Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  44 The list is from Tames, op.cit., p.12.

  45 See B.M.S. Campbell et al., A Medieval Capital and its Grain Supply, Historical Geography Research Series No. 30, 1993, p.47.

  46 John Stow, Survey of London (1603), ed. Charles Kingsforde, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1908, Vol.2, p.10.

  47 See Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Allen Lane, 2003, pp.2–4.

  48 Quoted in ibid., p.3.

  49 See Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power, Penguin, 1986, p.43.

  50 Ibid., p.40.

  51 Samuel Johnson (1709–84), On the Trades of London, published in The Adventurer, 1753, quoted in Xavier Baron, London 1066–1914: Literary Sources and Documents (3 vols.), Helm Information, East Sussex, 1997, vol.1, p.590.

  52 Daniel Defoe, The Review, 8 January 1713, quoted in Dorothy Davis, A History of Shopping, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1966, p.194.

  53 Daniel Defoe, Complete Tradesman, ii, Ch. 6, quoted in George Dodd, The Food of London, Longman Brown, Green and Longmans, London, 1856, pp.110–11.

  54 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan, Methuen, London, 1925 (2 vols.), vol. I, p.355.

  55 Ibid., p.48.

  56 Ibid., p.377.

  57 Dodd, op.cit., frontispiece.

  58 Ibid., p.2.

  59 Ibid., p.101.

  60 James P. Johnston, A Hundred Years Eating: Food, Drink and the Daily Diet in Britain since the late Nineteenth Century, Gill and Macmillan, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977, p.59.

  61 Ibid., p.3.

  62 Charles Booth, ‘Daily Bread’, in The Colony, July 1868, quoted in LSE Charles Booth Online Archive, http:.//booth.lse.ac.uk/static/a/2.html.

  63 See Edith Whetham, ‘The London Milk Trade 1900–1930’, in Derek J. Oddy and Derek S. Miller (eds.), The Making of the Modern British Diet, Croom Helm, London, 1976, Ch. 6.

  64 Frank Trentmann, ‘Bread, Milk and Democracy: Consumption and Citizenship in Twentieth-century Britain’, in Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton, The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, Berg, Oxford, 2001, Ch. 7, pp.129–63.

  65 Power Hungry: Six Reasons to Regulate Global Food Corporations, Action Aid International, 2004, p.4.

  66 Building Smiles, Wal-Mart Annual Report, 2006, p.12.

  67 Quoted in Lang and Heasman, op.cit., p.140.

  68 Ibid., p.147.

  69 Power Hungry, op.cit., p.21.

  70 http://www.goodhousekeeping.co.uk/index.php/v1/British_dairy_farms_in_crisis.

  71 Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How an Out-of-Town Superstore Became a Superpower, Allen Lane, 2006, pp.79–84.

  72 Quoted in Power Hungry, op.cit., p.27.

  73 Professor Heffernan’s figures quoted in Lang and Heasman, op.cit., p.144.

  74 Power Hungry, op.cit., p.4.

  75 Fishman, op.cit., p.13.

  76 Power Hungry, op.cit., p.25.

  77 George Monbiot, Captive State, Macmillan, 2000, p.205.

  78 Ibid., p.204.

  79 Felicity Lawrence, the Guardian, 8 December 2005.

  80 Stop the Dumping! How EU agricultural subsidies are damaging livelihoods in the developing world, Oxfam, 2002.

  81 Ibid., p.4.

  82 Defra, op.cit., p.6. By 2007, the figure was down to 58 per cent.

  83 Spokesperson for Elliot Morley, quoted in Science and Society, Spring Newsletter 2006, http://www.i-sis.org.uk/isisnews/sis29.php.

  84 George Bush, speech delivered on 25 April 2006, broadcast on Newsnight, BBC2.

  85 FAO, Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, 3 May 2006.

  86 Power Hungry, op.cit., p.21.

  87 Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, the Guardian, 24 May 2003.

  88 Fred Duncan, interviewed by the author in December 2005.

  89 Quoted by Simon Cox in The Silent Terrorist, BBC Radio 4, 22 August 2006.

  90 Lawrence Wein, Analyzing a bioterror attack on the food supply: the case of botulinum toxin in milk (with Y. Liu), Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, 2005, Vol.102, no.28, pp.9984–9, http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/102/28/9984.pdf.

  91 The Silent Terrorist, see note 89.

  Chapter 3 Market and Supermarket

  1 Victor Gruen and Larry Smith, Shopping Towns USA, The Planning of Shopping Centres, Reinhold Publishing Corporation, New York, 1960, p.267.

  2 Tesco, Asda/Wal-Mart, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons.

  3 To get an idea of what a narrow squeak London had, take a look at the building at the top west corner of Drury Lane at High Holborn. That is what the whole of Covent Garden would look like now if the GLC had got its way.

  4 The Covent Garden Community Association, which still exists, was set up in 1971 specifically to fight the GLC proposals. It was the first case of a community action changing the course of a planning enquiry in Britain. See http://www.coventgarden.org.

  5 The area comprises Faneuil Hall and the neighbouring Quincy Market – by which name it is sometimes known.

  6 Joanna Blythman, Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets, Fourth Estate, 2004, p.6.

  7 DETR, Impact Of Large Foodstores On Market Towns And District Centres, 1998, note 21.

  8 Ghost Town Britain: The Threat From Economic Globalisation To Livelihoods, Liberty And Local Economic Freedom, New Economics Foundation, 2002, p.15.

  9 Blythman, op.cit., p.20.

  10 Grocer magazine, Vol.229, no.7753, 6 May 2006, p.35.

  11 The Money Programme, Tesco: Supermarket Superpower, BBC2, 3 June 2005.

  12 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Vintage, 1992, p.39.

  13 Stale tampons.

  14 George Dodd, The Food of London, Longman Brown, Green and Longmans, London, 1856, p.244.

  15 Gillian Bebbington, Street Names of London, Batsford, London, 1972, p.82.

  16 See Felix Barker and Peter Jackson, London: 2000 Years of a City and its People, Macmillan, London, 1974, p.76.

  17 Quoted in Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Temple Smith, London, 1978, p.179.

  18 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, 1982, p.29.

  19 Pier Luigi Fantelli and Franca Pellegrini (eds.), Il Palazzo della Ragione in Padova, Studio Editoriale Programma, Padova, 1990, p.20.

  20 See R.E. Wycherley, The Stones of Athens, Princeton, 1979, p.93.

  21 R. E. Wycherley, How the Greeks Built Cities, Macmillan Press, 1979, p.66.

  22 Since citizenship was barred to women, slaves and foreigners, this aspect of the Agora was not fully inclusive.

  23 Quoted in R.E. Wycherley, (1978), op.cit., p.91.

  24 Aristotle, Politics, vii, 11, 2, quoted in Wycherley (1979), op.cit., p.67.

  25 A separate senate house was eventually built on the Pnyx Hill. See Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone, Faber and Faber, 1996, pp.52–67.

  26 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, 1958, pp.22–78.

  27 Idios, the ancient Greek root of our word ‘idiot’, indicated privacy as well as separateness, strangeness. See ibid., pp.38–49.

  28 See Burke, op.cit., p.183.

  29 Ibid.

  30 Ibid., p.186.

  31 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, MIT Press, 1968, p.6.

  32 Ibid., p.25.

  33 See Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700, The Pelican History of Art, Penguin, 1973, pp.160–3.

  34 Punch, 14 August 1880, quoted in Robert Webber, Covent Garden: Mud-Salad Market, J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1969, pp.122–3.

  35 The ‘sermon’ is attended every year by Punch and Judy men and women from all over the country.

  36 Burke, op.cit., p.203.

  37 Denis Diderot, Oeuvres Complètes, Paris, 1769, ed. Paris, 1969, 8:184, quoted in Stephen Kaplan, Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade During the E
ighteenth Century, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1984, p.185.

  38 Dodd, op.cit., p.255.

  39 Quoted in Forshaw and Bergström, Smithfield Past and Present, Heinemann, London, 1980, p.59.

  40 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1967), published in French journal Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, October 1984, trans. Jay Miskowiec, www.foucault.info.

  41 See Dorothy Davis, A History of Shopping, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1966, pp.189–90.

  42 G.K. Chesterton, Wine, Water and Song, London, 1915, quoted in James P. Johnston, A Hundred Years Eating: Food, Drink and the Daily Diet in Britain since the Late Nineteenth Century, Gill and Macmillan, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977, p.70.

  43 Ibid., p.76.

  44 Ibid., p.78.

  45 See http://www.pigglywiggly.com.

  46 Quoted in Malcolm Gladwell, ‘The Terrazzo Jungle’, the New Yorker, 15 March 2004.

  47 Victor Gruen, Centres for the Urban Environment: Survival of the Cities, New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973, p.158.

  48 Victor Gruen, The Heart of Our Cities, Thames and Hudson, London, 1965, pp.248–50.

  49 Gruen (1973), op.cit., p.74.

  50 Ibid., p.37.

  51 Johnston, op.cit., pp.61–2.

  52 DETR, op.cit., introduction, paras 4 and 6.

  53 See C.J. Chung, J. Inaba, R. Koolhaas, S. Leong (eds.), Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, Taschen, 2001, p.642.

  54 See ibid., pp.642–6.

  55 See Blythman, op.cit., pp.29–30.

  56 See the Tescopoly website, http://www.tescopoly.org/.

  57 Friends of the Earth, Calling the Shots: How Supermarkets Get Their Way in Planning Decisions, January 2006, p.8.

  58 Ibid., pp.21–2.

  59 Blythman, op.cit., p.27.

  60 Katherine Edwards, quoted in Calling the Shots, op.cit., p.23.

  61 Building Design Partnership website, www.bdp.net.

  62 Planning White Paper, 2007, Paragraph 7.54. See also the Friends of the Earth website, www.foe.co.uk.

  63 Joseph F. Sullivan, ‘Court Protects speech in Malls’, New York Times, 21 December 1994, quoted by Sze Tsung Leong, ‘… And then there was Shopping’, in Chung, et al., op.cit., p.152.

  64 Ibid.

  65 Public Eye: Art is a Battlefield, http://www.metroactive.com/papers/

  metro/02.27.03/public-eye-0309.html.

  66 Marc Augé, Non-Places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe, Verso, New York, 1995, p.34.

  67 Jacobs, op.cit., p.65.

  68 Measuring Access to Healthy Food in Sandwell, The University of Warwick and Sandwell Health Action Zone, 2001, p.8.

  69 London Development Agency, Healthy and Sustainable Food for London, The Mayor’s Food Strategy, May 2006, p.49.

  70 Nicholas Saphir, Review of London Wholesale Markets, Defra and the Corporation of London, 2002, p.55.

  71 The Mayor’s Food Strategy, op.cit., foreword by Jenny Jones.

  72 An initial project to create a local food hub at New Covent Garden began in 2007.

  73 Ibid., p.101.

  74 Lady Caroline Cranbrook, interviewed by Patrick Barkham, ‘The town that said no to Tesco’, the Guardian, 28 June 2006.

  75 Queen’s Market Development Agreement and Lease Summary, Newham Council, 16 March 2006, p.3.

  76 Marie Jackson, ‘Can Paris Teach London a Lesson?’, BBC News, 11 February 2005, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4244609.stm.

  77 Ibid.

  78 From an interview with Woman’s Own, 31 October 1987.

  Chapter 4 The Kitchen

  1 James Boswell, Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, quoted in Michael Symons, A History of Cooks and Cooking, University of Illinois Press, 2004, p.34.

  2 My visit to the Savoy took place several years ago, before the major refurbishment of 2008.

  3 Grimod de la Reynière, Almanach des Gourmands, vol.4, p.47, quoted in Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant, Harvard, 2000, p.163.

  4 Emil Petrie, ‘Feeding frenzy: convenient cuisine’, The Money Programme, BBC2, 6 October 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5407472.stm.

  5 See Carlo Petrini, Slow Food Nation, Rizzoli, 2007, pp.164–76.

  6 From an interview with a product developer and food consultant to M&S in 2006.

  7 Hydrogenated fats, otherwise known as trans fats, are chemically modified fats used widely in the food industry since the early 1900s. They are cheaper and have a longer shelf life than saturated fats, but have been linked to raised cholesterol and heart disease. In 2006, M&S and Waitrose removed hydrogenated fats from all their foods, and Sainsbury’s announced its intention to phase them out. In December, Mayor Giuliani announced he was banning them from New York City – easier said than done.

  8 I have never understood why so many chefs give recipes for roast potatoes that involve all sorts of ‘tricks’ to make them fluffy and crunchy without specifying the most important thing of all: the sort of potato you should use. King Edwards are perfect.

  9 See http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/

  dates/stories/april/1/

  newsid_2819000/2819261.stm.

  10 Jamie’s School Dinners, Channel 4, 2005.

  11 See Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food, First Illinois Paperback, 1996, pp.309–10.

  12 Leonard Woolley, Excavations at Ur: a record of twelve years’ work, London, Ernest Benn, 1954, p.104.

  13 Symons, op.cit., p.311.

  14 William Fitzstephen, Description of London (c.1175), quoted in George Dodd, The Food of London, Longman Brown, Green and Longmans, London, 1856, p.26. See also Xavier Baron, London 1066–1914: Literary Sources and Documents (3 vols.), Helm Information, East Sussex, 1997, p.56.

  15 Ned Ward, The London Spy, quoted in Edwina Ehrman, Hazel Forsyth, Lucy Peltz, Cathy Ross, London Eats Out: 500 Years of Capital Dining, Museum of London, 1999, p.40.

  16 George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, Penguin, 1986, p.67.

  17 There are exceptions – for instance there is a strong tradition of professional female cooks from the seventeenth century onwards in England – but their work has generally been confined to household management and the keeping of inns – not haute cuisine. See Mennell, op.cit., pp.95–8.

  18 The use of valuable ingredients such as sugar would, however, have been supervised by the mistress of the house.

  19 See James P. Johnston, A Hundred Years Eating: Food, Drink and the Daily Diet in Britain Since the Late Nineteenth Century, Gill and Macmillan, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977, p.13.

  20 Bisto gravy powder (which stands for Browns, Seasons and Thickens all in One) was first manufactured in 1908. The TV adverts have run since the 1960s.

  21 The social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss attempted to analyse the social status of food by constructing a ‘culinary triangle’ consisting of the raw, the cooked and the rotten, and analysing the connections between them. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Culinary Triangle’, 1966, Partisan Review pp.586–95.

  22 Such domestic segregation still exists in Arabic cultures. See Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone, Faber and Faber, 1996, p.74.

  23 See Chapter 3.

  24 For a detailed discussion of the Athenian symposion, see Oswyn Murray (ed.), Sympotica: a Symposium on the Symposion, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990.

  25 Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, 137f; 2:129, quoted in Symons, op.cit., p.35.

  26 For a detailed social analysis of the Roman house, see Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, ‘The Social Structure of the Roman House’, Papers of the British School at Rome, 56 NS 43 (1988), pp.43–97.

  27 See Mennell, op.cit., pp.102–3.

  28 Maestro Martino, The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery Book, Luigi Ballerini (ed.), trans. Jeremy Parzen, California Studies in Food and Culture 14, 2005, pp.77, 114.

  29 Quoted in Mennell, op.cit., p.96.

  30 Relevés were large dishes of stewed meat or fish; hors
d’oeuvres accompaniments placed around them; entrées smaller savoury dishes; and entremets lighter sweet or savoury dishes served between courses.

  31 Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management, London, Cassell & Co., 1861, reprint 2000, p.905.

  32 J.E. Panton, From Kitchen to Garrett, quoted in Roy Strong, Feast: A History of Grand Eating, Jonathan Cape, London, 2002, p.293.

  33 Manners and Tone of Good Society, and Solecisms to be Avoided, by a Member of the Aristocracy, Frederick Warne and Co., 1885, quoted in Strong, op.cit., p.294.

  34 Quoted in Mennell, op.cit., p.309.

  35 See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800, Allen Lane, 1983, p.297.

  36 See Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and The Discovery of India, Harper Press, 2006, p.423.

  37 Quoted in Thomas, op.cit., p.300.

  38 John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 1865, quoted in John Burnett, A Social History of Housing, 1815–1970, Methuen, London, 1986, p.197.

  39 Robert Kerr, quoted in J.J. Stevenson, House Architecture, Macmillan, London, 1880, vol. 2, p.78.

  40 Ibid., pp.82–3.

  41 Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House, John Murray, London (1864), 2nd edn, 1865, p.210.

  42 See Burnett, op.cit., pp.70–7.

  43 One alternative was ‘catering flats’ – blocks of flats that supplied catering services like those of a hotel. Residents could either choose to eat in a communal dining room, or take meals in their flats.

  44 Catherine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, Harper, 1842, p.62.

  45 Ibid., p.143.

  46 The Panopticon, with its underlying messages of observation, order and obedience, is discussed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Peregrine Books, 1985.

  47 Pasteur went on to invent one of the best-known processes in microbiology: pasteurisation, a process in universal use today.

  48 Quoted in Annegret S. Ogden, The Great American Housewife: From Helpmate to Wage-earner 1776–1986, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut and London, 1986, p.141.

  49 Quoted in Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Expert’s Advice to Women, Pluto Press, London, 1979, p.143.