Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

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?

 

 

bread flour retail weights and measures
Horsepower finds a new balance
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There is no shortage of examples of horses travelling to WWI battlefields, only to be shipped out as carrion within a month, if that. The British army had been working on mechanised replacements to haul heavy artillery pieces, for the best part of a decade. It would only be fair to give the military engineers credit for their efforts to minimise internal rows, and soldier on to modify the original design through two or three iterations by the end of the first world war. Thousands of horses still died in the process, but there was an end in sight to mass equine butchery.

This could not come too soon, as inter-war businesses set about restoring their delivery systems. When trying to track the development of value in the pricing of bread and bakery goods, the editor of Industrial Peace, Major W Melville, conceded that the public grasp of the price structure was “little understood”. The only accessible estimates came from the Linlithgow Report and started outside bakeries with the purchase of sacks of flour. From the plains of north America, the vast expanses of Australia,  to the more modest arable holdings of England, Linlithgow collects the entire growing stage of breadmaking flour into a single undifferentiated lump.

The disadvantages of average returns are there for all to see. Melville put it like this: “No evidence offered in respect of price structure of flour. My inquiry begins at the point at which the baker buys his flour from the miller.” The opening price of breadmaking flour in January 1923 was 42 shillings and a penny. There is no indication of whether this should be taken as an “asking” price or a “taking” price, as given in a trade paper, meaning that flat pricing goes out of the window, speeded on its way by discounts applied at strategic order volumes. The figures discussed in the Linlithgow report were fixed during a time when flour prices were starting to fall, leaving a number of question marks over the validity of 42 shillings and a penny as a credible price for a sack of flour at this time.

more follows later…

crunchy numbers weights and measures
Data diversity
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For some reason there are times and contexts where we do not accept the idea that there should ever be more than one way of defining an activity or a process. There are innumerable ways of defining the same thing in nature: different life forms will literally see things differently. From the outset, we need to distinguish measurements (in a standard unit) from expressions of quality (descriptive). Providing the unit of measurement is agreed explicitly in advance, there is not a lot to go wrong. This is one of the lessons that the development teams for the Hubble deep space telescope learnt the hard way.

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pre-history weights and measures
Weighty measures
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To get a proper grip on the workings of the food industry, it is vital to understand the units that are used to organise and quantify production. Since this website sets out to cover historical aspects of food production, it is only fair to offer a brief outline of the systems in place during the formative years. We live in a metric world and should not imagine that any other set of measures is going to return to re-establish the status quo ante. But we need to have a clear idea of how we started.

The starting point for present purposes is the 1824 Weights and Measures Act, for reasons which will be made clear to subscribers in a fuller treatment of the topic. It will come with a basic tool kit for managing the practical aspects of modern metrology. For seekers of the arcane, visit Wikipedia’s excellent listing of the many post Sumerian systems and notations for weights, here. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Mesopotamian_units_of_measurement)