Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

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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.

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.

 

 

 

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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?

 

 

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Disjointed thinking on prices.

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Responding to Linlithgow’s insistence on the need for market data to be available on a regular basis, a senior MAF official, Mr RJ Thomson, submitted a more detailed version of the government’s reservations over broadcasting raw price data without a standardised format or structure. Thomson told the commission that MAF was working on a “comparative index” that would somehow make sense of wholesale and retail price movements. It couldn’t be done in the 1920s and I’m not convinced we could do it in 2025. Take the example of a pig producer with slaughter weight bacon pig to sell in 1925. The creature is sold to a curer, who kills the animal and splits it into two sides of bacon. So far we have two mirror image halves of the same animal. One side of bacon goes to a Drury Lane emporium, the other to a Tyneside grocer on the east coast. The cuts that are taken off a London side of bacon, sold in a well-to-do part of London will earn more than the side of bacon shipped to Newcastle, even when the higher shipping costs are factored in. It is so predictable, but illogical, and index numbers won’t explain it.

It is not difficult to spot a flaw in M AF’s argument: the cumulative effect of the changes made at each stage are not counted as part of the process.  Is this the only structural flaw?

 

 

insects

Marketing insects takes more than buzz words

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It is easy to make a case for raising insects as a food crop, the farming industry done this sort of thing all the time for some pretty unsavoury byproducts. However, it is hard to persuade western consumers that it could be cool to include insects in their daily diet. In parts of the world where insects are on the menu, the trade is a local business, more local loop than long haul. Ironically, increasingly affluent countries such as China are pushing up their meat consumption and cutting back on traditional specialities.

Writing in Sustainable Production and Consumption 49, Dustin Crummett notes a lack of food industry research into plant or insect products that might challenge meat in the weekly shop. The head of the insect institute, Crummett draws on philosophy and religion for a lot of his work: but his disappointment is unmistakeable.

His frustration arises from the difficulty of making one meal ingredient replace another. His argument is simple: lower resource ingredients mean less costly food. However, the additional habitat requirements and changing user profile can add costs that were once disregarded by economists. Counting a price calculation differently does not necessarily mean something costs less, it just costs differently.

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Leverage for horses

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This diagram from a US army manual issued in 1916 shows the standard loading for a pack animal.

It is time to review how draft animals are connected to their loads. The simplest example would be a pack horse or a mule, in the days when mule trains carried clay to pottery workshops. The Devon clay that was transported this way earned the name of ball clay, since it was shaped into large balls and carried in a double bag carried on the animal’s back, where a saddle might otherwise have gone. Pack animals are often quite light, enabling them to cross rugged terrain, where roads were not available. It is important to keep a regularly updated note of a draft animal’s weight, taking care not to expect them to carry more than 15-20% of their current weight.

Take a half ton horse, hitch it up to loaded lighter, and you’re off!

Carts redistribute a load, but slowing down or stopping can be more demanding, particularly when going downhill. The most efficient means of transport, particularly for heavy consignments such as building supplies, is the canal barge. This can be hauled by a (large) single horse, even when loaded with several tonnes of goods.

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Horses, pigs and numbers

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The relentless development of machine guns and heavy artillery from the turn of the twentieth century raised the stakes of warfare in previously unimaginable ways. Just as there is a case to argue for a wider interpretation of margins, to reflect a product’s costs and value to the economy, there is also a case to be made for revising the criteria by which these items are judged to be of use. Agriculture brings together a number of inseparable variables just to survive, let alone be profitable, making complex trade-offs on the way. Take animals, for instance.

From conception to weaning successive generations of pigs, producers face a steady pull on their resources. In the case of pigs, there will be little prospect of selling from a new litter until the new arrivals can leave their mothers’ sides and feed independently. Once this milestone has been passed, options will become available for breeders.

Animals that are to be raised for slaughter will have a target slaughter weight, somewhere around 100kg for pigs. Any heavier than that and the earning potential will drop steadily, as more feed is consumed and overheads rise. This brings us to a vital distinction that is easily overlooked. The pig producer will generally earn average money by the standards of the sector if the young animals wean successfully and go on to gain a hundred grams per day for the next six months. The market is front-end loaded and is run like clockwork down to the final 24 hours.

The opposite is true for draft animals, which earn their keep by staying alive and working to whatever age their breed can manage. The lead times are longer, the resources needed are greater and in the early 20th century users like the British army were buying extensively for matched pairs and teams of six and more. It is quite clear that by sending draft animals off to battlefields, their value will be turned into an increasingly expensive remounting cycle of the military’s own making, in which the animals can perish within hours of arriving behind the lines. Even if brood mares are kept away from warfare, the early years of the twentieth century effectively wrote a series of blank cheques for the makers of commercial motors and trucks, to fill the haulage gap caused by modern warfare.

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Verdun: the turning point

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When the first world war started in 1914, the world’s armies were accustomed to seeing imposing troops on horseback leading charges across open ground and engaging in the thick of the action. By the end of the battle of Verdun, in December 1916, the former cavalry units were to be found changing their sabres for machine guns and driving armoured vehicles instead of riding horses.

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Verdun marked a pivotal point in the first world war, claiming so many lives that it was known as the “meat grinder”. To this day, farmers are still digging up horseshoes from the former battlefield. After decades of developing increasingly powerful artillery and with the arrival of mechanised warfare, the twentieth century battlefield witnessed the massacre of draft animals  on a scale never previously imagined. 

The British Army did not appreciate just how few horses it could afford to lose. Moving artillery pieces, carrying munitions to gun emplacements, at the turn of the century, modern armies could not operate without horses. From the front line to the billets, draft animals were ever-present. The first world war was deadly: on a particularly bad day, over 7,000 were killed in a conflict that lasted for years and claimed millions of equine lives around the world. Of these, nearly half a million were attached to the British army in some way. Faced with the eye-watering costs of procuring and transporting horses, the government set up the British army veterinary corps. Its skilled veterinary surgeons treated nearly three quarters of a million draft animals.

Despite going to war with extra horses to keep the army supplied, the German government had problems procuring fodder and some animals starved to death. Importing horse-related items was particularly difficult since traders were refusing to take German currency.

Around the world, the heavy losses of working horses created strong demand for alternative transport capacity. In Britain, the War Office pushed up demand for commercial vehicles by dumping 6,000 war surplus lorries and trucks on the market at bargain prices. It is hard to gauge the full extent of wartime losses and their impact on the wider economy, but many businesses that used to be horse-based changed to offer engineering and driving skills.

Horses were among the first animals to be domesticated during millennia of prehistory. You can be sure that the energy needed to build the monuments and cities of antiquity came from horses, mules and donkeys, if it did not come from slaves.

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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?

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Horse sense

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A cornerstone of Urban Food Chains crystallised this evening. Fundamental to the structure of a supply chain is the basic unit of transport and energy. Taking three major themes of this blog, let’s unpack the topic. First, before the dawn of time, generations of early agriculturists worked for millennia to domesticate species and crops that we would recognise today. They also tamed fire, an evolutionary trump card. Their lasting achievement was to breed forerunners of today’s strategic ungulates: cows, pigs, sheep and horses. Fast forward to the early twentieth century, when the first world war slaughtered millions of draft animals.

This high tech cull of horses, in particular, damaged the bedrock of the agricultural world. Livestock numbers would take decades to restore, if indeed there was either the economic resources or the political will to do so. The first world war was a reset that made way for change on a global scale, for humans and animals alike. Thousands of years spent establishing stable working relationships turned to dust in the heat of battle.

The penny dropped when I read Christopher Turnor, an author of the time, complaining that the UK had too many pastures, they were blocking food production. The origins of all this empty grassland are to be found in Edwardian England, but the wartime cull of draft animals accelerated the trend. The rest is not so much history as a race to plug the economic gaps left by the ravages of war.