Food and the City in Europe since 1800

Peter Lummel, Peter J. Atkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317134497
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This fascinating volume examines the impact that rapid urbanization has had upon diets and food systems throughout Western Europe over the past two centuries. Bringing together studies from across the continent, it stresses the fundamental links between key changes in European social history and food systems, food cultures and food politics. Contributors respond to a number of important questions, including: when and how did local food production cease to be sufficient for the city and when did improved transport conditions and liberal commercial relations replace local by supra-regional food supplies? How far did the food industry contribute to improved living conditions in cities? What influence did urban consumers have? Food and the City in Europe since 1800 also examines issues of food hygiene and health impacts in cities, looks at various food innovations and how 'new' foods often first gained acceptance in cities, and explores how eating fashions have changed over the centuries.

Chapter 1 Food and the City

Peter J. Atkins and Derek J. Oddy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315582610-1

This book is about food in the city in all its manifestations from the production, processing, marketing and consumption of food to the impact of urbanization upon diets and food systems. The International Commission for Research into European Food History (ICREFH) has given thought to cities and towns before, but has never concentrated on the larger urban aggregations, often with multiple centres, that grew up in Europe in the late nineteenth century, and which were characterized by Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) – the Scottish biologist – as ‘conurbations’.¹ By 1900, Europe contained several large urban agglomerations, notably London, Paris, Berlin, followed in size by Moscow and Vienna.² Their size meant that the supply and distribution of foodstuffs was complex, creating problems that required the state, the municipal institutions, and also the town-dwellers themselves, to make numerous adaptations. After collection and long-distance transportation to such markets, food might be stale on arrival, in which case wholesalers and retailers alike sought to delay the deterioration of perishable items. The Symposium considered especially those large and important European cities which, in differing national contexts, developed outstanding economic and political importance and a cultural charisma as centres of innovations and changes. It also analysed the ‘metropolitan effect’ that was felt in smaller countries, focused on cities such as Barcelona and Brussels, as the stages in the food chain between farm gate and consumers’ kitchens grew, and in Prague where post-World War II Czechoslovakia struggled to meet the regime’s showcase requirements.

¹ See Welter, 2002. ² Urban-industrial areas such as the Ruhr or industrial areas of northern England were not considered by the Symposium. Sutcliffe, 1984, includes essays on the growth of the principal European cities.

No summary historical treatment of these developments exists in a comparative European perspective, taking account of all interests along the chain from the producer to the consumer. Yet food history has been a constituent part of modernization and food has shaped European urban life just as cities have influenced the systems of supply and the shifting currents of consumption. The resulting social and cultural transformation of urban society created a dynamic for changes in food consumption that had never been known before. As cities expanded, the lower social classes had to offset the higher cost of living against their limited incomes, while urban elites formulated new wants. The interplay of these factors led to new urban consumption patterns in Europe. A modern urban lifestyle came into being in European cities and the Berlin philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel in his essay The Metropolis and Mental Life provided a basic vocabulary to discuss these changes.³

³ Originally published in 1903, translated in 1950. See also the objectives and principles of the Georg Simmel Centre for Metropolitan Studies (GSZ) in Berlin: <http://www.gsz.hu-berlin.de/php/index.php?style=0&size> (accessed 29 November 2006).

There are many ways of testing assertions about the impact of cities. In the present volume we have chosen a framework of four themes (A. Feeding the Multitude; B. Food Regulation; C. Food Innovations – the Product Perspective; D. Eating Fashions – the Consumer Perspective), each of which is addressed by four or five papers. All of the authors were participants in ICREFH’s Berlin Symposium in September 2005 and come from ten countries and a number of different disciplines. The Symposium resided, appropriately, in Harnack House, named after Adolf Harnack, President of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (KWG), which, from its opening in 1929 was a discussion forum symbolizing German scientific excellence and international networks. The open-air and food museum, Domäne Dahlem, was the second venue. This has its own 800 years old agricultural history and it contributed to feeding Berlin until the time of the Cold war and, as such, it was the perfect place to discuss the interrelationship between food and the growth of cities.

Our focus is upon Europe in the last 200 years but we note that at the present the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and other development organizations are investing a great deal in studying similar structures and processes in present-day third-world cities. A sense of how fundamental the link with food remains in the process of urbanization can be gained from FAO’s ‘Feeding the Cities’ programme. On a global scale they argue that:

One of the main challenges … will be to achieve an efficient distribution of nutritional and inexpensive foodstuffs to urban inhabitants. Failure to meet this challenge could lead to a repeat of the widespread political unrest and rising social instability already well-documented in cities throughout the world when sharp rises in food prices have been precipitated by the need to cut food subsidies…Creation and expansion of markets has often lagged behind the growth in urban populations and merchandise flows.…⁴

⁴ FAO, 1999, 1. There is now a large literature in this area, with helpful commentaries on websites entitled ‘Food for the Cities’, and ‘Food into Cities’. The emphasis is upon improving urban food supply systems in the developing world, especially in Africa. See: <http://www.fao.org/fcit/doc.asp>; <http://www.eldis.org/static/DOC8851.htm> (accessed 29 November 2006).

A discussion of historical problems of feeding cities in Europe seems to be particularly relevant against the contemporary background of rapid urban growth in developing countries, leading to food and housing shortages as well as severe social problems. In the mid-twentieth century ten per cent of human beings lived in towns and cities but this proportion has now passed half. Worldwide a million people move into cities daily.⁵ Many historians have contributed understandings of the relationship between urban growth and the raw materials that feed it. The work of Campbell et al., and Galloway on medieval London is notable, as is the classic work of Fisher on early modern London.⁶ For Paris, Kaplan and Abbad have published detailed studies of provisioning under the Ancien Régime and there are many other European studies.⁷

⁵ Burdett, 2006. ⁶ Fisher, 1935; Galloway and Murphy, 1991; Campbell et al., 1993. ⁷ Kaplan, 1984; Clark and Lepetit, 1996; Abad, 2002.

Despite the sophistication of their food-supply systems, very large European cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not escape food crises. Expansionary policies of aggrandisement, for instance colonialism, were costly in manpower and communications, and caused Europe’s rulers to be concerned about food supply. In particular, policymakers were unimpressed by the physique of the urban males of military age they saw around them; and lamented their undernourishment or ‘irrational nutrition’. Although famines were essentially a rural experience linked to harvest failure, no metropolitan centre in Europe could avoid food crises in the twentieth century. Varying in intensity, food shortages ranged from queues at shops and food rationing to periods of near starvation during the times when European cities were at the centre of two world wars. Europe’s last peacetime famine was in Russia in 1891/2 but armed conflict and totalitarian politics caused major disruptions to urban food supplies up to the middle of the twentieth century.⁸ Even Germany, which had done so much to create the science of nutrition, failed to utilize it rationally in World War I.

⁸ Robbins, 1974.

Although food habits might be used to generate nationalism, as in Norway, no political regime successfully incorporated nutritional science into food policy or planning, as the examples from Soviet Russia and Czechoslovakia discussed in section C indicate. Indeed, famine in the USSR in the 1930s was due to collectivization of agriculture rather than crop failure, while in Czechoslovakia under post-World War II communism, planning the socialist diet failed due to supply limitations. Modern examples of urban food habits, such as fast-food consumption, or the increase in body weights leading towards obesity, fall outside the scope of this book. For this, have a look on previous ICREFH symposia, such as ICREFH VII, which dealt with eating out in Europe and noted in some detail the dramatic changes in urban food habits in the second-half of the twentieth century, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s.⁹

⁹ Jacobs and Scholliers, 2003.

A Feeding the Multitude

The burgeoning urban markets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries presented food producers with new opportunities. An issue here is scale and intensity because one would expect a different functional response at the lower end of the urban hierarchy from that in the largest of cities, so recognizing regional difference is an important element in ICREFH’s deliberations, as is the identification of temporal disjuncture in the pace of change between cities and between nations. As conurbations and urban-industrial fields developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was often integrated hierarchies of marketing potential that mattered more rather than single settlements and their consumers. The theme of feeding cities is of course familiar in food history but there is room in the literature for two developments.

First, we are in need of the type of overview paper written here by Hans Jürgen Teuteberg. He sets the scene in general terms for the rest of this book with the German-speaking part of middle Europe in mind, and his overview explains how the web of modern production, processing, and retailing systems gradually replaced the traditional guild restrictions on commerce. It is interesting to note that urban food systems here evolved structurally at a rather different pace to, say, the United Kingdom. Although German scientists and food technologists were in the forefront of nutritional theory and manufacturing processes, the food retailing environment seems to have been constrained in its development before the mid-nineteenth century and was therefore slow to modernize.

Peter Atkins suggests that one answer to the question of regional disparities may be to engage with the comparative history of superficially similar metropolises, such as London and Paris, in order to tease out the factors that were in common and the divergent paths that followed. The mid-nineteenth century was a hinge point in the urban experience of both countries, with powerful forces bearing upon their ability to make available sufficient food of a reasonable quality in their capital cities. Some variations of context are revealed on both the supply and demand sides, with the result that these two world cities went into the second half of the nineteenth century with subtly different strategies for ‘feeding modernity’.

The contribution by Corinna Treitel reviews the career and ideas of the German physiologist, Max Rubner. Although less well-known than Liebig and Voit, he nevertheless contributed to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century debate about the diet of the urban working class. Professor Treitel argues that Rubner had a lasting impact upon consumers’ understanding of their diet, for instance through the standard value of the calorie. Building on the work of Liebig and Voit, he saw nutrition as a social question and suggested that the foodways of the urban working class were dangerously irrational, to the point of mass chronic undernutrition. However, Rubner could not persuade the Imperial German government to reduce the high protein allowance, conventionally regarded as essential for adult males, in favour of more emphasis on the energy available from cereals. In consequence, during World War I, all of the combatant nations maintained high-energy, high-protein rations for their armed services and looked to their civilians to limit their food consumption.¹⁰ It has been claimed that Britain’s Corn Production Act, 1917, by encouraging cereal production from grasslands and permanent pasture, achieved a change in nutrition policy that Germany failed to make: shortages and food queues in London in the winter of 1917–18 did not lead to the collapse of morale that occurred in Berlin and other German and Austrian cities.¹¹

¹⁰ For Italy, see Dentoni, 1994 and 2003. ¹¹ Signs of malnutrition appeared amongst children in German towns as early as 1915. See Eltzbacher, cited in Corinna Treitel’s chapter.

Second, there is a need for more research on the links between food supply and the changing diets of urban dwellers. This addresses the issue of prime cause: the respective weight in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Food and the City
• PART A FEEDING THE MULTITUDE
• PART B FOOD REGULATION
• PART C FOOD INNOVATIONS – THE PRODUCT PERSPECTIVE
• PART D EATING FASHIONS – THE CONSUMER PERSPECTIVE
• Index