On an Empty Stomach

Two Hundred Years of Hunger Relief

Tom Scott-Smith

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501748653, 9781501748653
• eBook ISBN: 9781501748660
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

On an Empty Stomach examines the practical techniques humanitarians have used to manage and measure starvation, from Victorian "scientific" soup kitchens to space-age, high-protein foods. Tracing the evolution of these techniques since the start of the nineteenth century, Tom Scott-Smith argues that humanitarianism is not a simple story of progress and improvement, but rather is profoundly shaped by sociopolitical conditions. Aid is often presented as an apolitical and technical project, but the way humanitarians conceive and tackle human needs has always been deeply influenced by culture, politics, and society. Txhese influences extend down to the most detailed mechanisms for measuring malnutrition and providing sustenance.

As Scott-Smith shows, over the past century, the humanitarian approach to hunger has redefined food as nutrients and hunger as a medical condition. Aid has become more individualized, medicalized, and rationalized, shaped by modernism in bureaucracy, commerce, and food technology. On an Empty Stomach focuses on the gains and losses that result, examining the complex compromises that arise between efficiency of distribution and quality of care. Scott-Smith concludes that humanitarian groups have developed an approach to the empty stomach that is dependent on compact, commercially produced devices and is often paternalistic and culturally insensitive.

1

FROM THE CLASSICAL SOUP KITCHEN TO THE IRISH FAMINE

The attraction of Soyer’s soup kitchen was precision, not originality. It had an aura of efficiency, with a meticulous arrangement of working parts. From the shiny soup boiler to the chained-down spoons, from the queues of paupers to the six-minute bell, every inch of space, every moment of time, was carefully accounted for. But the idea wasn’t new. In 1840s Britain, soup was already a well-established part of poor relief, and pottage had been a humble staple for centuries.¹ The basic model of the Tudor alms house involved bread and broth served in a public kitchen: an approach that had been extended under the Elizabethan Poor Laws and existed far beyond Europe as well.² Imarets could be found across the Ottoman Empire, and “soup shops” existed in China during the Qing dynasty.³ The soup kitchen, therefore, did not begin with Soyer. In fact, if there was a key figure in the development of the soup kitchen it was an American natural scientist named Benjamin Thompson, who was born at Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1753.

Combining diverse interests in physics, philosophy, and social engineering, Benjamin Thompson very much fitted the mold of eighteenth-century upper class intellectuals. He is best known for his contribution to thermodynamics, undertaking some groundbreaking experiments concerning convection, insulation, and friction. After moving to Bavaria in 1785, Thompson entered government service under Elector Karl Theodore, and he was later given the title of Count Rumford—the name by which he is commonly known. He soon became famous for his practical inventions, eventually transforming the soup kitchen into an industrialized and standardized model of relief. Rumford used his discoveries on heat to develop a range of fuel-efficient stoves and kettles. He applied his knowledge of insulation to develop warmer clothing for the Bavarian army. He explored methods for heating and ventilating homes. His most durable material legacy was the Rumford fireplace: an invention to save coal and reduce smoke that can still be found in many European and American houses.⁴

Count Rumford’s commitment to everyday reform generated a new word, “rumfordizing,” which meant improving and refining something in accordance with natural laws. In the 1790s he started to rumfordize the soup kitchen.⁵ He introduced a new, fuel-efficient hearth and advocated economies of scale that would come from catering masses of people in one place. He promoted a recipe that made the most of cheap and filling ingredients such as barley, potatoes, and peas. He argued that the poor should always eat in a public kitchen, receiving food in return for work, and he tested these ideas in Bavaria, establishing a new model soup kitchen with characteristic arrogance and authoritarianism.⁶ It was opened on January 1, 1790, a traditional day in Munich for almsgiving, and it involved the cooperation of local police, who were instructed to arrest any beggar they found and bring them to the new institution. Rumford later boasted of how quickly he cleared the town of those “detestable vermin” who “infested the streets.”⁷ The vagrants were initiated into the basic principles of Rumfordian relief: regular hot meals in return for labor and good behavior.

Rumford’s model received an enthusiastic reception amongst reformers and politicians in the 1790s. Amplified by the unstable backdrop of poor harvests, high grain prices, and revolutionary upheaval, Rumford was able to tap into a growing discontent with existing charitable systems throughout Europe. In Britain, for example, Rumfordian relief was vigorously promoted in pamphlets and through the missionary zeal of organizations like the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor.⁸ By the start of the nineteenth century, such soup kitchens had become “all but universal” in the major British population centers, a “more or less permanent feature of life” in the slums.⁹ Rumford’s reforms spread further across Europe as well: Napoleon set up model soup kitchens across France, and they could also be found in Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland. In some places, meal tickets were illustrated with Rumford’s name and image.¹⁰

The attraction of Rumford’s soup kitchen was simple: he promised it would reduce scarcity and unrest. He used his status as a famous scientist to harness “natural laws” about “human nature,” claiming that he could make the poor more industrious and reduce widespread hunger. This chapter examines Rumford’s concern for order and control, which extended to the food he served and the behavior he expected of his beneficiaries. Indeed, Rumford saw his role as calibrating a machine, guiding soups and the starving alike in order to produce a more balanced society. These features began to change as the soup kitchen developed to meet the scale of need in urban areas, culminating in Alexis Soyer’s “soup-shop of soup-shops” in Dublin. Rumford’s vision of the soup kitchen, however, acted as a pivot between the classical and modern periods, before nutritional science emerged onto the scene.

Rumfordizing Relief

Rumford claimed that his soup kitchens were able to get the best from people. He sought to shape and improve poor communities, and he drew on the analogy of a machine to explain his intentions. The soup kitchen, he believed, was a machine that could maximize human industry, with the soup acting as a reward for good conduct and an encouragement to persevere in good habits.¹¹ His hearths and recipes were meant to be a model of efficiency, inspiring frugality on the part of the poor. Rumford claimed that he had discovered how humans responded to stimuli and incentives: “How necessary it is to be acquainted with the secret springs of action in the human heart,” he wrote in one pamphlet, “to direct even the lowest and unfeeling class of mankind! The machine is intrinsically the same in all situations. The greatest secret is first to put it in tune before an attempt is made to play upon it. The jarring sounds of former vibrations must be stilled, otherwise no harmony can be produced; but when the instrument is in order, the notes cannot fail to answer to the touch of a skillful master.”¹²

Rumford saw himself as the skilled master of the soup kitchen machine, manipulating its inputs and outputs. Just as his fuel-efficient stove drew on natural laws to maximize the use of heat, the soup kitchen would make the most of human nature. Rumford treated all aspects of the kitchen in a similar way: spaces, structures, even the starving themselves were there to be rumfordized, and his reforms began with the soup. Rumford’s first innovation was to argue that water made soup particularly nourishing. “What surprised me,” he wrote, was the “very small quantity of solid food which, when properly prepared, will suffice to satisfy hunger.”¹³ Diluting soup aided taste and digestion, he argued, as well as making it more nourishing. Rumford drew on a strange analogy to prove his point. Just as plants could be fed by water, he believed, so could the poor.¹⁴ This was a convenient belief, since it allowed Rumford to cut costs and increase efficiency, reporting with pride about the “trifling expense at which the stoutest and most labourious man may be fed.”¹⁵

Rumford’s “science” of food was more about giving the impression of satiation than it was about biochemical nourishment. His concern was to promote a certain experience of eating, providing something that appeared to satisfy hunger. In the spirit of “directing the lowest class of mankind” he added stale bread as a topping on the soup before serving. This, he explained, promoted mastication and “prolong[ed] the duration of the enjoyment of eating.”¹⁶ Stale bread was cheap, he argued, and difficult to chew, making poor people think they had eaten more while delivering the experience of satiation at very little cost. Rumford developed his recipes with a similar concern for economics. He based his soup on potatoes, which were cheap but unpopular at the end of the eighteenth century. If they were boiled enough, however, Rumford realized that they would combine with the other ingredients to form a heavy mash of miserly but uncertain provenance.¹⁷ To prolong the eating of this soup still further, Rumford instructed that soup should be consumed from the edge of the bowl to the middle, eaten slowly to prolong the experience of eating. His descriptions concerning the correct way to eat a cheap “pudding” made of cornmeal took such detail to an absurd new level, beginning with the instruction that such a pudding should be sliced “about half an inch, or three quarters of an inch, in thickness” before “being laid hot upon a plate.”

An excavation [should then be] made in the middle . . . with the point of a knife, into which a small piece of butter, as large perhaps as nutmeg, is put, and where it soon melts. To expedite the melting of the butter, the small piece of pudding, which is cut out of the middle of the slice to form the excavation for receiving the butter, is frequently laid over the butter for a few moments, and is taken away (and eaten) as soon as the butter is melted. . . . The pudding is to be eaten with a knife and a fork, beginning at the circumference of the slice, and approaching regularly towards the centre, each piece of pudding being taken up with the fork, and dipped into the butter, or dipped into it in part only, as is commonly the case, before it is carried into the mouth.¹⁸

Rumford sometimes apologized for his ponderous detail. “If I am prolix in these descriptions,” he wrote, “my reader must excuse me . . . persuaded as I am that the action of food upon the palate, and consequently the pleasure of eating, depends very much upon the manner in which the food is applied to the organs of taste.”¹⁹ The idea, once again, was to manipulate the feelings of the eater, creating a more efficient soup kitchen in the process.

The rumfordization of the soup kitchen also extended to admission. To receive a meal, each person was required to work and their output was closely monitored. Standardized forms were used to record attendance and labor rates, with meal tickets distributed to those deserving of support. Everything was made clearly visible in ledgers, tables, and charts; indeed, the measurement of costs and the quantification of inputs and outputs dominated management of the institution. If anyone was in doubt about his intentions, Rumford emblazoned the legend “No Alms Received Here” in gold above the soup kitchen door.²⁰ Often known as a “House of Industry,” the idea was that food would only be provided if work had been expended, making Rumford’s soup kitchen essentially self-financing. All that was needed was to put it in tune, he thought; then the machine would run itself.

Rumford made particular use of the “natural habits” of children to develop his idea that the soup kitchen could be self-sustaining. “Nothing is so tedious to a child as being obliged to sit still in the same place for a considerable time,” he wrote in one essay, describing how he made newly arrived children sit silently and watch others work, so as to “inspire them with the desire to do that which [the] other children, apparently more favoured, more caressed, and more praised than themselves, were permitted to do.”²¹ He summed up the idea by with the following phrase: “To reform their minds it is necessary to know their habits.” To manipulate the “secret springs of action in the human heart,” in other words, children were initially forced to sit still and “obliged to be spectators of this busy and entertaining scene.” This meant that they would soon become “so uneasy in their situations, and so jealous of those who were permitted to be more active, that they frequently solicited with the greatest importunity to be permitted to work, and often cried most heartily if this favour was not instantly granted them.”²²

The End of the Classical Soup Kitchen

To understand the significance of the Rumfordian soup kitchen, it is important to appreciate that Rumford was transforming a smaller, more local affair: an institution that was specific to a town or area. In Britain, these had been financed through “charitable subscriptions” in which four to five hundred of the “most respectable local inhabitants” came together to pay for premises and food.^23...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Humanitarian Approaches to Hunger
• 1. From the Classical Soup Kitchen to the Irish Famine
• 2. Justus Liebig and the Rise of Nutritional Science
• 3. Governing the Diet in Victorian Institutions
• 4. Colonialism and Communal Strength
• 5. Social Nutrition at the League of Nations
• 6. Military Feeding during World War II
• 7. The Medicalization of Hunger and the Postwar Period
• 8. High Modernism and the Development Decade
• 9. Low Modernism after Biafra
• 10. Small-Scale Devices and the Low Modernist Legacy
• Conclusion: On an Empty Stomach
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index