Near a Thousand Tables (40 page)

Markets built under new municipal dispensation became, in their very structures, monuments to the wonder of industrial technology: palaces of abundance, of crystal walls and roofs, elevated on elegant cast iron arcades. Together with the railway stations, winter gardens and shopping arcades, these were industrializing Europe's equivalents of the aqueducts and agoras of antiquity. Some of the most magnificent examples have disappeared. I hope no one will think mere chauvinism makes me recommend Spain as the land where the survivors are to be seen at their best. The Mercado de la Cebada in Madrid was built in 1870 to be a model for subsequent markets. An irregular glass triangle was erected on columns imported from England and designed by the mayor, Nicolás María Ribero, who had no engineering or artistic background, but a burning ambition to modernize his city. It enclosed five hundred square yards around a central fountain. All Spanish cities have such markets: big ones have several and they remain as remarkable for their contents as their frameworks. “Tucked away in the side streets of Madrid,” H. V. Morton found “the most decorous and beautifully arranged markets in the world. They are the sort of ideal market that you might see in a ballet or a musical comedy…. Never have I seen fish, fruit, vegetables and meat displayed with a finer sense of the attractiveness
of common things
.”

In rapidly growing towns, markets alone could not meet demand for distribution: they were nodal points which could serve retailers and shoppers who happened to live close to them. Shops and, to a lesser extent, itinerant traders were essential in spanning the spaces between
marketplaces and neighborhoods
. Grocers, who had formerly specialized in
épicerie
or delicatessen, became general purveyors. In pursuit of the economies of scale achieved by mass production, some of them developed the “chain store” system, led by Thomas Lipton of Glasgow, whose
Home and Colonial Stores were established in the 1870s and 1880s in every major center of population in Great Britain. His “own brand” tea retains a certain international prestige today, when the rest of the business has disappeared. Supermarkets are the paradoxical last stage of this trend: they threaten to engulf other methods of food retailing, combining the scale of the market with the convenience of the shop. For a while, from the 1960s to the 1980s, they tended to get monstrously big and to locate in suburban sites from where shoppers took their purchases home in cars. In the 1990s, however, this trend showed signs of being reversed, as supermarket chains in Europe and a few major metropolitan locations in America moved back to central cities or introduced home deliveries in a reversion to a practice which was once universal among local grocers but had seemed on the point of dying out.

Between the new scale of production in the countryside and the new methods of distribution and supply, the mechanization of processing multiplied the availability of food. Food manufacture imitated other industries: powering production with steam in the nineteenth century, electricity in the twentieth, using mechanized assembly lines and producing a standard product. The story is usually told in terms of heroes, inventors and entrepreneurs who were pioneers of ingenuity and embodiments of the gospel of self-help. Really the processes which brought food manufacture into the factories were more modest, cumulative and imitative. Four products can be selected to illustrate what happened. Three—the chocolate bar, margarine and the meat extract cube—were new inventions of the industrializing age, whereas the industrially generated biscuit was a new version of one of the oldest and most widely eaten of food products, which acquired a new kind of appeal to the senses: a regular, machined geometry, an unmistakable uniformity, and a predictability of consistency and taste, like those of the bar and the cube. These products proclaimed with pride their difference from the handcrafted, individual efforts of the independent artisan.

The most commercially successful biscuits of the nineteenth century came in tins which depicted an idyll. Along a neatly paved street with a quaint, bowfronted shop, elegant officers in Number One dress escorted daintily crinolined ladies. In reality, London Road, Reading, where Joseph Huntley started his biscuit business in 1822, was a mud track where the coach from London stopped on its way west. The coach brought custom virtually to the shop door and diffused patronage along the coaching routes of the realm. The firm quickly built a reputation that made its products sought from London to Bristol and was able to mesh a network of representatives to sell its wares to retailers as far away as Liverpool. But it was an old-fashioned Quaker business, constructed by family connections,
run by family members. It was confined in a small, traditional bakery, with the family literally living above the shop. It was technologically primitive, except for the metal boxes made by one of Huntley's sons, which kept the wares fresh. The vision of mass production arrived in London Road with George Palmer, who became a partner in 1846. The idea of industrializing did not, however, spring from George's head: it emerged from context and precedent. Hardtack had long been made by human assembly lines in eighteenth-century dockyards. In 1833 the Royal Navy introduced steam-powered machinery to these establishments for rolling the dough. In the late 1830s, another Quaker, Jonathan Dickson Carr of Carlisle, invented the mechanical biscuit stamp, which enabled numerous biscuits to be cut from a strip of dough with minimal muscle power. To this day, the towns of Reading and Carlisle vie for the honor of having originated
mass production of biscuits
. Palmer's innovations were modest. He used ovens of an established pattern made for the manufacture of ship's biscuit. For making dough he brought in other inventors' versions of existing technology. He made the process of rolling it reversible, which halved the time taken, as the rollers sped back and forth. His success was due rather to his integrated approach to business—covering marketing and finance as well as production—than to technical ingenuity.

The results of the small increments he and other leading biscuit manufacturers made were, however, spectacular. In 1859 six million pounds of biscuits were produced by the world's three leading manufacturers, all of whom were based in Britain. By the late 1870s the same firms were producing 37 million pounds. The Reading biscuit and the Huntley and Palmer
biscuit tin
, with its distinctive blue livery, became symbols of the global reach of British industry and imperialism. Lord Redesdale saw the tins used as a portable garden by a Mongolian chieftainess in the 1860s and as altar vessels in a chapel in Ceylon in the 1890s. They were recycled as sword scabbards by followers of the Mahdi, and during the Christianization of Uganda served as containers to preserve Bibles from white ants. The British army which entered Kandahar in 1879 found an advertisement for Huntley and Palmers emblazoned on the bazaar wall. Henry Morton Stanley relied on the biscuits for nourishment in Central Africa and pacified a warlike tribe in what is now Tanzania with some tins as a present. When a naval landing party went ashore at Juan Fernández—Robinson Crusoe's island—in the early 1900s, “all it found there,” according to the firm's historian, “was a few goats and—an empty Reading biscuit tin.”

Huntley and Palmers had transformed the biscuit. Other industries created foods which were genuinely new to human experience. Chocolate, for instance, was reinvented. From a luxury beverage, it became a solid food with a mass
market. To effect this change, it was necessary not only to create mechanized factories for pressing the cocoa bean: such factories existed by the end of the eighteenth century in Barcelona and Bologna but they were still producing an expensive product for the sort of exclusive clientele whom we met as consumers of chocolate in the last chapter. The development of a new product had to await a new cultural climate, a revolution in attitudes. The technology came from continental Europe—from Spain and Italy where cocoa presses were first mechanized; from Holland, where Conrad van Houten created cocoa powder; from Switzerland, where the Caillier and Nestlé families, united by marriage, combined in business to make milk chocolate. But it was English Quaker manufacturers of cocoa who did most to revolutionize tastes. In eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England, civil disabilities forced Quakers into business. The chocolate business attracted them particularly, because of cocoa's potential as a temperance beverage. To drive the price and accessibility of their product down to the level of the mass market was an ambition which, for the families like the Frys of York or the Cadburys of Bournville, united God with gain. The chocolate bar was the outcome.

The first true bars, intended for eating, not infusion—not brittle, dry and unmoldable but recognizably of the consistency familiar to every consumer today—were marketed in 1847 by Fry's. They were made of Van Houten's powder, mixed with sugar and
cocoa butter
. The new product was particularly suited to mass production and its further transformations, over the next 150 years, seemed infinite, as new flavors and textures were contrived by small modifications to the manufacturing process. The entire history of chocolate, from colonial crop to industrialized product, was encapsulated in the fictional chocolate factory, imagined by Roald Dahl, where magically supramodern technology combined with the labor of a tiny race of slaves. Dahl's heroic entrepreneur, Willy Wonka, was inspired by the American chocolate millionaire, Milton Snavely Hershey, whose benevolence as an employer was exceeded only by his munificence as a public benefactor and his genius as a businessman. He was the embodiment of the American dream, rising by perseverance from a string of disasters and bankruptcies. He was still a pushcart peddler in his thirties but, “born with a sweet tooth,” as an admiring employee said, “he never stopped making candy.” His ascent to greatness began when he opened his chocolate factory on the site of his old family farm in 1904. It grew to include housing, a hospital, a park and a zoo. During the Depression, Hershey kept his workers at work by expanding the amenities of his model community. His most heartfelt philanthropic project was born of personal tragedy: his childlessness inspired him with a vocation as a friend of orphans. “I would give everything I possess,” he said of the inmates of his orphanage, “if I
could call one of these boys my own.” He was so lavish in his benefactions that when he died the sale of his personal effects raised
only $20,000
. His legacy today includes Hershey Park (a huge Disneyland-style theme park, originally picnic grounds for the chocolate factory's employees), the Milton Hershey School and Medical Center, and the Hershey Hotel, built to the model of a Florentine palazzo, right in the center of Pennsylvania dairy country.

The full effects of the business he launched were not felt for nearly a century after the first bars emerged from his assembly lines. In the Second World War Hershey bars were modified to resist tropical temperatures and a billion bars were issued as rations to help Americans fight successful campaigns in tropical environments. The ecology of cacao had come full spiral when the new conquistadors returned to the tropics with chocolate transformed. Meanwhile, the association between chocolate manufacture and public benevolence began to fade. Chocolate entrepreneurs tended to be radical Protestants—in England, they were almost all Quakers—with fixations about temperance, friendship, brotherly love and thrift. But these qualities were dissipated as firms got big, family traditions vanished and the profit motive took over. In the early days, Hershey supplied chocolate to the fledgling Mars firm in a spirit of comradeship; Hershey's associate, R. Bruce Murrie, was one of the Ms in M&M's. Today, the rivalry of Mars and Hershey is pursued ruthlessly and secretively “bar against bar,” according to the only journalist who has been allowed full access to Mars records, in a “chocolate slugfest.” Among the present giants of the chocolate industry, only the Mars company, though a formidable enemy in the market, still has, by the general standards of industrial capitalism, exceptional ethical standards. It has never stopped being a family business. Despite a turnover bigger than that of McDonald's, it has never been quoted on the stock exchange and has hardly ever engaged in takeover bids or mergers. Its grimly dédicated and unrestrainedly ambitious patriarch, Forrest Mars, passed on to the present generation, who still run the firm, his fanatical standards of personal austerity, generosity to the workforce and service to the customer: Mars aims to make only a 3 percent return after tax. All employees are “associates” whose remuneration keeps pace with profits. The family's management style is that of a tribal monarchy, but Mars associates earn more than their counterparts in other comparable firms, while the directors
earn much less
.

A side effect of the industrialization of chocolate was the transformation of the product into something astonishingly different from the form in which it occurred in nature. The power of industry to achieve this sort of metamorphosis fascinated food chemists of the nineteenth century, especially when they turned to the problem of how to present meat to consumers: how to prettify this bloody and
elemental source of food. The beauty of butchered carcasses was apparent to still-life painters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and attracted the greatest artists. Studies originally undertaken as exercises in the artistic representation of anatomy became objects of wonder, exposés of the mysteries of creation—even symbols of the Eucharist. When Rembrandt painted a side of beef oozing blood, or Carracci depicted a butcher's shop, with hanging, dripping, glistening joints, and vivid bones and membranes, the beholder had no chance to be repelled. The new romantic sensibilities of the late eighteenth century and the rise of vegetarian propaganda (above, p. 42) changed the way people looked at meat. In the new century the search was on for a way of exploiting the nutrition of meat in an emotionally sanitized form.