An Edible History of Humanity

by Tom Standage

  The American forces also suffered from supply problems of their own, but they had the advantage of being on familiar territory, and could draw manpower and supplies from the country in a way the British could not. As George Washington, the commander in chief of the American forces, remarked shortly afterward, “It will not be believed that such a force as Great Britain has employed for eight years in this Country could be baffled in their plan . . . by numbers infinitely less, composed of men sometimes half starved; always in rags, without pay, and experiencing, at times, every species of distress which human nature is capable of undergoing.” The British failure to provide adequate food supplies to its troops was not the only cause of its defeat, and of America’s subsequent independence. But it was a very significant one. Logistical considerations alone do not determine the outcome of military conflicts, but unless an army is properly fed, it cannot get to the battlefield in the first place. Adequate food is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for victory. As the Duke of Wellington put it: “To gain your [objectives] you must feed.”

  “AN ARMY MARCHES ON ITS STOMACH”

  In the early hours of October 5, 1795, a promising young artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte was put in charge of the forces defending the French government, known as the National Convention. It had been elected in 1792, in the wake of the French Revolution that had overthrown the monarchy, but there were still large numbers of royalist sympathizers in the country. An army of thirty thousand royalists was now advancing on the Tuileries Palace in Paris, where the convention’s members had taken refuge. Napoleon immediately sent a cavalry officer to fetch forty cannons and their crews, and by dawn he had positioned them carefully in the streets around the palace and had them loaded with grapeshot. His defending forces were outnumbered six to one, and at one point Napoleon had his horse shot out from under him as he directed his men. When the royalist columns launched their main attack, the defending troops managed to channel them toward the main bank of guns, positioned in front of a church. Napoleon gave the order to fire, and the cannons cut down the royalist troops with devastating effectiveness, causing the survivors to turn and flee. “As usual I did not receive a scratch. I could not be happier,” Napoleon wrote to his brother Joseph afterward. It was to prove a turning point in his career.

  A few days later General Paul Barras, who had delegated the defense of the government to Napoleon, appeared with him and other officers before the convention’s members, who wanted to express their thanks. Without warning one of the politicians climbed up to the dais to speak, and instead of thanking Barras, he declared that the hero of the hour had in fact been “General Bonaparte, who had only that morning in which to station his cannon so cleverly.” Napoleon instantly became a celebrity, applauded whenever he appeared in public, and he was rewarded soon afterward with the command of the French forces in Italy. In the months that followed he waged a rapid and brutal campaign against the Austrians, bringing most of northern Italy under French control. Napoleon even dictated the terms of the peace with the Austrians, despite lacking the formal authority to do so. He became a national hero in France and used his success on the battlefield to win political influence in Paris, paving the way for his seizure of power in 1799. After his Italian campaign one French general even described him as “a new Alexander the Great.”

  This was in fact quite an accurate description, because one of the main things that distinguished Napoleon from other generals of his day, and shaped the course of his career, was the readoption of Alexander’s minimalist approach to logistics. As a French general, the Comte de Guibert, had pointed out in the 1770s, armies of the period had become terribly reliant on their cumbersome supply systems and depots, or magazines. He suggested that they ought to be more mobile, travel light, and live off the country. Guibert also observed that relying on standing armies of professional soldiers meant that most ordinary people were untrained in the use of arms. He predicted that the first European nation to develop a “vigorous citizen soldiery” would triumph over the others. In the event his ideas prevailed, but not because of a deliberate program of military reform. Instead the French Revolution in 1789 resulted in the collapse of the old supply system and forced French soldiers fighting in the wars that followed to fend for themselves.

  Reliance on living off the land began as a necessity, but the French army soon developed it into an organized system of requisitioning and amassing food, fodder, and other supplies. As Napoleon himself explained to one of his generals: “It is up to the commanding generals to obtain their provender from the territories through which they pass.” Individual companies would send out eight or ten men under the command of a corporal or sergeant, for as little as a day or as a long as a week. These foraging parties would spread out behind the vanguard of the advancing army and requisition food from nearby villages and farms, sometimes paying for it with gold, but more often with an assignat, or receipt, that could in theory be presented for reimbursement once hostilities had ended. (The expression “as worthless as an assignat” indicates how rarely this happened in practice.) The foragers would then return to their companies to distribute what they had collected, with the food often being made into a stew or soup. This resulted in much less waste than the disorganized pillaging of the past, and French soldiers quickly became experts at finding hidden stores and evaluating how much food was available in a given area. “The inhabitants had buried everything underground in the forests and in their houses,” observed one French soldier of the time. “After much searching we discovered their hiding places. By sounding with the butt ends of our guns we found provisions of all sorts.”

  All this made French armies extremely agile; they needed around one eighth of the number of wagons used by other armies of the time, and were capable of marching fifty miles per day, at least for a day or two. Greater mobility dovetailed neatly with Napoleon’s military strategy, encapsulated in the maxim “divide for foraging, concentrate for fighting.” His preferred approach was to split up his forces, spreading them out over a wide front to ensure each fast-moving corps had its own area in which to forage, and then suddenly concentrating his troops to force the enemy into a decisive battle. The result was a stunning series of French victories that gave the French army under Napoleon a fearsome reputation.

  Napoleon did not do away with traditional supply systems altogether, however. When preparing for a campaign he would have large depots prepared within friendly territory, to provide supplies for his troops as they crossed the border. Soldiers carried a few days’ worth of supplies, usually in the form of bread or biscuits, for use when foraging could not provide enough food, or when the enemy was nearby and the French forces were concentrated. As Napoleon himself observed, “the method of feeding on the march becomes impracticable when many troops are concentrated.”

  The best example of how all this worked came in the autumn of 1805, in the campaign that culminated in the battle of Austerlitz. Having amassed a large army in northern France with the intention of invading Britain, Napoleon instead found himself threatened by Britain’s allies, Austria and Russia, and ordered his troops to head east through France. Mayors of towns along the way, two or three days apart, were asked to provide provisions for distribution to the soldiers as they passed through. Meanwhile, Napoleon ordered 500,000 biscuit rations to be prepared in cities along the Rhine. A month after being mobilized, Napoleon’s 200,000 troops crossed the Rhine, spread over a front more than one hundred miles across. Each corps was instructed to live off the country to its left, requisitioning supplies from the local people and issuing receipts in the standard French way. Rec-ords show just how much food the French were able to extract, even from small towns. The German city of Heilbronn, with a population of around 15,000, produced 85,000 bread rations, 11 tons of salt, 3,600 bushels of hay, 6,000 sacks of oats, 5,000 pints of wine, 800 bushels of straw, and 100 wagons to carry what was not immediately consumed. The city of Hall, with only 8,000 inhabitants, produced 60,000
bread rations, 70 oxen, 4,000 pints of wine and 100,000 bundles of hay and straw. It helped that the French campaign occurred at harvest time, which meant more supplies were available than at any other time of year. Preparing and delivering supplies for such a large army using depots and wagon trains alone, in the eighteenth-century style, would have taken months to organize and would have prevented the army from moving so quickly.

  Napoleon’s aim was to defeat the Austrian army in the Danube region before the Russians arrived to reinforce it. He accomplished this with the celebrated “Ulm maneuver”: Cavalry attacking from the west distracted the Austrian army while the main French force swiftly marched around it, encircling the Austrians and forcing them to surrender. Having taken care of the Austrians, Napoleon then set off in pursuit of the Russian army. This meant traveling through wooded country where there was little food to be had, so Napoleon issued his men with eight days’ rations in bread and biscuits, gathered from the region around Ulm. This sustained his army until it reached richer territory to the east, where it could once again make requisitions; several Austrian depots were also captured. Once Vienna, the Austrian capital, had been taken it could be used as a supply depot, providing vast amounts of food and fodder: 33 tons of bread, 11 tons of meat, 90 tons of oats, 125 tons of hay, and 375 buckets of wine were requisitioned on one day alone. The army was given three days to recuperate before heading north in pursuit of the Russians, now joined by the remaining Austrian forces. The two armies eventually took up positions facing each other near the city of Austerlitz (modern Slavkov, in the Czech Republic), and Napoleon’s subsequent victory is widely regarded as the greatest of his career. Napoleon had advanced deep inside enemy territory and had prevailed, humiliating the Austrian Empire. His army’s unrivaled speed and mobility, made possible by its ability to break free when necessary from traditional supply systems, played a decisive role in his triumph. As Napoleon himself is said to have observed, “An army marches on its stomach.”

  Having underpinned his greatest victory, however, food also contributed to Napoleon’s greatest blunder: his invasion of Russia in 1812. As he began planning the campaign in 1811, it is clear that Napoleon did not expect his troops to be able to live off the land once they crossed into Russia. He ordered large supply depots to be established in Prussia and expanded the French military train with the addition of thousands of new wagons. And he proposed switching from four-horse to six-horse wagons, with 50 percent greater capacity, to reduce the number of wagons needed to carry a given amount of food. By March 1812 enough supplies had been gathered in the city of Danzig to supply four hundred thousand men and fifty thousand horses for seven weeks, and more supplies were being gathered along the Polish border. Napoleon hoped to mount a swift, decisive campaign, engaging the Russian army near the border and defeating it swiftly. He did not expect his army to have to venture very far into Russia, or to have to depend on foraging for food.

  Napoleon’s army of 450,000 crossed into Russian territory in late June 1812, carrying twenty-four days’ worth of supplies: The men carried four days of rations in their packs, and the rest was in wagons. The problems began almost immediately. Heavy rain turned the poor local roads, little more than dirt tracks, into muddy swamps. The heavy wagons quickly became bogged down, horses broke their legs, and men lost their boots. The infantry moved more quickly, some units advancing seventy miles in two days, but they were then cut off from their supplies. Once the soldiers had consumed the rations they were carrying with them, they had to resort to living off the land. But the countryside was poor, and the army included many inexperienced recruits who were unfamiliar with the efficient French system of foraging. Discipline broke down and instead of careful distribution of supplies there was indiscriminate plunder. The few villages and farms along the route were soon exhausted of food, there was not enough grass to provide fodder for the French horses, and the crops in the fields were not ripe enough to harvest. “The advance guard lived quite well, but the rest of the army was dying of hunger,” a French general later recalled.

  The Russians retreated as the French advanced, abandoning their positions and falling back toward Moscow. Napoleon expected the richer country around Smolensk and Moscow to be able to provide food for his army, so he pressed on. But the Russians were stripping the countryside and destroying supplies as they retreated. The French army began to disintegrate as the men, weakened by hunger, fell prey to disease. A Russian general observed: “The roads were strewn with the carcasses of horses, and swarming with sick and stragglers. All French prisoners were carefully questioned as to the matter of subsistence; it was ascertained that already, in the neighborhood of Vitebsk, the horses were obtaining only green forage, and the men, instead of bread, only flour, which they were obliged to cook into soup.” By the end of July, a mere five weeks after the start of the campaign, the French army had lost 130,000 men and 80,000 horses, and had yet to bring the enemy to battle. In August an indecisive battle was fought at Smolensk, which fell to the French, but only after the Russians had destroyed all supplies of food in the city. A far bloodier battle at Borodino ended with a Russian retreat, leaving the road open to the capital.

  By denying Napoleon a decisive victory Prince Mikhail Illari-onovich Kutuzov, the Russian commander, forced him to move even deeper into Russia, worsening his supply problems which, the Russians knew, posed the greatest threat to Napoleon’s soldiers. Upon his arrival in Moscow with one hundred thousand remaining troops, Napoleon expected to be met by the city elders, but instead he found the city abandoned, with no civil administration to organize the collection of supplies for the army. Fires were already burning when the French arrived, and they turned into a huge conflagration, destroying three quarters of the city and many of its stores of food. (As well as setting fires, the retreating inhabitants of Moscow had also destroyed all the fire-fighting equipment.) The capture of the Russian capital proved to be a worthless victory: Napoleon had expected the Russians to capitulate and sue for peace, but he soon realized that they had no intention of doing so. The longer the French remained in the city, the more vulnerable they would become. A month after its arrival, the army began its retreat westward, accompanied by thousands of wagons loaded with loot. But treasure cannot be eaten, and the shortage of food prompted infighting and further desertions.

  Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.

  Discipline collapsed and the army dissolved into a disorderly, ragtag horde thinking only of its own survival, weakened by hunger and illness and reduced to eating dogs and horses. Stragglers were set upon by Cossacks and tortured to death by local peasants. Abandoned wagons and cannons littered the roads. “If I met anyone in the woods with a loaf of bread I would force him to give me half—no, I would kill him and take it all,” wrote one French soldier. The winter set in later than usual, in early November, toppling horses on icy roads and freezing men to death as they camped out at night. It is sometimes claimed that the Russian winter was responsible for Napoleon’s defeat, but it merely hastened the destruction of his army, a process that was already well advanced. Only around 25,000 of Napoleon’s main force of 450,000 troops eventually withdrew from Russia in December 1812. Napoleon had been defeated, and the myth of his invincibility had been shattered. His command of logistics had helped to make him the ruler of most of Europe, but it failed him in Russia and marked the beginning of his decline.

  THE INVENTION OF CANNED FOOD

  In 1795, in an effort to improve the diets of soldiers and sailors during military campaigns, the French government offered a prize to anyone who could develop a new way to preserve food. The rules stipulated that the resulting food should be cheap to produce, easy to transport, and better tasting and more nutritious than food preserved using existing techniques. Salting, drying, and smoking had all been used to preserve foodstuffs for centuries, but all of them affected the taste of food and failed to preserve many of its nutrients. Experiments to find better ways to preserve food had been going on since the
seventeenth century, when scientists had begun to take an interest in the process of decomposition and, by extension, how it could be prevented.

  Robert Boyle, an Irish scientist known as the “Father of Chemistry,” developed a vacuum pump and made many discoveries with it, showing for example that the sound of a ringing bell inside a sealed jar diminished in volume as the air was pumped out. Boyle also speculated that the decomposition of food was dependent on the presence of air, and he tried preserving food by storing it in evacuated jars. But he eventually concluded that contact with air was not the sole cause of decomposition. Denis Papin, a French physicist, extended Boyle’s work by sealing food in evacuated bottles and then heating them. This seemed to work much better, though the food still spoiled sometimes. From time to time Papin would present his preserved food to other scientists at meetings of the Royal Society in London. In 1687 they reported that he had preserved “great quantities” of fruit: “He shuts up the Fruits in Glass Vessels exhausted of the Air, and then puts the Vessel thus exhausted in hot Water, and lets it stand there for some while; and that is enough to keep the Fruit from the Fermentation, which would otherwise undoubtedly happen.”

  At the time the mechanism of decomposition was not understood, though many people subscribed to the theory of “spontaneous generation,” an idea going back to the Greeks which held that maggots were somehow generated from decomposing meat, mice from rotting piles of grain, and so on. Despite the experimental work of Boyle, Pa-pin, and others, the problem of food preservation remained unsolved. The various preservation techniques developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were both expensive and unreliable. Nobody managed to improve upon the traditional military rations of salted meat and dry biscuits, which explains the conditions attached to the French prize in 1795.