Do you know when the heat treatment of food for canning and bottling was first documented? The same process is still in use today.
Man walks into a bar…
…and asks for a glass of tap water.
Imagine that you are working behind the bar: do you serve said glass of tap water?
Animal, vegetable, mineral
These three words help us to navigate the arcane world of customs codes, which do in fact follow logical rules. The underlying structure is called the Harmonised System. This is made up of groups of traded commodities, referred to as chapters which add up collectively as a schedule. Merchandise is listed in the order animal, vegetable and mineral.
The opening chapters cover live animals, followed by carcases and meat, moving on to animal products. Animals are followed by fish. Plants come next and are similarly classified in the order of seeds, then plants followed by retail fruit and vegetables.
A guide to the detail of customs classifications is in preparations and will be downloadable from this page in the coming weeks.
What Mona Lisa tells us about sardines
Sardines in the Mediterranean are now smaller and lighter than 20 years ago. Mona Lisa is a European project which has been studying sardine populations in the region and has established that the average lengths of sardines had fallen from 15 centimetres to 11 and the average weight has nosedived from 30 grams to 10.
Researchers attribute the dramatic decline to a 15% drop in stocks of micro-algae in the bay of Biscay, which has lowered the nutritional value of plankton. The study carried out by the French marine institute Ifremer was able to rule out overfishing and natural predators such as dolphins or tuna. It also established that there was no virus to blame for the dramatic decline.
The changing composition of plankton was investigated using a controlled sardine population of 450 fish divided into four groups and fed differing strengths of plankton. This is the largest project of its kind anywhere in the world.
The sardine is one of the most heavily fished species in the world. The high demand from canneries creates a commercial value for sardines within a certain size range. Changing the size of sardine cans would entail substantial costs for retooling packing lines, not to mention major revisions to packing and cooking protocols for the autoclaves.
Summer fungi in November
Four percent is history
Within living memory, a grocery business was considered successful if it earned a margin of three or four percent, but in the late 20th century supermarkets rewrote the rules.
Call it shelf money; marketing assistance; listing fees, the multiples started asking for — and getting — sums in the order of GBP 5000 a year per Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) for listing a product in an agreed number of stores (usually hundreds). Bearing in mind that a large supermarket will stock about 20,000 SKUs, some of which will be furnished by more than one supplier, the country’s major multiples are trousering millions in readies up front, without giving suppliers so much as a cat in hell’s chance of their money back if an SKU is delisted.
There are many ways the multiples can extract whatever money they feel a supplier should cough up: withholding invoice settlements; requiring suppliers to pay for Point Of Sale promotional material; special offers (these are always funded by the supplier); the list is a long one.
So the grocer that used to eke out resources to earn three or four percent has been consigned to history. France’s biggest retailer, Michel-Edouard Leclerc went on the record in October 2007 to say that a hypermarket needs to earn a margin of 25%. I saved the URL*, but Leclerc has deleted the blog post since then, leaving a rather fancy 404 page shown in the picture.
* http://www.michel-edouard-leclerc.com/blog/m.e.l/archives/2007/10/index.php?date=20071025#000727
Settling down
Reading the preface of James C Scott’s book Against the Grain, I realised that it promises to live up to my expectations. Scott disentangles the timelines of settled agriculture, which is only possible with domesticated crops and livestock. The process of domestication was spread over millenia in the region between the Tigris and the Euphrates, starting around 8000BCE. Domestication was an essential step on the way to settling in a fixed location.
Establishing permanent crop-fields attracted wildlife such as ducks and other fowl that could, like fire or food crops, also be domesticated. Scott argues that the process of domestication is reciprocal, since humans adapted in subtle ways to the livestock they wanted to keep.
There is a lot of detail to absorb, so it will be a while before I return to discussing his analysis of the history of the region that later became Mesopotamia and Sumeria. Scott is published by Yale University Press.
Hand to mouth
Meet Tollund man, whose body was recovered from a peat bog in Denmark in 1950. His face is one of a handful to have survived down the centuries from an age when finding food in Europe was a constant struggle. The cadaver was so well preserved in the sphagnum moss that scientists have had an opportunity to investigate Tollund man’s last meal.
This was a rough gruel made from seeds and grain, including barley, flax and common knotweed. There is no way of knowing whether Tollund man ate as frequently as once a day, but every last morsel of food came from his immediate surroundings.
There was no question of exotic or imported food reaching such a humble soul. This may strike us as strange since we live in a world where foods of all descriptions travel halfway round the world. We need to recognise that Tollund man had marginal existence rather than a sustainable diet. How he survived is a mystery to us in the twenty first century, but we are about to relearn the skill set or perish in the attempt. The plants Tollund man harvested can still be found at certain times during the year and these harvests will reclaim their relevance to our times, probably within our lifetimes.
We should not think of Tollund man as a survivor in a hostile environment that has long since been domesticated but recognise that this former denizen of the wild prehistoric lowlands has a lesson for us. Regardless of how he met his end, Tollund man lived by foraging and had skills that we are likely to need once more.
What makes an English breakfast?
The first shipment of Danish bacon arrived in October 1847. Through the nineteenth century, Denmark used to export wheat to Britain, but North America’s railway network reached the east coast in the 1840s and generated a tidal wave of cheap grain across Europe. Like the rest of its European neighbours, Denmark was unable to compete with transatlantic prices and turned instead to converting American grain into eggs, dairy products and bacon. At this time, the whey left over from cheesemaking was fed to pigs, who can put on 100 grams a day to their body weight.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Danish agriculture underwent a transformation in which livestock cooperatives flourished, especially those raising pigs. In 1887, Germany banned imports of Danish pigs and bacon, which pushed the cooperatives to increase the volumes of bacon shipped to the UK. It is worth remembering that without universal refrigeration, pigmeat had to travel as salt pork or bacon.
Time travel for food
The process of sealing food into a glass jar or a can and boiling the sealed units has been used for over two centuries. In 1812 French revolutionary Nicolas Appert published a user’s manual to the process, called The Art Of Preserving for Several Years Animal and Vegetable Substances. The process is often referred to eponymously as Appertisation and the food is literally cooked in the can (or bottle).
Appert was making and selling bottled vegetables and other foodstuffs in Paris, during the dark days of the terror and Robespierre. Ever since the French revolution, canned food has sustained earnest adventurers atop the highest mountain peaks, in the depths of the oceans, not forgetting orbiting space stations.
Although first published in French, within months English translations were being studied in England and the technique was applied to preserve food for long sea voyages. A French naval captain complained that this was a French military secret which had been smuggled across the Channel and was now being used against its inventors.
The reality was in fact more mundane. English engineer Bryan Donkin ran a workshop in Bermondsey, London and was looking for an additional manufacturing activity to stay in business. Donkin licensed Appert’s process from a travelling commercial agent who went by the name Peter Durand in England and Pierre Durand in France. Donkin set to work filling tinplate canisters with food, only to find that he had missed something out.
Donkin summoned Durand, who called Appert away from the wreckage of his house and workshop to visit Donkin in Bermondsey during 1814. The problem was simple enough: the food was not being sealed in its cans until it had cooled down, by which time there was a risk of spoilage.
By the time Appert left England, Durand had a fully working filling line and Appert had seen at first hand just how effective tinplate canisters were for storing food. The quality of tinplate available in France was nowhere near as good as the tinplate Donkin was buying. Nevertheless, by paying over the odds for tinplate, Appert started to use metal packaging for his products.
Originally from the Champagne region of France, Appert was used to packing food in heavy glass jars. These were not well-received by the French navy, on the grounds of breakage, and needed more attention when sealing the jars and keeping out the air. Appert spent the rest of his life experimenting with canned and bottled food until he reached the age of 91, dying in poverty and obscurity during 1841.
Read a short story about Nicolas Appert