Giorgio Pedrocco
Food Economy and Population Growth in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Radical solutions to the need to provide European populations with food began to emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alongside the rapid process of industrialization, which developed in England and other parts of western Europe. Industrial growth was based on the factory system and was accompanied by a process of urbanization, with a massive migration of population from the country to towns. The “reproduction cost” of the new urban workforce, however, was very high, owing to the difficulty of supplying food to all towns—not only industrial centers but also commercial ones.
The same period witnessed parallel growth in overall population that contributed, in those areas undergoing industrialization, to upsetting even further the already difficult balance between food supplies and population as well as between the geographical distribution of food supplies and the territorial distribution of population. The result was that living conditions for the urban working classes became particularly harsh. Food supplies were scarce and expensive, primarily because of the inadequate distribution system in the large cities. Markets and slaughterhouses were unable to absorb the increased volume of trade created by increased consumption.
It is no accident that Malthusian theories enjoyed considerable success at this time. These theories dramatized imbalances between population growth and increases in food supplies and proposed preventing both population growth and improvements in living conditions in order to avert ruinous social unrest.
The economic anxieties and political problems that emerged from this situation encouraged the transformation of the productive system in Europe. During this period, as a result of complex contractual and technological mechanisms, the agricultural sector managed to increase the volume of production of its most important food products from cereals to meat. The period also saw the birth of a new industrial sector: food processing. This developed innovative systems for the production and conservation of foodstuffs that would allow a decrease in production costs, more efficient marketing, and, finally, more rational distribution.
The Food Industry and a World Food Economy
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the growing needs of the European food markets, as a result of population growth and urbanization, revealed the basic incapacity of European agriculture to fulfil them—despite increases in production during the previous century to meet the demands of the new town dwellers.
The role of colonial and ex-colonial economies became increasingly important, since their land resources, unlike those of Europe, seemed inexhaustible. Bringing vast new areas of land into cultivation in order to provide the European market with food—especially meat and cereals—at prices markedly below those in Europe had become the most significant aspect of the world economy by the end of the nineteenth century. This revolution in food supplies was also the result of rapid new rail and sea links, which made it possible to connect urban centers with areas of production outside Europe.
The arrival of American and Russian cereals in the 1880s obliged European agriculture to transform its production, abandoning uneconomical grain cultivation in favor of more profitable activities linked to food (vineyards and livestock raising) and manufacturing (cotton, linen, and tobacco). Western Europe began to send its manufactured goods in the opposite direction, compensating for food imports in their balance of payments.
The massive development of the food industry, particularly of beef and on-the-spot butchering, made it necessary to invent ways of processing and preserving produce. This problem had always existed, and many solutions had been found through the centuries. It now became necessary to transform these traditional preservation techniques into industrial practices. In Europe especially, efforts were also made to develop packaging systems for the most common foodstuffs, from bread to wine, in order to increase productivity.
The nineteenth century was marked by important developments in the food industry, above all in the preserving and refrigeration sectors. The former enabled meat and vegetables to be kept for long periods of time, while the latter was mainly concerned with the short- and medium-term preservation of the most valued animal products from fish to beef and pork.
Bread and Wine
The first sector to be transformed was that of the staples bread and wine. For centuries these had provided the daily sustenance of the urban and rural lower classes, with other foods—such as beef and pork—being eaten only on special occasions such as feast days and festivals.
MILLS AND OVENS From ancient times, bread-making had been shared between the baker’s oven and that of the home. Bakers’ guilds operated in the towns; in the country, women met their families’ needs by baking enough bread for up to a month in their own ovens.
Before bread could be made, the grain had to be ground into flour. From the Middle Ages on, this was done outside the home in both the country and the town. The peasant’s practice of taking small amounts of grain to the mill to be ground was linked to the small size and large number of traditional mills, whose stones were moved, according to local conditions, by water or wind. Because mills had to be built near water or in exposed areas, they were often located in inaccessible or peripheral areas.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, mills were transformed by a series of innovations increasing the quantity and quality of the flour that could be obtained from grain. These innovations radically changed the structure of mills. Traditional sources of energy were now replaced by steam-driven machinery that made it possible to work throughout the year. Millstones were replaced by a system based on iron rollers. In order to store the large amounts of grain necessary to satisfy the productive capacity of these new mills, silos in various shapes and sizes were built.
At the same time, bread-making—the most common and widespread of all activities—was one of the first to be subjected to mechanization. Efforts were made to mechanize the tiresome task of kneading the dough and then baking it, which represented a bottleneck in the productive cycle. However, the complexity of producing dough continued to create problems. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century attempts to substitute the expertise of the baker’s hands in the kneading process produced dubious results. It was only in 1925 that a mixer capable of being used with all kinds of flour became competitive with manual labor. As for baking, a technique that had been developed in other areas of industry was applied: the solid fuels that had previously been used inside the oven itself were replaced by hot air.
VINEYARDS AND CELLARS Wine was the other irreplaceable element in the rural and urban diet. In the course of the nineteenth century, consumption increased considerably, despite the epidemics of blight that struck European vineyards, the only vineyards able to meet the needs of the international market. This increase in consumption confronted the centuries-old problem of preserving wine, which, after about a year, turned into vinegar.
Here, too, it was necessary to move from a fragmented rural productive system to a more articulated industrial one that distinguished grape-growing from winemaking. While cultivation and harvesting necessarily remained in the hands of the rural population, winemaking became a separate industry that was organized into a factory system during the nineteenth century, radically changing an ancient and traditional activity.
In order to satisfy mass demand, the industrialization of winemaking required new buildings. Neither the peasants’ cellars nor the larger underground vaults of landowners were adequate. The original site of production—the cellar—was to lose its central role when the introduction of chemical additives into the productive process and the ability to regulate temperatures within buildings made it possible to mass-produce wine anywhere.
As a result of technical and scientific advances in the productive phases, from crushing to fermentation and aging, the winemaking cycle became more complex and exact. Two factors—chemistry and mechanics—contributed to transforming the process of winemaking into a truly industrial one and replacing many practices that had governed it, almost unchanged, for centuries.
Mechanization entered the early phases of the cycle. Crusher-stemmers and presses operated by steam rather than hand had the primary aim of reducing the labor force. Thanks to these machines, the task of pressing the grapes was shifted from the peasants to the factories. Machines could also select and classify the grapes more carefully in order to produce a more clearly defined range of wines. Chemical applications were introduced in the later phases of the cycle to stabilize the wine, which helped preserve it and facilitated its transport and marketing. A completely new operation—pasteurization—was introduced to keep the wine from turning into vinegar. In this process, developed by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s, the wine was heated in vats to a temperature of 60 degrees Centigrade (140 degrees Fahrenheit) in order to destroy all traces of colonies of microorganisms—in particular, Mycoderma aceti and Mycoderma vini. The operation rapidly brought the wine to the right temperature without damaging its characteristics.
Racking—the ancient technique of separating the wine from the lees in order to complete fermentation—was accelerated by the introduction of pumps, which made it easier to transfer wine from one barrel to another. At this stage, sodium bisulfite was added to stabilize the wine.
With the storing of wine in enormous vats, where it was aged and clarified through a slow process of sedimentation, the modern industrial plant soon replaced the traditional cellar. Producers could meet the needs of the market even in bad years by drawing on reserves. They could also guarantee that the wine maintained its “typical” features, ensuring a more consolidated relationship with the market.
The buildings that housed the new industry were large enough to provide easy access for workers and transport. They also allowed for the storage of huge quantities of wine during the aging process. The massive barrels used in this process were later replaced by cement vats lined with glass; here the wine was stored until it could be put on the market.
The Problem of Food Preservation
Industrial and commercial urban society could not be satisfied simply by the ready availability of bread and wine. Other foods, previously reserved for the upper classes, therefore had to be made accessible—albeit to a lesser extent—to the lower classes. Numerous attempts were made to provide traditionally luxury goods like meat and fish at low prices, leading to the birth of the preserving industry.
HALTING DECOMPOSITION IN ORGANIC SUBSTANCES All scientific attempts to transform preserving from a traditional activity to an industrial process depended on a better understanding of decomposition. All edible vegetable or animal organisms immediately begin to ferment and then decay as soon as they are harvested or killed. Throughout the eighteenth century, much debate had centered on whether this process was the result of “spontaneous generation” or whether it was caused by spores and ovulation. It had been observed that enzyme activity, on the one hand, and infection, on the other, were blocked by processes involving cold and heat, making it possible to preserve luxury foods on a small scale.
The French scientist Denis Papin experimented, around the turn of the eighteenth century, with preservation. He cooked and preserved foods in hermetically sealed containers or placed them raw in a sugar solution inside hermetically sealed glass jars. When Papin informed Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz of his discoveries, the German philosopher and scientist became the first person to suggest using food preserved in this way for soldiers’ rations.
A French pastry chef, Nicolas Appert, was the first person to conceive of bottling food to preserve it for relatively long periods and then to put the idea into practice. It is not known whether he was aware of Papin’s work or whether he had confronted the problem of food preservation from scratch. He ran a confiserie in Paris from 1789 to 1795, and it was probably during this period that he encountered the problems of preserving food and the empirical methods that were then adopted to solve them. He soon developed a method that anticipated Pasteur’s ideas and techniques, based on sterilizing food in order to kill living microorganisms, les ferments, and their spores. Appert intuitively understood the destructive action of heat on ferments that modified the quality of vegetable and animal substances. Freeing the food of its ferments by heating it sufficiently, placing it in a hermetically sealed jar, and then immersing the jar in boiling water effectively stopped the process of decomposition. Once the jar cooled, the preserved food lasted for years.
Appert started to put his discoveries into practice on an industrial scale, setting up a food-preserving factory in 1804 at Massy and employing fifty workers. Chunks of cooked meat were placed into tin cans, meat stock was added, and the can was hermetically sealed with a soldered top. The cans were then placed into vats of boiling water for different lengths of time according to the size of the can. The cans were then cooled and kept under observation in environments of 30 degrees Centigrade (86 degrees Fahrenheit). If the can swelled (a sign that the process had not been successful), it was discarded. Those cans that showed no change in volume were put on the market.
The first to appreciate Appert’s experiments were the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte, which could be provided with autonomous rations on their many campaigns, and naval crews, who were less exposed to shortages of food supplies during risky transatlantic crossings. The French navy, which directly tested these new products, was particularly impressed.
Some decades later, Pasteur formulated his theory of spores, laying the scientific foundations for a correct interpretation of Appert’s methods, and developed the theory and laws of food sterilization. The process known as pasteurization is now used throughout the food-processing industry, from milk to wine.
THE EUROPEAN FOOD-PRESERVING INDUSTRY Strikingly, Appert’s discoveries did not initiallly lead to the establishment of a food-preserving industry in his own country because of France’s predominantly agricultural character—and the fact that Paris and the industrialized northern regions could obtain fruit and vegetable supplies almost all year round from the southern regions as well as from French colonies in North Africa. It was only after 1900 that small companies were established.
The industry had its inception in Braunschweig in Lower Saxony. In 1830 Baron Wilhelm Eberhard Anton von Campen returned from a diplomatic mission in France, where he had learned about Appert’s discoveries. He tried to apply the method to game, succeeding after a few attempts. Around 1840 two local tinsmiths, Pillman and Daubert, began to experiment by preserving asparagus, which grew on the city’s outskirts. They devoted part of their workshop to the new activity, which developed rapidly.
In the German port town of Lübeck, the C. C. Hahn food-preserving factory opened in 1848. Once again Appert had provided the inspiration. After Hahn had seen Appert’s preserves in France, he realized their importance in providing food supplies for ships and, after a number of unsuccessful attempts, managed to make his own. By mid-century, the Hahn family was exporting preserved vegetables, primarily asparagus and peas, to Russia and Finland.
The German food-preserving industry thus began in Braunschweig and Lübeck, and it was in these towns that a parallel industry developed—supplying materials to the new food-processing industry, such as tin for canning and packaging materials. The presence of the food industry in Braunschweig also encouraged agriculture. Asparagus cultivation developed rapidly to provide the raw material.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, food-preserving factories grew up in other German regions, numbering 224 by 1906. This encouraged the development in the 1920s and 1930s of specialized crops, mainly in Saxony and Brandenburg, where, in 1938, around 50,000 acres were devoted to asparagus, French beans, peas, and cucumbers. Innovations in agricultural labor also appeared. Modern machines were used for planting and harvesting vegetables, leading to economies in labor costs. Close links thus developed between the agricultural and food-preserving industries.
In nineteenth-century Italy, most vegetable and pulse preservation was in the hands of the Turin-based Società Anonima di Esportazione Agricola Cirio. Francesco Cirio was sometimes amusingly called “the best-known Italian abroad” because of the factory he had set up, which made it possible to export vast quantities of fruit and vegetables to countries where the climate prevented their cultivation.
Cirio’s company was primarily concerned with the commercialization of preserved foods. He was the first to export large quantities of agricultural produce from the south to the north of Europe. Thanks to the collaboration of the Società delle Ferrovie dell’alta Italia, he created a network of warehouses near the railway stations from which his refrigerated carriages departed. In 1885 he founded his company with the backing of banks, financiers, and politicians.
His preserving activities took second place. In 1868 the Cirio pea-canning factory in Borgo Dora in Turin processed only 5,000 kilograms of peas and a few dozen kilograms of preserved black truffles. In the 1870s production increased, reaching a total of one million kilograms of canned peas, asparagus, artichokes, peaches, and pears.
Both in Europe and the United States, the canned milk industry developed alongside that of meat and vegetable products. Fresh milk quickly went sour and became a health hazard owing to the bacteria it contained. In England, the railway system, along with the introduction of water refrigeration and pasteurization, made it possible to set up an efficient distribution system for milk without altering its flavor or removing the cream.
To guarantee longer life and to eliminate health risks, condensed milk was developed. By the end of the nineteenth century, numerous large companies were satisfying the needs of the international market for this product, using a system designed by Malbec in 1827.
In the 1880s, the Swiss J. B. Meyenberg discovered that condensed milk lasted even longer if a method derived from Appert was adopted. This involved sterilizing the milk in a sealed container in a pressure cooker until it reached a temperature of 105–120 degrees Centigrade (221–248 degrees Fahrenheit) in order to eliminate all the spores that could trigger acid fermentation.
The largest European milk-processing factories were in central Europe, Switzerland, and Germany, while the biggest market was in England. In 1867 a German chemist living in Vevey, Switzerland, named Henry Nestlé developed a milk-based baby food. In 1905 the Nestlé and Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company was founded; soon the company had seventeen plants throughout Europe and one in the United States.
THE UNITED STATES: MASS INDUSTRY AND THE FOOD BUSINESS The pioneer of American food processing was William Underwood, who emigrated from England in 1817. He used the experience he had acquired in food preservation to open a small workshop in Boston, where he preserved fruit and cucumbers and produced bottled sauces. During the next thirty years, only a handful of people in various parts of the country followed Underwood’s example, preserving mostly fruits and vegetables.
The situation changed in 1860 in New York, when Gail Borden built the first factory for canned milk after numerous experiments and setbacks. Although the milk was not particularly good, it became very popular—as did other preserved products—when the Civil War broke out in 1861. From that moment, production rapidly expanded.
Livestock-raising became increasingly important in the United States and, in the first half of the nineteenth century, butchering was concentrated in massive slaughterhouses in Cincinnati. With the development of railways in the second half of the century, this activity moved to Chicago. These slaughterhouses were important for two reasons. They were directly linked to the corned beef industry that operated in close proximity, and they developed a mechanized butchering process involving division of labor and a nonstop production line. The complicated work of butchery was divided into numerous small operations entrusted to individual workers along a “disassembly line” of animal carcasses.
From 1860 on, in states such as Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and California, large numbers of food-preserving factories sprang up to provide soldiers with food during the Civil War. At the end of the war, they found a new market in the urban centers, swollen by massive migration from southern and central Europe.
Economic development in the second half of the nineteenth century was further stimulated when mass production grew up alongside mass marketing. In only a few decades, thanks to contributions from scientists and technicians, new methods of fruit and vegetable cultivation were developed, and the productivity of the food industry was dramatically increased with the introduction of completely automated machinery. All this required hefty capital investment in factories and machines. Furthermore, the profitability of mass production depended on rapid processing of materials within the productive unit and equally rapid marketing.
The starting point for American power was the agricultural depression in Europe in 1873. Massive exports of foodstuffs—both fresh and processed—produced a balance of payments that was decidedly favorable to the United States.
Three canning companies, Campbell, Heinz, and Borden, began to concentrate their retailing energies on advertising (rather than on traveling salesmen) and on international marketing networks. This strategy enabled them to sell their products with greater continuity. At the same time, large networks purchased raw materials to keep factories supplied on a regular basis.
Preserving soon expanded from meat to include a whole range of other foods: milk and other dairy products, vegetables (primarily tomatoes but also asparagus, French beans, and cauliflower), and pulses (peas and beans).
Once the agricultural crisis was resolved, European governments began to erect protectionist tariffs and to organize the exploitation of other areas, such as Russia, Argentina, and India, where the prices of cereals and livestock could compete with those in the United States.
THE REFRIGERATION CHAIN The use of snow and ice as natural preserving agents goes back to ancient times. The homes of the rich contained wine cellars and deeper underground spaces where ice and foodstuffs could be kept. Each town or village had one or more icehouses—buried structures in which the ice collected during the winter was stored for later use to preserve meat, fish, and vegetables.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, icehouses continued to offer the only solution to the problem of maintaining food at low temperatures. As the demand for ice and preserved foods increased, so did the dimensions of these structures. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, icehouses were not that different from those in use centuries before, despite increasingly refined insulating systems designed to slow down the inevitable melting of the ice.
To meet the growing demand for ice, techniques developed to produce the low temperatures required for making ice by artificial means. These techniques involved the compression and expansion of certain gases. The first refrigerator to be based on the compression and expansion of air, driven by a steam engine, was patented in 1851 in the United States by John Gorrie. It was intended to provide refreshment in hospital wards. Other refrigerators were developed in France, England, and the United States. The turning point came two decades later when Charles Tellier, an engineer and builder of meat refrigerators, managed to install them on a boat called the Frigorifique. In 105 days he transported meat butchered in Buenos Aires to France. This voyage marked the birth of great commercial interest in the refrigeration chain, which developed very rapidly, especially in the United States. This technique became by far the most widely used for transporting food from outside Europe to the most important European cities. “Today, fresh meat is transported from America and as far away as New Zealand in ships with holds artificially chilled by highly ingenious instruments,” commented Mantegazza only a few years after Tellier’s first attempts to carry butchered meat on long transatlantic voyages.
Other ships were equipped with refrigeration to make the first crossings from Australia, Argentina, and the United States to France and England. In the former countries, livestock-raising was highly developed and meat prices were therefore very low. By 1910, the trade in butchered meat from outside Europe was worth between 8 billion and 10 billion French francs.
Despite a certain reluctance on the part of the public to eat preserved food, the food-processing industry had taken off and remains an effective weapon against the Malthusian fears of the late eighteenth century.
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