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a cultural history
of food
VOLUME 5
A Cultural History of Food
General Editors: Fabio Parasecoli and Peter Scholliers

Volume 1
A Cultural History of Food in Antiquity
Edited by Paul Erdkamp

Volume 2
A Cultural History of Food in the Medieval Age
Edited by Massimo Montanari

Volume 3
A Cultural History of Food in the Renaissance
Edited by Ken Albala

Volume 4
A Cultural History of Food in the Early Modern Age
Edited by Beat Kümin

Volume 5
A Cultural History of Food in the Age of Empire
Edited by Martin Bruegel

Volume 6
A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Age
Edited by Amy Bentley
 A CULTURAL HISTORY
OF FOOD

IN THE AGE
OF EMPIRE
VOLUME 5

Edited by Martin Bruegel

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON
LON DON• OX
DON • NFEO
WR D
DE• LNHEIW• YO
N ER
WK YOR
• N EK
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• SY DN EY
 Bloomsbury
BloomsburyAcademic
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An
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imprintof
ofBloomsbury
BloomsburyPublishing
PublishingPlc
Plc

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Bedford Square
Bedford Square 1385
1385Broadway
Broadway
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London New
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York
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www.bloomsbury.com
www.bloomsbury.com

BLOOMSBURY
First and the Diana
published logoby
in 2012 areBerg
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Bloomsbury
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by Bloomsbury Plc 2013
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and Peter by Berg2012
Scholliers Publishers,
an imprint of Bloomsbury Academic
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2016 bythier
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right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.
© Fabio Parasecoli and Peter Scholliers, 2012, 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
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or the author.

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 contents

Series Preface vii

Introduction: Locating Foodways in the Nineteenth Century 1

Martin Bruegel

1 Food Production: Industrial Processing Begins to Gain Ground 27

Pierre Saunier

2 Food Systems in the Nineteenth Century 49

Yves Segers

3 Food Security and Safety 67

Vera Hierholzer

4 Food and Politics: Policing the Street, Regulating the Market 87

Martin Bruegel

5 Eating Out 107

Peter Scholliers

6 Professional Cooking, Kitchens, and Service Work 123

Amy B. Trubek

7 Family and Domesticity: Food in Poor Households 141

Anna Davin

8 Body and Soul: From Tension to Bifurcation 165

Ulrike Thoms
vi CONTENTS

9 Food Representations 181

Kolleen M. Guy

10 World Food: The Age of Empire c. 1800–1920 199

Fabio Parasecoli

Notes 209
Bibliography 235
Notes on Contributors 269
Index 273
 series preface
general editors, fabio parasecoli
and peter scholliers

A Cultural History of Food presents an authoritative survey from ancient

times to the present. This set of six volumes covers nearly 3,000 years of
food and its physical, spiritual, social, and cultural dimensions. Volume
editors and authors, representing different nationalities and cultural tradi-
tions, constitute the cutting edge in historical research on food and offer an
overview of the field that reflects the state of the art of the discipline. While
the volumes focus mostly on the West (Europe in its broadest sense and
North America), they also draw in comparative material and each volume
concludes with a brief final chapter on contemporaneous developments in
food ideas and practices outside the West. These works will contribute to
the expansion of the food history research in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and
South America, which is already growing at an increasingly fast pace.
The six volumes, which follow the traditional approach to examining
the past in Western cultures, divide the history of food as follows:

Volume 1: A Cultural History of Food in Antiquity (800 bce–500 ce)

Volume 2: A Cultural History of Food in the Medieval Age (500–1300)
Volume 3: A Cultural History of Food in the Renaissance (1300–1600)
Volume 4: A Cultural History of Food in the Early Modern Age
(1600–1800)
Volume 5: A Cultural History of Food in the Age of Empire (1800–1900)
Volume 6: A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Age (1920–2000)
viii SERIES PREFACE

This periodization does not necessarily reflect the realities and the histori-
cal dynamics of non-Western regions, but the relevance of cultural and ma-
terial exchanges among different civilizations in each period is emphasized.
Each volume discusses the same themes in its chapters:

1. Food Production. These chapters examine agriculture, husbandry,

fishing, hunting, and foraging at any given period, considering the
environmental impact of technological and social innovations, and
the adaptation to the climate and environment changes.
2. Food Systems. These chapters explore the whole range of the trans-
portation, distribution, marketing, advertising, and retailing of food,
emphasizing trade, commerce, and the international routes that have
crisscrossed the world since antiquity.
3. Food Security, Safety, and Crises. We cannot have a complete picture
of the history of food without discussing how societies dealt with
moments of crisis and disruption of food production and distribu-
tion, such as wars, famines, shortages, and epidemics. These essays
reflect on the cultural, institutional, economic, and social ways of
coping with such crises.
4. Food and Politics. These chapters focus on the political aspects of
public food consumption: food aspects of public ceremonies and
feasts, the impact on public life, regulations, controls, and taxation
over food and alcohol production, exchange, and consumption.
5. Eating Out. The communal and public aspects of eating constitute
the main focus of these essays. Authors consider hospitality for
guests, at home and in public spaces (banquets and celebrations),
and discuss public places to eat and drink in urban and rural envi-
ronments, including street food, marketplaces, and fairs.
6. Professional Cooking, Kitchens, and Service Work. These chap-
ters look at the various roles involved in food preparation outside
the family nucleus: slaves, cooks, servants, waiters, maitre d’hotel
etc., investigating also the most relevant cooking techniques, tech-
nologies, and tools for each period, giving special consideration to
innovations.
7. Family and Domesticity. The acquisition, shopping and storage,
preparation, consumption, and disposal of food in a domestic setting
SERIES PREFACE ix

are among the most important aspects of food culture. These chap-
ters analyze family habits in different periods of time, paying par-
ticular attention to gender roles and the material culture of the
domestic kitchen.
8. Body and Soul. These chapters examine fundamental material
aspects such as nutritional patterns, food constituents, and food-
related diseases. Furthermore, spiritual and cultural aspects of
thinking about and consuming food are highlighted, including reli-
gion, philosophy, as well as health and diet theories.
9. Food Representations. These essays analyze cultural and discursive
reflections about food, which not only contributed to the way peo-
ple conceive of food, but also to the social and geographical diffu-
sion of techniques and behavior.
10. World Developments. These brief chapters overview developments,
dynamics, products, food-related behaviors, social structures, and
concepts in cultural environments that often found themselves at
the margins of Western modernity.

Rather than embracing the encyclopedic model, the authors apply a broad
multidisciplinary framework to examine the production, distribution, and
consumption of food, as grounded in the cultural experiences of the six
historical periods. This structure allows readers to obtain a broad overview
of a period by reading a volume, or to follow a theme through history by
reading the relevant chapter in each volume.
Highly illustrated, the full six-volume set combines to present the most
authoritative and comprehensive survey available on food through history.
 Introduction
Locating Foodways in the Nineteenth Century

martin bruegel

The collection of hard data on the cost of living among laboring classes
was the official reason why Lee Meriwether (1862–1966) found himself in
Europe during an economic downturn in the mid-1880s. Sent there by the
American Bureau of Labor Statistics, he held no brief against this task. He
passionately believed that a Republican government and free trade would
help to improve material well-being everywhere. The household budgets
that he intended to collect would make his case incontrovertible. And yet,
Meriwether doubted whether numbers culled from official statistics while
staying in hotels recommended in Baedeker’s travel guides could do justice
to the variety of experiences anywhere. They indubitably provided useful
information and valuable perspectives on the ways in which people spent
their income; however, they were incapable of conveying the values that
informed people’s behavior and were insufficient to capture the full mean-
thatpeople
ing that peopleattached
attachedtoto events,
events, both
both ordinary and
extraordinary androutine,
routine,inintheir
their lives.
Meriwether wanted to “penetrate below the surface” accessible by way of
numerical surveys. “To know a country,” he declared, “one must fraternize
with its people, must live with them, sympathize with them, win their con-
fidence.” He thus resolved to walk through Europe—from Gibraltar to the
2 INTRODUCTION

Bosporus, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic Sea—to see “something of

low life.” By this, he meant the everyday lives of peasants, workers, and the
occasional retailer.1
Because food provisioning mattered so much to the people who
Meriwether visited, and often accounted for more than two-thirds of their
budgets, foodways consistently captured his attention. (This curiosity was
much less in evidence twenty-five years later when he, then a forty-five-year-
old lawyer, and his wife took an anniversary trip along some of the same
routes in an automobile; according to Meriwether, speed impeded close
observation, and already
had already
in 1887recommended, in 1887, forgoing the bicycle
he had recommended
because “the bicycler might go faster, but he would see less.”) As a tramp
abroad, Meriwether shared the ubiquitous rye bread that was the staff of
life for most people whose “intimate acquaintance” he sought on his year-
long backpacking tour. The young American discovered fried artichokes in
Naples;
Naples; yogurt
yogurt and
andalso
the the varieties
varieties (but
(but alsothe
also thehigh
highcost)
cost) of
of drinking
drinking
water in Constantinople; Gemütlichkeit and its relation to beer in southern
Germany, where he appreciated the vegetables that workers cultivated in
their own time in gardens provided by their employers; milk-cures for well-
heeled tourists in Alpine Interlaken; the highly seasonal character of the
Russian diet whose richness he much appreciated (“a glance at the bill of
fare for dinner would disclose the exact month and season”); the by-then
typical French three-course meal in a cheap—and precocious—self-service
eatery in a Parisian bazaar; and vegetarian restaurants in London (“the eco-
nomical traveller will do well to remember these”), where menus indicted
the proper English meal in which meat was central. Certainly Meriwether’s
encounters, more often than not, were fleeting. Yet he had an eye for the
ordinary run of things. Breaking bread and engaging in table talk with a
great many people of modest means from rural and urban, farm and indus-
trial backgrounds, he came very close to embracing a posture akin to the
ethnographic technique of participant observation. On the practical side,
he proved
too, he proved something
somethingof ofaprecursor.
precursor.In
Inthe
the course
course of
of working
working up his fi
field
notes he put together a handbook for frugal travelling. He thus invented
a subgenre among tourist guides that turned out to have a bright future.2
The young investigator was onto something when it came to the in-
terpretation of material conditions and their development. He wondered
about the relationship between wealth and happiness because he knew that
INTRODUCTION 3

there was no straightforward way to define well-being. Not that questions

concerning the reliability of statistical information worried Meriwether.
He trusted their robustness. After all, vanguard Massachusetts had pro-
duced fine, large-scale budget surveys since the 1870s, perfecting earlier
European studies.3 Such assurances completely eluded the French reporter
and factory inspector Henri Louis Bourrillon (1876–1962). His involve-
ment with data gathering led to the publication of a biting satire entitled
L’enquête (1913) that detailed shortcomings in the process: biases in selec-
tion and attitudes, incompleteness, oversights, and especially involuntary
and deliberate omissions. The book cast doubt on the usefulness of such
records for an accurate appraisal of working-class lives. It left no ambigu-
ity in terms of the political uses of data as evidence to justify efforts to
reform the putatively profligate habits of laboring families.4 Meriwether
shared neither qualms nor outlook. In the 1889 American companion vol-
ume to his European investigation, he expanded on a distinction between
“cost of living” and “kind of living.” This was how the newly established
U.S. Department of Labor meant to get a comprehensive grip on “the eco-
nomic, social, and moral welfare of the people.” Budget parts, food quan-
tities, and prices proved themselves to be pertinent tools when it came to
assessing people’s capacity to satisfy their basic physiological and physi-
cal needs (food, housing, clothing) in a particular society. Such tangible
data made historical and especially international comparisons possible. Yet
Meriwether reckoned that the “cost of living” did not enable a complete
interpretation of lived experience and human behavior. Hence his efforts
to find out about social values and norms that shaped lives and helped or-
ganize society, and his interest in individual as well as collective manifesta-
tions of joy and sorrow.5
Meriwether’s intellectual challenge resulted from an embarrassment
of riches. Before the nineteenth century there had never been such sys-
tematic drives to collect data in order to find patterns and regularities in
human characteristics, conditions, and comportments. To be sure, the
concomitant interpretation of two kinds of evidence—“hard,” objective
facts and “soft,” subjective accounts—added complexity to his undertak-
ing. And indeed, ever since, historians and social scientists relying on this
legacy have grappled with, and often clashed over, the issue of translating
quantifiable data (consumer baskets, wages, fertility, mortality, morbidity,
4 INTRODUCTION

inequality, or crime) into assessments of the quality of life.6 The difficulty

was real enough but it paled in the face of another, rather more surrep-
titious pitfall: the danger of describing unfamiliar societies according to
American standards and of finding them lacking. Meriwether’s attention to
the social uses and appreciation of things reduced the risk. This perspective
allowed him to consider each population on its own while remaining level-
headed about its position when compared to other societies, their economic
performance, and material achievements. It also kept him attuned to social
inequalities. “Pedestrianism, [and] no other method of travel, will afford so
clear and accurate a conception of the condition of a country’s masses, of
the millions who produce the wealth which the few enjoy.”7
The observation of food and foodways lent itself well to such an inte-
grated approach to the people’s “kind of living.” This multifaceted approach
was path-breaking. It was an original accomplishment of the nineteenth
century. The era saw the invention of intellectual tools and scientific meth-
ods that offered a new view of food consumption. For one, human nourish-
ment emerged as an object of measurement with a quantitative vocabulary
of nutrients, energy, and the supply of other life-sustaining elements now
expressing its properties. Moreover, food appeared as a carrier of meanings
that make up a culture, and so invited an examination in terms of signs and
symbols that inform people’s actions. Meriwether’s curiosity and his eager-
ness to go native when it came to eating and drinking disabused him of
some widely held Anglo-American beliefs. Was more necessarily better?
Not so in Bulgaria, where he “walked twenty-five miles a day for days at a
time, living the while entirely on black bread, grapes, figs and other fruit.”
This “simple and wholesome diet [enabled the American tramp] to stand
the fatigue, and even to improve in health and vigor.” His appreciation of
meat notwithstanding, Meriwether arrived at an iconoclastic conclusion:
“Lovers of roast-meat and juicy beefsteaks think hard work or active exer-
cise cannot long continue on a bread-and-fruit diet. I think my pedestrian
tour proves the contrary.”8
While the young investigator held that free trade would improve mate-
rial conditions, he also recognized that its impact on people’s happiness
was unclear. One of Meriwether’s convictions, however, seemed indelible:
the consumption of food and drink best occurred in a sociable environ-
ment. Part of the punishment meted out to prisoners in penitentiaries
INTRODUCTION 5

from Brooklyn to Nuremberg and Lisbon consisted in having them eat in

isolation. This was the degree zero of food consumption. Even a series of rich
meals would fail to make up for the denial of company and conversation—
the necessary ingredients of a full life. To deny them was, according to
Meriwether, counterproductive: rather than providing inmates quiet time
to reflect on their guilty ways and thus promote their reform, it was likely
to induce melancholy, despair, and end in lunacy. Breaking bread—even
if it was made of rye rather than wheat—helped institute humanity: whether
on the roadside or a mountain top with itinerant artists or journeymen, on
board an ocean steamer with fellow travelers, in a one-room, ground-floor
apartment with a Neapolitan family, at the table of the Constantinople res-
idence of a Syrian merchant, in the company of a “long-haired student” at
the table of an eating house in Southern Russia, in a “cheap coffee-house”
in Strasbourg, or in a “greasy spoon” in Frankfurt-on-the-Main.9
Meriwether’s narrative offers a fitting perspective on the relations of
people to their nourishment in the nineteenth century. His peregrinations,
which were far from commonplace even in a century that invented tourism
(thanks to travel by railroad, which Meriwether used to get to Kiev), not
only open doors on a variety of cultures and their foodways, but in fact
reflect intellectual and practical preoccupations thoroughly rooted in the
era’s increase in scientific projects to account for, explain, and perhaps mas-
ter stability and change in nature and society. The following pages sketch
this long century’s salient food features: they relate the invention of data to
guide public actions and the transformation of the findings into historical
sources; the elaboration of a quantitative framework to determine human
physiological needs that combined with a hygienic impulse to improve liv-
ing conditions (and eventually helped prolong life expectancy); and the
effects of economic growth as well as the persistence of inequality and hun-
ger. Taking the cue from young Meriwether, tangible developments in food
expenses, caloric intakes, and innovations in food repertoires all figure in
this thumbnail profile. However, the emphasis is on the categories through
which contemporaries—peasants, workers, entrepreneurs, scientists, re-
porters, bureaucrats, politicians—construed their world, moved to change
it, and interpreted the obstacles in their way in order to modify their environ-
ment. The combined attention to structural conditions and their interpreta-
tion by contemporaries is itself a legacy of the nineteenth century. Standard
6 INTRODUCTION

research focuses on man either as a natural or as a social being. Here, the

inquiry encompasses both aspects in an attempt to capture the ways in
which culture mediated people’s relationship to food between the French
Revolution and World War I.

SOURCES

Modern statistics was born in the nineteenth century. System was the
watchword when governments incorporated the use of large numbers to
develop policy tools. Detailed empirical knowledge became a prerequisite
for public policies. National states and cities created offices, supported
agencies, and backed associations that devised scientific methods to gen-
erate and analyze information on population demographics, agricultural
and industrial production, domestic and foreign trade, private and public
revenues, housing, socially deviant practices (crime, drunkenness, prosti-
tution), meteorology, disease, provisioning, and consumption. The list is
incomplete, for anything that could be counted was likely to turn up in
inquiries, surveys, and censuses. Today they serve as the archival stock
of historical inquiries into the conditions and standards of living on the
threshold of the contemporary era.10
A forceful promoter of quantitative research into so-called moral facts,
the Belgian polymath Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) contended that cor-
relations between, say, age or education and criminal acts, poverty and
illness, occupation and birth or death rates, not only afforded a better de-
scription of society, but also sharpened the perception of the routes taken
from cause to effect. The better grasp of social reality, Quetelet argued in
the 1830s, put policies designed to “improve society” and to modify be-
havior on firmer ground. His relentless search for mathematical laws and
normal distributions also led him to establish a correlation between human
growth in height and gain in weight. “We find,” he observed, “that the
normal [average] weight of adult individuals is proportional to the square
of height [in meters].” Fifty years later, the German statistician Ernst Engel
(1821–1896) held that Quetelet’s discovery was extremely useful because a
deviation from the correlation was a good predictor of ill-health or physi-
cal weakness. This revolutionary insight languished for three generations
but then enjoyed a forceful come-back in the 1970s. Baptized as the body
INTRODUCTION 7

mass index, it now generally serves as the medical standard to define nor-
mal weight and obesity, and in epidemiological studies it suggests a link be-
tween excess weight and ailments of various kinds (cardiovascular disease,
diabetes, kidney trouble, cancer, and so on).11
The boundless appetite for observable facts notwithstanding, the re-
sources required in collecting quantitative data were not spent harum-
scarum. Industrial development generated worry about its effect on industrial
workers and on their living conditions, moving it onto the public agenda.
Concerns over poverty propelled inquiries into working families who
dwelt in overcrowded quarters and lived on scanty food supplies that ex-
acerbated the odds of their falling victim to epidemics and other afflic-
tions. To learn just how they spent their incomes—and what they received
in terms of food, clothing, habitat, and health care—was the purpose of
household surveys, first conducted privately in late-eighteenth-century
England, and then vigorously and administratively on the continent by
the mid-nineteenth century. By then, statistics was on the way to becom-
ing a lingua franca; its practitioners united in an intellectual community
spanning the Atlantic to the Ural. From within this vibrant environment,
Ernst Engel formulated one of the very few “laws” obtained within the
social sciences. Calculating averages on the Belgian data coming from
199 working-class household budgets collected under the supervision of
Edouard Ducpétiaux (1804–1868), Engel stated that “the poorer a family,
the greater the proportion of the total outlay devoted to the purchase of
food . . . and furthermore, other things being equal, the proportion of the
outlay spent on food is an altogether unmistakable measure of a popula-
tion’s material standard of living.” The statement has kept researchers
busy since the late 1850s.12
Engel’s generalization relied on mean expenditures and mean revenues.
It promoted research in economics where the mathematically formalized
relationship between size of income and budget share, and its theoretical
explanation, continues to this day, reflecting on data from Ducpétiaux’s
original budget series and linking the findings to contemporary surveys
on consumer demand. Yet aggregation often hides as much as it reveals.
Identical incomes often yield variable (heterogeneous) consumption pat-
terns. Economists agree that variables beyond revenues and prices influence
the ways in which people spend their money.13 The cautious conclusion
8 INTRODUCTION

by no means implies that irrationality, impulse, and idiosyncrasy guide

spending. It does, however, shift the burden of explanation to other social
sciences. And indeed, the analysis of 482 German household budgets se-
lected from surveys conducted on the cost of labor by the Imperial Office of
Statistics in 1907 and by the Metal Workers Union in 1909 led the French
sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945), to assert the social, rather
than the economic determination of expenditures. Equal revenues gener-
ated different budget allocations among blue- and white-collar workers.
Social classes, he concluded, lived by their own definitions of needs. This
finding, too, sent scores of researchers looking for the motives that drive
consumption practices. Halbwachs’s thesis is not without issues. It per-
petuates the sempiternal notion that the satisfaction of primary biological
requirements among the popular classes precedes the development of sec-
ondary (high) spiritual wants, which are thought to characterize the upper
echelons of society. That cultural factors—custom and taste, and the sym-
bolic meaning of goods—affect consumer spending as much as, if not more
than, the satisfaction of material or spiritual wants was the point made at
the end of the nineteenth century by the American social critic Thorstein
Veblen (1857–1929). He pinpointed invidious distinction as the motive of
conspicuous—and hence wasteful, economically inefficient—consumption,
rather more so in, but not limited to the leisure class.14
Factual investigation did not stop with the accumulation of numbers,
their mathematical analysis, their representation in graphs and tables, and
their discussion in the media and legislatures. Dry statistics required a nar-
rative to relate the context in which the observed population evolved, so the
peripatetic Meriwether thought. His attempt to recover first-hand accounts
from the people whose conditions he set out to depict situated him in an
almost century-long line of social investigators. They, too, invented them-
selves in reaction to the Industrial Revolution and directed their searchlight
on the poor, the factory, and the city. They, too, sought to describe social
conditions in quantitative and qualitative terms. At times, theirs was a par-
liamentary or scientific mission, at other times print media or philanthropic
associations hired them, and sometimes—as in the case of Friederich Engels
(1820–1895), reporting from the industrial cauldron that was Manchester in
the early 1840s—they worked on their own. Physicians such as Louis-René
INTRODUCTION 9

Villermé (1782–1863), a member of the French Académie des sciences mo-

rales et politiques and a friend of Quetelet’s, with whom he happened to
share a keenness for numbers, “examined the effects of the textile industry
on those it employs [in France and Switzerland], investigated wretchedness
without humiliating the wretched, observed depravity without irritating the
depraved” in the 1830s. He followed workers into factories and homes, sat
down for meals with them, joined the men in pubs, and with the wives’ help,
poured over their household accounts (if any). In doing so, he learned about
“their joys and complaints, disappointments and hopes, vices and virtues.”
In England, the journalist Henry Mayhew (1812–1887) built his monumen-
tal work of portraits of London Labour and the London Poor, collected in
four volumes in the early 1860s, on the same procedure: direct observation
and communication. Mayhew took special pains to emphasize that this was
“the history of a people, from the lips of the people themselves—giving a
literal description of their labour, their earnings, their trials and their suf-
ferings, in their own ‘unvarnished’ language.” Whatever the partiality—soft
spots or jaundiced eyes, miserabilism or populism—among the social inves-
tigators who compiled such records, these were attempts to retrieve usually
unheard voices from the lower classes and ignored views from the inside.15
Statistical surveys and investigative reporting detailed conditions and
experience: agency inasmuch escaped them as witnesses filtered their offer-
ings. The growth of literacy and numeracy expanded the number of actors
who wrote down their lives or kept archives of their activities. It eased the
paucity of sources relating particular experiences from an original perspec-
tive. Novel organizations and institutions on the rise contributed to the
diffusion of the printed word as applied to food production, provisioning,
and preparation. Consumer cooperatives—and their annual reports—thus
provide data on self-help and the changing acceptation of a decent ali-
mentary supply in the nineteenth century. Restaurants and collective eat-
ing places—and their menus—disclose proper meals and hierarchies among
consumers. Cookbooks relate the tensions between culinary standardiza-
tion and innovation, the modernizing or conservative impulse of cuisines in
politics or technology, the ideas on the education of homemakers, and the
management of households (the rationalization of which would, of course,
facilitate budgetary surveys).16
10 INTRODUCTION

On the individual level, autobiographies, diaries, as well as personal

correspondence allow for the observation of everyday life. These are dif-
ficult sources to exploit: retrovision likely colored recollections. And yet,
the very partiality conveys clues as to the motives that drove the actors.
Historical narratives gain texture from such particular documents. At their
best, first-hand records show how things got done and what they meant.
There is, however, more at stake. The combination of direct evidence with
structural data is a step toward the reconstruction of people’s possible con-
duct. The integration of quantitative and qualitative evidence results in the
retrieval of the past and how it essentially was: it proposes a depiction of
historical constraints and their perception by different protagonists who
acted upon them. It provides a dynamic account of people’s choices. Their
routines, adherence to conventions, and sprees into opportunistic behavior
are then best construed as strategies to get a grip on everyday life—in the
present, as well as in the near and distant future. In short, historical contin-
gency and the bandwidth of choice identify individuals, families, groups,
or social classes by way of their objective situation and their specific behav-
ioral pattern. The combination of different types of evidence and various
points of view helps to uncover the general principles governing the social
and cultural world on a particular scale: the personal, the familial, the
neighborhood—up to the institutional, and long-distance world that the
protagonists inhabited.17
The understanding of the culture of food in the long nineteenth century
gets a boost from the abundance of statistical data and first-hand observa-
tions. The data enable inquiries into provisioning and consumption that
highlight the ways in which people navigated between chore and choice
when encountering supply. Such analyses show that the consumer who
used foods to fashion a lifestyle and to create an identity was still a far-
distant type. Indeed, anxiety continued to burden the relationship of many
to their sustenance. As late as 1900, the children of London’s working
class still learned to live with hunger, residents of the French countryside
were still confronted with chronic malnutrition, and protracted periods on
empty stomachs were still endemic among workers and their households
in Saint-Petersburg. Penury imposed thrift as a way of life. As if to cheat
hunger at least once in a while, feasts had long punctuated lean existences:
on religious holidays, upon completing a job where many hands joined
INTRODUCTION 11

together (harvesting, for example), on an exceptional civic occasion (coro-

nations, elections), during yearly trade or agricultural fairs. They continued
to do so in the nineteenth century.18
Necessity also propelled invention. When the price of fat geese dropped,
poor Parisians were poised to grease their knives. That was the topical
expression in France: fat was indeed the limiting element in many a diet.
Most remarkable indeed is the savvy with which poor people sought food-
stuffs and established relationships to maintain their efforts; the affluent
had their own circuits of provisioning. Poor and rich did so within and
without the market. Old and sometimes new wealth drew foods from their
landed estates. The food economy of the poor family engaged all the mem-
bers (just as revenues came from husband, wife, and offspring): children
scavenged for leftovers in front of military barracks (as they did in Basel)
or on markets at the end of the day (as happened most everywhere); wives
and daughters received comestible extras from their bourgeois employers
(via their cooks), or picked up stale bread from the baker’s outlet, and limp
vegetables from the greengrocer’s stand on their way home; and fathers and
sons fetched a bite—fish and chips, fried potatoes, smoked eel, a ham sand-
wich, a pizza, a piece of cake?—on the run to, or back from work. In fact,
there were secondary—or used-food—markets for most anything in major
cities from London to Paris and Naples: edible oils, coffee grounds, tea
leaves, left-over meat and fish, the latter either hot or cold. The mobiliza-
tion of these sources makes everyday culture come to light in the allocation
of the food budget and the deployment of social skills to assure the food
supply and to organize its consumption. The study of food and foodways
thus becomes a means to explain the ways in which societies reproduced
themselves.19

MEASURES

The quantitative groundswell effected a turnabout in the scientific ap-

proach to human nourishment as well. Justus von Liebig (1803–1873), one
of the activists promoting the new method, caught the paradigmatic shift in
a few lines. Before, “medicine, following the model of Aristotelian philoso-
phy, has formed [abstract] conceptions of nutrition and the formation of
blood; it classified comestibles into nutritious and non-nutritious; but these
12 INTRODUCTION

theories, based on observations made under conditions that ignored the

requirements necessary to arrive at just [testifiable] conclusions, could not
describe real processes.” It took the application of “the quantitative method
in organic chemistry to see [and understand], in all clarity, the relations
between foodstuffs and the purposes they serve in the living body.” While
clarity would not be obtained for some decades, by the 1840s a community
of researchers had identified the components of foodstuffs. In a momen-
tous article published in 1827, the English physician and chemist William
Prout (1785–1850) divided alimentary principles into saccharinous (car-
bohydrates), oleaginous (fats), and albuminous (proteins). The invention
of an original language based on pioneering investigations conducted in
newly established laboratories was but one, albeit crucial and long-lasting
contribution of organic chemistry to the study of animal and human me-
tabolisms. It also elaborated a research program that pretty much remains
intact today. The chemical characterization of individual foodstuffs made
up one axis, their assimilation into—and disposal from—the body formed
a second area of investigation, and the measurement of nutriment intake
and output was another.20
It was the third vector of research that would resonate most forcefully
beyond the laboratory walls in the nineteenth—and into the twenty-first—
centuries. Nutritional knowledge appeared to be a propitious path to bet-
ter health and increased labor power, and the drive to acquire it fired up
medical and physiological studies of men’s macronutrient needs. In turn,
the mediatization of dismal living conditions and the capacity to formu-
late potential improvements offered a forceful argument for their pursuit,
leading to the rise of chemical physiology’s academic standing. Empirical
ration scales had, of course, long existed. Hospitals, poor-relief institu-
tions, monasteries, but especially the army, the navy, and prisons parceled
out food in order to keep their clientele going in the worst case, and active
and alert in the best. By the 1840s, tradition and empiricism gave way
to systematic observation and controlled experiments, the result of which
aimed at influencing public policies, commercial ventures, and individual
behavior. Scholars developed complex methods to quantify macronutrient
ingestion and excretion of able-bodied men (railway workers, peasants,
soldiers) in order to determine their need for nourishment when active,
resting, or merely surviving over a precise period of time. It fell to the
INTRODUCTION 13

Dutch physician Jacob Moleschott (1822–1893) to compile the results of

twenty-one dietary studies and derive an average man’s needs by subtract-
ing excretions from intakes. The resulting numbers, published in 1859,
set the daily consumption of proteins at 4.5 ounces, that of carbohydrates
at 14 ounces, and fats at 3 ounces for the average man, whose weight of
roughly 140 pounds came directly from Quetelet’s work. (Moleschott could
not yet know because the scientific tools were lacking at that point in time,
but his macronutrients added up to approximately 3,000 kilocalories.)
This summary does not do justice to the skill required, and hypotheses
formulated in order to do such calculations. Our more sedentary mode of
living as well as methodological modifications have led to a reduction of
the officially suggested macronutrient contribution to the diet of a healthy
adult. But the fact holds: Moleschott’s computations inaugurated the era
of quantitative nutritional recommendations.21
They certainly had an impact. Liebig’s prestige and voluntarism led pio-
neer physiologists to emphasize the role of protein (from the Greek protos,
meaning first) as the main building block of muscle tissue and exclusive
provider of energy to animals and humans. Adherence to balanced diets did
not prevent chemical physiology from exalting meat—animal protein—at
the expense of other foods. The high recommended intake of protein and
its actual presence in the dominantly plant-based diets of poorer house-
holds did the rest: the discrepancy exposed an overwhelming protein defi-
cit. Closing this gap appeared to be one solution to the so-called social
question; all the more so, as good food appeared as a rampart against the
consumption of alcohol. The hope for changing the living conditions of the
European population for the better inspired researchers. The prospect of
financial profits revealed entrepreneurial acumen and motivated industrial
ventures. Liebig himself devised a method to extract and condense meat
juices whose benefits to human health and strength he asserted. The enor-
mous cattle herds in South America and Australia supplied the raw material
for his branded meat extract, a commercially successful application of an
erroneous scientific theory. Others followed suit, for this was “a remunera-
tive trade” and “a remarkable page in economical history” in the words of
the Food Journal in the early 1870s. Hospitals and the military were early
clients of the new product, and there individuals acquired the taste for it
before private consumption took off in middle-class households intent on
14 INTRODUCTION

saving time rather than money. This was global business. The New World
fulfilled an ancient European dream: it provided meat, albeit first as a con-
diment rather than a food. It took traditional salting and modern canning
and refrigeration to supply European markets with large quantities of the
real stuff somewhat later in the century.22
The scientific doctrine of the priority of animal protein was swiftly
overthrown. The growth of meat consumption, however, remained a top
priority, if not always for governments, at least for philanthropists, politi-
cians of a reformist bent, and among food experts. Other foods of animal
origin profi
profited from
from in thishierarchy:
this hierarchy:asasbutchers’
butchers’meat
meatremained
remainedat
at aa price
that precluded its regular consumption in working-class families in Europe,
lobbies and professional authorities promoted substitutes such as fish (in
Great Britain and Germany), or dairy products and eggs (in France and
Switzerland, for example). In brief, average meat consumption per head
continued to serve as a measure of economic development. It indicated the
standard of living. As a cliché from which his usual sagacity did not save
the Italian economist and politician Francesco Nitti (1868–1953), diets
rich in animal protein were supposed to explain the reason why “a few tens
of thousands of well-fed English carnivores hold in subjection a hundred
million of Hindus [living as vegetarians on a plant-based diet].”23
Physiological inquiries in the second half of the nineteenth century
turned toward studying energy metabolism. Macronutrient, and especially
protein needs remained a focus of study and (at times, acrimonious) de-
bate, but attention shifted to the amounts of power that food delivered.
New metaphors accompanied the change in perspective. Food became
fuel—the body emerged as a motor. In this era of rising industrial capital-
ism, efficiency soon became the motto of studies on the ways and ratios
in which muscles transformed food intake into physical output. Calories
became the unit of measurement. They made possible the calculation of the
cost of human productivity. If knowledge of physiological processes moti-
vated researchers such as Wilbur Atwater (1844–1907) and Max Rubner
(1854–1932), they added two more vectors to their scientific activities. For
one, they turned to “the pecuniary economy of food” (to use the title of an
1888 article by Atwater in the magazine The Century that took as its hook
an anecdote on American food practices culled from Lee Meriwether’s re-
porting). The combination of nutrition and economics was to consider “the
INTRODUCTION 15

relation of the nutritive value of food to its cost.” Empirical budget stud-
ies appeared to prove that poor households spent their money unwisely;
according to these “students of social economy,” reallocation between
foods—from meat to legumes or pasta, for example—would augment the
healthfulness of a diet, save money, and incidentally stave off the temp-
tations of alcohol. In short, the program aimed at the rationalization of
common, wage-earning people’s conventional diet; wealthy households,
who elevated conspicuous waste to a lifestyle, eluded reform (at least until
World War I). If grande cuisine and gastronomy had meant the emancipa-
tion of food from medicine, rational eating strapped them up again with
the ties of utility.24
Such modification of daily practices required the spread of scientific
information, and many a physiologist joined a pedagogical vector and a
social engagement to his or her professional duties as a lever with which to
inflect alimentary habits. They wrote articles in widely distributed maga-
zines, rode the public-lecture circuit, and participated in associations for
the promotion of rational eating. Since women ideally ran household pro-
visioning and nurtured family members, they were the main target of the
diffusion of the new knowledge. To be sure, they were certainly beneficia-
ries of this, but victims, too: for the advice conveyed new standards to live
up to. Nutritional recommendations came as part of a package to reform
modes of living. It concerned cleanliness, physical activity and, obviously,
household management that included such virtues as foresight and saving,
personal hygiene, and temperance. All of them required investments. One
handbook urged households to buy “a balance and a clock” to implement
new behavior. Change came slowly, however, as food habits resisted in-
junction. The burden of the new and more intensive domestic chores fell
disproportionately on women. Accordingly, they bore the brunt of criti-
cism when reformers sought the culprit for the failure of putting informa-
tion into practice. Thus, the American businessman and moral reformer
Edward Atkinson (1827–1905), who had invented a fuel-efficient stove for
cooking, concluded in the early 1890s that his “own mission appears to be
to overcome the inertia of woman; a very hard piece of work.”25
By the end of the nineteenth century, scholarly studies of the processes
involved in the maintenance of human life had ostensibly dispensed with
Galienian, Hippocratic dietetics. It had also linked human and animal
16 INTRODUCTION

physiology: the study of feeding standards for livestock proceeded at the

same time. Still, theoretical reasoning and empirical proofs did not sway
the establishment instantly. Moleschott himself relied on the temperaments
to explain metabolic differences and to recommend certain foods to regu-
late digestion and balance character: he still believed that firy wines, coffee
and tea profited melancoly people. University textbooks and up-to-date
manuals, at least in France, sometimes fell back on humoral language. They
continued to advise sanguinary temperaments to eat mild and refreshing
food (fresh fruit and vegetables, avant tout), whereas phlegmatics required
stimulating comestibles (red meat). Overall, however, research progressed
within the newly established framework: scholarly disputes revolved
around the values, but not the existence of substantial and caloric needs.26
Beyond laboratory walls, scientific journals, advice books, and middle-
brow magazines the new nutrition ran into difficulties in inflecting food-
ways. “Habit,” the already quoted reformer Atkinson noted, was at the
root of the “lack of appreciation of the importance of a reform.” Inherited
beliefs that beans were bad for children persisted and curbed the recom-
mended increase in the consumption of protein-rich legumes in lieu of meat.
Among the French working class, the use of the easily digested sugar as an
energy-laden food stumbled over its image as a futile condiment “good for
the bourgeois” when nutritionists promoted it around 1900 as a way to
increase calorie intake, especially among men (the decline in its price was to
sustain the growth of its average consumption). The English working class
remained suspicious of fruit, vegetables, and milk. In the United States,
fresh milk was yet to become “nature’s perfect food,” too—a competitor
of the increase in carbonated-soda sales.27
If attitudes and beliefs interfered with nutritional messages, perhaps the
toughest resistance to the new way of describing and classifying foodstuffs
came from long-established, religious nomenclatures. Their precepts had
found their way into daily routines; as everyday practices, they asserted (and
marked) identities. The encounter of two classifications of food could be
reinforcing. In Germany, conservative Jewish authorities found much sup-
port for the traditional dietary laws in physiology. Science, rather than
making tradition obsolete, sustained its claims to health benefits and sani-
tary accomplishments. Things could go the other way round, of course,
and modernizing Jews used nutrition to argue against what seemed to be
INTRODUCTION 17

irrational rules with baleful effects on health. In Catholic France, the re-
ligious heritage identified foods according to principles whose incompat-
ibility with the new scientific understanding seems obvious now, but took
time to settle on commentators then. Meager was one such category. If it
still designated Lenten foods for Catholics, it came as low fat in nutritional
terms. The difference is significant, its impact on nutritional recommenda-
tions patent. “It is well known that ‘meager foods’ include milk, cheese,
cream, and eggs,” a popular French magazine wrote in 1905. It extolled
their nutritional and culinary virtues, especially when it came to feeding
children. The combination of dairy products and legumes (nevertheless ac-
companied by half a pint of beer or wine per meal for an adult man), it
further insisted, “fully satisfies the needs of the human body.” The rise
of the average body mass index in many a developed country in the late
twentieth century would have this advice sit ill with the guardians of public
health who were concerned with calories and cholesterol. Secularization
pre-empted the confrontation.28

DEVELOPMENTS

Was the parallel existence of different food nomenclatures a moot concern

around 1900 when malnourishment remained a widespread affliction in
Europe and, to some extent, the United States? Maybe so. As a matter
of fact, even a cursory look at advertising in the years before the Great
War unveils an altogether more pervasive preoccupation with fatigue, its
immediate relation to productivity and accidents, and its longer-term link
with tuberculosis. Anything to overcome neurasthenia appeared worthy of
attention. This was the era when all kinds of kola products hit the mar-
ket as tonics. In France, the African kola nut’s active principle—caffeine—
could be obtained in the form of pills at drugstores or as powder to prepare
a hot drink (comparable to chocolate) at the grocer’s. In the first instance, it
was used to help sportsmen maintain their form, in the second it whipped
up energy at breakfast or helped restore “force and vigor” in the afternoon.
As a carbonated, tickling energizer of the body and the brain, a concoction
of extracts from cocaine leafs and kola nuts started its rise to world promi-
nence in the 1880s at one Dr Pemberton’s (1831–1888) apothecary’s coun-
ter in Georgia, in the United States; marketed first as patent medicine, it
18 INTRODUCTION

quickly morphed into a soft drink (minus cocaine, the story has it). Sobriety
developed into a personal asset in this age of industrial growth and moral
reform. Though lacking soda’s refreshing potency, coffee’s stimulating ef-
fect sustained its increasing importance in private and public consumption:
in Germany, its per capita consumption tripled from 1.7 to 5 pounds be-
tween 1850 and 1900. The focus on exhaustion resulted, at least in part,
from an optical effect. The European science of labor focused its attention
on the rapport between energy balance and fatigue. However, everyday
experience had something to do with marketing spotlighting the benefits
of stimulants. After all, longer factory and business hours meant that the
intensity of work increased apace. Such new physical claims on people in
the labor market needed to be met. Caffeine—or quinine or nicotine—
provided some necessary jolts. Nourishment, however, provided the most
consequential part.29
Food supply increased tremendously in the nineteenth century. Average
food consumption took off spectacularly after centuries of stagnation (only
alleviated in periods of drastic demographic losses). Everything changed;
this was an era of a distinct break with the past. In France, mean daily in-
take per person grew from about 1,900 to 3,000 kilocalories between 1800
and 1900. The point of departure was slightly higher in England, with ap-
proximately 2,400 kilocalories, but it too reached 3,000 kilocalories on the
eve of World War I. The volume grew, and every foodstuff contributed to
the momentous step that moved these countries from the barely adequate
level of diet on average to sufficient calorie availability. Benefitting from ag-
ricultural improvements and existing distribution circuits, the caloric con-
tribution of cereals augmented while its part declined as a consequence of
the growing importance of potatoes, meat, dairy, vegetables, fruit, fish, and
sugar. Of course, the diet was more industrial in urbanized England than in
still predominantly rural France: on average, groceries (such as marmalade
or margarine, or even tins and exotic fruit such as pineapple) weighed in
more heavily in England, whose foodstuff importations from overseas had
vastly expanded with the coming of steamships and railroads.30
Change moved more than mere volumes. It modified the diet’s nutri-
tional makeup. Something of a pattern emerges from other countries’ very
similar, if later historical experiences. The mounting number of carbohy-
drates brought a switch to more prestigious, more easily panified cereals. In
INTRODUCTION 19

Belgium, rye bread gave way to loaves containing ever more wheat in the
nineteenth century. The same phenomenon had taken place earlier in Paris,
but was noticeable in rural France at the same time. There, barley and
oats had given way to rye, and then to a mixture of rye and wheat. This
bread got whiter as industrial milling progressed. The British, too, mani-
fested their preference for white bread. Not that there was an economic or
nutritional gain in this development. Taste surely played a role. But so did
the symbol. White bread, whose material importance actually diminished
with time, appears as a sure sign of a society that put nature’s fetters at a
distance, a society that was capable of removing hitherto essential natural
resources from its food supply.31
Then there was the threshold of 3,000 kilocalories per day and per per-
son. As availability got nearer to this level, animal products began substi-
tuting for plants. The tremendous growth of sugar in the average diet—it
furnished one-sixth of the calories consumed by the English at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century—hardly mattered in this modification: car-
bohydrates (from cereals and potatoes) yielded part of their share to fats,
and animal proteins equaled, then supplanted proteins of vegetable origin.
Many different places in Europe replicated this development. The structural
transformation became known as the nutritional transition. The move from
a plant-based to a meat-based diet was a tremendous achievement, and it
effected a better absorption of nutrients that, in turn, improved health.
Seven plant-based calories produce one meat calorie, and in nineteenth-
century Europe the substitution was made possible by goods coming from
overseas. This is emphatically not the same as the otherwise momentous
domestication of American plants in Europe (whose crucial contribution to
the gamut of foods and well-being is only overshadowed by the Irish Potato
Famine of 1845–1848, whose notoriety eclipses later peacetime famines
resulting from the crop failures in Finland of 1866–1867, and regional
occurrences in Russia twenty-five years later). Granting the Old World a
long-held wish, the new diet turned into a model elsewhere, with various
degrees of success—as the twentieth century would show. It also set the
stage for the increasing anxiety over the effects of such a rich nutritional
regime—from cardiovascular disease, to obesity and diabetes.32
While the pattern of the nutritional transition is clear, the rhythm of the
remarkable development remains a controversial issue—and one that has
20 INTRODUCTION

engaged historians in an abrasive dispute, first in England, and later, to a

lesser extent, in other locales where economic output increased. As inter-
pretations stand now, it does seem that the generations who lived through
the onset of modern economic growth may well have paid a physical price
for it. Not only did average height decrease in Europe and North America
before about 1860, poor nutrition in childhood and adolescence, as well
as residence in more crowded, urban spaces appear to have taken their toll
on individual health when reaching a mature age. People were shorter and
sicker on average, but the distribution of the burden was unequal. The in-
creasing disparity in physical height denotes the exacerbation of social dif-
ferences: upper-class men were taller than those coming from the working
class. Higher incomes bought better nutrition. That observation applied to
nations, too. Meriwether noted that a six-foot-tall Frenchman was a curi-
osity, and indeed, on average, American and English men were taller than
their continental counterparts.33
The second half of the nineteenth century brings with it less historio-
graphic controversy. Stable or lower relative food prices contributed to
improvements in the physical well-being of the lower classes. Inequality
persisted, however. From a nutritional point of view, rural dwellers were
usually worse off than urban residents (though urban living came with
other risks that shortened life). Rural provisioning bore the mark of an
economy of expenditures. The imperative prompted families to produce
as much for themselves as they could in order to keep cash expenses to
a minimum. However, self-sufficiency was not the ideal; rather, surplus
production stimulated exchange and generated the income with which to
buy indispensable goods (salt, sugar, and so on), services (medical care,
lawyers, and notaries), and pay taxes. When women ran the dairy and
raised poultry, commercial motives and self-supply went hand in hand;
such income may even have added to women’s say within the family and
weighed in on spending decisions. And still, ever more intense relations
with cities kindled ill feelings among the peasantry in France. A glum mood
may have informed peasant-writer Émile Guillaumin (1873–1951) when
describing the hardships of life in the countryside. He noted that the finest
farm products—white flour, beef, fine ham, vegetables, and fruits—went
to the city market: “to us the pain, to them the gain.” Farm meals re-
mained monotonous: rye bread, onion soup, potato soup, pumpkin soup,
INTRODUCTION 21

and beans. Meat appeared on holidays, and during harvesting rancid lard
fortified the soup. Wine remained an urban beverage, consumed only at
festivals in rural areas. In the English countryside, too, potatoes came in as
the second food item after bread; the stereotype about English beefeaters
notwithstanding, meat remained a luxury among families of farm hands
and other low-paid workers residing in rural areas. Social investigators
noted that provisioning hardly ever met Atwater standards (3,500 kcal and
4.5 oz of protein per person and per day), and that underfeeding remained
a rule in rural England.34
In cities, next to palaces of high living where French gastronomy held
sway and whose leftovers supplied secondary food markets, usually sur-
vived a population living on scraps—and charity. Meriwether, for whom
London was the modern Babylon where “there is so much wealth on the
one hand and poverty on the other,” thought that philanthropy allowed
many a working poor to exist; “existing,” he emphasized, “for he does
not live.” Poverty perdured. Wages, even when rising, often proved insuf-
ficient to pay for the satisfaction of basic needs; that is, to assure physical
efficiency. “How do Dutch workmen and their families manage to live on
these small incomes in such an expensive place?” the American consul in
Amsterdam wondered in the early 1870s. “In reply,” he went on, “I must
in the first place explain that to the industrial classes in Holland, animal
food, cheese, eggs, beer, currants, raisins, sugar, &c., are luxuries of which
they partake only on Sundays, and then but sparingly, and in some in-
stances not at all. They live chiefly on potatoes, cheap vegetables, such as
carrots, turnips, onions, cabbage &c., stewed with lard, and bread, both
wheat and rye. When cheap vegetables are not procurable, they vary their
meal by dried peas and beans of various kinds, or rice, barley, and flour,
prepared with butter milk and treacle.” There had surely been an increase
in variety since 1800. But did it meet the requirements to get through a
ten-hour work day?35
The trend toward an average supply of 3,000 kilocalories per person
by 1900 failed to reach contemporary recommendations (today, it stands
at 3,300 kcal for eight working hours). Children, of course, need less, and
so adults receive more. However, food distribution within the family was
geared toward the father. Sons, too, benefitted. Since supply was limited,
mothers and daughters received the smaller part, and went less nourished.
22 INTRODUCTION

The justification for this nutritional imbalance relied on the fuel argument:
the main breadwinner required most energy, and so had a right to the best
foods. Self-denial came with the mother’s position. Its consequences on
possible pregnancies remained an overlooked issue (although Moleschott
quite clearly noted the increased need for nutrients among pregnant and
breast-feeding women). There was, in effect, more to this mechanism.
Meat’s top rank in the hierarchy of foodstuffs corresponded to the status
of the pater at the apex of the family pyramid. The physiological and the
symbolic, culturally determined attributes of meat as a provider of strength
reinforced each other perfectly. Access to food literally signified the peck-
ing order.36

CONCLUSION: MODERN TIMES

Agricultural innovation and industrial development pushed economic

growth in the nineteenth century. Material well-being improved in Europe
and North America. The pace was uneven, the gains were unequal. Real
income did not rise in the same proportion for everyone, and some groups
became worse off before their circumstances improved. Social struggles
to receive a more equitable part in the fruits of economic development
marked the era. The overall trend, however, was there, if not unmistakably
so: contemporaries—and the burgeoning statisticians studying mortality
rates—may not have noticed, but by 1800 England and France stood at
the brink of an increase in life expectancy that continued up through the
twentieth century and would sweep along other nations, too. By 1900, an
English newborn could expect to live 48 years, up from 36 a century be-
fore; a French baby’s life expectancy had risen from 33 to 46 years over the
same period. A new era had begun.37
The growing food supply as well as the surveillance of its quality, con-
tributed to this gain. When, in 1820, a whistle blew in London, it was
heard around the world, insuring that food quality became an ever-more
salient public concern. The cause for alarm originated in the danger
that the goods available in the town’s markets presented for consumers.
No article seemed to escape the cry of indignation. The author of A Treatise
on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons was a German chemist.
Frederick Accum (1769–1838), though abreast of the most recent advances
INTRODUCTION 23

in theoretical chemistry, cultivated a very practical outlook. He had pre-

viously made crucial contributions to the introduction of gaslight to cit-
ies, and continued to devote his energy to improve his contemporaries’
quality of life thereafter. To be sure, this was not the first time that a
city’s food supply was the subject of a ghastly and detailed description.
Pre-revolutionary Paris emerged under a rather sinister aspect when the
roving chronicler Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740–1812) described its food
markets, as well as its water supplies (drawn from fountains and the in-
creasingly polluted Seine) and deficient sewage system. The darker corners
of the city of light held tainted bread, fetid meat, spoiled fish, and soiled
vegetables. Circumstances were no different in Vienna, Madrid, and in
larger, ever-more crowded cities elsewhere. Cologne’s streets struck poet
Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) as particularly dirty in the 1840s, and he only
repeated the critical, if humorous stance on the city’s stenches that Samuel
Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) had composed in 1828. There is, however,
good evidence that the remarkable attention to bodily hygiene elevated the
achievements of public health in Japan to levels then unknown in Europe.
Accum had arrived at his appalling conclusion by using the methods of
chemical analysis rather than the use of sensory capabilities; that is, of
view, touch, smell, and taste. That was a paradigmatic break with the past.
Henceforth, scientists and scientific expertise would claim—or be pushed
into—a part to play in regulating food markets.38
Experts thrive on norms, of course, and normalization is what happened
when food became an object of scientific analysis. The new understanding
of foodstuffs promoted research. It also fashioned a public discourse on
how to behave. The efficiency by which new industries, forms of transport,
and wire communication distinguished themselves, was reflected in the rec-
ommendations on what to eat and drink. Everything seemed to speed up.
Lee Meriwether, a fine observer, mentioned “another thing that lends to
Milan an appearance of the nineteenth century is the fact that the people
are in a hurry. I don’t mean, of course, an American hurry, but an Italian
hurry.” Foodways, however, changed at a more leisurely pace, building on
traditional tastes and inclinations. After all, people eat culturally conse-
crated foods, not nutrients advocated by health reformers. Some routines
appeared perennial. One is the habit of eating on the run and in the street.
Meriwether marveled at (his spelling) “the marruzzara, the carnacatotaro,
24 INTRODUCTION

the pizzaiuolo (shellfish, cooked meats, and cake sellers) . . . who ply their
trades in the street, in the open air” in Italian cities. This was an incli-
nation that was open to innovation: after all, fish and chips became an
English working-class staple with the growth of trawl fishing and the
spread of railroad networks.39
Such continuity should not conceal the impact of the great transforma-
tion that began in the nineteenth century. Consumer baskets were not only
larger in 1910, their composition was richer. Again, disposable incomes
varied, and with them the extent of choice. For some, this meant merely
more potatoes on the plate (all other things being equal); for others, an ad-
ditional cut of sausage. The better-off managed to buy time-saving conve-
nience foods, packaged and branded. Soups, sauces and tins, jellies, pasta,
corn flakes, condensed milk, margarine, baking powder, and baby formula
could be stashed away in the larder, required little more than heating as
preparation, and were easy to consume. Mass-produced biscuits began
to accompany tea and coffee. Exotic fruits from bananas to pineapples
graced some tables. Many of these goods made timid appearances in mod-
est households. But the “extension of consumption” was a fact “as remark-
able as the transformation of transport and communication networks,” an
observer of Paris in the 1890s noted; he boldly asserted that “we now live
under the regime of universal consumption.” Entrepreneurs anticipated
growing business. Just as the techniques of consumption were updated,
commerce modernized its sales strategies and invented quasi architectural
designs to display new goods (canned preserves being a favorite). In Milan,
Meriwether noted “big shops with large windows, and goods tastefully
exhibited therein—a thing unknown in the southern Italian cities where
the smallness of the business shops is astonishing.” Increasing supplies re-
quired means with which to stimulate consumer spending.40
There is another aspect to this makeover of the food repertoire. Most
of the new, industrially produced articles, including American pork sau-
sages, were evidence of the spatial integration of the food economy: much
merchandise hailed from afar. Africa, North and South America, Asia, and
Australia sent their foodstuffs—from wheat to rice, from fruit and veg-
etables to coffee and tea, and meat—to Europe. Goods (and information
and people) now moved faster and farther. Awareness of that momentous
change came early in England where industrialization, urbanization, and
INTRODUCTION 25

the building of an empire had altered modes of living before their effects
modified lives in continental Europe. By 1873, the Food Journal noted
that “the world is ransacked for delicacies; the kitchens of the East and the
West, of the North and the South, are open to all mankind; we cover our
tables with rarities from every country from India to the Pole, we grow our
meat, our fruits, and our wines on one side of the world and eat them on
the other; we have arrived almost at the perfect world wide communism in
the matter of food.” The English seemed none the happier for it; the Food
Journal concluded that “we are not content” in spite (or perhaps because)
of the new abundance and its commercial display.41
The benefits of such trade were often lopsided, its consequences on re-
gional economic development uneven. Lee Meriwether’s travels offered
“food for reflection . . . on the march of human progress.” He had visited
some of the most advanced and some very backward regions in Europe,
North Africa, and his native United States. Geography permitted the de-
tection of processes that moved human affairs, and every place provided
information on a particular stage. There was no doubt that the world was
growing smaller (Meriwether no longer resisted the allure of the auto-
mobile on the eve of World War I). Connections and dependencies grew.
Happenings on one continent affected events on another, and rather quickly
so. Pressure rose to reduce the differences in the ways of doing things and
in defining goods; nomenclatures became ubiquitous. Meriwether was
mindful that machinery and the division of labor vastly increased wealth,
and that they “were beneficial in the long run.” But, he added, he could
not shut his eyes “to the present suffering caused by such changes.” The
“remorseless Juggernaut of modern times” affected lives everywhere.
Artisans and laborers lost their livelihoods. Migration tore families apart.
Economic growth derailed quotidian routines. Inequality bred discontent.
Meriwether, in effect, was witnessing the acceleration of transformations
taking place in the world’s systems of production and the rearrangement
of its trade. Globalization is the label we use to designate these on-going
phenomena today. The young American was a compassionate observer, yet
his ruminations resonate through to the twenty-first century. When urging
“political economists . . . to include human feelings in their calculations,” he
anticipated today’s worries about the effects that global forces have on a
local scale. Meriwether dreaded the uniformization of the manifold “kinds
26 INTRODUCTION

of living” he had discovered and come to cherish as an expression of hu-

mankind’s cultural riches. In doing so, he questioned the tendency to let
the market, including the food market, be the sole regulator of society.
Culture—values, emotions, norms, habits, and beliefs—mattered because
it breathed life into societies.42
 CHAPTER ONE

Food Production:
Industrial Processing
Begins to Gain Ground
pierre saunier
Translated by Rosemary Kneipp

On the eve of World War I, several of the food industries had already been
in existence for nearly a century, others for only a few decades, while still
others had yet to make their appearance. It is therefore tempting to see the
early 1900s as a midpoint in the history of the food industries, with the ma-
ture, primary processing industries on one side (flour mills, oil mills, sugar
refineries, starch production, and alcoholic beverages) and on the other side,
the newly emerging secondary industries, some of which were still in the
making, or were vague ideas that were not to develop until much later. This
distinction embraces the history of the food industries but does not explain
their development. Important secondary processing activities such as the
manufacture of chocolates, biscuits, pasta, and condiments were already
considered as industries in the last third of the nineteenth century. Many
chocolate factories, for example, employed several hundred workers, and,
in some cases, more than a thousand. The primacy of primary processing
28 FOOD PRODUCTION: INDUSTRIAL PROCESSING BEGINS TO GAIN GROUND

industries in the nineteenth century and the dominance of secondary pro-

cessing industries in the twentieth century is an observation rather than
an explanation of the expansion of the food industries. The principle be-
hind their growth is their capacity to gradually replace traditional, non-
industrial food-production systems, such as farming, small-scale, and
household production. Replacing home cooking with ready-made meals is
no different from what happened a century earlier when home-made bread
was ousted by the country baker (note that Lee Meriwether still considered
the baking housewife to be the rule in small-town provincial England in the
1880s1). From this point of view, there is no reason to distinguish between
primary and secondary processing industries. The areas in which the food
industries expand may change but the principle will remain the same. Sev-
eral paths lead to this expansion. Their exploration will provide a picture
of the development of food industries, of how far they had already come
by 1900 in order to gauge the road that lay ahead.
The first path has already been mentioned above. The food industries
gradually came to take over areas that in the past had belonged exclusively
to the realms of farming, small-scale, and household production. This can
be illustrated by the successive disappearance of three traditional occupa-
tions that are currently very popular with advertisers: the miller and his
flour mill, the dairymaid and her churn, and the housewife and her tasty
little dishes. How did this come about and what strategies were used? Here,
we will only consider the most important factor: the superiority of the
food industries in terms of productivity and, therefore, cost. They quickly
gained ground in those areas in which the difference in productivity was
the greatest in comparison with traditional food-production methods. It
is no coincidence that the first targets of the food industries were flour,
fat, sugar, and beverages. These are all capital-intensive activities—for ex-
ample, they represented 96 percent of the fixed assets of the food industries
in France in the 1860s—that are easier to mechanize than other branches
of the food chain, and in which the food industries were able to supplant
non-industrial forms of food production at a very early stage.2
Neither is it a coincidence that it was only much later that the food
industries replaced domestic food-preparation activities and—more impor-
tant still—it was only because women had moved out of the kitchen, so
to speak. The growth of the convenience and pre-packaged food market
PIERRE SAUNIER 29

owes less to the difference in productivity between the so-called housewife

and the food industry than to the difference in earnings between women
in the workplace and those undertaking domestic tasks. The monetary gain
that encourages the housewife to give up her household activities and join
the work force is a boon for the food industries and is particularly ef-
fective when the economic depreciation of housework, which is the cor-
ollary of the working woman, is combined with a symbolic depreciation
of everything traditional. The downside of this new trend must be borne
in mind when explaining the growth of the modern, quick-service foods
market; that is, the disqualification of traditional practices (own consump-
tion, housework, and so on, more or less implicitly associated with archaic
customs), which accelerates their elimination and subsequent replacement
with modern, highly esteemed practices.
The means by which the food industries triumphed over pre-industrial
forms of food production—large-scale production, the division of labor, the
mechanization of production processes, the branding, and so on—hardly
need clarifying. However, it is important to remember that the growth of
the food industries required an abundant source of regular, homogeneous
agricultural inputs. Industrial slaughtering cannot exist without a relatively
standardized pool of beef cattle further up the line. Neither can there be a
dairy industry without a supply of stabilized, homogenized milk that has
been refrigerated and pasteurized. The mechanization and automation of
food-production processes, with the ultimate goal of a production process
that is as continuous and fluid as that of the chemical industry, are impos-
sible if agriculture does not provide the food industries with raw materials
that have the same level of standardization as assembly parts in produc-
tion workshops in the non-food industries. This meant that the secular
growth of the food industries was inseparable from the modernization of
agriculture.
The growth of the food industries obviously depended on the market
penetration of the products. Many were products that were not spontane-
ously accepted by consumers. The example of the difficulties encoun-
tered in replacing farm butter with industrial butter at the beginning of
the twentieth century is discussed further on. Commercial and non-commercial
channels have a crucial role to play in facilitating the penetration of
new products. Modern, dynamic, urban social groups who are quick
30 FOOD PRODUCTION: INDUSTRIAL PROCESSING BEGINS TO GAIN GROUND

to adopt food innovations are one such channel; institutions such as the
army, which help to overcome reluctance toward trying new foods (see
below in relation to tinned food), are another. Advertising, too, is important.
It has a dual function. First, it vouches for the quality of branded products
and has been doing so regularly since the nineteenth century. Second, it is
the main way that foods produced by different companies can be differenti-
ated, as their technological content is very similar.3 As competition between
firms becomes monopolistic, several kinds of differentiation strategies are
stepped up: on the one hand, the vertical and horizontal differentiation of
products that segments supply to appeal to all consumers according to their
income, age, and taste; on the other hand, the delayed differentiation that
consists in using the same production line to make standard products that
are differentiated at the end of the supply chain by minor but perceivable
characteristics, in order to offer a wider product range at a minimum cost.
At the end of the twentieth century, the growth of the food industries was
no longer dependent on their capacity to replace pre-industrial production
types, but rather on the distribution of highly processed, highly packaged,
highly branded products.4

VARIOUS IN-BETWEEN INDUSTRIES

This quick look at the growth of the food industries gives a better idea
of what they were like in 1900 and shows how they differ from those we
know today. There appear to be four main differences: (1) in 1900, every-
thing that the growth of the food industries was to owe to the future manu-
facture of ready-made meals, pre-cooked dishes, quick-service foods, and
so on, was still very vague; (2) packaging, presentation in individual por-
tions, and labeling of foods, which would subsequently become an integral
part of the food industries, were still mainly carried out by distributors and
retailers; (3) the streamlining of production processes to improve flow—a
more accomplished form of the automation of manufacturing processes5—
was still very futuristic; (4) product differentiation and trademarks or
brand names (not in the sense of a label certifying quality, but rather what
they had started to become at the end of the twentieth century—that is, a
simple emblem or “totem”6) also belonged to an undefined future. A fifth
factor needs to be added, of a different nature this time, because it concerns
PIERRE SAUNIER 31

the structure of the food industries. It was not until after 1900 that the
meat and dairy industries started to gain ground. Employment in these
animal-based industries, virtually non-existent at the end of the nineteenth
century except in the United States, increased rapidly in the 1960s until it
was on a par with that of the grain-based industries. It should be noted that
this change in the employment structure of the food industries was com-
bined with a virtually constant total headcount if the population increase
is taken into account: 1.1 employees per 100 inhabitants in France in 1901
as in 1982, half that in the United States in 1904 and 1987.7 Employment
moved from the vegetable-based industries to the animal-based industries.
It decreased as consumption dropped or where the productivity gain was
highest (grain products, sugar, and beverages). It went up when consump-
tion increased and where it was based on money.8
Let us consider what the food industries were like before these changes
took place. They had two main characteristics: they were diverse and they
were in a sort of in-between situation. Diversity is a fundamental trait of
the food industries, but in 1900 it was further accentuated by a series of
technical and economic changes: a change of energy sources (steam diffu-
sion, then electricity) with its repercussions on the location of businesses;
the switch from small-scale industry to large-scale industry; the switch
from small batch processing to mass production; and, more generally
speaking, the switch from the old world to the new world, to quote Gour-
vish and Wilson in relation to brewers: “[they] straddled the new world of
large-scale manufacture and the old, rooted in agriculture—spheres which
drifted so relentlessly apart in Victorian Britain.”9
These changes turned the early decades of the twentieth century into
decades of transition. However, the transition from one world to another is
only a general trend. It does not apply to all industries (nor to all places), or
at least not in the same way. Some remained at the small batch-processing
stage. The bakery, in keeping with its etymology (bread is baked in batches),
remained a small-scale business. There were almost as many self-employed
as employed. The average number of people per bakery in France, for ex-
ample, was three, slightly fewer than in Great Britain or the United States.
The production process remained discontinuous and industrial methods
struggled to develop.10 On the contrary, American slaughterhouses and, to
a lesser extent, sugar refineries, biscuit factories, breweries, and chocolate
32 FOOD PRODUCTION: INDUSTRIAL PROCESSING BEGINS TO GAIN GROUND

factories had, well before the turn of the century, a foot in the new world.
They were mechanized, with at least some degree of mass production. In
short, not all the food industries took the same path from batch production
to mass production and when they did, they went at their own pace.
Let us consider some other aspects of industrialization: the number of
employees, the size of the production installations, and their concentration.
Once again, the difference between industries is striking. The case of dairy
products is a good example. Everywhere, farmhouse butter predominated
(85% of production in 1890 and nearly two-thirds in 1909 in the United
States). Industrial butter was produced by enterprises that, in 93 percent of
cases, had fewer than five employees.11 In contrast, cheese production ap-
peared to be industrialized. The number of North American cheese facto-
ries jumped from 1,313 in 1870 to 4,552 in 1890, when they accounted for
93 percent of production. But in actual fact, it was no more than a cottage
industry based on a network of very small enterprises working for local
markets. It was not until much later, with the manufacture of processed
cheese in the United States and brand-name cheese in Europe that cheese
making really began to take on an industrial scale.
Let us take a second example of industries belonging to the same fam-
ily, namely confectionery and chocolate making. Confectionery was domi-
nated by small establishments (an average of 9 employees in the United
States in 1900, 7 in France in 1901). The situation was quite the opposite
in chocolate making (95 employees per factory in the United States in 1905,
46 in France in 1906) where, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter,
certain factories employed more than a hundred workers and even many
more in the case of Menier, for example, which had a headcount of nearly
1,300. Considerable economic disparity could therefore be observed, ac-
companied by the technical diversity mentioned earlier. This technical and
economic diverseness was accentuated by a number of so-called national
traits. Great Britain offers two contrasting illustrations: breweries and flour
mills. The first was ahead of its European counterparts. It was soon indus-
trialized by the middle of the nineteenth century but that did not prevent
large-scale plants from co-existing with a network of very small breweries.
The second, on the contrary, lagged behind.12 It was not until much later
that the roller mills that had replaced millstones in most countries were
finally adopted in Great Britain.
PIERRE SAUNIER 33

Changes in production processes were one of the reasons behind the dis-
parity of the food industries at the time. Old and new processes cohabited,
but for varying periods of time depending on the industry, and affected
industrialization in different ways. We will limit our discussion to two
examples: butter factories and breweries. The manufacture of butter was
mechanized at the turn of the century. New technical processes appeared
(particularly the centrifuge at the end of the nineteenth century) without
leading to the development of a corresponding industry. Technical modern-
ization was not accompanied by economic modernization. The industrial
butter factory developed slowly because industrial butter met with reti-
cence from consumers. Its color, consistency, and taste were different from
those of the farmhouse butter it was intended to replace.13 In this case, as
in many others, the industrial variant of a traditional product took time to
catch on, particularly since it mainly targeted overtly industrial alternatives
such as margarine, whose promoters tried to facilitate diffusion by giving
it a name similar to that of the traditional product it was competing with,
namely butterine.
The breweries followed a different path. This time, two processes co-
existed: the old process (top fermentation) and the new process (bottom fer-
mentation), which took off in the middle of the nineteenth century (except
in Great Britain and Belgium) because it produced a stable, homogeneous,
storable, easily transported beer that could be consumed cold. But it was
to take a very long time for the new process to eliminate the old process.
In the 1900s, most large breweries used bottom (slow rather than the vio-
lent top) fermentation, but in terms of the number of plants, top fermenta-
tion still predominated up until the 1930s in France. The cohabitation of
two processes explains the large number of breweries, their considerable
geographical dispersion (beer produced by top fermentation does not travel
well), and their high statistical dispersion. The coexistence of plants of dif-
ferent sizes in a given industry is the rule, and even a law, called Gibrat’s
law or rule of proportionate growth: even in branches dominated by a few
large plants, numerous small factories subsist, working as subcontractors
or for market niches. But while the statistical law remains the same, its pa-
rameters change. The breweries of 1900 and 1930 were not only far more
numerous than those of the end of the twentieth century (in France, for
example, there were 2,706 in 1901, 1,489 in 1931, and 48 in 1998), but
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