Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

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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.

Asia Caribbean Europe France plantation profit or lorr ship

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.

climate Europe France profit or loaa

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.

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.

Europe France

Pictures worth a thousand words

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click picture to download original text (in French)

On April 23, 2008, Michel Barnier greeted  hundreds of French citizens in Paris, who were disturbed  by the farm minister’s use of a contentious image to promote a series of  conferences about food.  “We don’t live on burgers or fast food,” one lady grumbled, staring at a picture of a discarded burger box bearing the words “Qu’est-ce qu’on mange ?” (“what are we eating?”) Collectively, the conferences were promoted under the title “Parlons agriculture” – ‘let’s talk about agriculture’. The graphics are challenging, particularly for rural populations: as well as the burger box image you can see on this page,  elsewhere in the posters and conference literature, there is a battered steel barrel that has not just seen better times, but is clearly toxic.

Starting with the blue booklet on this page, we will unpack the arguments and economics that were shaping agriculture in 2008. Here are the opening words from the minister: “Current events have just reminded us, with terrible consequences, that the world has yet to get rid of the scourge of famine. Egypt, Morocco, Indonesia, Cameroon, Mexico, Bolivia, every continent on the planet is seeing a resurgence of food riots, which harden men’s resolve and leave behind the smouldering wreckage of civilisation. History is being wrapped up in front of us as the world’s raw material prices rise in brutal leaps and bounds, food prices are soaring, traders all over the world are panicking. Rice, a basic food for half the world’s population was at the heart of this. Prices had risen by 54% since January (he was speaking in April) and major exporters were holding back their export tonnages. Today, three billion people live on less than two dollars a day, and the spectre of hardship hangs over them.”

Nearer to home “…hunger has been avoided for a long time, we think that shortages have become a thing  of the past and there is an illusion of food security.” Look again and you will recall “mad cow disease”, alongside avian flu, arising from instances where feeding same-species animal remains have put human health in danger.

“In these times of great doubt, we need to bring together those who produce and those who consume, we need to end the mistrust between two worlds that have stopped talking to each other.”

Nowadays,  [2008] …”wherever we live, a big question hangs over the new century: how do we feed humanity to ensure health and sustainability?  Barnier argues that we can no longer afford to live in ignorance of past mistakes, guzzling saturated fats and rich foods can no longer be indulged. This is the underlying purpose of the conference: we need to   share and exchange resources; weave a dialogue of a sort that has never been seen before; making it possible for agriculture to rejoin the rest of the world.

Breton farmer Morgan urges president Macron to lead European action while it is still an option.

This morning (23-NOV-2025)  I reposted a call to action made by Morgan, a radical peasant  farmer. Speaking to camera, she calls on President Macron to head up a pan-European campaign to stop fruit growers being put out of business by cheap imports from Latin America. France has a strong enough voice to make itself heard on the international scene, Morgan argues. France should stop dreaming of its past glories and wake up to a very real threat, she warns.

Europe France

Talk about agriculture..(2)

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Here’s a challenge; how many agriculture ministers would cheerfully stake their political careers on the agressive tone of the visual below? Subtle as a flying brick, this artwork got right up the noses of the farming unions they were targeting. There can be nothing worse than projecting a goody two shoes image of your industry only to see the minister’s team spoil the effect.

French farming unions milked  a government department that they thought they could call their own. For years, the FNSEA posted teams of so-called advisors in the corridors of rue de Varenne, who would be consulted on all manner of policy matters, trivial or otherwise. Fast food ingredients do not automatically  earn thick margins in a competitive sector: even economists need to be realistic occasionally. In the middle of multiple crises with local, regional and national consequences, seemingly overnight we had a food crisis. Sociologist Claude Fischler, research director at CNRS, cautions against considering a collection  of local responses to specific, localised problems will somehow add up to ways of working that will add up to a regional or national strategy that will work straight out of the box. In particular, there is an ever-present push-pull tension between planning for food security, (making sure that there is  food on sale) including, but not exclusively, supermarkets and other distribution models. The rich world which was once home to eaters is now populated by consumers, with all the implications of added-value strategies. Consumers transfer their disposable income to products  increasingly heavily-processed products, thus spending more on food and transferring market power to an ever smaller group of brand owners. As such, they become closed off to the outside world, in an increasingly bitter war of words to justify their positions, if only in their eyes. Food manufacturers focussing on sales targets and profit margins will drift out of markets in the hungry world, widening the gaps between consumers and ever greater numbers of starving populations who are constantly hungry. To say such things are “nobody’s fault” would be disingenuous but is often used to dissipate any blame implied.

A more urgent question is whether or not poor countries should be assisted to stimulate higher productivity among their fellow citizens, with an ever-greater risk of system failure in technology that will stop working sooner or later. Capital-intensive systems have less to offer traditional peasants with lower capital exposure, they are also more likely to survive extended drought or unforeseeable weather conditions (climate change).

Europe France

Let’s talk agriculture!

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The Barnier oil barrel image, reminding everyone that modern agriculture has an environmental cost.

In June 2008, Michel Barnier left rue de Varenne  after two years as France’s farm minister. He was outwardly at peace with the world, after two years spent steadfastly denying that he had any serious differences of opinion with President Nicolas Sarkozy. This was not altogether convincing, since Sarkozy was prone to talk up his chances of successful plans and policies long before they were anywhere near ready to be seen in public. Such stoicism in the face of  a president that spoke first and thought later does not come easily, as the Americans are learning in 2025. Barnier was trained as an administrator, graduating from the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris (ESCP) in 1972 .

This does not mean that he is a rug to be walked on: far from it. He won a number of internal battles without comment. Some of his victories were reversed by political opponents who went over the minister’s head and persuaded the President to see things their way. People such as Xavier Beulin, head of the FNSEA, had Sarkozy’s ear and seized any opportunity to put ideas into his head (click here). In Beulin’s case, it was personal: the farming unions had operated a system for sitting in on internal ministry meetings and generally making sure that the FNSEA view prevailed elsewhere in the ministry. If this sounds overstated, have a look at this post, describing the modus operandi. Barnier cleared the corridors of unwanted loiterers, by simply re-issuing security passes to ministry staff and setting higher security standards  at rue de , Varenne. He also succeeded in raising the level of public debate around agriculture with a series of state-sponsored debates scheduled for 2008. There were two in Paris and a third in Brussels. There was no mistaking tone of the events, which challenged the FNSEA ‘s founding principles, namely to corner every centime of public funding for  agriculture. A battered steel barrel, dominates one set of conference documents, with the question of the day in big white letters: “What kinds of agriculture(s) do we want for tomorrow?

Barnier sets the scene in the opening paragraph: “There can be no doubt that the outlook for the world has changed. The abundance of nature that we have unthinkingly squandered has now given way to a weak and fragile planet, in which resources are threatened. Today, we have the results of years of work from the scientific community. We can no longer ignore them.The age of widespread scarcity has begun.” Readers will be glad to learn that unless things turn nasty, I shall make these two conference documents available for as long as possible. I have no plans to offer a translation unless a significant number  of people request one. There is no way I would put the documents through an AI system, the words are too carefully balanced to survive a bot’s blunt ignorance and I haven’t got the necessary time to make a useable translation.

There can be no discussion of how to set things back on track without an understanding of population dynamics. Barnier sketches it out like this: “The prodigious population explosion that marked the 20th century is set to continue until 2050, at least. It will impact the poor world, in the places where hunger is already  rife and  in urban areas, where eating habits at all levels of society have been messed up.” Up until now, Barnier argues, humanity has usually been able to patch things up with technical solutions. In 2008,  there was a glimmer of recognition that the scale of the problem was greater than anyone imagined.

“Faced with rocketing food costs (in 2008), confronted by food riots, hampered by shortages of basic resources: the strategies which we used to think would solve the problem will do no such thing.

“We are faced with an equation, the like of which we have never seen before (still in 2008) (the French use “inédit” so much that it ceases to carry much weight) . “To deal with the problem, on the basis of current evidence we have to break with development models that will increase the consumption of finite resources. This is what makes the situation so urgent, since all the checks and balances that keep the planet in working order are threatened.”

 

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