Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  London was becoming rich; and, as Daniel Defoe noted, the city was getting increasingly frivolous with it. ‘It will hardly be believed in ages to come,’ he wrote, ‘that a pastry cook’s shop, which twenty pounds would effectively furnish at one time with all needful things for sale, yet that fitting up one of these shops should cost upwards of £300, Anno Domini 1710: let the year be recorded!’52 Defoe might have been outraged at his contemporaries’ extravagances, but he could also see their benefits to the nation. Londoners might have been high on sugar, but they also needed their bread and butter, which, as Defoe noted in his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain in 1720, was good for everyone:

  It is not the kingdom which makes London rich, but London makes the rest of the kingdom rich. The country corresponds with London, but London corresponds with the world. The country supplies London with corn and cattle; and if there were not such a metropolis, what would become of the farmers? … The country send up their corn, their malt, their cattle, their fowls, their coals, their fish, all to London, and London sends back spice, sugar, wine, drugs, cotton, linen, tobacco, and all foreign necessaries to the country … London consumes all, circulates all, exports all, and at last pays for all; and this is trade.53

  The craving for sugar was turning London – and Britain – into the world’s first consumer society. Mixed with the bitter trio of coffee, tea and cocoa, it was creating an intoxicating desire; a blurring of the boundaries between luxury and need. As one of the first to witness the phenomenon, Defoe could see that the world about him was changing, yet it would take another 50 years before the events he described were acknowledged as a whole new economic order; the start of a hunger that could never be satisfied.

  The Case for Free Trade

  By the early eighteenth century, the contrasting fortunes of Paris and London were stark. With a population of 675,000, London had just surpassed Paris as the largest city in Europe; yet while the French capital became increasingly obsessed with its food supply, Londoners were so busy making money that the authorities barely gave a second thought to how their citizens were to be fed.

  One man for whom the contrast did not go unnoticed was Adam Smith, Scottish son of a customs officer, professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University, and author of one of the most influential economic tracts ever written, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. In this famous work, Smith set out many of the principles of modern capitalism; in particular the idea that a market based on free trade is the best way to generate wealth. The fact that his idea seems so obvious today is testimony to its power, but back in Smith’s day it was far from obvious. Smith argued that although agriculture formed the basis of a nation’s wealth, cities played a vital role in driving it forward:

  The great commerce of every civilised society, is that carried on between the inhabitants of the town and those of the country … The country supplies the town with the means of subsistence, and the materials of manufacture. The town repays this by sending back a part of the manufactured produce to the inhabitants of the country. The town, in which there neither is nor can be any reproduction of substances, may very properly be said to gain its whole wealth and subsistence from the country. We must not, however upon this account, imagine that the gain of the town is the loss of the country. The gains of both are mutual and reciprocal …54

  Together city and country created a mutually beneficial market – one that required no regulation, since it operated entirely through the competing self-interest of many individuals. The ‘hidden hand’ of commerce therefore regulated itself.

  Having established the concept of free trade, Smith went on to consider how to maximise its benefits, concluding that the best way was to expand the market by investing in transport:

  Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of a town. They are upon that account the greatest of all improvements … They are advantageous to the town, by breaking down the monopoly of the country in its neighbourhood.55

  No farmer himself, Smith was able to view the relationship between city and country with a dispassionate eye. However, he did acknowledge the unpleasant truth that William Cobbett would spend his life railing against: namely that the free operation of capitalism would create inevitable human casualties:

  The inhabitants of a city, it is true, must always ultimately derive their subsistence, and the whole materials and means of their industry, from the country. But those of a city, situated near either the sea-coast or the banks of a navigable river, are not necessarily confined to derive them from the country in their neighbourhood. They have a much wider range, and they may draw them from the most remote corners of the world … A city might in this manner grow to great wealth and splendour, while not only the country in its neighbourhood, but all those to which it traded were in poverty and wretchedness.56

  A mighty city on a navigable river: there could be no better description of eighteenth-century London. Although Smith did not mention it by name, London demonstrated the power of what he called ‘perfect competition’: the forces of supply and demand left to their own devices. Smith’s model predicted human wretchedness, but also economic gain – a formulation that would prove mightily enduring.

  ‘Nobody Does It’

  Eighty years after Wealth of Nations, the social chronicler George Dodd published what he called a ‘sketch’ of London, describing ‘the chief varieties, sources of supply, probable quantities, modes of arrival, process of manufacture, suspected adulteration, and machinery of distribution of the food for a community of two millions and a half’.57 The resulting tome, The Food of London, is an exhaustive record of everything to do with the Victorian capital’s food supply. You want to know how many tons of potatoes were sold at Covent Garden in 1853? Ask George Dodd: 72,000. The number of livestock imported into the capital in that same year? Two point two million. How many ships docked each day at the city’s ports? One hundred and twenty-one, of which all but 15 were British built, and 52 came from the colonies, bringing, among other things, an annual 86 million pounds of tea from India and China. Dodd’s researches were exhaustive, but when he tried to explain how all this produce was reaching London, he had to admit that he was stumped:

  It is useless to ask by what central authority, or under what controlling system, is such a city as London supplied with its daily food. ‘Nobody does it.’ No-one for instance, took care that a sufficient quantity of food should reach London in 1855, for the supply of two millions and a half of human beings during fifty-two weeks. And yet such a supply did reach London.58

  By George Dodd’s day, the ‘hidden hand’ that fed London was in full swing, and its methods had barely changed for centuries. Cattle were still herded down St John Street to the livestock market at Smithfield, geese still waddled in from Essex, tea clippers still sailed up the Thames. Yet things were on the verge of change. In 1835, the first railway line into London was completed (connecting London Bridge to Greenwich), and two years later, the rather more impressive London to Birmingham line was constructed, terminating at Euston Station. As Dodd recognised, the railways were set to revolutionise the way cities were fed. ‘It is scarcely possible,’ he wrote, ‘to exaggerate the value of quick and easy transmission of food to so enormous a city as London; the variety of the commodities, and the prices at which they can be sold, are so intimately dependent thereon, that it becomes almost a matter of life and death to the inhabitants.’59

  The Great Western Railway in 1840, carrying animals bound for the city.

  The most obvious and vital effect of the railways, at least to the hungry citizens of London, Liverpool and Manchester, was to allow food to be transported in bulk, so saving them from the fate that had engulfed Paris 50 years previously. What was less apparent was that in solving the greatest and oldest problem to afflict cities, the railways were creating ano
ther, ultimately greater problem. Up until the nineteenth century, food, and the natural geography that provided it, had determined where cities were built, and how large they could grow. But railways made it possible to build cities just about anywhere, and just about any size. They broke the one constraint that had always held back urban sprawl, and as geography was swept aside (along with von Thünen’s land-use theories), the urban carpet began to roll out in earnest. Cities sprouted suburbs, and suburbs merged to form conurbations, whose new inhabitants expected to be fed, and began to succumb to the sort of consumerism previously limited to maritime cities like London.

  There was plenty of money to be made from feeding the expanding cities, but the biggest profits were no longer in basic commodities such as grain, rather in added-value consumables such as milk, the first food to benefit not just from the railways’ carrying capacity, but from their speed. To Victorian Londoners, ‘railway milk’ was a revelation. No longer the product of unsanitary inner-city cowsheds, fresh milk from wholesome counties such as Devon, Dorset and Somerset could now be loaded on to trains at 6 a.m., arriving in London in time for breakfast. Although the system wasn’t perfect (in hot summers the milk often went off in transit, arriving not only sour, but churned solid by the motion of the train), railway milk was soon regarded as a highly desirable, and profitable, commodity. Together with American cereal and Danish bacon and eggs, it helped forge a new gastronomic institution, the Great British Breakfast, making those supplying it (among them a London grocer by the name of John Sainsbury) very rich indeed.

  Then, as now, Sainsbury’s emphasised the cleanliness and freshness of its food. The original shop in Drury Lane, opened in 1869, was immaculately scrubbed, and allowed customers to fill up their milk jugs from shining churns set on a marble counter. Despite coming from a lot further away, railway milk seemed – and probably was – fresher than milk bought straight from the cow in the dung-strewn cowshed a few doors along, and carried with it the welcome breath of the countryside. The milk was soon so popular that Sainsbury’s made it available to customers out of hours via a ‘mechanical cow’: a coin-operated pump that could be operated standing in the street. Sainsbury’s was inventing the modern grocery trade as it went along, and within a few years it began opening new branches in London, supplying them from a central depot with a ‘distribution fleet’ of horse-drawn vans. The vans might have run on hay, but modern retail logistics had effectively arrived.

  Other aspects of the London food supply were modernising too. Due to its rapid increase in population, London was struggling to feed itself for the first time in its history, and the government felt it had little choice but to extend the principle on which the city had always depended – the ‘hidden hand’ of commerce – as far as it could. By the century’s end, the nation was the world’s biggest importer not only of grain, but of processed and preserved foods too. While the urban poor dined on American wheat, middle-class Britons discovered the delights of tinned prunes, apricots and peaches from California and condensed milk from Switzerland. When the first shipload of frozen Australian meat arrived in London in 1880, still in perfect condition after many weeks at sea, the future pattern of British consumption was set.60

  The Milk Combine

  By the end of the nineteenth century, there was no shortage of food in London, but not all Londoners could afford to eat it. When Queen Victoria died in 1901, two thirds of the wealth in her realm was in the hands of just 2.5 per cent of her subjects, and as the social reformer Charles Booth revealed in his exhaustive 1903 survey Life and Labour of the People in London, many of the remaining 97.5 per cent lived in conditions as grim as those of ancient Rome (or worse: at least some Romans had received free bread).61 Booth’s survey, which ran to 17 volumes, made shocking reading. Many Londoners were living in slum conditions, 30 per cent of them under the breadline. Booth castigated his contemporaries for their lack of empathy towards their fellow men:

  The words ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ have not much meaning to us; do we ever think what they mean to the poor? I am constantly impressed with the different aspect of our life compared to that of those who live on daily wages, from day to day, from hand to mouth. Some of my friends will say ‘You mean the difference between the thrifty and the unthrifty’ but I do not think I do.62

  What was becoming clear was that leaving the food supply solely to the ‘hidden hand’ of commerce had its downside. While the nascent food industries were very good at producing and transporting food, feeding the urban poor wasn’t their goal. Left to their own devices, they naturally sought to maximise profits, which meant targeting those who could afford to pay. While poorer city-dwellers disappeared off the food-supply radar, food companies competed for the lucrative end of the market by doing what every urban authority in history had sought to prevent them from doing: they consolidated.

  By the start of the First World War, greater awareness of the nutritional benefits of milk had elevated it from a novelty drink into what the government called ‘a most necessary food’. Public access to ‘good, clean milk’ was now seen as a more urgent priority than bread; yet London’s milk was supplied by just five major wholesalers, two of which merged in 1915 to form United Dairies, gaining control of half the capital’s supply. While the House of Commons debated whether or not this constituted a dangerous monopoly, the new ‘milk combine’ answered the question itself, hoicking up its prices to such an extent that the government was forced to act. In 1918, it nationalised milk production under a new Milk Control Board; but the new regime was to prove short-lived. After a year spent wrangling with milk producers and retailers, the Board was unable to fix a fair price for milk, and it collapsed soon after. The ‘milk combine’ was then referred to the Standing Committee on Trusts, a forerunner of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, and about as toothless.63

  By the end of the war, the government’s failure to wrest control of London’s milk supply was clear. United Dairies’ share of the trade had increased to 80 per cent, and in 1920 it augmented its business with the acquisition of 470 retail outlets in the capital. As a memo from the Ministry of Food noted, ‘if the State stands aside, this growth will continue unchecked, placing the consumer at the mercy of a powerful monopoly controlling an essential food’.64 But it was already too late. From then on, it would be the food industry, and not government, that would be calling the shots.

  Biggest is Best

  Things have moved on somewhat since London was first menaced by its ‘milk combine’. As Adam Smith foresaw – but on a scale that he could not have imagined – better transport links between city and country have indeed opened up urban markets to greater competition. But the global scale of those markets changes everything. The world’s industrialised nations now effectively represent one enormous city; the rest of the world their rural hinterland. In the new global village, we all eat the same food, supplied by the same companies, available in the same shops, and the laws of competition envisioned by Smith no longer apply. Throughout the twentieth century, consolidation within the food industry went virtually unchecked. Today, just 30 companies handle 30 per cent of all global trade in food; a neatly symmetrical statistic that gives some idea of the unprecedented power that major conglomerates now have over the food supply.65 Similarly awesome statistics are the annual sales figures of the three biggest: Nestlé, Philip Morris Co. Inc. (Kraft) and ConAgra Foods sold food worth $61 billion, $34 billion and $14 billion respectively in 2005. Never in the field of human consumption has so much been fed to so many by so few.

  With food producers like that to deal with, no wonder retailers like Tesco are keen to expand: they need all the buying power they can get. Tesco might loom large on the British retail scene, but in global terms it is still a relative minnow. Its sales revenues of £38 billion in 2006 paled beside those of Wal-Mart, whose staggering sales of $312 billion (£167 billion) that year confirmed its status as top global grocery dog. Wal-Mart’s annual report, Building Smiles, anno
unced a 9.5 per cent sales increase that year, with an additional 537 stores and 50,000 employees (or ‘associates’, in Wal-Mart speak), making a global total of 6,100 stores and a workforce of 1.8 million.66 Reading statistics about Wal-Mart is rather like reading about outer space: the numbers are so huge they don’t really sink in. In 2000, the UN reckoned that the company’s sales were bigger than the gross domestic product of three quarters of the world’s economies. Six years later, those figures had all but doubled. The biggest smiles, one imagines, are on the faces of Wal-Mart’s shareholders.

  Feeding cities these days is very big business indeed, but as seventeenth-century Polish grain producers discovered, you have to be at the right end of the food chain in order to profit. Power in the modern food industry has shifted more than ever away from farmers, to those who control the food supply chain. In 1996 the food policy expert Marion Nestle reckoned that a mere 20 per cent of US food expenditure went to producers; the rest went on added value, ‘labour, packaging, transportation, advertising and profits’.67 In the modern food industry, major conglomerates are a powerful tail wagging a very small dog.