Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

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City life horse ship

Why looking the other way doesn’t work

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There is a streak of unpredictable whimsy that runs through English high society from Georgian times up to Victoria’s accession to the throne and beyond. It was aggravated by conventions that made no sense and dug ever deeper chasms between the aristocracy and its servants. Take the brutal economics of keeping a horse in cities, large or small. It was generally reckoned to cost upwards of £300 a year per steed, looked after by specialist staff, some of them issued with uniform that cost more than their wages, even after allowing for any board and lodging found by the employer.

Town-dwelling horses were kept in grouped stables, or mews, usually bearing the name of the street they served. The  equine diets were the standard fare of working horses of the day: hay, oats and roughage, washed down with water at intervals. Horses were the prerogative of the very rich or tradesmen who could cover their outgoings from their business. Agricultural businesses occupied the middle ground in this polarised rule of thumb scenario. The more successful ones worked with established lines of Percherons, Cobs or Shires, often breeding their own draft animals and systematically avoiding the saddle horse fraternity.

There was no missing the fact that horses scaled up the waste disposal problems associated with urban lifestyles. Dung disposal alone was a significant challenge, to the point where the city of London filled at least two barges a day with sweepings from the city’s crossings, which went down to the Thames estuary under cover of darkness to dump good quality, nutrient-rich material at sea.

Clearly, today’s environmental issues have deep roots: they were taking shape in the Thames estuary and elsewhere around our coasts, long before the arrival of the automotive age.

 

 

Switzerland

Off the back of a lorry

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Tomorrow, on Friday (September 5) Swiss cooperative Migros is marking its centenary by selling basic groceries off the back of a pick-up truck, just like its founder Gottlieb Duttweiler did 100 years ago. He loaded a fleet of five Model T Fords with six basic products: cornettes (Swiss pasta); coffee; rice; sugar; soap and blocks of refined coconut. Duttweiler got off to a good start despite the difficult economic times. The customised pick-up trucks went from one village to the next, in the French-speaking districts and uplands around Mont Blanc. To mark the occasion, this year’s centenary trucks will be carrying 100 Migros-manufactured own label products, Migros store inventories routinely run to 40,000 Stock Keeping Units (SKUs).

Switzerland has a long tradition of  integrating road transport: its PostBus network has been operational since 1906, with a number of forays into retailing. When developing a strategy for Migros, Duttweiler researched his competitors’ working practices and adopted the productive ones. It is worth noting, for instance, that although PostBus retained dedicated facilities for horses until 1962*, it ran very few horse-drawn buses. By 1925, Henry Ford’s Model T series had become the commercial motor of choice around the world, since it could be extensivly modified for local requirements. Duttweiler carried out simple and cost-effective adaptations to his fleet, which grew steadily. 

If you want to join in with the celebrations in Switzerland, follow this link.

*Coincidentally, Dr Beeching began his programme of cuts to the UK railway network at around the same time, starting with stations that still had stabling.

A footnote that Betty Bossi would endorse…

Never confuse the Swiss national pasta with macaroni: that would be sacrilege! A cornette looks like an elbow joint and the shape tends to settle into a stodgy honeycomb, unless a sauce of the right viscosity is added at exactly the right moment.

PS Pasta maker Betty Bossi is the Swiss market leader.

insects

Wild bees pick and choose

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After eight years tracking the foraging preferences of eight species of wild bees, researchers in North America have identified patterns in their choice of pollens. Protein contents in pollens studied by a team drawn from Northwestern University and Chicago Botanic Garden ranged from 17% to 86%. Large species were found to prefer high protein pollens, while smaller bees in the study homed in on pollens with higher carbohydrate levels and fat contents. This range is wide enough to make co-existence possible and support seasonal variations within colonies through the summer.

Science News covered the story here, Northwestern published this, which stresses how little twenty first century scientists know about wild pollinators at a landscape level. Why we listen to pesticide manufacturers rather than wild bumblebees defies logic.

fish

The Test of time

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Faced with low water levels across its territory, Southern Water is preparing to apply to the British government for a drought order in a bid to keep up with user demand. The water tables at risk include those feeding the river Test. Rising near Basingstoke, the waterway flows 64 km into the sea near Southampton. It has been famous for some of the world’s highest quality freshwater fishing grounds  and accounts for 85% of the world’s cleanest habitat in its category. It is home to several endangered species of fish, otters and river mammals.

The British government is committed to protecting both habitats and diversity. It needs words not action to ensure that corporate expedience doesn’t kill off whatever remains of quality habitats like the river Test. Because extinction is forever.

asparagus bread flour ship UK

Distance and price

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The further food travels, the more it should cost. Logically, yes, but the full story may not be quite so simple. With ingredients travelling literally half way round the world, it is no simple matter to differentiate one proposition from another. Take the example of 1925 loaf of bread, in the  previous post. The starting point is 20-stone sack of flour that anyone could visualise for themselves, suppposedly costing 42 shillings and a halfpenny. There was, in those days, total silence from the millers concerning where their wheat came from, let alone what it might have cost. Since millers earn a living from making flour,  their reticence is understandable.

By creating a synthetic starting point for the journey that would put a loaf of bread on the table, millers were able to influence the British public’s notion of what bread ought to cost. The 42 shilling sack was not a hard sell, it was a working  price point for those years. However, the Linlithgow committee, to a man, refused to make any comment on the prices of wheat, wherever it might have come from. In one sense, wheat and bread pass through very different markets, yet the two are joined at the hip for some purposes, notably if supplies fail: no wheat, no flour, no bread. It is that simple.

All through the latter years of the nineteenth century, British ports were unloading grain from every corner of the known world. For most people, grain imports were a permanent fixture and, as part of the British Empire, this happy state of affairs would somehow be left continue. However, the U-boat attacks, which started in 1916, jolted Britain into protecting inbound shipments of any description. From being adventuresome and exciting, life on a long haul merchantman took on a more challenging aspect as the U-boats extended their range from the concrete bunkers at Rochefort, comfortably crossing the Bay of Biscay.

 

 

 

bread flour three quick questions

Four frameworks

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The Linlithgow committee provided four business snapshots based on live data (1923 figures..) to illustrate how the sector operated. There is no way of telling how much m, but the ones they published cast some light on the baking sector. Only theWar Office refused to share any data.  The most detailed is based on figures from the National Association of Master Bakers’ and a number of local associations. The Industrial Co-operative group gave a terse rendering of the Co-op’s pricing structure, which differs in smalll but significant ways from retail rivals. Third is a glimpse of the War Office bakery, in Aldershot. It went to extraordinary lengths to say nothing.  For the time being, I cannot locate where Butler Brothers traded, but the firm operated a number of branches from a central bakery.

Get ready to work in farthings for a while, since this small, fiddly coin was the lowest common denominator of the day.

The Master Bakers give a fairly thorough view of the additional inputs needed to make a batch of bread from a sack of flour, bearing in mind that it consolidates data supplied by 26 local firms and 63 local associations.

National Association of Master Bakers

All the figures that follow are the additional costs for a batch of bread. The dry ingredients added to the 20 stone sack of flour were valued at 161 farthings or 3s/4d and a farthing. Upstream expenses for converting the flour totalled 112d, that is 9s/4d, ignoring a stray halfpenny. Downstream expenses including distribution for the resultant bread was 11 shillings. Total cost to convert a sack of flour left change out of £2/4 shillings. Stables accounted for just over three shillings to the costs  of each batch, while depreciation on the capital for automotive vehicles was just a third of that.

Butler Bros.

bread City life crunchy numbers flour food production UK economy weights and measures

The pricing of daily bread

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This female factory hand was photographed at work in Birkenhead during September 1918. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Logistics contractors refer to it as the final mile, but many of us would settle for “delivering the goods.” It is potentially a complex stage in a product’s journey to meet the end user.

In December 1924, the LinLithgow Committee supplied the Royal Commission with four sets of operational models and an outwardly robust methodology to analyse the cost of bread.  It was based on the bakers’ key ingredient, the 20-stone (127 kg) sack of flour at the heart of every batch of bread baked across the land in those days. In its day, this was a Known Value Item, to borrow a modern term. It traded at forty two shillings and a farthing, according to popular belief, not moving from one year to the next. Every baker who ever bought a sack of flour from a miller in those days  paid 42s and one farthing, the story goes. Did anyone ever query the extra farthing? Where did it come from? Where did it go?

 

 

bread flour retail weights and measures

Horsepower finds a new balance

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There is no shortage of examples of horses travelling to WWI battlefields, only to be shipped out as carrion within a month, if that. The British army had been working on mechanised replacements to haul heavy artillery pieces, for the best part of a decade. It would only be fair to give the military engineers credit for their efforts to minimise internal rows, and soldier on to modify the original design through two or three iterations by the end of the first world war. Thousands of horses still died in the process, but there was an end in sight to mass equine butchery.

This could not come too soon, as inter-war businesses set about restoring their delivery systems. When trying to track the development of value in the pricing of bread and bakery goods, the editor of Industrial Peace, Major W Melville, conceded that the public grasp of the price structure was “little understood”. The only accessible estimates came from the Linlithgow Report and started outside bakeries with the purchase of sacks of flour. From the plains of north America, the vast expanses of Australia,  to the more modest arable holdings of England, Linlithgow collects the entire growing stage of breadmaking flour into a single undifferentiated lump.

The disadvantages of average returns are there for all to see. Melville put it like this: “No evidence offered in respect of price structure of flour. My inquiry begins at the point at which the baker buys his flour from the miller.” The opening price of breadmaking flour in January 1923 was 42 shillings and a penny. There is no indication of whether this should be taken as an “asking” price or a “taking” price, as given in a trade paper, meaning that flat pricing goes out of the window, speeded on its way by discounts applied at strategic order volumes. The figures discussed in the Linlithgow report were fixed during a time when flour prices were starting to fall, leaving a number of question marks over the validity of 42 shillings and a penny as a credible price for a sack of flour at this time.

more follows later…

Wednesday September 10

It has taken a long time to work out the interaction of resources and the sequence of events that generated an avalanche of cash for European and American motor manufacturers in the 1920s. Unpacking the topic is a slow business: so many numbers to crunch combined with a need to understand the different assumptions that accompany the costings of equine and automotive modi operandi. From Georgian times and much of the Victorian era, London had a working horse population of more than a quarter of a million animals, that came with significant food and stabling requirements. Extending these planning requirements to the rest of the horse population, noticeably in ports and cities across the country, There was no way equine transport would ever be cheap in the way railways rapidly became.

Friday September 12

-Let us start by unravelling the requirements of industry in general. Profitability, as Henry Ford went on to demonstrate with his Model T series, could be generated by scaling up the manufacture of a basic product, particularly if it delivered scope for adaptations on its way to the customer.  The carrriagemakers of the day imagined that they were safe from the rigours of change, but their dreams turned to dust. Once-revered craft skills were cast into obscurity, lost in the cut and thrust of sparring markets, consigned  to history.

 

 

crunchy numbers

Are you sitting comfortably?

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There is a serious error in the opening of the commission’s report: the sales figures of a major retailer were either misquoted by M. Charié and the record of what he said was an accurate record, or, an error was made during the transcription of an otherwise accurate account of the hearing. It consists of a total in billions being rendered in millions. It is  an error anyone could have made, since we are all capable of making gaffes like that. What matters is that we untangle the original instance and ensure that there can be no repetition.

The opening pages of the Charié report (vol 1, p17) carries a parallel message, likening a distortion of competition to a pin left behind in an armchair. No matter how well-appointed the chair, a single pin can render it unuseable. (montage: Urban Food Chains)

Charié was both surprised and impressed by the quality and quantity of replies to the commission’s questionnaire for the coming weeks. He noted that many were hand-written and often from senior management across a wide range of sectors. While the captains of industry, large and small, were keen to see fair play, there was an unfortunate degree of flexibility in the interpretation of the basic terms such as “single price list” or “payment terms”, or even “selling at a loss”.

Regardless of the quality of the responses, it was clear that a lot remained unspoken. Would a supplier risk offending a client and potentially lose a listing, when orders, let alone listings were hard to win. Or how many companies would admit to having extracted preferential terms  (answer: zero). The subject may be complex, but no-one is going to miss out on getting one over the competition.

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A voice from the past

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Twenty five years ago Europe was in a state of flux. Many differing political agendas were being promoted in the belief that drafting the right regulations would somehow automatically unlock all the expectations with little or no further discussion or purpose.

If there was a single example to illustrate the processes involved, you will not be surprised to learn that I happen to think that competition is  sine qua non  for civilised society. Considering the central role of competition in a liberal economy, it is disturbing that at no point during the closing years of the 20th century was there a single EU-backed discussion or study of commercial planning permission for urban populations. At the time, there was just one voice to be heard in the darkness, challenging the naif notion that competition would somehow develop unhindered in a bed of thistles, that we would somehow recognise this state of innocence when it emerges from the shadows. The voice was that of French deputy Jean-Paul Charié. He presided over la commission de la production et les Echanges, publishing a parliamentary report into dysfunctional competition. At the time I was a production sub on a weekly trade title . Intrigued by the subject matter and knowing that this was a one-off opportunity, I phoned the French parliament and spoke to Chariés office. I was pleasantly surprised to get a phone call back from Charié in person, when he promised to post me a copy of the report to get the full story. Sadly, I never spoke to him again, since he died, but his published work casts a bright light on topics that thenceforth could  be debated in public with impunity. The evidence he collected on commercial malpractices came from all over Europe, painting a rather downbeat picture of how ethical standards in  retailing had declined while managing to appear outwardly presentable.

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