Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  By swapping the pastoralist fantasy for that of the noble savage, Rousseau’s Discourse was tantamount to a critique of civilisation itself. Like Seneca before him, Rousseau believed that the life of primitive man in the ‘vast forests’ must once have been happy, but Seneca, good Roman that he was, could hardly have approved of Rousseau’s conclusion that it ‘was iron and corn which first civilised men, and ruined humanity’. For Rousseau, agriculture was as much to blame for man’s misfortune as cities were. He warmed to his theme with a series of romantic novels: thinly disguised polemical tracts whose innocent heroes and heroines led lives of exemplary purity in the mountains, living on fruit, milk and honey.57 Unsurprisingly, these forerunners of Heidi didn’t go down too well with some of Rousseau’s Parisian contemporaries, Voltaire among them, who greeted the author’s announcement that he was heading for the mountains in order to practise what he preached with howls of derision. But it was Rousseau’s view that would prove the more enduring. By disparaging cultivated landscape in favour of wilderness, he paved the way for Romanticism, creating a schism in the urban view of nature that helped to shape the modern world.

  The Invisible Land

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

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

  The railroads brought thousands of acres of previously inaccessible farmland into the food chain for the first time, delivering efficiencies of which Arthur Young could only have dreamt. The American prairies weren’t worked by serfs enslaved by a noble lord or obliged to feed their local populace. They were commercial enterprises whose temples were the towering elevators that transferred their grain into ships bound for distant markets. Limitless quantities of cheap grain began to arrive in Europe in the 1870s, sparking an agricultural depression from which the continent would never fully recover. Rural Britain was hit particularly hard: with more than half the British population living in cities, food shortages were acute, and feeding the urban poor was a more urgent government priority than protecting local farmers. While most other European countries imposed import tariffs on American grain (Bismarck tripled import duties in Germany in order to protect its powerful land-owning classes), Britain went the other way. Having abandoned protectionism with the repeal of its Corn Laws in 1846, it once again felt the pain of agricultural reform as a short sharp shock, rather than dragging out the inevitable.

  Grain wasn’t the only cheap food coming out of America. The expense and difficulty of feeding cattle had always meant that meat was a luxury food, but with a surplus of feed available, it now became possible to raise animals in artificial feed lots, preserving their carcasses after slaughter by ‘packing’ them with grain and salt. By the early nineteenth century, Cincinnati was the centre of the new ‘meat-packing’ industry, processing thousands of hogs and dispatching them down the Ohio River to the East Coast. The hogs were ‘disassembled’ in purpose-built slaughterhouses, where they were slaughtered, butchered, cured and canned, all along a single conveyored production line. There was no room for sentimentality in such a process: the animals were treated brutally, shackled to a wheel by their hind legs and dragged backwards before being hoisted up in the air to have their throats cut without prior stunning. Cruel though it was, the automated disassembly line was certainly efficient: by 1848, Cincinnati (or ‘Porkopolis’, as it became known) was the undisputed meat-packing capital of the world, processing half a million hogs a year. Its position seemed assured – until the railroads came along and nullified its strategic advantage at a stroke. Cincinnati was forced to cede its mantle to Chicago, whose Union Stockyards took meat-packing to a whole new level. Covering more than a square mile and employing some 75,000 people, they were a city within a city, with their own water and electricity supply, bank, hotel and even newspaper, the Drovers’ Journal. According to the Chicago Tribune, the Stockyards were the ‘eighth wonder of the world’ (which perhaps should have been the ninth, since the Erie Canal had already been built). In any case, they were certainly prodigious. By 1872, they were processing three million cattle, hogs and sheep annually, rising to 17 million by 1905.

  A state-of-the-art Chicago packing house, early twentieth century.

  Grain was the food that made the ancient city, but meat made the industrial one. Factory workers needed higher-octane fuel to get them through the day, and meat was what they demanded for their dinner. British meat consumption increased threefold in the 20 years after 1870, with most of the increase accounted for by imported meat. Meat-packing made cheap meat widely available for the first time, so setting the scene for modern urban consumption, and the ruthless efficiencies and economies of scale necessary to satisfy it. America wasn’t the only nation getting into factory food production either. Two European nations, Denmark and the Netherlands, saw an additional opportunity presented by cheap American grain. Both countries began to build factory farms in which pigs and chickens could be reared intensively on imported feed, exporting the results to the British in the form of bacon and eggs, as both still do today.

  For the first time, cities had a cheap, reliable source of food. Prices plummeted, revolutionising living standards for the urban poor. So, did city-dwellers burst with gratitude, composing grateful sonnets to the glorious meat-packers of the New World? Not a bit of it. Perhaps understandably, people preferred to marvel at the engineering feats of the age, rather than contemplate the industrialised rendition of pork fat, even though the latter was having just as great an impact on their standard of living. Industrialisation might have brought people cheap food, but by denaturing farming, it also created an irreparable gulf between the feeders and the fed. That left just one kind of ‘nature’ capable of capturing the urban imagination: wilderness. Rousseau had been ahead of his time.58

  Back to the Woods

  By the mid nineteenth century, the cities that were once extolled as centres of beauty had descended into smog-ridden hell-pits. While writers such as Dickens, Hugo and Zola chronicled the degradations of industrial urbanity, others took
a leaf out of Rousseau’s book, wandering off to rediscover the wild. Prominent among them was the American proto-environmentalist Henry David Thoreau, who spent two years living in a rustic cabin in the Massachusetts woods, recording his experiences in Walden, or Life in the Woods, published in 1854. The book’s central theme was a plea for men to abandon the complexities of urban existence and embrace a simpler life closer to nature. Thoreau tried to lead by example, detailing his uneventful days spent cultivating his bean patch, listening to birds, and bathing in the eponymous Walden Pond, while ruminating on the shortcomings of the civilised society he had left behind: ‘Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.’59

  Although Thoreau made much of his self-imposed exile, in reality his hut was only a mile and a half from his native town of Concord, where he would repair occasionally for a bit of human company, or to pick up supplies. Not that such details made any difference to his readers. To them, Thoreau was the true prophet of living wild, his example a clarion call to lead a purer, truer life. Walden might not have been the instant success Thoreau had hoped for, but after his death, its popularity grew steadily, as its message, ‘in wilderness is the preservation of the world’, struck the perfect chord with the nascent environmental movement.

  Thoreau may have heard the call of the wild, but it was the Scottish-born geologist John Muir who became its most effective mouthpiece. Muir’s credentials as a woodsman were rather more impressive than were Thoreau’s: his induction in the ‘university of the wilderness’ consisted of a 1,000-mile walk from Indiana to Florida, and he spent most of his life in the wild, including what became a revelatory sojourn in the Yosemite Valley, Sierra Nevada. On his first visit there in 1868, Muir was struck by the natural beauty of what he called ‘the grandest of all special temples of Nature’, and he immediately accepted a series of casual jobs that would allow him to remain there. Over the next five years, he lived rough in the mountains, earning his keep as a shepherd, sawmill operator and ferryman, all the while studying the craggy rocks that he was increasingly coming to resemble. Over time, he became convinced that Yosemite should be protected from man’s influence, and in 1889 he wrote two articles in Century magazine, advocating that it should be made into a national park, from which all human activity was excluded. (The sheep he had gladly tended 20 years earlier were now described as ‘hooved locusts’.) Muir attracted some powerful friends to his cause, including President Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt, whose conversion came on a 1903 camping trip with Muir during which the president had to be dug out of a snowdrift. Muir’s efforts were rewarded in 1905, when Yosemite was granted the status of a national park.

  Yosemite Valley – nature reconfigured as temple.

  The idea that ‘proper’ wilderness should be untouched by human hand was a curious legacy of Thoreau and Muir, since both men recognised the role of man in creating the landscapes they so admired. Muir’s early writings described how the Ahwahneechee Indians had helped to shape Yosemite, and he wondered, not without a hint of jealousy, at their deep knowledge of their natural habitat: ‘Like the Indians, we ought to know how to get the starch out of fern and saxifrage stalks, lily bulbs, pine bark etc. Our education has been sadly neglected for many generations.’ Muir also noted approvingly how the Indians lived alongside nature – ‘Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels’ – but as he got older, he could condone less and less the thought of any human intervention in his precious wilderness. As the historian Simon Schama remarked, the Indians’ memory at Yosemite was ‘carefully and forcibly edited out of the idyll’.60

  Like Thoreau before him, Muir created a reverence for wilderness that became the equivalent of a religion. ‘Everybody needs beauty as well as bread,’ he wrote in The Yosemite in 1912, ‘places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.’ Absolutely. But the question of where that bread was going to come from was something about which Muir had a lot less to say.

  The Artificial Soil

  The nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  By the mid nineteenth century, the age-old struggle to supply cities with food seemed to have been solved. The question was no longer whether cities could be fed, but how much it would cost to feed them. As far as urban consumers were concerned, all the ancient fears about food – the fertility of the soil, the sun and the rain, the strength of the harvest – translated into one concern: the size of their weekly shopping bill. Cut off from the land as never before, city-dwellers began to disassociate food from the very idea of nature.

  Which was precisely what farmers were trying to do. The whole point of farming had always been to produce food as cheaply and reliably as possible; a pursuit in which the vagaries of nature were the chief enemy. Farmers had always sought ways to tame their old adversary; now it seemed they had finally found some. In 1836, the German chemist Justus von Liebig had investigated the chief nutrients necessary to plant life, concluding they were carbon dioxide, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Liebig went on to manufacture the world’s first mineral fertiliser, earning himself the soubriquet ‘father of fertiliser’ (although he could equally well have been called ‘father of the stock cube’, since he also pioneered the meat extraction process and co-founded the OXO company).

  At first, results were encouraging. With the help of manmade chemicals, farmers found that yields were steadily rising, and it looked as though hunger would soon be consigned to history. But after a few years, yields began to fall again, and farmers found they were having to use ever more potent cocktails just to maintain their crops.61 It seemed that artificial fertilisers were no substitute for the natural balance of the soil provided by mixed vegetation – used over long periods, they actually stunted its fertility. Towards the end of his life, Liebig became disillusioned with his efforts. ‘I have sinned against the Creator,’ he wrote, ‘and justly I have been punished. I wanted to improve his work because, in my blindness, I believed that a link in the astonishing chain of laws that govern and constantly renew life on the surface of the earth had been forgotten.’62 Liebig may have thought better of interfering with nature, but by then the genie was out of the bottle. Towering American silos demanded constant supplies of grain, not a mixed diet of wheat, turnips, barley and clover. Chemical fertiliser had already become a necessary prop to commercial farming.

  Worldwide food shortages during the First World War meant there were huge profits to be made from grain, and even marginal farmland in America was ploughed up in order to increase production. American farmers grew rich, but slowly, surely, the land was being exhausted. Stripped of its natural vegetation and continuously exploited year after year, the topsoil was being sucked dry of humus and losing its capacity to retain moisture. Then, during the 1930s, the worst possible thing happened: the rains failed. Eight years of drought turned the Great Plains into a desert. Without any plant fibres to hold it down, the topsoil simply blew away in a series of devastating dust storms known as ‘black blizzards’. Four hundred thousand farmers – the ‘Okies’ of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath – lost everything, and were forced to migrate west in search of work.

  The Dust Bowl was a massive body blow to the brave new world of commercial farming. Franklin D. Roosevelt responded by setting up the US Soil Conservation Service in 1935, the first such body in the world. The disaster had repercussions across the Atlantic too. It inspired Lady Eve Balfour, one of the first women to graduate from agricultural college, to set up the first comparative study of organic and chemical-based farming methods on her farm at Haughley, Suffolk, in 1939. She ran two mixed farms side by side, one as a closed organic system, and the other using chemical inputs. The experiment confirmed what Justus von Liebig had suspected a century earlier. Balfour found that while the organic farm developed a robust cycle in which soil nutrients
peaked naturally during the growing season, the fertilised farm developed a dependency on its chemical ‘fix’, in what she described as ‘a manner suggestive of drug addiction’.63 Not only did the organic farm maintain nutrient levels as high as those of the fertilised one, but, according to Balfour, the cows that grazed it were ‘noticeably more contented’ than their chemically dosed-up counterparts, producing 15 per cent more milk. Balfour’s account of her findings, published as The Living Soil in 1943, remains a classic text of the organic movement, and she went on to co-found the Soil Association three years after its publication.

  Silent Spring

  Soil fertility is not the only perennial source of vexation to farmers. Another is pests. For millennia, farmers have tried everything to control them. The Chinese harnessed ant power in the battle against aphids; the Romans used sulphur to beat the bestiolae. Such methods worked to a degree, but eventually the bugs always seemed to get the upper hand. Until, that is, the discovery just before the Second World War of a chemical capable of delivering insect Armageddon: dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT. The chemical was first manufactured as early as 1873, but its spectacular pesticidal qualities were only discovered in 1939 when the Swiss scientist Paul Hermann Muller had the idea of using it to control insect-borne diseases such as malaria; a piece of work that earned him the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. Throughout the war, DDT was used by Allied troops to kill mosquitoes and nits. It was only later that people would think of using it on crops.