50 Christine Frederick, Efficient Housekeeping, or Household Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home, George Routledge, 1915, p.22.
51 Ibid., p.46.
52 Ibid., p.93.
53 Nick Bullock, ‘First the Kitchen: Then the Façade’, Journal of Design History, Vol.1, No.3/4 (1988), pp.177–92.
54 Grete Lihotzky in Schlesisches Heim (Silesian Home), 8/1921, p.217.
55 Le Corbusier, ‘The Hour of Architecture’, in The Decorative Art of Today, trans. James I. Dunnett, The Architectural Press, 1987, p.132.
56 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, Trans. Frederick Etchells, The Architectural Press, 1972, p.115; and Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op.cit., p.188.
57 See Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: the Fashioning of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, London, 1995, pp.3–8.
58 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op.cit., p.188.
59 F.R.S. Yorke, The Modern House, The Architectural Press, London, 1934, p.32.
60 Lesley Jackson, ‘Contemporary’: Architecture and Interiors of the 1950s, Phaidon, 1994, p.83.
61 Echoing the Victorian manual writers, Le Corbusier even suggests putting the kitchen on the roof to avoid smells: hardly the practical solution one would expect for a ‘machine for living in’.
62 See Rayner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, The Architectural Press, London, 1960, pp.305–19.
63 Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (1933), trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker, Jonathan Cape, London, 1991, p.20.
64 See Harvey Levenstein, The Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, Oxford University Press, 1993, p.34.
65 Ibid., p.32.
66 Ibid., p.37.
67 Ibid., p.102.
68 George Nelson and Henry Wright, Tomorrow’s House – A Complete Guide For the Home-builder, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1945, p.72.
69 Ibid., p.75.
70 Pat Mainardi, The Politics of Housework, Redstockings, 1970, quoted in Joanna Blythman, Bad Food Britain, Fourth Estate, 2006, p.72.
71 Smash was instant mashed potato made popular by a brilliant TV ad in which a group of metallic ‘aliens’ mocked earthlings for their antiquated way of peeling potatoes, boiling them, and mashing them up with butter and milk.
72 IGD Convenience Retailing Market Overview factsheet, http://www.igd.com/CIR.asp?menuid=51&cirid=109.
73 Quoted in Andrew Seth and Geoffrey Randall, The Grocers: The Rise and Rise of the Supermarket Chains, Kogan Page, London, 1999, p.125.
74 Eating Habits – Pan European Overview, report by Mintel, December 2002.
75 Eating Habits – Scratch vs Convenience Cooking, report by Mintel, June 2005.
76 The Terra Madre (Mother Earth) conference is held in Turin every two years.
77 WRAP, Understanding Food Waste, March 2007, p.13.
78 Quoted in ibid., p.13.
79 Type B malnutrition is the new disease of the urban poor – see Chapter 5.
80 Mulholland Research & Consulting, Perceptions of Privacy and Density in Housing, Report on Research Findings Prepared for the Popular Housing Group, August 2003, p.100. See also Housing Space Standards, Mayor of London, August 2006, pp.47, 138.
81 Housing Space Standards, op.cit., Appendix 9, p.24.
82 PPG3 (1992), quoted in ibid., Appendix 9, p.2.
83 Mulholland Research & Consulting, op.cit., p.100.
84 Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), What Home Buyers Want: attitudes and decision making among consumers, 2005, p.20.
85 Housing Space Standards, op.cit., p.42.
86 See the Joseph Rowntree Foundation website, http://www.jrf.org.uk/
housingandcare/lifetimehomes/.
87 Blythman, op.cit., p.196.
88 http://www.waitrose.com/food_drink/foodexpertise/readymeals/index.asp.
89 Patricia Michelson, The Cheese Room, Penguin, 2001, p.16.
90 In January 2008, the government announced that compulsory cooking lessons for 11–14 year olds were to be re-introduced, although funding levels were minimal.
Chapter 5 At Table
1 Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste (La Physiologie du gout, 1825), trans. Anne Drayton, Penguin, 1970, p.13.
2 ‘Benchers’ is short for Masters of the Bench; ‘silks’ are members of Queen’s Counsel.
3 I am reliably informed that the food at Middle Temple has improved considerably since my meal there.
4 The inheritance is shared by Middle Temple’s sister Inn, Inner Temple. Their chapel, Temple Church, gained international fame in 2004 thanks to its inclusion in Dan Brown’s fantasy account of the Templar inheritance, The Da Vinci Code.
5 The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, Handbook (2007), p.12.
6 See http://www.innertemple.org.uk/.
7 The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, Dining in Hall, 1970, p.16.
8 According to the Institute of Grocery Distribution, 51.1 per cent of meals were eaten alone in 2006, compared to 34.4 per cent in 1994. IGD, Grocery Retailing Report, 2006.
9 See John Burnett, ‘Time, place and content: the changing structure of meals in Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries’, in Martin R. Schärer and Alexander Fenton (eds.), Food and Material Culture, Tuckwell Press, East Linton, Scotland, 1998, and Ch. 9, p.121; Office of National Statistics, Family Spending 2002–3.
10 In 2006, 48 per cent of meals in the USA were eaten outside the home.
11 Figures from the IGD website.
12 The Times, 4 June 2005, quoted in Joanna Blythman, Bad Food Britain, Fourth Estate, 2006, p.269.
13 For a detailed discussion of Seder, see Chaim Raphael, A Feast of History, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972.
14 Brillat-Savarin, op.cit., p.162.
15 Although ritual halal and kosher slaughter is also carried out in Britain, it can only be done legally in licensed slaughterhouses.
16 The existence of diet clubs such as WeightWatchers emphasises how much we need to share our eating habits with others – even if those habits involve not eating.
17 The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame, Hamish Hamilton, 1958, p.846.
18 Georg Simmel, ‘Sociology of the Meal’ (1910), trans. Michael Symons, Food and Foodways, Vol.5, No.4, 1994, pp.345–50.
19 The satisfyingly homophonic German equivalent, ‘Der Mensch ist was er isst’, is attributed to the nineteenth-century philosopher Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach.
20 Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner, Penguin, 1991, p.87.
21 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E.V. Rieu and revised by D.C.H. Rieu, Penguin, 1991, p.60.
22 See Visser, op.cit., pp.90–9.
23 Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance, Act 2.
24 Visser, op.cit., p.17.
25 Ibid., p.92.
26 Regional Eating and Drinking Habits, Mintel, 2001, quoted in Sue Palmer, Toxic Childhood, Orion Books, 2006, p.34.
27 The survey was carried out by Brewsters restaurant chain, quoted in Palmer, op.cit., p.33. Of course, eating with your fingers is perfectly polite in other cultures.
28 Madhur Jaffrey, An Invitation to Indian Cookery, Jonathan Cape, 1987, p.21.
29 Blythman, op.cit., pp.87 and 217.
30 Athenaeus, Deipnosophists (6.228d), quoted in John Wilkins, David Harvey, Mike Dobson (eds.), Food in Antiquity, University of Exeter Press, 1995, p.197.
31 Anonymous, 1879, quoted in Visser, op.cit., p.69.
32 Xenophon, Memorabilia (3.14), quoted in Wilkins et al., op.cit., p.208.
33 See James Davidson, Opsophagia: Revolutionary Eating at Athens, in Wilkins et al., op.cit., pp.204–13.
34 Erasmus, De Civilitate morum puerilium (1530), trans. Brian McGregor, in Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. J.K. Sowards, University of Toronto Press, 1985, p.273.
35 Ibid., p.289.
36 Emily Post, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Polit
ics and at Home, Funk and Wagnalls, New York, 1922, pp.244 and 223.
37 Ibid., p.189.
38 Ibid., p.2.
39 Brillat-Savarin, op.cit., p.55.
40 Pliny, Letters, quoted in Roy Strong, Feast: A History of Grand Eating, Jonathan Cape, London, 2002, p.97.
41 Petronius, The Satyricon, trans. J.P. Sullivan, Penguin, 1981, pp.49–55.
42 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, quoted in Strong, op.cit., p.273.
43 For a discussion of attitudes toward excessive eating in Rome, see Chapter 6.
44 Michael Symons, A History of Cooks and Cooking, University of Illinois Press, 2004, p.268, and Strong, op.cit., p.8.
45 William Langland, Piers Plowman, quoted in Strong, op.cit., p.94.
46 Strong, op.cit., p.205.
47 Ibid., p.209.
48 Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant, Harvard, 2000, p.96.
49 See Burnett, op.cit., pp.117–19.
50 Colin Clair, Kitchen and Table, Abelard-Schuman, London, 1964, p.105.
51 Burnett, op.cit., p.122.
52 Mary Douglas, ‘Deciphering a Meal’, in Carole Counihan, P. Van Esterik (eds.), Food and Culture, Routledge, New York, 1997, Ch. 4.
53 Thomas Decker, Gull’s Horn-Book (1609), quoted in George Dodd, The Food of London, Longman Brown, Green and Longmans, London, 1856, p.87,
54 Hazel Forsyth, in Edwina Ehrman, Hazel Forsyth, Lucy Peltz, Cathy Ross, London Eats Out: 500 Years of Capital Dining, Museum of London, 1999, pp.34–40.
55 See John Schofield (ed.), The London Surveys of Ralph Treswell, London Topographical Society Publication No. 135, 1987, p.86.
56 Samuel Pepys’ Diary, 1 August 1660, quoted by Forsyth, in Ehrman et al., op.cit., p.37.
57 Like restaurants today, taverns made most of their profits from stiff mark-ups on wine.
58 Ehrman et al., op.cit., p.46.
59 Mr Fairholt, Percy Society’s Publications (1845), quoted in Dodd, op.cit., p.88.
60 See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Polity Press, 1992, pp.89–102.
61 Quoted in Spang, op.cit., p.34.
62 Antoine Joseph Nicolas Rosny, Le Péruvian à Paris (1801), quoted in ibid., p.64.
63 See Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, First Illinois Paperback, 1996, pp.151–3.
64 William Blanchard Jerrold, The Epicure’s Year Book and Table Companion, London, 1868, quoted by Edwina Ehrman in Ehrman et al., op.cit., pp.72–3.
65 Quoted in Harvey Levenstein, The Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, Oxford University Press, 1993, p.228.
66 Ibid., p.51.
67 Quoted in ibid., p.229.
68 Ibid., p.233.
69 In exposing the iniquities of the fast-food industry, Fast Food Nation followed in the footsteps of The Jungle of a century earlier. In the film Supersize Me, the journalist Morgan Spurlock reported on the dangers of living on nothing but McDonald’s for a month.
70 Reported by Reuters, September 2004.
71 McDonald’s press release, 13 April 2007, http://www.mcdonalds.com.
72 See Levenstein, op.cit., pp.28–30.
73 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Penguin, 2001, p.92.
74 For a detailed discussion of the French ‘decapitation’ of English cookery, see Mennell, op.cit., pp.204–14.
75 Derek Cooper, The Bad Food Guide, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967, p.xvi.
76 Joanne Finkelstein, Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners, Polity Press, Blackwell, 1989, p.3.
77 One tube advert for The Brunswick read, ‘The Bloomsbury Set might have had culture, but they didn’t have Waitrose.’
78 Yes, it contains coffee. But by the time it has been decaffeinated and had frothy milk, sugar and flavourings added, it effectively becomes a large, hot milkshake: a nursery drink.
79 See Naomi Klein, No Logo, Flamingo, 2001, pp.135–7.
80 Brillat-Savarin, op.cit., p.208.
81 See the splendidly named Barbara J. Rolls, ‘The Supersizing of America, Portion Size and the Obesity Epidemic’, Nutrition Today, Vol.38, No.2, March/April 2003, pp.42–53.
82 Greg Critser, Fat Land, Penguin, 2003, p.14.
83 Ibid., p.28.
84 Ibid.
85 Type B malnutrition describes of the effects of eating too many processed foods, leaving people simultaneously obese and undernourished, with a high risk of developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.
86 Paul Rozin, quoted in Levenstein, op.cit., p.256.
87 Banzhaf was also the first lawyer to sue tobacco companies on health grounds.
88 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/south_yorkshire/5349392.stm.
Chapter 6 Waste
1 Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), trans. Norman Denny, Penguin, 1982, p.1065.
2 The engines were fabricated in 1856 by James Watt and Co. to designs by Joseph Bazalgette.
3 Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman, London Under London, John Murray, 1993, p.60.
4 Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations, Harvard University Press, 1993, p.10.
5 Coventry Leet Book, quoted in Dorothy Davis, A History of Shopping, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966, p.24.
6 Estimates of London’s size vary. See B.M.S. Campbell et al., A Medieval Capital and its Grain Supply, Historical Geography Research Series No.30, 1993, pp.9–11.
7 Trench and Hillman, op.cit., p.60.
8 Ibid., p.63.
9 Malcolm Thick, The Neat House Gardens, Early Market Gardening Around London, Prospect Books, 1998.
10 John Strype, An Accurate Edition of Stow’s Survey of London (1720), quoted in Robert Webber, Covent Garden: Mud-Salad Market, J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1969, p.31.
11 The first patented flushing WC was designed by Alexander Cummings in 1775. See Trench and Hillman, op.cit., p.64.
12 John Snow’s discovery of germ theory was still two decades away.
13 Edwin Chadwick, Inquiry into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, London, 1842, p.369.
14 Rome’s sewers only served public buildings such as latrines and bath-houses. Most private houses made do with cesspits, while multistorey apartment buildings, insulae, had no means of sewage disposal. See Jérôme Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome (1941), Penguin, 1991, p.51.
15 According to some scholars, Rome was founded by the Etruscans. Certainly many Roman city-founding rites can be traced directly to Etruscan practice. See Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town, Faber and Faber, 1976, p.29.
16 Carcopino, op.cit., p.51.
17 The Cloaca is still in use today, its mouth visible just downriver of the Ponte Rotto.
18 Justus von Liebig, Agriculturchemie, quoted in Herbert Girardet, Cities, People, Planet: Liveable Cities for a Sustainable World, Wiley Academy, 2004, p.77.
19 Reid, op.cit., p.56.
20 Trench and Hillman, op.cit., p.71.
21 Although John Snow made his discovery of the link between cholera and contaminated water in 1854, ‘germ theory’ was not yet fully understood. See Chapter 4.
22 Quoted in Trench and Hillman, op.cit., p.69.
23 One engine, Prince Consort, has been restored to full working order by the Crossness Engines Trust, and can be seen in action on ‘steaming days’. See http://www.crossness.org.uk/.
24 http://www.thameswateruk.co.uk.
25 Girardet, op.cit., p.227.
26 Hugo, op.cit., p.1061.
27 WRAP, Understanding Food Waste, March 2007, p.4.
28 Ibid., p.19.
29 Defra, Waste Strategy for England, 2007, p.20.
30 WRAP, op.cit., p.9.
31 Ibid., p.12.
32 Walkers Midshire, one of Britain’s largest food manufacturers, has a special lab dedicated to ‘abusing’ its products in various ways, and testing the outcome.
33 Mary Douglas, Purity
and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966), Routledge, 1995, p.2.
34 Ibid., p.4.
35 Ibid., p.36.
36 Ibid., p.161.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., p.162.
39 The dilemma is captured in the double meaning of the English word ‘soil’, both a verb meaning ‘make something dirty’ and as a noun meaning earth; and the American usage of the word ‘dirt’, primarily referring to earth or soil.
40 Hugo, op.cit., p.1065.
41 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, quoted in Reid, op.cit., p.21.
42 Reid, op.cit., p.3.
43 Sometimes the transformation was direct: one of Paris’s most fanciful parks, Buttes-Chaumont, was built on top of the city’s notorious old rubbish tip at Montfaucon, made obsolete by the construction of the sewers and designed by Adolphe Alphand, another of Haussmann’s chief sewer engineers.
44 ‘The food we eat – crops rot as supermarkets demand perfection’, the Observer, 16 August 1998, quoted in A Battle in Store?, Sustain, 2000, p.11.
45 There has been some controversy in Britain over Whole Foods Market’s ‘organic’ status, since rules governing the use of the term are less stringent in the US than they are in Britain.
46 Timothy Jones (2004), University of Arizona’s Bureau of Applied Research Anthropology, http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/news/ng.asp?id=56376-us-wastes-half.
47 http://www.fareshare.org.uk/.
48 The word ‘freegan’ is a conflation of ‘free’ and ‘vegan’.
49 J.N. Postgate, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History, Routledge, London and New York, 1994, p.181.
50 Plato, Critias, 111c, The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Princeton University Press, 1987, p.1216.
51 The mound, now Monte Testaccio, remains intact. It was the city’s main rubbish dump until the fourth century AD.
52 See Neville Morley, Metropolis and Hinterland, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.88.
53 Quoted in Girardet, op.cit., p.46.
54 Quoted in Massimo Montanari, The Culture of Food, trans. Carl Ipsen, Blackwell, Oxford, 1994, p.10.
55 Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon, cited in Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury, MIT Press, 2000, p.119.
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