Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

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UK voters face difficult choices

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Next month town halls up and down the UK will be holding local elections. In past years, this multifaceted media matrix has not been covered in these pages. But this year, when the votes are counted, the distribution of political power across the landscape will change before a single committee meets or a single bin is emptied.

On May 7, voters will choose more than 4850 local councillors to run 134 local authorities. While the buildings will not look any different, the ways in which they will work will change literally overnight. Will the root causes of regional misunderstandings melt away in the warmth of a new dawn? The newly-constituted authorities will need to ensure   funds remain available for local planning officials to have a better grasp of agricultural issues in their decision-making processes. Pigs might fly. Making waste disposal sites accessible and affordable can reduce the temptation to resort to fly tipping. Realistically, rural policing policy can only be based on lower population densities outside urban zones.

While canvassing for the local council elections, candidates can expect to face hostility on the doorstep on topics they have no control over. These could be items such as longer waiting lists for healthcare or services that voters believe to be cheaper/more reliable/generally favouring urban areas. 

The lower density of rural populations made the provision online capacity less attractive for early commercial internet providers. Satellite services get round a lot of the transmission issues that faced early broadband services, but  are not totally immune from signal issues, such as sunspots and solar flares. Sending a service engineer to repair a network outage in Dagenham can be covered by a simple phone call, while restoring an array of satellites takes some forward planning.

Tom Broadshaw has been speaking up for years to get fairer treatment for everyone in the supply chain.

Rather than accepting crumbs from the urban table, UK farmers need a market mechanism that protects their interests. For instance, as the law stands, farmers have no rights as suppliers to supermarket suppliers. This fails to recognise the role food producers in mult-party supplier agreements, as well as being unfair. This particular bone of contention  has been running for years now, NFU President Tom Bradshaw explained: “Farming is the backbone of our rural economy and lifeblood of rural communities. Our farmers manage over 70% of the landscape, protect   enhance the environment and produce food for 70 million people.”

Confidence within the sector remains low. “Farm businesses are under extreme cost pressure, Bradshaw added. “Pressures for feem has been runningd, fuel and fertiliser, are exacerbated by geopolitical tensions,” he declared. Starting with the invasion of Ukraine and now the war in the Middle East, the political outlook is not predictable. Add it to the unstable climate and extreme weather and we all face problems that   impact our ability to produce food.

“Decisions being taken by local authorities can have a direct and lasting impact on farm businesses and the communities they support. By championing pro-farming policies on areas suchttps://urbanfoodchains.uk/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wps_overview_pageh as planning, rural crime and the procurement of more British food, councils aren’t just supporting individual farming businesses — they can help turn the tide and shape the future of our industry by increasing our collective resilience.”

France prisis

Colbert and economic crisis

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Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683*) was in his early 40s in 1661, when Louis XIV appointed him Comptroller of the French navy – along with a handful of related posts. Managing the accounts for the French fleet was particularly toxic. A quick look at the French state’s solvency track record suggests that it was less than perfect. The king’s choice of Colbert senior was timely, if nothing else. Colbert kept the post until he  died in 1683, adding to a formidable reputation in the process.

He actively supported the national economy, making sure that his staff monitored duty on imports that could be produced more economically in France

The fact that Colbert senior spent a lot of time overseeing construction projects in his later years should not be taken as evidence of the French state’s ability  to pay. The country’s fragile finances were not out of place alongside it’s continental rivals. Started around 1600, the Tours  Livre was a sub-regional institution. Look at the y-axis on the graph at the top of this page. which is denominated in “Tours livres” – and plots the relative tax yields one of a collection of metal-based regional currencies used in the middle ages for shared investments over modest areas. The Tours livre and contemporaries of its ilk were in use from about 1600 until the first quarter of the 18th century. After a near catastrophic collapse following the return of William and Mary, finance ministers realised why there weren’t more of these currency baskets in operation. Basically, there were no restraints on royalty.

Colbert senior used his strong networking skills to back and build food market halls the length and breadth of the Hexagon. Known as “le grand Colbert”  he promoted a form of mercantilism (dubbed “colbertism”), while spending a lot of time on capital-intensive projects such as groups of four dry docks served by a single lock for    naval shipbuilding and repairs. By placing an order for a 374 metre-long rope machine to supply the dockyard in 1666, Louis XIV ensured the success of Colbert’s plans for Rochefort and generated strong demand for French-grown sisal and hemp for years to come. Rope-making was the  the key to the increasing complexity and manoeuvrability of navalfleets: it was normal use as much as 30 miles (56km) for even a small ship. Drinking water was a knotty problem, however, until the late 19th century. To complicate matters, Rochefort had  no readily accessible water supplies, despite intensive foraging. In 1808, Napoleon ordered a full scale search for water in Rochefort After years of searching, in 1868 a hapless team of diggers finally broke through a hard rock dome that had been holding back an underground reservoir of super-heated boiling salt water**. Later developed as a thermal bath site, the problem of supplying drinking water remained intractable and dogged the city for years to come.

  •  Readers need to know that Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683) had a son, Jean-Baptiste Colbert* (1651-1690, Marquis de Seignélay) Given the frequency of first names passing from one generation to the next, it is important to keep track of the generation markers when they are cited by a significant number of sources, as here. It is also useful to keep any asterisks that other researchers might have added, even if your own investigations might suggest that they are superfluous: once removed, they will forever prey on your productive time (caveat editor…).

** A kettle will boil at atmospheric pressure, reaching a temperature of  around 100 degrees C. If you leave it to boil, the water will continue to boil at 100 degrees, expelling water vapour to balance the surplus heat.   Put a heavy duty closure on the kettle and the pressure inside the vessel will rise quite rapidly, as will the temperature. This rising pressure and temperature is what moved steam engines: it is an example of superheating at work. Do  not try this at home unless you have a qualified engineer to fit and monitor a pressure gauge…

France oysters

Have gabarre, will trade

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This article visits a corner of south west France where a group of minor rivers were developed to produce a series of navigable river sections, making it easier to carry heavy loads over long distances. 

This was achieved with great skill,  causing minimal interference to the surrounding countryside. Work started on sections of the Charente and the Boutonne marshland navigations in the middle ages. With regular dredging the waterways became easily navigable, although declining boat numbers in recent years have allowed the weeds to  to grow back. It is still navigable, even when compared to its heyday in

Barrels of wine from Sète arriving on a gabare

the latter days of the  18th century (17xx) . France was at the height of its maritime power, commanding a large fleet of warships – and despatched squadrons of frigates as the need arose. The brave sailors who sailed on them often spent three

to four years at sea in  difficult  conditions. It was common for sailors to be lost at sea ; some were washed overboard ; others were taken ill and did not recover ; some just never went home because for whatever reason, they found  themselves in a country they liked, or they found a port where they could live without being persecuted, or they had set up a new home and started another family.

The part of France that I am writing about today is in the south west of the country, where my wife, Michelle, was born and

Gabare in Royan harbour, 1901. Note lack of tourists…

spent her early years. A group of rivers flow down gentle valleys, a patchwork of vineyards and wooded hillsides. The largest is  the Charente, a long, sinuous river which rises not far from Angoulême. Its biggest tributary is the Boutonne, which emerges, full size, from a hillside, overlooking marshlands. The Boutonne feeds the extensive marshlands, joining the Charente down  stream of Saint Jean d’Angély, which was an important commercial focus at this time. The marshlands were hard to navigate, but the people who lived in the ancient département of Aunis kept dredging the channels in a regular pattern, at the times specified by the elders.The craft they used for all their needs was called a gabare, a 20-metre flat-bottomed barge. The wooded hilltop ridges that clung to the sky provided timber of all sizes, from beams to charcoal, which was also made by the local foundries for all sorts of ironware.You are unlikely ever see an old-fashioned gabare since they were often little more than consignments of timber lashed up with a steering oar. They could take cargo, but as a shared risk. These ad hoc lash-ups made a single trip downstream. Once any cargo had been taken off, the gabares were delivered to the shipyards as timber and used to make ships of the line. Today, a gabare is a simple flat bottomed boat, with a canopy to shelter tourist groups of 20 to 30 people.

All manner of things passed through the riverside wharves on the Boutonne and the Charente, such as cannon for the king’s shipyards. The two big rivers were joined by the Seigné and the Né. Further south, the river Seudre flows north west into the top end of a tidal corridor linking Fort Boyard to the north and the Gironde estuary in the south. These rivers are not long,  starting around Limoges and flowing west north west to reach the Atlantic some 50 miles downstream at Rochefort, where the king had a series of naval shipyards and a ropemaking machine. In the seventeenth century (starts 1601, finishes 1699) it was one of Europe’s  major maritime powers. These minor rivers literally powered a large and extensive economic engine that travelled the world, planting its language, culture and economic structures as it went.

Today, much of central Africa is francophone (speaks French), likewise a huge swathe of the Panote:cific islands, not forgetting that some  French speaking settlers stayed on the coasts of the Americas,  (north and south) having migrated for better fishing. 

Translation note

Une fleuve and une rivière  se traduisent vers l’anglais avec le même mot : “river” tous les deux. Une fleuve se jette dans la mer; une rivière jette son eau dans un lac ou une autre rivière ou même dans une fleuve. La fleuve aura automatiquement un zône où le niveau d’eau est variable suivant la marée. Il y a quelques rivières avec une masse suffisante pour ateller la force gravitationnelle de la lune, mais pas toutes.

raw

Fresh ideas for food?

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Food production can appear chaotic at first sight, but  those doing tbe heavy lifting have a fair grsp of what is required.  More to the point, even if it may not be immediately obvious, there will usually  be a number of integrated systems monitoring crucial  processes. Take canned foods, for instance. The underlying technology is an oversize pressure cooker, which has been in constant use since Denis Papin invented what came to be known as the Papin digester in the latter half of the 18th century. Down the intervening centuries canning technology improved dramatically, not that anyone who was not involved with the day to day minutiae of contemporary products  would ever have guessed. There is more than a touch of national pride surrounding the lives and work of such industry demigods as Nicolas Appert; Antoine-Augustin Parmentier;Louis Pasteur. Here are  a few examples of the genre: French inventions, capital F ; French national pride in its canners is very commendable, but overlooks a few small but significant glitches.

UK UK economy

Trussed in the system?

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Once in a while, somebody releases statistics or data that tells a complete story in figures alone. Take this example from the National Farmers’ Union (NFU)  last week.

…One fifth of laying hen are kept in sheds that are more than 25 years old, with the average shed age being 17 years. Meanwhile, sheds for pullet ands and breeding  activities are  even  older . The total spend on  building construction fell by 40% compared to the previous five-year period. The UK poultry sector is being squeezed, even if this is not immediately apparent.; If you want another example, many English pullets  are living in sheds that are up to 50 years old, while their Welsh counterparts are accommodated in sheds that go back 12 years on average. (data available here))

There is  no suggestion that the fabric of the buildings concerned  could be unsound, but rather that as supermarket suppliers, they have faced pressure to leave capital expenditure for years on en. The lack of due process to recover their legitimate capital costs, let alone operating costs, just adds injury to insult.

 

 

 

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Tipping points in history

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In the wake of changes brought about by the revolution, the  focus of the French economy shifted. The 18th century was a time when international trade was operating in what people used to call triangular trading patterns.  Starting in the UK or a European port, ships would sail to ports on the African coast, where they collected shipments of slaves before leaving for the Caribbean. Many died aboard ship, others within days or weeks of arriving. The ships stayed tied up while they were loaded with tea and sugar before returning to London, where these luxury products were taxed and sold on.

Carrying food safety is a bit like a fairground ride: it appears chaotic at first sight, but  the staff who have to work on the rides develop very finely tuned responses to changes in their work.

There is a more than a touch of narrative enthusiasm surrounding the lives and work of such industry demigods as Nicolas Appert;  Louis Pasteur; Antoine-Augustin Parmentier. Many of the robust and worthy food industry leaders of the 19th century were also buried in the Parthenon, provided the body was not in an advanced state of decay. Legendary French family food businesses, just like their founders, have been long-lived, profitable and  for those tourists who thought that Paris was as good as it gets, a source of wonder to passing visitors to France. There are many competent food companies working in obscure corners of la France profonde  and a lot of them knock the parisians into a cocked hat.

Take a scrap of paper and start writing down a list of French firms. As you start looking for famous businesses and household   names in towns and cities across France, you will find highly reputable companies with postcodes that spell out traditional landscapes rather than modernity. For me, the four generations of the Hénaff family come to mind: starting with very simple ingredients, they have a very small staff, but manage a huge production schedule. due to the efforts of third generation family member Jean-Jacques Hénaff. His core product is the canned Paté Hénaff,  perfected at the Hénaff family’s manufacturing site in Pouldreuzic on the Breton peninsula. Should you like fungi, look up the Borde  mushroom packing plant. All three generations were busy sorting and cleaning fungi, when I visited.

The tropical peasants who supply large quantities of almost dry fungi used to top up the sacks with ferrous waste to bulk up the weight loss in the drying stage. Nobody ever mentions the overweight sacks to the suppliers, for one very simple reason. So long as they carry on using scrap iron pellets, the metal shows up on a standard food industry  conveyor belt. If the pickers change the material used to top up the sack weight, there is a risk that  the substitution might not be detected in time, with potentially expensive litigation.

Elsewhere, in the south of France, spirit manufacturer, Matthieu Tesseire was politically active during the early 18th century. By 1720 the Tesseires had spotted the risk of a change of government, sold their land and sailed to the Caribbean, where nobody was challenged for their politics. The family devised  a reliable and safe way of transporting sugar to metropolitan France, earning a fortune as they went.  As the generations passed, they became increasingly argumentative and ongoing feuds within the clan finally pushed André Tesseire to restructure the business as a twenty first century corporate entity, in a despairing bid to prevent personal emnities from tearing up a multi-million cash cow into commercial confetti.

In the years leading into the 19th century, transport set operational ceilings for distribution systems, but once the age of steam was in motion, bigger load sizes and greater carrying capacities resolved a lot of the once-intractable issues.

Asia climate

Missing the point…

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There are a number of gaps in the human rights platform that cannot be allowed to go unchallenged. The first is that in eighteenth century France, it excluded women, which was more than a minor oversight. It means that where womens’ rights had prevailed, there were the beginnings of a more balanced society. But while womens’ voices were heard in occasional outbursts and as far away from the functions of government as could be managed, the bigger flaw in the liberal vision remains the exclusion of the planet and the natural world from future vision. There is no way that humanity can be left to destroy the planet’s resources  from the highest levels of the atmosphere to the deepest recesses of the oceans. It is not just ironic that a species which claims the world’s resources for itself should make such a good job of destroying life on the planet, its own included. It is also extremely offensive, not least because of the high levels of coercion that the world’s rulers apply to those around them.

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Universal rights for all?

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The opening weeks of the French revolution saw the drafting of a declaration establishing the existence of human rights and what each person was obliged to do to protect the same rights and privileges for their fellow citizens. These boundaries can only be determined by law. As we shall see later, there was no  question of extending such protection to animals, let alone the natural world or even the planet. This anthropocentric oversight is something we are still paying for and is unlikely to be resolved in an equitable fashion.

We need to start somewhere and there is every sign that even exemplary revolutionaries will struggle with the idealistic aims of human rights: the planet comes off second best in the face of such the supposedly universal rights, as do flora and fauna the length and breadth of the planet. Having claimed the lion’s share of the world’s natural resources, the human revolutionary elite turned its attention to making a set of laws to withhold its new-found privileges from those who could possibly represent a challenge to future generations of global power brokers. The irony of this paradox is a heavy burden that is shared with nature in every corner of the globe: we have already seen some of the consequences in our atmosphere, our ocean depths and our chances of survival, but this is only this is only the beginning.

Europe France

Palais Bourbon faces reality

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For France’s parliamentarians, 1993 ended with some progress, but without a readily identifiable outcome. To be sure, national legislation had got a better grip on the systematic abuses of commercial practice, but there remained a lot of work to finish before anyone would be able to say they had anything solid to show for it. The  French government focussed on the work of a parliamentary commission led by Jean-Paul Charié, the député for Loiret, which shares its name with an upstream tributary of the river Loire. Sadly, Charié did not live to see the fruits of his work, but his input was invaluable, especially in the way he could summarise and implement new national expectations for commercial propriety.

City life Europe France raw

France needed laws to protect its citizens… but now it’s too late

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Philippe SEGUIN at a meeting with UPE members in the 1990

Times change: it is no longer considered smart to be dismissive of liberty and the rule of law. In 1993, the leader of the French parliament, Philippe Séguin implored his colleagues at the Palais Bourbon to double down on sharp commercial practices. He was addressing members of the elected lower house of the French parliament at the start of a root and branch review of the country’s commercial law for the food industry. Nowhere else in the national economy was it so important to establish and protect a body of people that would both protect current legislation yet still allow business and industry to develop and extend free trade in positive ways.

“Managing a balanced set of rules  for free competition is only possible when there is full a
greement on a legal framework that will protect and develop equitable trading, while still allowing lawmakers to legislate with precision and firm resolve to prevent any future damage.”

Restoring damaged sectors, building the trust for future developments and protecting the weak from the predations of the rich and powerful are just three tasks still waiting for French lawmakers

. 

Preserving a free trading environment is an important and basic requirement for our country, Séguin declared.

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