Background
The history of global food begins well before the twentieth century. Trade in food was going on before historical records in the ancient world and documented today mainly by archaeological evidence. Olive oil and wheat and other grains, for instance, were transported across the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Livestock were driven hundreds of miles to markets. Dried meats, fish, and fruits traded across regions, before there were mathematics and written languages to account for them. But such global foods, if we may so call them, did not comprise the majority of diets; diets of the ordinary family were filled with a few, simple, local foods, raised near by consumers.
The great transformation in food, that brought global foods to parity or to dominate local diets, came in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Three great revolutions dramatically changed the diets of ordinary folk--the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the transportation and information revolution. At the end of the eighteen century, ordinary folk in Europe and America ate diets hardly better in quantity and quality than the diets of slaves. By the end of the nineteenth century, working class families ate a wide variety of nutritious foods. Most of these new foods were global foods.
Some of the demand for global food was generated by the great emigration from Europe to America and from the Chinese diaspora; emigrants wanted the foods of their homelands.
Clam seller in Mulberry Bend, N.Y. c. 1900. Byron (Firm: New York, N.Y.), photographer. From the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920 Collection, American Memory Collection, Library of Congress.
What made global foods possible? The first revolution was a great increase in food variety and food production made possible by the agricultural revolution. The agriculture revolution involved more than mechanization. It involved scientific hybridization that brought cultivation of new edible foods. It involved new methods of planting and harvest, beginning with the slave plantation and culminating in the commercial, mechanized corporately-organized farm--that is, agribusiness--of the late nineteenth century. The sugar slave plantation made sugar cheap enough for its incorporation in everyday diets. Typical of mechanized agribusiness at the middle of the nineteenth century was the California wheat farm of the central valley; while the citrus industry of Southern California at the end of the nineteenth century (think "Sunkist" oranges) represented the vertically integrated agribusiness. European and American capital financed huge industrial farm enterprises all over the world: English and French investment in tea plantations in India and southeast Asia, English investment in citrus plantations in Southern California, English and French investment in sugar plantations, cattle ranches, and wheat farms in South America, in cattle and sheep ranches in Australia and New Zealand. A host of new foods flowed in great quantities from around the world back to the cities of American, Britain, and the Continent.
The second great revolution was the industrial revolution. To buy food products from around the world, consumers don't need money; not directly. Money is just the medium of exchange. They need products--physical things they can sell for money. Factory production made enough products (cotton cloth, cigarettes, steel, shoes, clocks, brooms, revolvers, whatever!), cheap enough in the market, a "surplus" of products, to be precise, that the products could be shipped and sold abroad to earn the money to purchase food abroad. To put it differently, the industrial revolution generated sufficient wealth that a poor country like England could afford to buy enough food and sell it cheaply enough that the ordinary British, Irish, and Scot factory hand could buy a large, nutritious diet.
The third revolution was the transportation and information revolution. Clipper ships, steam ships, steam railroads, and the telegraph made national and international--in a word, global--markets possible. Expansion of markets brought cheaper prices.
Without question, in hindsight, some of the advances in industrialization of food were not to the long-term nutrition advantage of consumers. Cheap sugar, along with salt, was added to canned foods, once factory canning technologies and pasteurization were invented in the mid-nineteenth century. There were some protests against factory food, but most consumers embraced it with enthusiasm.
Refined, crystallized, cane sugar, for instance, was one of the most factory-processed products of the new factory system. A mid-nineteenth century British encyclopedia on technology devoted its longest article to sugar refining; it was the industrial, technological pride of the British empire. The issue of the nutritional and safety quality of global and industrial foods is an issue that we can set aside for the moment. For the clear evidence is that global foods, despite problems we now, in hindsight, recognize, provided an enormous jump in the nutrition and quality of the diets of the mass of consumers in America and the West. As the West urbanized, the jump in diet quality increased more.
Evidence for Dietary Improvement
The claim for improvement of diet due to global foods is not a matter of conjecture. We have a great deal of hard evidence of the improvement in the diet of ordinary Americans and Europeans over the course of the nineteenth century. The evidence is extensive surveys done by reformers of agriculture, rural life, and of the urban poor. By the mid-nineteenth century, new social science and academic professions also carefully studied the living conditions, including diets, of ordinary people.
Late Eighteenth Century Diets
What do these surveys show? Let's start by looking at the diets of rural English households, at a time when most English people lived in the countryside, before factories drew them into cities.
Over the course of nearly twenty years, an English minister sent questionnaires to ministers and parish keepers of the poor to query families about their household budgets, how much they spent (or obtained in monetary equivalents) on rent, goods, and food. The correspondents tried to verify the testimony of interviewees by checking with store owners and local gentry. (Donald Davies, Labourers in Husbandry [Bath, printed by R. Cruttwell, for G. G. and J. Robinson, Pater-Noster-Row, London, 1795], pp. 192-195. © Reprint. Fairfield, New Jersey: Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers, 1977.) Another survey was conducted by Sir Frederic Eden in the 1790s. (Sir Frederic Eden, State of the Poor [London: Printed by J. Davis, 1797.] Let see what some of these budgets of the common folk were like.
Food categories included:
- bread and flour;
- yeast and salt;
- bacon or other meat;
- tea, sugar, butter, cream;
- cheese;
- beer;
- potatoes and barley.
Notice what foods are not included. No vegetables other than potato. No milk. No beef. No eggs. No fruit. No game meats. No fish. Surveying six families in the parish of Antony in Cornwall, a minister stated that none of the families purchased or consumed cheese or beer. Why? Too expensive. Their diets consisted of bread, potatoes, occasional bacon, seldom tea or sugar, butter, or cream, never cheese or beer. That's largely it.
The correspondent of Crawley Parish in Hampshire, who surveyed six households, explains that a family of six to eight persons would buy about 5 half-peck loaves of bread a week. A half-peck loaf was roughly the equivalent of two loaves of commercial bread today. So the family of six lived consumed about ten loaves of bread a week.
Sir Frederic Eden found in a survey of 5 families in Bedfordshire that they kept gardens and several raised a pig. The garden would provide in season a few vegetables and some of their own potatoes. Pigs were too valuable for personal consumption; the family would probably sell the pig to a village butcher to get coin to buy necessities, like clothes.
Researchers occasionally found a family that kept a few hens, which meant that they might consume a few eggs a week.
A survey in Surrey of six families found that four of the six brewed barley to make beer. They drank beer and water; no milk.
Reverend Romaine measured the consumption of tea by four families in Berkshire. They consumed on the average, in a week, 2 ounces of tea and 1/2 pound of butter in their diets. Three of these families had 5 to 8 family members; one had three members.
It is revealing of the poor diets of the ordinary English family that the reformers argued over the value of oatmeal cereal. Oatmeal was not widely consumed; but oatmeal was recognized by reformers as a nutritious food. The reason that oatmeal was not more widely consumed was not its price; it was cheap. The reason was the oatmeal cooked in water was not delicious. Oatmeal cereal cooked in milk was a wholly different meal and was delicious; but the ordinary English family could not afford to buy the milk to cook oatmeal.
Late Nineteenth Century Diets
By the early twentieth century, the diets of English families, most of whom were now living in cities, had greatly improved. England was concerned about the diets of its citizens as a matter of state security. The nation was engaged in an economic and military race with France and Germany and it needed a healthy workforce. So the state commissioned an enormous survey of diets in England, France, and Germany. ("[Tables] Average Weekly Cost and Quantity of Certain Articles of Food Consumed by Urban Workmen's Families in 1904," Board of Trade, Report, United Kingdom (London: Printed for His Majesty's Stationary Office, By Darling & Son, Ltd., 34-40, Bacon Street, E., 1908), © 1908 Crown Copyright, United Kingdom.)
Look at the list of foods they found the urban working family consumed:
- Bread
- Meats (beef, pork, lamb, chicken, rabbit, tinned meats, sheep's head, tripe, fish)
- Bacon
- Fresh Milk
- Cheese
- Butter
- Potatoes
- Vegetables and Fruit
- Raisins and Currants
- Rice, Tapioca, Oatmeal
- Tea, Coffee, Cocoa
- Sugar
- Jams, Marmalade, Treacle, Syrups
- Pickles, Condiments
Not only were families consuming these foods, they were consuming them in quantities. 30 pounds of bread, 5 pounds of meat, 1 pound of bacon, 7-12 pints of milk, 2/3ds to 1 pound of cheese, 15-20 pounds of potatoes, a half-pound of tea, a quarter pound of coffee, a half-pound of raisins and currents. Per week.
[Below] Broad St. lunch carts, New York, N.Y., c. 1906. (Selling frankfurters, according to the signs.) Photograph from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920, Collection, American Memory Collection, Library of Congress.
Where did the foods come from? Meats from South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa. Vegetables and fruit from the US (especially apples and oranges), England, and the Continent. Raisins from Asia. Rice and tapioca from Asia. Tea, coffee, and cocoa from India, Asia, and Africa. Sugar from the Caribbean. These were global commodities.
Similar diets were found in France and Germany and the United States by an enormous number of scientific surveys. If anything, working class diets in France were even better--a testament to France's better climate and, as with England, its colonies and world-wide trade. By the early twentieth century, a dietary revolution had occurred in the Western industrial countries. The dietary revolution was the product of the three great revolutions--agriculture, industry, transportation and information--we have already discussed. It greatly raised the standard of living of the mass citizenry of each country and constitutes one of the great achievements of the nineteenth century.
It was not the end of the revolution, of course. The revolution of globalization of food continues today. Go to your supermarket and look around. What happened in the nineteenth century was the foundation for what you find in your supermarket.
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