The Food Industries of Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Alain Drouard, Derek J. Oddy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317031536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The industrialization of food preservation and processing has been a dramatic development across Europe during modern times. This book sets out its story from the beginning of the nineteenth century when preservation of food from one harvest to another was essential to prevent hunger and even famine. Population growth and urbanization depended upon a break out from the 'biological ancien regime' in which hunger was an ever-present threat. The application of mass production techniques by the food industries was essential to the modernization of Europe. From the mid-nineteenth century the development of food industries followed a marked regional pattern. After an initial growth in north-west Europe, the spread towards south-east Europe was slowed by social, cultural and political constraints. This was notable in the post-Second World War era. The picture of change in this volume is presented by case studies of countries ranging from the United Kingdom in the west to Romania in the east. All illustrate the role of food industries in creating new products that expanded the traditional cereal-based diet of pre-industrial Europe. Industrially preserved and processed foods provided new flavours and appetizing novelties which led to brand names recognized by consumers everywhere. Product marketing and advertising became fundamental to modern food retailing so that Europe's largest food producers, Danone, Nestlé and Unilever, are numbered amongst the world's biggest companies.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Derek J. Oddy

Prior to the nineteenth century, food supplies everywhere were unpredictable and Europe suffered from a succession of subsistence crises. In the words of Fernand Braudel ‘cereal yields were poor; two consecutive bad harvests spelt disaster.’ Such uncertainties of existence were marks of ‘the biological ancien régime’.1 Braudel’s idea was taken up by Professor J.D. Post who called the European-wide dearth of the 1740s the ‘last great subsistence crisis’2 even though Europe experienced a widespread shortage of food in 1766, as did Britain in the 1790s (especially 1795–1796), and 1801. Yet Post discounted the acute food shortages in post-Napoleonic Europe during 1816–1817, because he assumed that new techniques being developed in agriculture would lead to increases in the output of crops and numbers of animals. An increased food supply, including imported foodstuffs during the nineteenth century, would result in Europe becoming capable of sustaining population growth. Post’s assessment was broadly correct: continent-wide subsistence crises did not appear in Western Europe or North America later than the eighteenth century. After the immediate post-Napoleonic War crisis, famine in nineteenth-century Europe was much more localized, though it was extensive in the northern provinces of European Russia in 1891.3

From the 1790s, Europe underwent a protracted period of warfare which lasted until the battle of Waterloo in 1815. Assembling armies and navies and keeping them in the field or at sea was a major stimulus to the expansion of the food industries. Armies and navies required immense supplies to feed the thousands of men assembled for the campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars. Much was achieved by depredations practised on the civilian populations by army commissariats but weather conditions around the turn of the eighteenth century also meant local food crises. One constant element in the conflict was Great Britain’s Royal Navy which blockaded ports on the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of mainland Europe for months on end regardless of season or weather. At the height of the wars, the Royal Navy’s Victualling Board had the task of supplying 800 ships and feeding over 140,000 men, many of whom were widely dispersed. In addition, the Victualling Board was responsible for sending supplies to the British army in its overseas garrisons and at times provided food for other allied armies and for more than 70 thousand prisoners-of-war.4 The Navy’s demand for suitable foodstuffs created numbers of agents in England’s home ports to supply preserved (salted) meat in barrels and ships’ biscuits known as ‘hard tack’ for use when fresh bread was not available.5 The baking of ships’ biscuits was the first modern industrialized food process recognizably operating on mass-production lines and perhaps matched in scale only by the larger breweries.

Food Preservation in Pre-Industrial Europe

There was a marked contrast between the food needs of the combatants and people in those parts of Europe unaffected by the campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte or the alliances formed against him. Away from the conflict, people remained dependent upon local agriculture for their foodstuffs, either from their own crops and animals or supplies from local markets. The rationale of the food ‘industries’ prior to the onset of industrialization was to preserve crops and animal produce and extend the availability of foodstuffs from one season to the next in order to avoid any shortfall or ‘hungry gap’ in the months before the following harvest. The universal problem affecting every population’s food supply was storage in a manner that would limit any deterioration which made food inedible later. The storage of the grain harvest and its conversion into flour was the principal requirement of townspeople and those in rural areas who could not produce their own food. Granaries and mills therefore performed an important economic activity across Europe since bread was the universal food in northern and western lowland areas where suitable bread-grains – wheat or barley – were cultivated. However there were regions, notably in the south and south-east – where maize-growing predominated – in which grain needed little processing. Maize required simple cracking in hand-mills since it was used for maize porridge known as mămăligă in the Danube Basin, Romania and Moldavia, or polenta in Italy; it formed the staple food of the poorer people over wide areas of southern and south-eastern Europe.6 Similarly, in colder northern countries and highland zones where only oats or rye could be grown, porridge was also a staple food.

Millers and bakers generally functioned on a small scale in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries using technology that had changed little over the centuries: millers relied on wind or water to power the rotating mill stones that ground grain into flour while bakers employed a long process of dough-making which might take up to a day before the dough went into wood-fired ovens. Keeping flour could be difficult, so when grain surpluses occurred in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was common practice to convert them to alcoholic beverages by brewing or distilling.

Storing food for later use depended heavily upon the availability of salt, not just to preserve meat but also to salt green vegetables such as beans, cucumbers, and the almost universal cabbage which became the sauerkraut eaten widely in northern Europe. Since salt drew out the liquid from food, much food appeared to be preserved in brine and could be washed, cooked and eaten throughout the winter and until the next harvest season made fresh vegetables available again. This cottage industry required no equipment beyond an earthenware crock but a trade in salt was important to link areas where salt was mined or where evaporation pans provided an alternative source. Salting was often linked to smoking as a means of preserving fish and meat, especially meat from pigs as ham or bacon. Smoke houses could also operate on a domestic scale if sufficient fuel was available; where it was not, food could be dried by wind as cod (stockfish) in Norway or by sun like grapes, fish and meat (Serbia) in southern Europe.7 Ice was available in colder parts of the continent where it could be harvested from flooded fields in winter for storage in icehouses, though for most of the nineteenth century the use of ice was limited to rich families for dinner-table decoration and ice cream rather than used widely for long-term food preservation. Icehouses were often found on the estates of wealthy people, frequently half-buried in the ground for insulation. Indeed, perhaps the most residual storage technique of all was to bury food in the ground for storage, as potatoes frequently were, or else to keep it in cellars.

Self-sufficiency was declining by the early nineteenth century as fewer people lived in very isolated circumstances except on islands, or in forests or highland regions of Europe. In general, Europe was a fertile region, able to supply its people with food. From the Pyrenees to Russia a coastal plain of broad-leaved deciduous woods and grasslands spread north and east across Europe, intersected by rivers flowing westwards into the Atlantic and North Sea or north into the Baltic. The land supported temperate grain crops, with pastures yielding meat and dairy products, so that the food supplies of the countries of the northern regions – France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, northern Germany and the British Isles – were similar. Further south and to the south-east highland areas were more pastoral economies, while the Mediterranean regions were noted for arboreal crops (olives, figs, citrus and stone fruits) and viticulture.

Demographic Change in Europe

It is difficult to know how big the population of Europe was in 1800, as few countries took censuses, but one estimate suggests that Europe (excluding Russia) contained just over 190 million people, a figure which had risen to about 420 million by 1900. Thereafter it did not increase significantly in the first half of the twentieth century as population limitation, war, and emigration occurred.8 The pattern of growth was clear: birth rates commonly exceeded 30 per thousand during the nineteenth century, while death rates were some 20 per thousand or more. Regional variation developed from the 1880s. In western and north-western Europe death rates declined to around 15 per thousand in the 1930s, though they remained close to 20 per thousand in eastern and south-eastern Europe. Between c.1875 and 1950, life expectancy at birth rose from under 40 years to the mid-60s for males and nearly 70 for females.9 Industrialization and urbanization was stimulated by rapid population growth rates: by 1880, Germany’s population after unification had reached 40m, France 39m, with the United Kingdom and Italy around 30m each.

The expanding population meant increasing numbers of people were no longer self-sufficient in foodstuffs, however simple their diet was. Home-brewing also declined. Reliance on markets as the source of foodstuffs grew, while numbers of traders such as dry-salters and ‘Italian oilmen’10 increasingly became food retailers in towns and industrial districts. The nineteenth century was therefore a period of sustained and increasing demand for foodstuffs, especially in the core of European economic development comprising France, Britain and the Low Countries. As urban centres expanded they relied on the growth of railways in the second half of the nineteenth century to transport food from distant sources while the larger cities became ringed with market gardens to supply more perishable foodstuffs. In some instances where the spatial concentration of industry became pronounced as when industry came to rely on mineral fuel, separate built-up areas began to merge together into city-regions, and the term ‘conurbation’ was coined to describe this phenomenon.11 In the last quarter of the nineteenth century urban food outlets proliferated, some of which became retail ‘chains’ of shops, that were able to introduce trademarks and own-brand names for their goods. Rural areas of central, eastern and south-eastern Europe shared minimally in these developments and their food supplies changed little during the nineteenth century, though some urban centres contained ‘colonial-goods shops’ in the first half of the twentieth century.12 Although some predominantly rural areas appeared backward by the standards of development experienced in north-west Europe, the rural economies of Europe did develop specialist lines of production as cash crops, such as tomatoes, olives and citrus fruits, which could be exported to the colder north. By the early twentieth century, European emigration to North and South America even created an international demand for emigrants’ ‘home’ produce. Nevertheless, subsistence agriculture remained significant in central and eastern Europe throughout the twentieth century and its demise was delayed by state policies from the 1940s onwards.13

The location of industrial facilities for food processing and manufacture was problematic and, for crops, might depend on the density of the yield. If the raw material was bulky, as with some cereals or vegetables, processing on a rural site as near to the source of production as possible might be favoured, but animals and geese were usually expected to walk considerable distances to slaughtering facilities adjacent to markets. As the scale of cereal marketing grew beyond local needs, crops were transported by cart to large mills closer to urban centres though a rural site was often preferred for processing food materials, particularly if perishability was an issue, as cheap seasonal labour was usually available. In central and eastern Europe, the rural population made up some 70–80 per cent of the total, and these proportions did not fall until the early twentieth century.14 In general, as urban areas expanded, transport became more important. The processing of milk in the countryside was common if it was done close to railway or road transport facilities. Where waterways allowed cheap transport, surprisingly little value was added near the point of production for commodities such as grain. Even perishable soft fruit was often brought to urban factories because their economies of scale and other advantages of market-orientation outweighed any losses in quality there might be en route. By the twentieth century, it was the ‘necessity to market a homogeneous product that prompted concentration of processing’.15 In short, the relationship between the locational factors was complex and changed through time and across space to such an extent that food factories frequently went out of business or were moved in order to optimize their advantages.

The Industrialization of the Food Supply

The origins of most modern food industries in Europe date from the 1860s. Until then, food trades were local, dispersed and used traditional processes. New sources of raw materials brought changes to production methods, food qualities and flavours. North American ‘hard’ wheat yielding ‘strong’ flour entered European markets through west-facing ports and began to replace traditional flours made from ‘soft’ wheat. Wind or water mills using rotating millstones were gradually replaced by mills driven by mechanical power and using roller technology. Introduced in Hungary in 1865 for the more effective milling of locally-grown ‘hard’ wheat, roller mills began to be operated in Britain at Glasgow and Liverpool in the 1870s to deal with hard-wheat from the mid-west of the United States of America.16 By 1914, milling in Britain was a large-scale operation in the hands of a few very big firms producing millions of sacks of flour a year.17 They produced white flour of low extraction (using just over 70 per cent of the grain) which stored better and yielded more loaves of bread per sack of flour. From the 1880s maki...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I THE ORIGINS AND GROWTH OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION
• PART II CREATING NEW FOODS
• PART III THE EFFECT OF FOOD TECHNOLOGY ON CONSUMPTION PATTERNS
• Index