentrations of people, often located far from the sources of supply. Wartime logistics provided the models and, sometimes, the forges of innovation for the men who devised new ways of producing and supplying food in nineteenth-century Europe. Food factories, for instance, were inspired by the huge production lines which first appeared in state bakeries producing hardtack for navies. The need for campaign provision stimulated the development of canning. Demand for grease for the maintenance of firearms added to the pressure to develop new sources of fat. Margarine was first devised explicitly for the use of the French navy.

Industrialization helped to cause wars: in all the major conflicts of the era in industrializing countries—the American Civil War and the wars of Italian and German unification—centralizing governments in industrializing areas challenged the particularism or autonomy of neighboring, unindustrialized regions. Yet, for most of the European and North American nineteenth century, armies stayed relatively quiescent, fighting only short, limited wars or leaving the industrializing areas for sallies on imperial frontiers. From 1815 to 1914 city growth replaced army growth as the motor of change in Europe. By 1900 nine European cities had more than a million people. The land, where food was produced, lost manpower to the towns, where it was eaten. Most of the population of Britain, by the end of the nineteenth century, had forsaken agriculture for industry and rural for urban life. In the rest of industrializing Europe the same trend was evident. In 1900 two thirds of the inhabitants of St. Petersburg were classified as former peasants. Today, country by country, 2 to 4 percent of people in the “developed” parts of the world remain engaged in agriculture and, at most, 20 percent live in what, for statistical purposes, counts as rural areas.

Towns cannot feed themselves. The result was a potential food gap, which only industrialization could bridge. Therefore, with the enlargement and concentration of markets, food itself became industrialized. Food production got ever more intensive. Processing conformed increasingly to the patterns set by industries producing consumer durables. Supply became mechanized. Distribution was reorganized. Mealtimes shifted with the changing patterns of the working day. Today, and for the last half-century or so, one can even speak of “the industrialization of eating,” as food gets “faster” and households rely on dishes prepared outside the home to uniform standards.

The first stage of the intensification of food production is documented in the elaborately engraved certificates which eighteenth-century agronomists' societies conferred on “improvers.” Increasingly, “scientific” stock breeding and soil management were the most favored activities, followed by introductions of new technology into planting, harvesting, drainage and fertilizing. These achievements were the fodder of the school curricula of my generation. One studied the “Agricultural Revolution” in terms of the heroism of the theorists of new methods and the inventors of new processes: the physiocrats in France, the Reales Sociedades Económicas in Spain, the English Board of Agriculture, the crafters of new high-yielding breeds and strains, the devisers of pumps and seed drills and methods of rotation. Their efforts multiplied the available amounts of potatoes, beets, turnips, clover and alfalfa, increased the availability of winter feed for livestock and slashed the amounts of land left fallow.

Selectively and gradually, farming then became quasi-industrial: there was no standard pattern because conditions were so various. In the “New Europes” created in the colonized grasslands of the Americas and Australasia, the trend was to huge-scale, increasingly mechanized farming and ranching. In parts of old Europe, specialization and consolidation were necessary responses to competition from the New Europes. In the areas of former slave-staffed plantations, a labor crisis followed the abolition of slavery: it was met, in different degrees in different places, by a mixture of mechanization “coolie” migration and reversion to a more “primitive” pattern of tenure with peasant tenantries and sharecropping. Generally, however, even where traditional patterns of landholding survived the industrial era, as they did in much of continental Western Europe, farming became more and more of a “business” like any other.

Luther Burbank was the most conspicuous farming entrepreneur of the nineteenth century, bringing to his craft the talents of the inventor, investor, publicist and manager. From a small farming background, he started a market garden business in Santa Rosa, California, in 1875, when he was twenty-six years old. In the 1880s he began a series of experiments with new varieties: he was to hybridization what Heliogabulus had been to eating—a dedicated pursuer of wild sensation and huge scale. He delighted in bizarre, eye-catching innovations—a white blackberry, a stoneless plum, a new fruit that was half plum, half apricot—and statistical giantism. He was said to have created a thousand new species, including the Burbank potato, from which that mainstay of the modern table, the Idaho russet, derives. He spoke almost constantly of “working with Nature” but he had an
industrialist's zeal for speed of production and scale of output. In his autobiography, he proudly proclaimed that his life was led on “a quantity basis, speeded up.” For his thousands of devotees he embodied American ideals. The future guru and multimillionaire “entered Santa Rosa,” according to one of his gushing followers, “alone and unknown, with ten dollars, ten potatoes, a few choice books, one suit of clothes and a clean bill of health.” He was an apologist for, as well as an exemplar of, American hustle. “We can do anything,” he declared, “in America we set our minds and hands to doing.”

His renown, however, was equivocal. Was this zealous autodidact “a scientific man of the class of Faraday,” as his many admirers claimed, or an undisciplined sciolist—a “plant wizard” or a sorcerer's apprentice? Critics claimed plausibly that his results were obtained by wasteful methods: thousands of plants consigned to the pyre for every experiment that worked. Success was a trick of the statistics: he tried so many hybridizations, some, by the law of averages, were bound to work. For his part, he claimed to be almost infallible and to have a unique gift, a “natural ability” unrivaled among his contemporaries, for identifying useful plants. He became embroiled in the great scientific dispute of his day and, indeed, to some extent, of ours, between orthodox Darwinians, for whom natural selection is a sufficient mechanism to explain everything in evolution, and heretics who insist that random mutations occur.

Burbank himself had no scientific knowledge or instincts. His vocation for gardening, he claimed, began when, at the age of eight, he felt overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of a green field, warmed by sudden, irrepressible, unseasonal vernal activity amid snow. He favored mystical musings about the “soul of the universe,” ignorant speculations on the heritability of acquired characteristics and invocations of “Our Savior, Science.” He had a pantheistic, peculiarly personal religion and tended to personify “Mother Nature” as an intelligent force in the world. Sometimes he represented himself as a thief from “Mother Nature's cupboard of marvels.” He toyed with eugenics but insisted on the vital importance of nurture. “Probably,” he said, “I have used that word ‘environment' more often than any other man who ever lived.” He exercised, in two respects, a benign influence on the history of food: first, by encouraging successors in the ecological context of species development, and, secondly, by inspiring imitators to develop new species. His example helped to fashion the life-saving new species that later
launched the “Green Revolution”
(below, p. 206).

Increasingly, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the capital investment necessary for increased output came from huge industrial companies, which made fertilizers and processed feed. The first chemical fertilizer was invented by
John Lawes, when he dissolved phosphate-rich ore in sulfuric acid in 1842. The process was not much used until the last few years of the century, when phosphate mines began to be discovered and developed on a large scale. Meanwhile, mountains of guano and potash supplied the world's undernourished fields. The real chemical revolution in fertilizer technology came in 1909, when Fritz Haber found a way of extracting nitrogen, the source of nitrate fertilizers, from the atmosphere. His admirers said he had “plucked
bread from air
.”

Ultimately, farms became stages in a sort of conveyor belt: chemical fertilizers and industrially processed feed went in at one end and edible—sometimes barely edible—industrial-scale products came out at the other. The trend approached culmination in 1945, when the “Chicken of Tomorrow” contest was announced in America. Three years later it produced the
battery breed
. In combination with “growth vitamins” marketed from 1949, and feed laced with antibiotics from 1950, it led rapidly to the forty-thousand-broiler chicken house. By 1954, there were five to six million chicken-breeding businesses in the United States. Some farmers had
ten million chicks
. Betty MacDonald, a chicken rancher's wife in Washington state, looked back unsentimentally on the old-style “chicken house knee-deep in weasels and blood” where “stupid” chicks would devote themselves to contriving self-immolation in their drinking fountains or under their brooders or “pick each other's eyes out or peck each other's feet until they are
bloody stumps
.” The advocates of the new methods were disingenuous to claim that the chicken came to “cover the globe” because of its unique merits: an undiscerning appetite and its own “refrigeration and heating” supplied by its
feather coat
. A ruthless new mode of production made chicken the cheap treat of the modern world. In “factory farms” which supplied most of the meat, eggs and dairy products of industrial society in the late twentieth century, animals were treated like machines: anonymous units of production, confined in ergonomically minimal spaces to turn over the maximum amount of output per unit of cost. These practices strained humane sensibilities but comforted stomachs. The latter organs proved the stronger.

The revolution in distribution also sometimes involves inhumane practices, when livestock is transported on the hoof in conditions which torture the creatures. Generally, however, the age of live transportation has been replaced by new techniques, such as rapid, refrigerated conveyance which has made it possible to shift dead carcasses over great distances. Herders in preindustrial and early industrializing societies drove their stock to points of slaughter: the cowboys who fed the rail gangs in the American West from the mid-nineteenth century provided the most strenuous, spectacular and long-range instance in history. Even as they
did so, they were contributing to the demise of their own age-old way of life. When the networks were complete the railways carried the live cattle. When refrigeration came in from the 1870s onward, butchered carcasses could be delivered in edible condition over any distance covered by rail. Meanwhile, of course, the revolution in transport affected supplies of less perishable items which could be carried unrefrigerated. Wheat was the most important because of the dual development of railways and wheatlands in the North American prairie in the second half of the nineteenth century. When I was a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, my balcony in downtown Minneapolis looked out over derelict evidence of this once mighty combination. The empty factories of Pillsbury and General Mills, decorated with fading proclamations of the glories of their flour, were being converted into hotels and apartments. Alongside, the Milwaukee Road railway station, saved from demolition, was undergoing rebirth as an upscale shopping mall. The old trade has shifted from downtown but is still vigorous in relocated, modernized mills, silos and weigh stations. The rails, where they remain unrusted, carry hardly any passengers but are still the arteries of commerce in grain.

In the late nineteenth century, the railroads linked up with steam-powered sea routes. British steam tonnage at sea exceeded that under sail from 1883: ocean routes would never be fully independent of weather, but their dependence on the elements was easing. Minnesota's railroad king, James Hill, whose sole munificence built the marble cathedral of St. Paul, had his own fleet of steamships. They joined the terminals of the fastest railroad across the Rockies with those of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which opened in 1900. The completion of these links was of more than symbolic significance. Land transport could now take bulk cargoes across continents as easily as seas. The great food-producing and consuming belt of the Northern Hemisphere, from Vancouver to Vladivostok, was linked by steam transport. “The flow of trade was no longer
governed by Nature
.” The results included a new form of worldwide specialization, as food no longer had to be produced near the point of consumption. In industrializing areas, agriculture declined. British agriculture virtually collapsed in the last generation of the nineteenth century. All over Western Europe, wheat production was abandoned in the face of cheap long-range imports. The rock-ribbed farmland of New England began its long, slow reversion to forest, as food production shifted west.

Distribution, however, still needed to be local. In the new big-city environments, new ways of shopping evolved. Markets became municipal responsibilities. Until 1846, for instance, the right to hold markets in Manchester was, by tradition and inheritance, a perquisite of the Lords of the Manor, the Mosley family. By the
1830s metropolitan growth made this an equivocal asset. Unrestricted markets in neighboring townships threatened to undermine the value of the family's rights. The difficulty of managing an uncontrollably growing arena was beyond the family's scope and resources. The constant battle for control with the municipal authorities was a drain on the proprietors' energies. “The markets are not such,” wrote the historian of the city in 1836, “as a town of great wealth and magnitude might be expected to possess.” By the early 1840s Sir Oswald Mosley was willing to sell out for the apparently enormous sum of £200,000. Rationalizing his situation in a heroic style ultimately derived from Caesar's
Commentaries,
he wrote of himself, in the third person, “After many years of unavoidable and anxious litigation in the protection of those manorial rights which he had inherited from his ancestors, he had at length the satisfaction of consigning them to hands which alone are capable of
managing them
.” Thus retreat was romanticized.