Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

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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

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

draft animals haulage three quick questions

From legs to wheels

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Having covered a blank canvas with lengthy discussions of horses’ roles in the transport of goods (click on a “horse” badge for the full list), the moment has arrived to resolve any lingering doubts. Registrations of commercial vehicles on British roads grew steadily in the 1920s: the figures used in this table  are all civilian, there are no military registrations to factor in. 0 At the start of the first world war, the British government commissioned regular orders with about half a dozen automotive manufacturers equipped to fulfill wartime orders. During the hostilities, these firms built 20,000 vehicles for the military – mostly lorry chassis ready for adaptation once their role had been allocated. The government disposed of a further 6,000 vehicles that were either no longer required or beyond repair.

The only army horses ever to return to the UK were those belonging to officers, some 65,000 in all, out of a total of close on a million. There was very little reliable data on the UK’s horse population at this time. The country had been a long term importer of horses since the mid-nineteenth century. There were groups of draft horses traded by specialist breeders, who saw to it that strong lines of Shire horses, Suffolk Punches and Percherons were kept available for companies that needed to patch a gap in a team, or other specific need.

The British army commandeered as many horses as it could lay its hands on. The entire industrial world was short of mules and horses during the 1920s. It was the growing reliability of automotive products that helped some to turn the corner. There was a persistent chafing between England’s lorry drivers and coachmen who were still in a job. Knowing that the brakes on lorries were often barely fit for purpose, coachmen would wind up lorry drivers while loading their vehicles and persuade them to increase their load to a point where the vehicle was a danger to other traffic.

 

City life France raw

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?

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Television advertisements get a seasonal boost over Christmas, many of them going off at a tangent to promote lifestyle changes. In the process, they can lose focus and clarity. This year’s Intermarché two and a half minute spot is a case in point, as you will see when you click the link above and run it. The animation is flawless, the soundtrack is bright and the subtitles are timed to perfection. The storyline should be as clear as day, or at least as good as the component parts. In this case, a family Christmas lunch scene dissolves into an insoluble conflict between a wolf’s longing for friends and the creature’s assumed carniverous background. To be sure, you can’t have friends and eat them (the reference to cakeism is deliberate), but you need something a bit more substantial than the “mother carries child off to bed” ending. If the ending rounded off a strong storyline, one might forgive the lingering doubts that follow the final screen. But with an understated narrative, the story fails to inspire, inform, or instruct. It has no clear statement to offer, nor lessons to learn. Which is a shame, given the high creative standards of the agency.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Thames_Barges-Canthusus.jpg
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.

 

 

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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https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Industry_during_the_First_World_War-_Flour_Mill_Q28276.jpg

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?

 

 

datacrumb three quick questions

What is Driving Business Change?

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Forget the presentations, the bonding exercises, the sales pitches, executive bonuses, company cars and other corporate paraphenalia: it belongs in the past. Today we need to adjust to accelerating climate change, political instability, there simply isn’t time for the other stuff. People are waking up to the planet’s problems a couple of generations too late,

three quick questions

Who is driving the business?

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Census figures do not come close to providing any insight into the level or nature of economic activity in a given county or town. The productivity of 100 potters in Stoke on Trent during the 18th century could be considered substantial, but of a different quality to Josiah Wedgwood (in portrait). Few would argue that Wedgwood was a powerful agent of change on many fronts, yet this famous Unitarian went unrecorded in Anglican records of any kind.

Technology is a key to transforming productivity, but only in the hands of people with vision. Technical finesse will not redeem a boring or uninspired artefact, but serve to emphasise its lack of distinction.

Tony Wrigley has written this accessible account of how the treatment of census data is changing in today’s more broadly-based research world. The answers to life’s mysteries are no better than the questions we pose to define them.

fruit olives royal-commission three quick questions

What’s driving the business?

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Own label instant coffees are made with the same sort of coffee beans as their branded counterparts. The only difference is that the retailers control the pricing and, as retail brand owners, they are not held to ransom for shelf money. The Consumer Association magazine Which? is advising readers to switch to cheaper own label alternatives. To stand up its story, Which? gives the example of a 200g jar of Nescafé Original, which was selling for five and a half quid in supermarkets last year and is now the thick end of eight quid a pop on Ocado. Given the scale of Nescafé’s economies of scale in the procurement and manufacturing stages, how does one explain a 30% year on year price rise? Sure, the beans are more expensive, but what does the future hold for premium home delivery shopping channels?

City life domestication pre-history

Time to reflect?

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We share a planet with millions of creatures who contribute to planetary processes that keep us alive and yet in ignorance. As a species we have been technically outstanding, but we have ridden roughshod over our neighbours. While proto-agriculturists dedicated millennia to domesticating the forerunners of modern farm animals, they never stopped to reflect on the special role they played in humanity’s most positive phase.

As human populations settled, the first quality they lost was a deep awareness of a wider world beyond their existence. By leaving the land and settling in cities, humanity extinguished any remaining spark of interest in the outside world. This is just one of our nemeses emerging from the shadows. Others will catch us out sooner, but they lack the central importance of a planetary view of the natural world. Writing in Against the Grain, James C Scott reminds us that without the millennia during which prehistoric populations domesticated crops and livestock there would never have been agrarian city states. He also argues that such an important process need not be a linear progression, but that during those years human populations would have probably have lived by more than one activity, the exact combination of which would have changed with the prevailing conditions. Life in prehistory was difficult enough, without trying to stick to a linear progression from nomad to city dweller.

Humanity is too busy chipping away at nature’s remaining toeholds to spot that we, too, depend on similarly fragile foundations. Urban Food Chains started as a repository for interesting insights into the origins of what we eat. Today, it draws from a broader set of sources, in greater depth.

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