Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  The Lorenzetti fresco captures a unique moment in urban history: one in which city and country co-existed in relative harmony. Unlike ancient city-states, whose rural hinterlands were owned almost exclusively by urban elites, the farmland around Italian communes was managed by city councillors, whose mercantile instincts brought a completely new perspective to farming. Recognising the value of maximising agricultural yields, many communes released their serfs to become land-owning peasants, or contadini, encouraging them to work the land far harder. In 1257, Bologna freed 6,000 serfs in one go in exchange for the receipt of half their produce every year – a move considered by the sociologist Henri Lefebvre to have marked the arrival of the world’s first capitalist agriculture.36

  Italian communes were in many ways ahead of their time, but their intimate involvement with their rural hinterlands was far from unique in the pre-industrial world. City-dwellers all over Europe retained close links with the countryside. Rich townsfolk often had country estates from which they kept themselves supplied with grain, poultry and vegetables, while poorer ones had smallholdings that they would periodically leave the city in order to farm. When the merchant classes, or bourgeoisie, came on the scene, they operated somewhere in between, building themselves country houses in order to imitate the lifestyles of the rich, but also making money from commercial farming. As a result, the suburbs of Renaissance Rome were almost as full of farms and villas as they had been in ancient times, with the difference that the typical fifteenth-century farmer possessed his own olive grove or vineyard and tended it himself. The city became so deserted at harvest times that a statute had to be passed suspending civic justice during those periods.37

  Not only did pre-industrial city-dwellers go regularly into the countryside, many also brought the country to the city. People commonly kept pigs and chickens in their houses, and grain and hay were often stored in yards too. Many houses resembled urban farms – an appearance that was not to everyone’s taste. The eighteenth-century German economist Ernst Ludwig Carl deplored the ‘piles of dung’ clogging up the nation’s cities, suggesting it would be far preferable ‘to ban all farming in towns, and to put it in the hands of those suited to it’.38 But despite such protestations, people continued to farm in cities until well into the nineteenth century – even those as large as London. In 1856, the Victorian historian George Dodd described one ‘extraordinary piggery at Kensington’ as follows:

  A group of wretched tenements, known as ‘The Potteries’, inhabited by a population of 1000 or 1200 persons, all engaged in the rearing of pigs; the pigs usually outnumbered the people three to one, and had their sties mixed up with the dwelling-houses; some of the pigs lived in the houses and even under the beds.39

  Whatever they might have thought of farming, no pre-industrial city-dweller could forget it existed. As the social historian Fernand Braudel remarked, ‘Town and country never separate like oil and water. They are at the same time separate yet drawn together, divided yet combined.’40

  Good City, Bad City

  Despite the close links between town and country in early modern Europe, the idea that urban life was civilised and rural life boorish frequently prevailed. Although the vast majority lived on the land, social life in Tudor England revolved increasingly around cities, with the landed gentry deserting their estates every winter for London; the beginnings of the so-called ‘London Season’. Urban life was compared favourably to the ‘great rudeness and barbarous custom of dwelling in the country’, while cities themselves were small and, in the opinion of their inhabitants, perfectly formed, often being described as ‘fair’ and ‘pretty’.41

  However, things were about to change. As cities grew larger (and smoggier, thanks to the increasing use of coal), their perceived moral stock began to decline. In 1548, Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, delivered a lacerating sermon on the steps of St Paul’s, accusing Londoners of ‘pride, covetousness, cruelty, and oppression’, and assuring them that ‘if the ploughmen in the country were as negligent in their office as prelates be, we should not long live, for lack of sustenance’.42 Latimer’s use of the plough as an image of virtue was to become a recurrent theme in centuries to come. As cities prospered and glittered, the rural view of them became increasingly jaundiced, as the admirably succinct 1630 ditty ‘The Poor Man Paies for All’ suggests:

  The King he governs all,

  The Parson pray for all,

  The Lawer plead for all,

  The Ploughman pay for all,

  And feed all.43

  By the seventeenth century, it wasn’t just country folk who found cities distasteful. Poets and philosophers were also starting to show a preference for the countryside; for, as the prominent Quaker William Penn put it, ‘there we see the works of God; but in cities little else but the works of men’.44 Penn demonstrated his love of nature by departing for somewhere he could get his paws on plenty of it: North America, a large tract of which (Pennsylvania) still bears his name.45 While Penn and others sailed off to pastures new, the nation they abandoned remained in the grip of a pastoral obsession. The purity and innocence of the countryside were extolled in paintings, poetry and plays, such as John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, performed at court in 1633 with the inclusion, at the author’s insistence, of real shepherds and sheep. But as the historian Keith Thomas pointed out in his book Man and the Natural World, such fantasies were born of the increasing distance between town and country: ‘… the growing tendency to disparage urban life and to look to the countryside as a symbol of innocence rested on a series of illusions. It involved that wholly false view of rural social relationships which underlies all pastoral.’46

  Meanwhile, the countryside of Stuart England was fast becoming a manmade landscape, as it scrambled to meet the cities’ growing demand for food. Agricultural improvement was the new moral imperative; the question was, how was it to be achieved? The answer came from the one nation that was predominantly urban earlier than England: the Netherlands. By the mid seventeenth century, more than half the Dutch lived in towns, and the land (much of which had been reclaimed from the sea) was working overtime to feed the population. Dutch farms consisted of small, sandy plots made fertile by deep digging, constant weeding and plenty of fertiliser, much of the latter provided by the towns in the form of wood ash and manure. Country and city were linked by a close network of canals, which carried waste from the towns to the farms and brought food back in the opposite direction. But perhaps the most important legacy of Dutch farming was the use of fodder crops, both to improve the soil and to provide winter feed for animals, which hitherto had to be slaughtered in late autumn. The value of these techniques was noted by English farmers, particularly those in the south-east, who enjoyed close trading links with the Dutch. The planting of fodder crops, popularised by Charles ‘Turnip’ Townshend at the start of the eighteenth century, was a symbol of the English Agricultural Revolution, but it had been practised in the Netherlands – and parts of East Anglia – for decades before he was even born.

  Robbing the Commons

  As Jean-Jacques Rousseau would later note, when men invest a lot of effort in land, they tend to want to own it. As marshes were drained and trees felled in England after the Civil War, the enclosure of common land was actively encouraged by Parliament, with the result that the traditional feudal landscape – large, open fields with village-based strip-farming – began to disappear under thousands of acres of neatly hedged, privately owned rectangles. The rural scenes that we think of today as typically English were the result of this particular land-grab, the like of which had not been seen since the days of the Normans. The comparison was not lost on those who witnessed it, as one contemporary verse suggests:

  The law locks up the man or woman,

  Who steals the goose from off the common,

  But leaves the greater villain loose

  Who steals the common from the goose.47

  To make matters worse, this second dispossession of rural Engla
nd was not being perpetrated by some foreign despot, but by the nation’s own parliament. Although the changes were arguably necessary in order to feed the expanding urban population, the speed of change, and the manner of it, was brutal.

  The upheavals brought the ‘land question’ once more to the fore, with battle lines drawn between Sir Robert Filmer, champion of the ‘Divine Right’ school of thought, and John Locke, co-founder of the Whig Party and one of England’s foremost political philosophers. Filmer’s logic, published in his treatise of 1680, Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings, went thus: God had given the earth to Adam, and since Adam was the ‘first monarch’ of mankind, all monarchs who succeeded him inherited the earth by divine right. Stuff and nonsense, said Locke: Adam may have inherited the earth, but he did so on behalf of all mankind, not just on behalf of himself and his offspring. Locke’s refutation of Filmer took up the whole of the first of his Two Treatises of Government, written in 1690. Having demolished Filmer in the first volume, Locke spent the second pondering how, if the earth belonged to everyone, any individual could claim a piece of it for himself. The answer, he concluded, was by investing labour in it:

  He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. Nobody can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask, then, when did they begin to be his? when he digested? or when he ate? or when he boiled? or when he brought them home? or when he picked them up? And it is plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. That labour put a distinction between them and common.48

  It followed that if a farmer tilled the land, he earned the right to call it his own. However (and here was the rub), this was only true provided each man took only what he needed, and no more. A farmer could enclose his land, so long as he was not greedy, and left enough for others. Locke’s ideas – that each man had the natural right to liberty, freedom and subsistence – would form the basis of the social contract at the heart of liberal democratic thought; and they were about to be put to the test in America, where, theoretically at least, there should have been enough land to go round. As it turned out, there wasn’t. The invidious treatment by European settlers of the Native Americans (who, thanks to their hunter-gatherer lifestyles, had never felt the need to lay claim to their land by planting hedges around it) soon put paid to any notion that the New World might deal with the land question any more equably than the old one had.

  Part of the problem, of course, was that Locke’s ideas were formulated from a farming perspective, not that of a hunter-gatherer. While Locke’s concept of liberty was eventually bound into the American Constitution through Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 Declaration of Independence, Native Americans forfeited their right to land because they lived on it, not off it. They trod too lightly to put down markers that Europeans might have recognised or understood. As it was, the concept of common land was as doomed in the vastness of North America as it was in the tiny island nation that sought to colonise it.

  War of the Wens

  While Native Americans were being robbed of their land in the New World, the peasant dream of a plot of one’s own was fast disappearing in the old one. The process of enclosure in England accelerated rapidly during the eighteenth century, resulting in the annexing of some million hectares by the century’s end.49 Yet progress was still too slow for the nation’s greatest champion of agricultural reform, Arthur Young. Surveying the country in 1773, Young declared the amount of land that remained uncultivated ‘a disgrace’, announcing his intention to bring ‘the wastelands of the Kingdom into culture’ and ‘cover them with turnips, corn and clover’.50 Although not raised a farmer, Young acquired an Essex farm in 1767, where he conducted a series of technical experiments, publishing the results in his Annals of Agriculture, which were so well received they ran to 45 volumes, and even enjoyed the occasional anonymous contribution from King George III. As his fame spread, Young took to travelling, preaching agricultural reform throughout Britain, France and Italy, lecturing to rapt audiences wherever he went.

  For Young and his followers, the growth of cities represented a fabulous opportunity for farmers to modernise; to develop what Young called ‘agriculture animated by a great demand’.51 But his enthusiasm was not universally shared. To William Cobbett, gentleman farmer, political essayist and tireless campaigner on behalf of the rural poor, cities were ‘wens’: parasitical boils that consumed everything in their path. Those who lived in them were little better: they were the undeserving and ungrateful beneficiaries of others’ sweat and toil. ‘We who are at anything else,’ he wrote, ‘are deserters from the plough.’52 Cobbett, unlike Young, was the son of a Surrey smallholder, and he identified personally with the agricultural labourers he considered ‘the very best and most virtuous of all mankind’.53 He dedicated himself to their cause, publishing a stream of invective in his paper, the Political Register, against the systems and policies that were destroying rural life. Cobbett’s disgust for London was such that he could barely bring himself to mention it by name, dubbing it instead ‘the Great Wen’. Yet since his political life forced him to spend a considerable amount of time there, he put it to good use, going on a series of exploratory journeys to see the effects of urbanisation for himself. His subsequent account, published as Rural Rides in 1830, emerged as a bitter diatribe against cities:

  Have I not, for twenty years, been regretting the existence of these unnatural embossments; these white-swellings, these odious wens, produced by Corruption and engendering crime and misery and slavery? But, what is to be the fate of the greatest wen of all? The monster, called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, ‘the metropolis of the empire’?54

  Highgate in the late eighteenth century, looking towards London. The idyllic scene masks the growing tensions between city and country.

  Cobbett’s solution was simple. He wanted to ‘disperse’ all the wens in England: literally lance them like boils, and return the countryside to its former state. He would be far from the last person to have such a wish, but, sadly for him, the urban tide was already flowing unstoppably in the opposite direction.

  Across the Channel, however, people watched the ‘English miracle’ with interest. While the Dutch and English had been engaging in land reform and inventing newfangled farming techniques, the French had remained mired in the past, with unimproved wastelands, crippling peasant taxes and convoluted patterns of ownership all serving to hamper agricultural production. Just as English farmers in the previous century had learned from the Dutch, French envoys now travelled to England to gain desperately needed farming knowledge. Uneasy relations between the two countries meant that agricultural espionage was rife: in 1763, the French government defied the English ban on exporting animals, paying for three Lincolnshire rams and six ewes to be smuggled illegally into France; while English turnip seeds made an unexpected appearance at the Parisian Royal Agricultural Society in 1785, where they were distributed among its members.55 As enthusiasm for agricultural reform took hold, a new wave of pastoralism hit the French. Painters such as Fragonard and Boucher portrayed the countryside as a sort of idealised picnic-ground populated by creamy-fleshed nymphs, and Marie-Antoinette famously dressed up as a shepherdess to keep company with her sheep in Le Hameau de la Reine, a rustic retreat constructed for her in the gardens at Versailles.

  But for one member of Parisian society, such pastoralist fantasies were symptomatic of a deep malaise. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was raised in the mountains around Geneva, but had moved to Paris as a young man, and found it not to his liking. For him, city and country were bound together on a path towards self-destruction, fuelled by the call to ‘progress’ that drove them on. His 1755 Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men was a paean to man’s lost innocence:

  So long as men remained content with their rustic huts, so long as they were satisfied with clothes made of the skins of animals and sewn together with thorns and fish-bones �
�� they lived free, healthy, honest and happy lives … but from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops.56