The Transformation of the World (51 page)

9 Globalized Consumption

In both town and country, extreme poverty may be defined as a state of constant undernourishment. Beyond the threshold of a hunger that does not kill but does not abate, the range of variation is not as great as in other areas of consumption. The rich man whose monthly income is a hundred times greater than the poor man's is not a hundred times better nourished. As Fernand Braudel has shown, the differences between the culinary systems of various civilizations have greater importance than the vertical ones running within their respective societies.
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The tables of the well-off were more diversified, fresher and more nutritious, and usually supplied by professional cooks but as a rule existed within one and the same culinary system. From the point of view of global history, therefore, only a few generalizations can be made.

The greatest interaction between the eating habits of continents occurred as long ago as the sixteenth century, when a “Columbian exchange” introduced European crops and animals into the New World and American crops into Asia and Europe.
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Nor did this early modern transfer concern only rare luxuries: it changed the agricultural and garden economy, with huge effects on productivity and consumption habits in many parts of the world. The potato, which arrived in Europe shortly before 1600, took roughly two hundred years to become the main food staple in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, or Britain. Much earlier still, the appearance of rice strains with a higher yield had considerably increased production in Southeast Asia and China. At the same time that the potato crossed the Atlantic, the sweet potato traveled from Manila to China and immediately became a tool of famine relief, while corn, tobacco, and groundnuts were introduced into the Middle Kingdom, and the chili pepper, today central to the cuisine of Sichuan and Hunan, was brought from the New
World. Once all these novelties had been absorbed in the space of a few decades, China's culinary system underwent no further major changes.
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The American manioc root became native in areas of Africa under Portuguese influence, and in the last third of the nineteenth century both indigenous and colonial initiatives helped to spread it to many other parts of the continent. Today it is by far the most widespread edible plant in the tropical countries of Africa. Centuries after plants of American origin first crossed the oceans, they were driven by new needs and applications to enter common use in the Old World. One example of this is the groundnut, probably first domesticated in Brazil and widely used in Inca Peru. It was introduced into China and soon became the main source of frying oil there. Then, in the nineteenth century, it was grown in the United States as animal fodder, before people realized that it could take the place of cotton in plantations devastated by pests. Nowadays the groundnut is firmly integrated into a number of Asian and West African culinary traditions, and over time groundnut oil has come to be appreciated in Europe too for its ability to withstand high temperatures. All in all, the use of tropical oils was one of the most important acquisitions of the nineteenth century, not only in cooking but also for soap and cosmetics.
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The huge expansion of the international agrarian trade made tropical produce available even where it could not be acclimatized to local conditions.

Culinary Mobility

Culinary systems differ in respect to the innovations they acquire. The situation was clearest in countries such as the United States, where virtually all eating habits had to be imported. New tastes arrived on its shores with the great migrations of the nineteenth century: Italians were present in California from the midcentury gold rush on and were soon migrating from Italy to other parts of the United States. They brought with them durum wheat, the basis for pasta dishes. The international spread of Italian cuisine thus began long before the worldwide triumph of the pizza.
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The geography of dietary influences does not coincide with the distribution of political and economic power. The Chinese, for example, who in the sixteenth century had already demonstrated their willingness to learn from others, and who were politically much weakened by the forcible opening of their country in the Opium War, did not lose confidence in their own culture. At first they saw no reason to adopt Western influences in their cuisine. This changed slightly after 1900, when three “white” products from the West (produced in China, and often by Chinese companies) gained considerable popularity in the cities: white flour, white rice, and white sugar. A few European restaurants opened in the 1860s in the big cities, and beginning in the 1880s, a visit to one of them in Shanghai—complete with white tablecloths, silver cutlery, and “Western-style Chinese cooking”—became a demonstrative statement on the part of wealthy Chinese families. In general, however, affluent Chinese continued to show unusually
scant interest in Western food and Western consumer goods in general.
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Japan, which in many other respects proved extremely receptive to the West, adopted few culinary loans in the nineteenth century; one major exception was the increased consumption of meat.

On the other hand, since the time of Marco Polo numerous European travelers, missionaries, and Canton-based merchants had become familiar with Chinese cuisine and written reports about it. After the opening of China in the 1840s hundreds of foreigners made its acquaintance in the restaurants of the treaty ports and in the offerings of their private cooks. Those unable or unwilling to eat it regularly spared no cost or effort to keep themselves supplied with European foods and delicacies. Outside China there was for a long time no opportunity to taste Chinese dishes. Scarcely any Europeans or Americans ever ventured into their local Chinatown to try out the fast-food booths or diners used by émigré workers. Mark Twain, in his time as a journalist, was one of the first Westerners to describe the experience of eating with chopsticks outside Asia. The first Chinese restaurant to appear in Europe, in 1884, could be visited as part of a health fair in South Kensington; Sir Robert Hart, the powerful Irish inspector-general of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, was responsible for the attraction. But China's gastronomic success with Western consumers still lay in the future. It began gradually in 1920s California and did not become a global phenomenon until after 1945.
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As to Western food, it was only in the last third of the twentieth century that it began to have a marked influence on eating habits outside the luxury hotels and Western enclaves of East Asia, and then in the form of mass-produced industrial items.

At the end of the nineteenth century, “colonial goods” were appearing more often in European food stores. In London and the large provincial cities of England it had been possible throughout the eighteenth century to buy cane sugar, tea, and other exotic produce in a number of specialist locations;
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nowhere else in Europe did food and delicacies from overseas play such an important role. The East India Company had made the British a nation of tea drinkers, especially after the duty on tea was sharply reduced in 1784. By 1820 they were consuming thirty million pounds of tea per annum.
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The only other exotic import that changed habits outside the narrow circle of luxury food and drink was sugar. Already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the demand for cane sugar had set in motion the dynamic of the Caribbean and Brazilian plantation economy and the transatlantic slave trade. But only in the late eighteenth century, not least as a sweetener in tea, did it reach the level of mass consumption. The real expansion, however, took place in the nineteenth century: world sugar production doubled between 1880 and 1900, and doubled again between 1900 and 1914.
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The share of sugar in the average caloric intake of Britons is thought to have increased from 2 percent to 14 percent in the course of the century. As the anthropologist Sydney W. Mintz has argued in an influential book, sugar actually became a food for the poor, a quick energy boost for the flagging labor force
of industrial Britain.
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This popularity of sugar was possible only because its real price was continually falling in retail outlets.
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Sugar can be produced only as cane in the tropics and only as beet at temperate latitudes. Salt, by contrast, can be extracted by various methods and is therefore more closely associated with particular localities. The same applies to livestock breeding, which like slaughtering was a local trade; the limited durability of meat in its fresh state was enough to ensure this. One of the major food trends of the nineteenth century was the industrialization of meat production, soon turned into a transcontinental business. Average meat consumption had slowly declined in early-modern Western Europe, and this trend persisted here and there into the nineteenth century, sometimes disguised as falling standards and expectations: in really hard times the poor of Paris ate cats.
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By midcentury at the latest, however, meat consumption was rising among the lower classes of Europe: English working-class families doubled their intake between the 1860s and 1890s to more than one pound per person per week.
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The Japanese, who otherwise stuck to the Tokugawa cuisine, were converted in the Meiji period to the eating of meat. Although certain groups such as samurai and sumo wrestlers had indulged in it before 1866, it was only in the final third of the century that people more generally became convinced that the imposing strength of the West was due in part to meat consumption and that a vegetarian diet was unworthy of a “civilized” nation.
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Expanding demand caused cattle stocks in Europe to grow faster than the human population between 1865 and 1892, while at the same time cattle breeding developed in the western United States, Canada, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Australia, and New Zealand. In 1876 beef was sent by refrigerated ship to Europe for the first time, and in the 1880s the new technology made it possible for Argentina and Australasia to export meat in large quantities.
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After 1900, as more and more of the colossal US output was absorbed by its internal market, Argentina became the world's largest meat exporter.
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The immediate reason, however, was the wish of the British government to supply canned and frozen meat to its troops fighting in the South African War. The real and lasting boom in Argentine exports to Europe began only in 1907, when American meatpacking companies with better deep-freeze technology took over the trade. It was the first important investment linkup between the United States and Argentina, which until then had belonged more to the British sphere of economic influence. On the other hand, access to the US market continued to be denied to Argentine producers.
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Romantic social types such as the American cowboy or the Argentine gaucho were the mobile proletariat of a global meat industry.

The ranchers of the “Wild West” increasingly became suppliers of the giant Chicago slaughterhouses. The south of the city saw the rise of something that came to be one of its tourist sights: an industrial hell on earth for cattle and swine that flourished once the railroad was in full operation. Only the slaughterhouse districts of Buenos Aires, with their vast heaps of skulls and bones, were a
shade more dramatic as animal necropolises. The industrialization of food production began during the American Civil War, when demand soared for the new powdered milk and canned meat. Chicago filled the gap for the Northern states, a second “porkopolis” next to Cincinatti. Its slaughterhouse complex could process 21,000 cattle and 75,000 pigs at the same time, so that by 1905 it had dispatched a total of 17 million animals.
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It is no accident that one of the sharpest literary attacks on American capitalism, Upton Sinclair's
The Jungle
(1906), is situated in the Chicago slaughterhouses, which the author, using Zola's naturalist techniques, depicted as a Dantesque inferno. Quickly becoming a bestseller, the novel caused many readers to lose their appetite for meat, and demand took a temporary dip. It is possible that the average American in the Midwest was consuming 4,000 calories a day around the turn of the century, at a time when the intake per head in English working-class families was around 2,400 calories.
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That age of meat surpluses, a new departure in the second half of the nineteenth century, gave rise to the American glorification of the steak, which had no parallel in any food culture other than that of Argentina.

Department Store and Restaurant

The industrialization of food production in the Western world—its beginnings can be dated to the 1870s in the case of Germany
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—was correlated with other changes in society. The growing employment outside the home of working-class and lower middle-class women reduced the time available for household labor and increased the need for ready-made food. Such products could reach the final consumer only via translocal distribution systems. This presupposed—in addition to farm sales, periodic markets, and local butchers and bakers—the existence of grocery stores that, in turn, required wholesale dealers to keep them supplied with produce. But this new trend spread through Europe only right at the end of the century, with many gaps and much unevenness. In many rural areas, the supply of nonlocal produce remained throughout the period in the hands of peddlers and traveling dealers. In this respect the distribution mechanisms were not essentially different from those in China at that time, where periodic district markets operated alongside elaborate chains of middlemen. The passage from market to store (or sometimes consumer cooperative) was a necessary concomitant of the industrialization and internationalization of food production.
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