Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

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herring raw weights and measures

Turning up the volume

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Scottish fishermen working in the North Sea from the from the 18th century onwards, adopted the cran basket as a measure of fish on the quayside; a full cran of herring weighed 56 stone and was usually spread across four quarter cran baskets. (56 stone = 56 x14 divided by 2,2 kilos) The quarter cran basket became a legalised trading measure in Scotland during the 19th century, followed by England and Wales in 1908.

The cran was first and foremost a volumetric unit, fixed in trading regulations at 37.5 imperial gallons, although dockside traders often needed to know the number of fish in a basket. While most quarter cran baskets held about 1,200 fish, the differing sizes and weights in arriving consignments ranged from around 700 fish (rare) to almost 2,000 (juveniles). For a piece count, there is no quick alternative to opening the basket.

The baskets were cylindrical with just a hint of a bulge: they were supplied in whole  cran, half cran and quarter cran sizes. The basket weaver wove a foot into each cran, so that every base stood solidly on the deck, crowding around the fishermen who were waiting for the seine nets to be brought inboard and emptied on the deck. The first task was to ensure that all the weevers were removed from the flailing mass of gasping fish. A weever is a very small fish, not more than  three or four inches long, if that. Their spiny backs have venomous stings that can kill an unwary man in minutes. The deck  crew sort and gather  the catch,  most of it is herring, bound for the smokehouses. Before the quarter cran baskets are filled, they are moved to the unloading area on the deck. Once again, the skill of the basket weaver is put to the test: a quarter cran basket holds on average seven stone (7stone = 7×14 divided by 2.2 kilos) of fish. The baskets are topped with a solidly woven rim. They are unloaded using a small steam-powered crane and of specially shaped pair of clips to hold the basket until they land on the quayside with a gentle scrunching noise. Soon to be smoked as kippers, some of this catch would have been sent to London by train overnight, arriving just in time for breakfast at a gentlemens’ club.

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Lifetime in food

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The NFU’s next director general is an experienced food industry management figure. Sophie Throup joins the National Farmers’ Union in May, bringing with her years of board level experience, notably as Head of Agriculture at Morrisons. Raised on her family farm in Yorkshire, her working life reflects her commitment to food production. “My roots have always been in agriculture, and I know how important this period of change is for the sector,’ she told journalists when her appointment was announced.

Brexit's legacy raw Turnor UK

Gratuitous ill will

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DEFRA has announced changes to entry checks for High Risk Feed Not (of) Animal Origin (HRFNAO) They took effect on January 1.

Britain imports about half its food, and has been a food importer for centuries. As a collection of islands, the British Isles (which does not include Ireland, by the way) is vulnerable to naval blockades when at war. The same holds in peace time, when it makes sense to offer competitively-priced port facilities. The Brexit preparations included a charge for imported goods to drive off the ferry and cross the marshalling yard, to leave the port. This thinly-disguised daylight robbery is called the Common User Charge (CUC) and gives those people with power in the UK government an opportunity to harass port operators around the country, without having to own up scoring an own goal.
 
In its early drafts, the CUC was expected to cost £100 or less; then less than £150. Every time the CUC charges were modified or increased, the DEFRA civil servants cranked up their revenue expectations. Exporters to the UK had trouble finding out when the CUC would be coming into force and, more worryingly, what they could expect to pay to use British ports.
 
The UK has a very diverse port sector, owned and operated by all sorts of organisations and businesses. Trading structures with centuries of history rub shoulders with modern commercial operators. Take a port like Dover, the entry point for the lion’s share of the UK’s food imports. 
 
The port was ganted a royal warrant in 1604 by James I, which transferred it to the town of Dover. It has been managed by a port trust ever since, until today it is one of the country’s largest ports.  
 
Ever since James signed Dover’s royal warrant, the town has had a free hand to manage and operate its port facilities as it sees fit. The crown has been excluded from the site — and it would appear that the UK government deeply resents the status quo. In a spectacular display of ill ill, DEFRA has taken the opportunity to take a side swipe at the businesses that pay good money to use the port.  
 
In mid-April, HMRC set a cat among the pigeons, announcing that CUC invoices would not be sent out until the end of July, just as the charge comes into force. Frantic enquiries from over-stretched company accountants went on to reveal that there would be no reference field on the CUC invoices that would enable invoices to be reliably checked against manifests before they are invoiced. To make matters worse, HMRC also informed importers that CUC invoices would revert to a four-week billing cycle, on July 30, when the first flush of CUC will also fall due, thereby engineering chaos for no good reason.
 
This deliberately provocative carry-on has fed a festering grudge. Like most ports run by a private trust in the UK, Dover is barred from using facilities and equipment as collateral when the port needs to raise money for capital investment. This requires an act of parliament. And a measure of tact.

Amazon raw

Risky contact

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The Amazon basin is home to some of the largest human populations that have no regular contact with the industrial world. There is no knowing how many there might be, but the awkward truth remains that incoming populations are regarded as evil and indigenous folk are constantly intensifying their avoidance of civilisation. The pressure on land resources is growing, as secondary occupations follow the chainsaws, taking advantage of recently-cleared ground.

Logging concessions cut raw green corridors in what would otherwise still be viable jungle. More importantly to the indigenous folk, the loggers are stripping out the largest trees, depriving local populations of resources that are irreplaceable. For the indigenous population, there are no meaningful distinctions to be made between loggers, settlers and peasant farmers. They all represent  the same hazards for indigenous  health; disruption of the indigenous economy  and the destruction of once abundant habitats.

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Maws

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Will global warming and the acidification of the oceans lead to toothless sharks? Researchers in Germany have confirmed that current climatic conditions are a factor in accelerating tooth corrosion and disrupting the normal alignment of shark teeth. Visit Heinrich Heine University` to get the full story.

 

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.

France raw

When is a peasant not a peasant?

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France’s national farmers’ federation, the FNSEA, is more like an advertising agency than a trade union. When marching in national demonstrations, they make a point of referring to themselves as ‘paysans’ (peasants), . Dare to call one of them a ‘peasant’ away from the television cameras and you’ll get a bunch of fives and a reminder that there is more to farming than spreading muck. While I was learning my way around government offices in Paris, I found myself being quizzed by a couple of burly agricultural types. I had just arrived at the agriculture ministry in rue de Varenne with an appointment to talk to the minister about the Common Agriculture Policy. These two weren’t as smartly dressed as the ministry staff, but were very interested in my business, only withdrawing when they spotted the minister’s chef de cabinet coming back. “Ouf, les syndicalistes, c’est pénible,” he groaned. “Lequel syndicat…?”  “FNSEA.” The conversation moved to less thorny topics and I took a sheaf of papers from my briefcase. “…let’s show those to my advisers, shall we…?” the minister pleaded. There was a brief exchange of words at the office door, just enough to identify the pair I had met in the foyer minutes earlier. “…subvention? …fonds publiques…?” This was clearly a fishing trip. “C’est un thème d’interet tout public…” I started. “…donc le public va payer…” came the answer. Stripped of any wider context or or even interest, the topic pretty much curled up and died on the spot.

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Bear necessities

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Spare a thought for Tex, a grizzly bear with form for breaking, entering and… eating. It should come as no surprise that between fishing trips, Tex likes urban environments. Something to do with easy pickings and creature comforts, no doubt. Apparently, the Canadian state has teams of animal experts who monitor delinquent grizzlies, inter alia. Some weeks ago, Tex took a high-risk three-mile swim to Texada island off the coast of British Colombia: this 30-mile long sliver of land is also home to a human population of around 1,200 people. This particular bear has been forcibly relocated on a number of occasions, but the grizzly’s navigational abilities always triumphed. As is often the case, the conclusive options are difficult: cull the bear before human lives are lost; cull the bear after human lives are lost; the hardest one to adopt is to do nothing, even though it is the most logical to succeed in bringing about trust the long term.

 

 

cultivation domestication fish pre-history raw

Food values

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To paraphrase Saint John, in the beginning was the meal. And the meal was with God…

We live in a world with more explanations than questions, more doubts than answers, more belief than knowledge. What sustains us is an unseen chain of events that conspire to make human life happen, whatever it takes. Our dependence on this process is total. Welcome to the world of food.

Our shared origins go back to the beginning of time before crops or livestock had been domesticated. There is general agreement once hominids had domesticated fire — tamed is probably a better word — there was a further four to six millennia before domesticated animals and crops emerged on the scene. Scholars may disagree over when this change came about, but we can be sure that until it was a fait accompli, everything else in the story of civilisation was on hold. There are quibbles about when exactly such a change can taken as read, but everybody is counting in millennia.

The rest is history. The trouble with history is its dependence on written records and sometimes incorrect attribution of artefacts. The reason we know so little about early agrarian populations is because they had neither written records nor surviving artefacts to bear witness to their passing. This is a pity, since what we do know about these groups is that they lived in harmony with nature and were environmentally enlightened. We are indebted to some of the world’s most dedicated and skillful archaeologists, who have traced the remains of villages that were built in the trackless alluvial wetlands. At this time, hominids and animals fed future generations of flora and fauna. Man was still bound to the laws of nature at this time.

When the world’s first states emerged, they were expressions of an agrarian social structure. Their dealings with the world around them were probably more extensive than we will ever know. What matters is that we learn and understand from such scraps as we can glean, to focus on value without being diverted by units of account.

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Welcome

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Urban Food Chains is going through a reset with a jolt from the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) study The False Economy of Big Food.

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