Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  Temples might have been capable of controlling food distribution in the city-states of the ancient Near East, but supplying a city the size of Rome was an entirely different matter. Not only was the population vast, but the average Roman lived in hellish conditions, in cramped insulae (tenements) six or seven storeys high, separated by narrow alleyways just a few feet across and with no drainage or running water.28 Most were as cut off from the countryside as we are in modern cities, and were utterly dependent on the state to feed them. From early Republican times, the Senate provided citizens with a subsidised monthly grain ration, the annona, both to keep them fed and to keep them quiet: the populace lived close to boiling point, and nothing got it bubbling faster than a threat to the food supply.

  Although not all Romans received the annona (it was limited to a privileged group of free adult males, the plebs frumentia), the cost of maintaining it was considerable. When the tribune Clodius had the idea in 58 BC of securing his popularity by making the rations free, Cicero reckoned it cost Rome a fifth of all its revenue.29 Successive emperors tried to reduce the numbers eligible, but were met with immediate rioting, and were usually forced to back down. Julius Caesar’s attempt to curb the annona caused bloody civil unrest that lasted until his own assassination in 44 BC.30 The lesson wasn’t lost on Augustus. Political animal that he was, he realised soon after taking office that, however irksome the task, feeding 320,000 citizens would prove a safer bet than trying to fiddle the numbers. It was one of his smartest moves according to Tacitus: the historian later wrote that Augustus had ‘won over the people with bread’.31

  Nobody close to the elite in Rome could be in any doubt that food and political power were closely linked, or that failing to feed the people was the surest path to political ruin. Seventy years after Clodius’ gift to the plebs, Tiberius acknowledged his need to uphold the pledge: ‘This duty, senators, devolves upon the emperor; if it is neglected, the utter ruin of the state will follow.’32 But even the might of Rome could not control the food supply fully. A particularly bad spate of piracy in the 70s BC sent grain prices rocketing, causing unrest in the city during which an angry mob attacked some consuls in the Forum. Realising the urgent need for action, the Senate nevertheless rejected an offer by the prominent general Pompey to clear the sea of pirates on the grounds that his success would give him unrivalled political power. They were soon proved right. When the people got wind of Pompey’s offer, they stormed the Senate, demanding a reversal of the decision and forcing the senators to cave in. Within weeks, Pompey had cleared the sea of pirates, causing an immediate fall in grain prices and securing him the unassailable power the senators had known it would.33

  The Baltic Bonanza

  As urban civilisation spread further north in Europe, so did its sources of supply. By medieval times, the Baltic was the new Mediterranean, and in place of the military smash-and-grab raids that characterised food supplies in the ancient world came a new, highly lucrative commercial trade.

  Before the days of canning and freezing, salted herring was the unloved mainstay of many a city-dweller’s diet, particularly since the Church forbade the eating of meat on Fridays and holy days, which could amount to over 100 days a year. The demand for salted fish was such that the discovery in the Baltic of an almost unlimited supply of herring led to the formation of one of the most powerful trading cartels in history, the Hanseatic League. A treaty with Denmark had given the German city of Lübeck rights to the spawning grounds off the Swedish Scania coast, and together with nearby Hamburg and its local salt mines, the city saw a way of turning the fish into cash. In 1241 the two cities formed a trading partnership that by the fourteenth century was exporting 300,000 barrels of salted fish all over Europe, with such impressive profits that other cities in the region such as Bruges, Riga and Danzig (Gdansk) were keen to get in on the act. The resulting Hanseatic League (from the Old High German Hansa, ‘group’) enjoyed a monopoly on Baltic trade until well into the fifteenth century, when a series of blows – not least the sudden migration of herring to the North Sea – began to weaken its grasp. The League’s collapse signalled the start of Dutch influence on trade in the region that can still be felt today – one based not just on herring, but on the most vital urban food of them all: grain.

  Long before the American Midwest was inhabited by farmers, the plains of Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and Russia fed European cities, which, by medieval times, were getting very hungry indeed. Despite an extensive fertile agricultural belt, fourteenth-century Venice had a navy of more than 3,000 ships, and kept 44 dockside warehouses stocked with Baltic and Black Sea grain; reserves that saved it when it was besieged by the Genoese in 1372. Sixteenth-century Constantinople was no one-horse town either: capital of the rapidly expanding Ottoman Empire, it had an estimated 700,000 mouths to feed, and needed, in the words of the historian Fernand Braudel, ‘every available flock of sheep from the Balkans to support it; rice, beans and corn from Egypt; corn and wood from the Black Sea; and oxen, camels and horses from Asia Minor’.34

  Although medieval and early modern cities bought their grain with gold rather than by military conquest, the sea was still the only means of carrying it very far. Just as the Nile had once carried grain through Egypt to Alexandria, the Vistula now conveyed it from the Polish interior to Danzig on the Baltic Sea, whence it could be shipped all over Europe. The journey, which often took many months, culminated in the spring, when the snows melted and hundreds of flat-bottomed craft floated downriver on the resulting floods. Once they reached Danzig, the rafts were broken up and sold for firewood, while their owners, having sold their corn to shipping merchants, faced a weary trudge back home. This annual migration, known as the frujor, was a major cultural event in Poland, widely celebrated in poetry and prose. As the historian Norman Davies has pointed out, it was the only time, other than in times of war, that many Poles came into contact with the wider world; the one thing that connected them with the ‘strange foreign world of ships and the sea’.35

  That division would prove decisive, not just to Poland’s fortunes, but to the nation best placed to benefit from it – the Dutch. Like the ancient Athenians before them, lack of agricultural land had forced the Dutch to start importing grain earlier than most, so that by the sixteenth century when others started to catch up, they already had a sizeable merchant fleet with a strong presence in Danzig. By 1650 they had virtual control of the Polish grain trade, not least because of a bizarre law of 1496 forbidding Polish merchants to travel overseas. Dozens of Dutch merchants had permanent bases in Danzig, and the ‘Amsterdam Fleet’, consisting of around 2,000 ships, carried grain to France, England, Portugal and even as far as Venice. The Dutch merchants’ power was reflected in the commonest type of contract between them and their Polish suppliers: the Lieferantzkauf, which would seem depressingly familiar to many modern producers. The quantity, price and date of delivery were all set a year in advance, and made entirely at the growers’ risk and expense.

  There has always been plenty of money to be made from feeding cities. The trick, as the Dutch knew very well, is to make sure you have control of the supply. Despite branching further afield with the Dutch East India Company in 1602, Baltic grain remained the backbone of Netherlanders’ ‘Golden Age’, the business they always referred to as the ‘Mother Trade’.

  Paris – Bread and Violence

  One would have trouble imagining that there are sources capable of meeting the needs of this vast pit.

  N.T.L. Des Essarts36

  No matter how much grain came out of the Baltic, it was no good to cities that could not get their hands on it. By 1750, Paris was one of the largest cities in Europe, with around 650,000 mouths to feed. Dubbed ‘New Rome’ because of its size, the city (unlike Constantinople, the actual ‘New Rome’) had to rely on its local hinterland to feed it. Although it sits on a river, Paris is 170 miles from the sea – too far to make the large-scale importing of foreign grain practicable. The result, as the historian Ste
phen Kaplan described in Provisioning Paris, was that the Parisian grain trade both dominated and stifled the rural economy of northern France.37 A series of ‘provisioning crowns’ were declared around the capital; the first consisting of a zone 20 miles deep in which only grain for the city could be grown. With a good harvest, this ‘first crown’ could just about cope, but in bad years (which could come as often as once in every three) the capital asserted its right, by force if necessary, to acquire its grain from further afield. The ‘second crown’, including Picardy and Champagne, then came into play; and if that wasn’t enough, the third, or ‘crisis’, crown was invoked, essentially consisting of most of the rest of France, from its Atlantic to its Mediterranean coasts.

  The capital’s habit of putting ‘a knife to the throat of the people’, as one local put it, didn’t go down too well in the countryside.38 When the harvests failed, rural folk needed their grain just as much as city-dwellers did, but since they posed rather less of a threat than their urban counterparts, they generally didn’t get to keep it. Citizens of Paris were as dependent on the authorities to feed them as those of Rome had been, and they were equally bellicose – as well as fussy. They insisted on eating a pure white loaf known as the bis-blanc; a bread so fine that, as one writer observed in 1709, ‘the small artisan eats a more beautiful loaf than the best bourgeois of the provinces’.39

  The Parisian authorities recognised, just as those of Rome had done, that feeding the people was a political necessity. In the words of the minister Jacques Necker, it was ‘the most essential object that must occupy the administration’.40 But without easy access to foreign grain, the authorities’ options were limited, and they responded by throwing as much legislation at the problem as they could. The administration was dominated – one might say crippled – by its grain police, an unwieldy hierarchy of hundreds of officials, headed by no less a figure than the king himself, the ‘baker of last resort’. The police oversaw every aspect of the grain trade, sending spies out into the countryside to gather information on current market conditions, the state of the crops, weather, local gossip and so on, and receiving reports back at weekly meetings. In an attempt to control the trade as fully as possible, every part of it was supposed to be transparent. All transactions were meant to take place in the open so that they could be monitored, and only licensed grain merchants were allowed to function within 20 miles of the city. The hoarding of grain was forbidden, and millers, bakers and merchants were all prevented from engaging in one another’s business.

  Paris’s main grain port in the seventeenth century. Merchants and suppliers were obliged to trade on muddy quays or on barges tied up alongside.

  That was the theory, anyway. In practice, a huge amount of trade went on illegally, via an extensive black market that included a network of illegal ‘corn exchanges’ held in taverns, farms and even out on the open road. Institutions licensed to hold stocks of grain for their own use, such as convents and hospitals, acted as illegal granaries, allowing dealers to store grain there in exchange for a cut of the profits. Meanwhile merchants, millers and bakers engaged in a struggle to wrest control of the supply: first millers began to deal in grain, accumulating vast wealth in the process; then bakers began milling their own flour, taking away the millers’ business. The grain police were well aware of these illegal practices, but they were powerless to stop them. As the officers themselves recognised, the black market – one might call it the free market – had an essential role to play in feeding the city. The police were in an invidious position, forced to turn a blind eye to the very practices they were supposed to prevent. The result was the worst of all possible worlds: a policy of complete control over a trade that was inherently uncontrollable.

  Even the most casual of historians knows that bread played some part in the French Revolution. Rather than seeing food shortages as a privation to be mutually endured, the people saw them as a failure of the authorities – and ultimately of the king himself. Signs of things to come were already evident in 1665, when Louis XIV tried to switch army pension rations from wheat to rye, only to be met with the instant threat of mutiny. Again, when Louis XV tried to avert famine by importing grain from Barbary in 1725, he was accused of ‘forcing the people to eat rotten wheat’, a notion that was widespread during the Revolution.41 The inevitable crisis came with a string of poor harvests during the 1780s, culminating in two disastrous ones in 1788 and 1789. As the population turned to riot, the ‘baker of last resort’ tried to flee Paris, but was apprehended and brought back to the city. Louis XVI had in fact stopped to change horses, but was popularly portrayed as having paused to eat a meal: the ultimate gesture of a monarch too greedy to save his own skin, let alone those of his people.42

  London – Feeding the Wen

  Of all cities, none deserved the honorary title ‘New Rome’ more than London. Just 20 years after its founding in AD 43, Londinium was described by Tacitus as a ‘celebrated centre of commerce’, and much of that was based on the old Roman obsession with foreign food.43 Olive oil, wine, pine nuts, raisins, pepper, ginger and cinnamon – not forgetting copious quantities of the all-important liquamen – were all shipped in from the Mediterranean to make life bearable for expat Romans shivering in the frozen north.44

  Blessed by its position on the tidal, navigable Thames, London always had plenty of options when it came to feeding itself. The river not only gave the city easy access to foreign foods, it also provided the channels by which produce from the rich farmland of south-east England could reach the city. The supply of grain to the capital already dominated the local economy by the thirteenth century, with market towns such as Ware on the River Lea, Henley-on-Thames, and Faversham, Maidstone and Rochester on the north Kent coast already well established by 1200. Henley grew so rich supplying Midlands grain to London that many of the capital’s cornmongers established granaries as well as second homes there.45 Yet despite its abundance of local supplies, London never lost the habit of importing food from abroad. Records from the tenth century onwards show the medieval city regularly supplementing its grain supplies from the Baltic.

  With so much food at its disposal, London always had a uniquely hands-off approach to feeding itself. English monarchs never took responsibility for feeding their citizens; on the contrary, royal interference in London trade was seen as more of a hindrance than a help. London merchants traded independently of Westminster, and dues from the city’s two main river ports, Billingsgate and Queenhithe, went to City and Crown respectively, making the question of which did the better trade a matter of great concern to the permanently cash-strapped monarchy. Being upstream of London Bridge, Queenhithe was the less well placed of the two, a disadvantage that successive monarchs tried to overcome by issuing edicts such as that of Edward IV in 1463, cited by John Stow:

  … it was ordained, that all manner of vessels, ships, or boats, great or small, resorting to the city with victual, should be sold by retail, and that if there came but one vessel at a time, were it salt, wheat, rye, or other corn from beyond the seas, or other grains, garlic, onions, herrings, sprats, eels, whiting, place, cod, mackerel &c, then that one vessel should come to Queene Hithe, and there to make sale: but if two vessels came, the one should come to Queene Hithe, the other to Billingsgate: if three, two of them should come to Queene Hithe, the third to Billingsgate &c. always the more to Queene Hithe.46

  Whichever port it came to, there was certainly no shortage of food arriving in London, which perhaps explains why the English were so slow when it came to exploring global trade. It was only when Christopher Columbus accidentally bumped into America while attempting to find a sea passage to Asia in 1492 that the English finally woke up and – as it were – smelt the coffee.47 It didn’t take them long to realise their mistake: just three years later, Henry VII engaged the Venetian explorers John Cabot and son, giving them ‘full and free authority’ to ‘conquer, occupy and possess whatsoever such towns, castles, cities and islands’ they could find anywhe
re in world.48 It was to be the start of four centuries of exploration and trade – or exploitation and piracy – that would turn England from a relative backwater into a global superpower.

  The English might have entered the global trade race in search of gold, but what they found was a substance that would turn out to be even more valuable – sugar. When Admiral William Penn seized Jamaica on behalf of the Crown in 1655, he could hardly have imagined the wealth that would soon pour out of the new colony. Sugar was to prove a food so irresistible that within the space of a century it would transform not just Britain’s economic fortunes, but the very fabric of its society. During the seventeenth century, demand for it grew so rapidly that plantations were soon established all over the Caribbean, run like factories on African slave labour, the shameful ‘false commodity’ on which so much colonial wealth was based.49 To begin with, England exported half its sugar to the rest of Europe, but by 1750, home consumption had outstripped supply to such an extent that all exports had virtually ceased. Yet, as the governor of the East India Company Sir Josiah Child pointed out, England didn’t need to export its sugar – it could manage very nicely just trading with its own foreign colonies.50

  Thanks largely to trade in the new ‘white gold’, eighteenth-century London was a boom town. A tenth of the population was living in the capital, a quarter of them engaged in port trades, dealing with goods flowing in from every part of the world. Walking through the burgeoning dockyards, Samuel Johnson marvelled at their contents:

  He that contemplates the extent of this wonderful city, finds it difficult to conceive, by what method plenty is maintained in our markets, and how the inhabitants are regularly supplied with the necessities of life; but when he examines the shops and warehouses, sees the immense stores of every kind of merchandise piled up for sale … he will be inclined to conclude that such quantities cannot easily be exhausted …51