In terms of transport, meat had one great advantage over grain. Cattle could walk themselves to market, which made it possible to raise them far from the city. Many of the sheep that fed ancient Rome were pastured 500 miles away in Apulia, while the cattle that fed the cities of medieval Germany and north Italy came from as far afield as Poland, Hungary and the Balkans, travelling westwards in herds up to 20,000 strong. The landscape all over Europe was criss-crossed by networks of drovers’ roads that ran separately from those carrying human traffic, along which sheep, geese and cattle were driven by highly skilled (and highly paid) men. Sir Walter Scott described the task of driving cattle from Scotland to London in the early nineteenth century:
They are required to know perfectly the drove-roads, which lie over the wildest parts of the country, and to avoid as much as possible the highways, which destroy the feet of the bullocks, and the turnpikes, which annoy the spirit of the drover; whereas in the broad green or gray track which lies across the pathless moor, the herd not only move at ease and without taxation, but if they mind their business may pick up a mouthful of food by the way. At night the drovers usually sleep along with their cattle, let the weather be what it will, and many of these hardy men do not once rest under a roof during the journey on foot from Lochaber to Lincolnshire.11
After their three-week cross-country marathon (or biathlon, in the case of cattle from Skye, since they had to swim the first leg of their journey), animals bound for London could lose up to 100lb in weight, and had to be fattened up again before slaughter. Fattening was a specialist occupation in the suburbs, and breweries had a nice sideline in feeding cattle on spent grain. Many counties close to London combined fattening with dairy farming, and Islington, conveniently placed on the route south to Smithfield, specialised in both. But the most troublesome stage of the cattle’s journey was the last. In order to avoid the meat going bad, the animals had to be slaughtered as close to the markets as possible. That meant driving them through the middle of the city, which could cause chaos at busy times, and occasionally led to the trampling of a passer-by (several fatalities were reported at Smithfield in the nineteenth century). The animals were then slaughtered in the open, or in makeshift cellars beneath butchers’ shops. The sights, sounds and smells of death were some of the least charming aspects of life in the pre-industrial city.
Fresh fish was the other main source of protein for many cities, especially during the winter when there was little fresh meat to be had. The problem was to find a means of keeping the catch edible before bringing it ashore. The range of London’s fishing fleet at Barking, for instance, was limited by the distance it had to sail up the Thames, which made the discovery in 1837 of a sole spawning ground just off the Norfolk coast particularly vexing, since it lay just out of reach. It took a Barking fisherman by the name of Samuel Hewett to come up with a solution. Ever since Roman times, winter ice had been collected from low-lying fields and stored in thick-walled ice houses for use during the summer. Hewett’s idea was to station a fleet of trawlers out at sea for weeks on end catching the fish, and use another fleet of high-speed cutters to bring it back to Billingsgate packed in ice. The business was so successful that in 1862 Hewett moved his fleet to Gorleston on the Norfolk coast; a move that signalled the end of Barking’s dominance in the supply of London’s fish.12
Fruit and vegetables did not figure greatly in the diets of most pre-industrial city-dwellers, largely because they were so expensive to produce. Even the humblest pea, carrot or bean was considered a high-maintenance crop, needing careful tending, plenty of manure, and gentle handling. Fruit and vegetables were grown as close to cities as possible, in order to benefit from the manure and ‘nightsoil’ (human waste) that the town could provide, as well as to minimise the bruising journey to market. That meant paying high land rents, which had to be offset by high profits, the pursuit of which led to the production of speciality crops, such as ‘forced’ vegetables, made to ripen weeks before their natural season by being grown under glass in ‘hot beds’ – pits filled with manure.13 City-dwellers then, as now, were prepared to pay absurd prices for out-of-season produce; and then, as now, they were often disappointed with what they got. Today the complaint is that the food tastes of nothing; 300 years ago, it was that it tasted of the dung it had been grown in. Nevertheless, market gardens always thrived on the edges of cities, catering to the luxury urban market. ‘Oh! The incredible profit by digging of ground,’ as the London gardener Thomas Fuller exclaimed in 1662, unconsciously echoing the Roman agronomist Varro’s enthusiasm for specialist suburban farming, pastio villatica, 2,000 years earlier.14
Perhaps the food that best illustrates how hard it was to feed a city the size of London before the age of steam is milk. Although its nutritional qualities were well recognised, the speed with which milk went off meant that it had to be produced more or less on the spot, either in insalubrious inner-city cowsheds (an estimated 8,500 cows were kept in late eighteenth-century London) or in suburban dairies. The suburban herd, which was 20,000 strong at its peak, was milked at 3 a.m. each day by milkmaids, who carried the liquid into the city in open pails to ‘milk cellars’, basement rooms where it was left to stand in order to separate out the cream, after which the remainder was sold (often watered down) as milk. As Tobias Smollett’s description in Humphry Clinker suggests, on every stage of its journey the milk was exposed to some peril or other. Even if it was free from disease, it was often adulterated, going sour, or both:
But the milk itself should not pass unanalysed, the produce of faded cabbage-leaves and sour draff, lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings, discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot and tobacco quids from foot-passengers, overflowings from mud-carts … dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke’s sake … and finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milk-maid.15
Even allowing for Smollettian hyperbole, there is little doubt that London milk in the eighteenth century was far from the fresh ‘pinta’ we pour over our cornflakes today. No wonder the majority of Londoners never touched the stuff.
Small is Beautiful
Given the physical difficulties of getting food into town, it is hardly surprising that most pre-industrial cities were compact by modern standards. A day’s journey by cart, a distance of around 20 miles, was the practical limit for bringing in grain overland, which limited the width of the city’s arable belt. The simple laws of geometry meant that the larger a city grew, the smaller the relative size of its rural hinterland became, until the latter could no longer feed the former. Of course cities on rivers could bring in grain from a greater distance, but even then the grain still had to be carried to the river first.
Little surprise, then, that few cities reached a population greater than 100,000 in the pre-industrial world, and most were considerably smaller than that. Even a city as powerful as fifteenth-century Bologna peaked at 72,000, before plague reduced its numbers again to around 50,000. Had plague not intervened, the city might well have struggled to feed itself. As early as 1305, the council recognised the strategic importance of being able to supply itself with food ‘from its own possessions’, something larger cities were unable to do.16 With a population of 90,000, fourteenth-century Florence was already having to import much of its grain from Sicily; no mean task, given that the city was 60 miles from the coast up the River Arno.
The transport of food in the pre-industrial world also determined the way in which cities’ rural hinterlands were arranged, a phenomenon first analysed by the German landowner and geographer Johann Heinrich von Thünen, in his work of 1826, The Isolated State. The eponymous ‘state’ consisted of a ‘very large town’ in the middle of a featureless, fertile plain, the latter inhabited only by rational, profit-seeking farmers.17 Under such conditions, postulated von Thünen, the farm belt around a cit
y would organise itself into a series of concentric rings, like ripples from a pebble chucked in a pond. The innermost one would consist of market gardens and dairies, whose profits would be high enough to pay the rent and whose activities would most benefit from the city’s manure. Beyond this would be a ring of coppices for firewood; and beyond that, arable land where the city’s grain would be grown, close enough to the city to make its transport feasible. Beyond that, there would be grazing for livestock, and finally, wilderness: land so far from the city that it wasn’t worth exploiting. (The question of where the inhabitants of the Isolated State might want to spend their weekends did not arise.) If the city was on a river, von Thünen argued, the low cost of water transport would distort its rural hinterland, stretching it along the river’s banks in a series of linear strips.
Despite its disregard of politics, culture and most forms of geography, von Thünen’s land-use model mirrored the pre-industrial world rather well. Of course it was essentially a mathematical rationalisation of the way most cities had been fed up until his day – cities, that is, without recourse to the most important influence on food supplies in the pre-industrial world: the sea.
The First Food Miles
Those who use the metaphors of war when they talk about food are often more accurate than they would care to admit.
Derek Cooper18
It can be tempting to hark back to a golden age when all food was produced and consumed locally, with no more than a short trip ‘from field to fork’. But of course no such age ever existed. Although small cities in the pre-industrial world were able to feed themselves locally, ‘food miles’ featured in the feeding of larger ones from the start.19 Before the railways, sea transport was the only way cities could transcend geography, and although not every great European city was a maritime power, those that were not – Paris, Florence and Madrid among them – all eventually faced the same fate. The larger they grew, the harder they found it to feed themselves, while their maritime rivals flourished.
Athens began importing grain from the Black Sea as early as the seventh century BC, since the local soil (a light, sandy loam) was unsuited to growing it. The city managed to turn its weakness into a strength, developing a powerful fleet that would later become a decisive weapon of war. Indeed, war and food were never far removed in the ancient world: many of Athens’ political allegiances, such as those made with Cyprus and Egypt against Persia in the fifth century BC, served the dual purpose of increasing the city’s political security while giving it access to those countries’ grain reserves. Critical supply routes were also heavily protected: the Hellespont, the narrow stretch of the Bosporus through which all Black Sea shipping must pass, was protected in times of war with a special army. Even in times of peace, such as that following the Persian defeat in 480 BC, Athens made sure it maintained superior naval power in the eastern Mediterranean in order to secure its grain supplies.
Poor local soil was not the only reason for cities to import their food. Rome, London, Antwerp and Venice all had fertile hinterlands, yet all imported food from overseas. One reason was that imported food – as is the case today – was often cheaper than local. Sea transport cost next to nothing relative to land transport in the ancient world: one estimate puts the ratio at 1:42.20 Even had Rome been capable of feeding itself from its own backyard, it would still have made economic sense for the city to import its grain from North Africa. As it was, cheap sea transport became so critical to the capital’s survival that Emperor Diocletian issued an edict to keep Mediterranean shipping costs artificially low, just as aviation fuel remains untaxed today by international agreement.21
By the third century BC Rome already relied on grain from Sicily and Sardinia, and as the capital expanded, its conquest of new territory became paramount in order to secure fresh supplies. Feeding itself was fast becoming a vicious circle from which the city could not escape: its need for grain, not political gain, often drove its empire onward. Two military conquests, over Carthage in 146 BC and Egypt in 30 BC, were crucial victories, securing access to coastal North Africa, territory as vital to Rome’s survival as the American Midwest would be to London’s almost 2,000 years later. Rome lost no time in turning its new colonies into efficient bread-making machines, occupying them not just with officials and soldiers, but with farmers, 6,000 of whom were given generous portions of land in North Africa on which to grow grain for the capital.
Rome may not have been the first city to import food by sea, but the scale of its trade made it the true pioneer of food miles. By the first century AD, the capital was a metropolis of a million or so citizens: a quite staggering number for the time, and one that no Western city would match until London in the nineteenth century.22 Life in contemporary London seems unthinkable without Brazilian coffee and New Zealand lamb; 2,000 years ago, the same was true in Rome of Spanish oil and Gallic ham. The entire Mediterranean sent food to the city: wine and oil came from Spain and Tunisia, pork from Gaul, honey from Greece, and last but not least came Spanish liquamen, a fermented fish sauce without which no Roman’s life was apparently worth living. When the Greek orator Aristides arrived in Rome in AD 143, he marvelled at the deluge of food flowing into the city:
… whatever is grown and made among each people cannot fail to be here at all times and in abundance … the city appears a kind of common emporium of the world … arrivals and departures by sea never cease, so that the wonder is, not that the harbour has insufficient space for merchant vessels, but that even the sea has enough, if it really does.23
The physical and administrative effort required to bring all this fodder into the capital was truly immense. Sea transport in the ancient world might have been cheap, but it was far from straightforward. Unprotected grain could easily be spoiled in open, wooden-built ships, and winter storms often made the sea voyage too treacherous to attempt, so that grain had to be held at Alexandria, waiting for conditions to improve. Even if the ships did make a safe landfall, that was far from the end of it. The Roman port of Ostia was too small to take large Alexandrian grain ships (the supertankers of their day), so that many had to dock at Puteoli in the Bay of Naples, transferring their cargoes to smaller vessels for the trip to Rome. When food finally got to Ostia, it still had to be lugged 20 miles upstream along the narrow, swift-flowing Tiber. This final leg of the journey was the most arduous of all. It took teams of men and oxen three days to tow barges of food upriver – often longer than it had taken to complete the sea voyage from Africa.24 The effort could never let up, even for a day – Rome gobbled up stocks of grain like sand pouring through an hourglass, and the city rarely had a comfortable safety margin to play with. When Claudius came to power, there were reckoned to be just eight days’ worth of grain left in the city.
Roman food miles. The food supply routes of Ancient Rome.
The scale of the effort can still be felt in the ancient ruins of Ostia. The Rotterdam of its day, Ostia was a thriving city of some 30,000 souls, and its theatres, temples, villas and baths are all remarkably well preserved – as are its streets, with their shops and four-storey apartment buildings above. It requires only the feeblest effort to imagine what life must once have been like here: one ancient taberna is so uncannily like a modern Italian bar that you have to restrain yourself from walking up and ordering a glass of wine. In the city centre, a large piazza lined with shops was once the city’s commercial hub, with merchants’ insignia – ships, dolphins, fish and the Pharos, the great Alexandria lighthouse – still visible in its mosaic pavement. But perhaps the most spectacular reminder of the scale of the capital’s appetite is the port itself: Trajan’s massive hexagonal dock, built by the emperor in AD 98 to solve the harbour’s perennial problem of silting up. The 350-metre-long quaysides can still be made out under a tangle of brambles, and the ground crunches underfoot with shards of the amphorae that once brought oil and wine to feed the greatest city on earth.
The Politics of Supply
You who control the transport
ation of food supplies are in charge, so to speak, of the city’s lifeline, of its very throat.
Cassiodorus25
It was rare for any city in the pre-industrial world to leave its food supplies to chance – they were far too important for that. From the days of the earliest city-states, managing the food supply was a matter for civic authorities, a responsibility they took very seriously indeed. In the ancient cities of Egypt and Mesopotamia, temples were the food hubs of their day, combining the symbolic function of feeding the gods with the less exalted, yet equally necessary one of feeding the people. Temples received taxes from landowners, organised the harvest, managed stocks of grain and doled them out – the latter task usually involving offering food to the gods first, before distributing what they did not take.26 Grain was more than just food in the ancient city, it was wealth; and maintaining adequate stocks was crucial. The Ramesseum at Thebes could hold enough grain to support 3,400 families: the population of a medium-sized city. As the Egyptologist Barry Kemp remarked, such temples were not just ceremonial centres or public granaries, they were ‘the reserve banks of the time’.27 Since Egyptian labourers were paid directly in grain and beer, the pharaohs knew by the size of the harvest just how much work could be carried out the following year.
The Ramesseum at Thebes, showing the public granaries around the temple.
Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives Page 9