Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

City life cultivation dairy eggs pigs UK
Value or price?
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Today’s On Your Farm came from Yew Tree Farm, Bristol’s last city farm. Third generation farmer Catherine Withers faces existential challenges to a business that has adapted to extensive and rapid change, but is on the point of losing access to land that is vital to its survival. Part of a site of Scientific and Conservation Interest, the farm should have been spared the predatory attention of a local property developer.

Click the screengrab to access the programme on the BBC.

Instead, acres of hay and winter feed once intended for Catherine’s dairy herd is under lock and key. The tenancy on the field concerned was terminated in favour of a planning proposal for 200 homes that has yet to be agreed. When the BBC visited, the hay in the field was ready to be cut and the livestock would have been sure of winter sustenance. However, Catherine is kept away from her crop by a heavy padlock on the gate. Being able to see the crop but not gather it in just adds injury to insult.

Elsewhere on the farm, another tenancy on a field adjacent to a local council crematorium is set to end, as the town hall plans to extend the amenities for its residents. Again, it is the dairy cattle that will lose out. Catherine has a small dairy herd, as well as outdoor pigs: she also grows vegetables, which she can sell to local residents within walking distance of her farmhouse. Bristol used to have more than 30 farms within its boundaries: as the city’s only remaining farmer, Catherine is something of a local hero, not just to her customers.

Yew Tree has a high proportion of ancient meadow in its grazing, an irreplaceable asset that has been quietly sheltering threatened flora and fauna for centuries. Its value to Bristol is incalculable, but depends on being an integrated space, across which wildlife can roam. The shift from viable and productive to long term decline is an ever-present threat and determined by factors that neither Catherine nor her many supporters can control.

Listen to the programme while it is available on the BBC Sounds website. It raises questions for all of us, regardless of whether we live in a city or a rural area.

cookery
Recipe for disaster
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NZ retailer Pak’n’Save needs to take customer care a bit more seriously. The firm’s developers released a beta chat bot to generate meal ideas from items left over from a weekly shop. Foody geeks pushed the parameters beyond foodstuffs and included cleaning materials: one used bleach to mix a “fresh breath mocktail”. The programmers were quick to criticise this abuse of their efforts, overlooking their duty of care to ensure that ingredients were restricted at the outset to foodstuffs. Behind every giga-gaffe there is usually a simple remedy waiting to be implemented.

animal products City life Europe ship
Day and night
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For centuries urban populations have cheerfully ignored one of the most basic phases in the rhythm of the planet’s life, thanks to rapidly evolving technology. It is paradoxical, but completely normal, for millions of people around the world to treat the hours of day and night as interchangeable. In the twenty first century, the electric light switch rewrites all the rules governing what can be done at different times of day. For all practical purposes, such rules have no current application.

City life is 24/7, thanks to artificial lighting. A trivial gesture over a light switch is all many of us need to turn night into day. But this has not always been the case and if we make any serious progress with choking off climate change, we will have to rethink our energy expectations, too.

Before the widespread use of electric light, the availability of town gas pipes determined the extent of street and domestic lighting in industrial towns and cities. Go back a century and the demand for animal fats and oils to make candles and run lanterns was significant, if waning. But go back further and a gaping chasm re-appears between those who lived in sparsely-lit houses and those who could afford to routinely light their homes and entertain guests to dinner or dance the night away at elaborate balls.

Alaskan dockside scene, circa 1911.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Dig a little deeper into history and the lighting fuel of choice was whale oil, initially processed in dockside refineries around the world, later produced on board ship as whaling vessels became large enough to accommodate the necessary equipment and tankage. From being a rough and ready battle with nature and the elements, fraught with danger for the dinghy crews, whaling became an increasingly ruthless war of attrition that drove whole species to the brink of extinction. As well as extracting all the oil from a huge carcase, the whaling industry earned substantial money from whale meat, with some cuts sold on for cheap food products and the rest sold to feed urban cats and dogs. In this context, the dog’s dinner was a secondary by-product from the days of lucrative barrels of whale oil.The whaling industry went into a long term decline as a direct result of its impact on whale numbers.

Brexit's legacy food manufacture UK UK economy
Of Brexit and dogs’ dinners
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For years the Common European Tariff has ensured that imports of third country pet food have been taxed heavily at the border. Duty of up to EUR 948/tonne is added to the invoice price of any dog food that might cross the EU border. The exact rate depends on the product’s composition. During the UK’s years as an EU member state, UK customs officials were ready and waiting to do their bit to ensure that third country pet food did not arrive unchallenged by officialdom. Needless to say, a duty regime as strong as this has successfully excluded products which faced duty out of all proportion to their price.

Click the image to download Schedule XIX, then go to file page 93, which is folio 87. (A folio is a printer’s name for the number on a page, the numbering of which may be dislocated by front matter, such as prefaces and other preliminary matter.)

That was then and this is now. We have been through Brexit, which remains a work in progress. As the world’s most recent third country, has the UK risen to the challenge and opened the gates to imports of third country pet foods? Have the punitive levels of duty been dismantled in the UK’s Schedule XIX? Guess.

The table shows the current duty rates for goods covered by customs code 2309 10 – Dog or cat food, put up for retail sale (highlighted in yellow). Click the image to download the complete document. Betweentimes, the tariffs have been redenominated in GBP at an exchange rate of around 85 pence to the Euro. Depending on the formulations, these products face duty up to GBP 805/tonne and are essentially unchanged. Given the stated aim of Brexit to boost trade with the rest of the world, it would have been simple to edit the twenty or so tariff lines, setting them to zero, job done.

The irony of the Brexit debacle is that it neither achieved any of its wild dreams, nor were any logical adjustments carried out to meet Brexit’s stated aim of trade liberalisation. The Common European Tariff (CET) was drafted as a blunt instrument to suggest that the cost of subsidised products under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) could be calculated with a degree of accuracy. The CAP has evolved since these agri-tariffs first saw the light of day, losing much of their relevance in the process.

But let us start at the beginning. At the risk of stating the obvious, the UK chose to become a third country, in the EU sense of the term, used to refer to non-members of the EU. The Common European Tariff is built on this “us and them” view of the world. This detailed document was structured for this purpose and no other. The UK has adopted it with a surprisingly low number of often symbolic modifications, leaving the original EU intent intact.

It comes as a bit of surprise to learn that such humble products as dogs’ dinners command such high levels of duty. Animal foods are a downstream activity that typically draw in by-products from the manufacture of more lucrative goods. Industrialised food production brings with it a higher degree of homogenisation in both ingredients and by-products. There is a business case for ensuring that all available downstream ingredients are incorporated in some sort of secondary product, even if it only serves to dodge the cost of waste disposal. Indeed, the tipping point between a positively-priced ingredient and the operational cost of managing indeterminate mush is a crude measure of technological sophistication. That said, it will be searched for more closely in company accounts than production lines.

Working with documents generally supposedly means keeping one’s hands clean. This is a moot point, which can be illustrated with a straightforward example: tariff item 0208 40 10 is whale meat, once a common ingredient in pet foods many years ago. Third country whale meat is taxed at 6.4% ad valorem. There is a case to be made for taxing it mercilessly, on environmental grounds. There is a procedural problem with this, however, since the World Trade Organization will only cut tariffs, but not raise them. Since the WTO decisions are based on consensus, any attempt to obstruct international trade in whale meat will be systematically be blocked by Japan, Iceland and the Faroes. There are similar problems, on a smaller scale, with a 6.4% ad valorem duty on tariff item 0208 90 70: frogs’ legs.

Brexit's legacy UK
Equivalence is not the same
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The familiar CE quality mark is far more important than it might appear at first sight. It is the first line of defence in meeting product liability requirements. The presence of the CE graphic assures consumers that the product concerned meets all the EU safety regulations and can be sold legally within the EU. CE stands for conformite europenne (conforms to European regulations).

At some point in the Brexit planning stages, someone had the bright idea of devising a British equivalent to reassure consumers that post-Brexit British goods complied with British legal requirements. It would have been better if someone had spotted the looming problem and canned the UKCA lookalike quality mark before releasing it on an unsuspecting public. No such luck, it just gets worse.

The UK parliament’s control of the quality mark and its use is limited to, well, the UK. It has no status or relevance in continental Europe, for which it was intended. Brussels does not recognise the mark, nor is there any reason why it should. UK plans to drop accreditation for the original CE mark have suddenly been put on hold, as businesses complained that they genuinely need the CE mark for their export goods. As part of the CE accreditation, a substantial chunk of EU law, previously earmarked for dumping, will now have to be kept on the statute book for the UK’s claim to continue issuing CE marks to be valid.

It is the kind of own-goal for which Brexit is becoming infamous. There is the mild embarrassment of having to retain EU laws that some in government wanted to clear out so as to make room for other things. The requirement to organise and fund two separate product certification applications, not to mention the additional testing fees, has unsettled many businesses, faced with having to pay twice. More to the point, UKCA cannot replace the CE mark outside UK borders, nor will Brussels ever recognise it.

Follow this link for a guide to UKCA and CE requirements.

France olives Switzerland tomatoes
Burning question
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Wildfires across huge areas of southern Europe mean even more bad news for olive oil and table olive packers. It is impossible to predict the full effect on this winter’s prices for olive oil or table olives, but there will be direct consequences. This is not a complete wipe-put story, since established olive trees with deep root systems can recover from fires, although this will take time. Young olive trees are more susceptible to fire damage.

Click image for latest information

The immediate impact will be on packers and blenders of olive oil, particularly in Italy: these skilled folk have a network of suppliers for very specific oils with relatively rare qualities. The suppliers of such rarities are spread over the continent, from Gibraltar and north Africa down to the middle east. The trading network is complex and known to a handful of olive oil blending experts.

In a year when the mainstream crop is already looking patchy and fraught, this will mean higher costs for the retailers. In the UK, the multiples are reluctant to let their double digit margins take a hit and will do their level best to make sure that suppliers carry the burden. The situation is, however, beyond horse trading. Bulk olive oil prices will be non-negotiable, where there is product to be had. Looking at the Mediterranean over the next few weeks, the following impacts can be expected. Industrial tomatoes for peeled plum tomato canning lines can be expected to be short, since crop irrigation is being used for firefighting. Chopped tomatoes, passata and tomato paste can be made from almost any variety of tomato and production is not limited to southern Italy. Table olives are under a shadow, with a high risk of localised damage: a lot of olives will have been burnt off the trees. Durum wheat, essential for pasta manufacture, may have escaped the worst of the heat waves, but export tonnages will probably be restricted.

For the latest information on the European forest fires, click here.

canning food production green beans tomatoes
Canned goods coming a cropper?
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We have been used to seeing cheap canned foods on supermarket shelves all the year round for decades. With southern Europe just one of the many regions suffering record temperatures and drought around the world, it is timely to look at the possible impact on food products that we have relied on for centuries. It is necessary to distinguish canned foods that have an underlying seasonality, in other words, a point in the season at which the given food is plentiful.

Foods such as canned peeled plum tomatoes, canned salmon, or canned green beans, are packed during the peak cropping weeks of the season. Dedicated canning and cooking lines operate 24/7, with a scaled up version of a process that Nicolas Appert would recognise instantly. In the case of wild salmon, the canneries are located next to the rivers and are stocked up with empty cans ahead of the season. When the salmon return to spawn, fishing crews join the serried ranks of predators that are attracted by thousands of fish in breeding condition.

The standard cooking unit on such lines are a large tank of water, similar to a swimming pool, but kept at a rolling boil for the duration of the pack, which can last weeks. As the fish are caught and brought to a salmon cannery, they are prepared and the cans are filled before cooking. The duration of the cooking time is regulated by a crawler belt that covers the floor of the cooker. Small 100 gram cans are shifted through the cooker during the day at relatively rapid speeds, since they need less cooking than larger cans.

In the case of peeled plum tomato canneries, can sizes go up to 3kg. Lorryloads of raw tomatoes are delivered during the day, some of which will be kept for the night shift. When they clock in, they start filling 3kg cans while the crawler belt is slowed down to its slowest setting. By the time the day shift returns, there will be large stacks of packed and cooked 3kg cans. There will also be a steady stream of lorries laden with tomatoes for the day shift as the belt at the bottom of the cooking tank returns to its daytime setting.

This kind of production line depends on high volume intakes during a clearly-delimited number of weeks (salmon canneries generally pack more than one kind of salmon). It is vulnerable to seasonal variations and crop failures. A bit like us, really. There is an important distinction to make for peeled plum tomatoes, which is that these are mainly grown and packed in Italy. Unlike chopped tomatoes or tomato paste or passata, the cannery can only pack intact tomatoes. These are an industrial variety that are not useful for any other product.

crunchy numbers cultivation
Cumulative cereal crises (1)
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Climate change can be expected to set off multiple simultaneous food crises around the world. The following post started with a story about rice, then collected a footnote about wheat from war-torn Ukraine and another from southern Europe in the grip of a drought. It could have had a snippet from north America’s struggling maize crop, but that will have to wait.

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India is curbing its rice exports in the face of predicted shortages. The country is the world’s biggest exporter of rice, selling 22,000 tonnes abroad in the crop year 2023. An estimated 10% of the world’s rice production is exported and traded internationally, according to data curated by the All India Rice Exporters Association . The tonnages traded internationally are less than one might have expected for one of the world’s most important cereal crops: global production tops 50 million tonnes.

In all its diverse forms, rice supplies about a fifth of the human calorie intake. As a labour intensive crop with very specific irrigation needs, rice does not travel as far or as readily as other mainstream cereals like wheat or barley. Rice is a complex commodity, with many specialist varieties and qualities. Indian rice growers produce premium grades of scented basmati rice for export sales, in addition to more basic varieties. The guiding principle is that all basmati rice is scented, but not all scented rice is basmati.

The first two months of the new growing season (2023-2024) have seen growth of just over 6% in volumes traded internationally, even though India imposed an export duty of 20% on rice part way through the 2022 crop year. The additional duty has not damped down demand, which remains strong. The current season has been hit by more rain and flooding than usual. “We are still keeping our fingers crossed over the likely impact of El Nino” AIREA president Nathi Ram Gupta told his members.

Rice export figures from India and all the significant growing areas across the world for the 2022-23 crop year have not moved dramatically against previous years. But past performance is a notoriously unreliable indicator of future shortages in any sector of the world economy.

This week there are reports of Russian military action destroying a grain silo in Odessa. First reports suggest that 40,000 tonnes of wheat were destroyed in the attack: more significantly the action removes storage capacity for 120,000 tonnes of grain in the middle of the harvest. One single incident casts a shadow over both dockside facilities and the safety of shipping that up until now had been able to deliver wheat to east Africa.

With southern Europe in the grip of a persistent heat wave, there are signs of firmer prices for durum wheat, which is grown across Spain and Italy. Since July 1, prices for European durum wheat price have bottomed out from a pre-harvest low point of around 330 Euros/tonne and moved up to almost 400 by late July. Southern European shoppers are high volume consumers of pasta, which is likely to push up prices of durum wheat in the coming weeks.

cultivation plantation
Wake up and smell the coffee…
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A major sector of the food industry is at risk. Wild populations of Arabica coffee trees have been devastated by deforestation and climate change, leaving domesticated stock at risk of disease and disasters. Arabica coffee trees are native to Ethiopia and Sudan.

Wikimedia Commons

Of the 124 species of coffee listed by botanists, Arabica accounts for two thirds of the coffee traded around the world. For centuries, wild Arabica coffee stock has been shipped around the world and grown on in plantations all around the tropics. The now-domesticated trees are concentrated on plantations where plant diseases can take hold and spread like wildfire. Without access to wild plant material, there will be no way of restoring traits or resistance lost during domestication.

Growing up to eight metres tall, Arabica coffee trees grow on high ground in the lower layers of rain forests, taking advantage of the moderate temperature ranges and sheltered locations. Rising temperatures have added to the pressure on any wild trees that have not been cut down.

The other mainstream coffee variety is Robusta, which is grown in east Africa. It is odd that out of the dozens of coffee species known to botanists, only two varieties have been developed commercially. There is more information about coffee on the Kew Garden website.

canning food manufacture France
Footnote on the protagonists in Time Travel for Food
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Leadership is something we all respond to and it takes many forms.

Take a figure from history, such as Napoleon Bonaparte. A product of the ruling elite of his day, Napoleon underwent officer training and was undaunted by meeting calls to define the working structure of a post revolutionary state from scratch. The Codes Civils (sometimes referred to as the Napoleonic Codes) were an object lesson in structuring the edifice of a state at the start of a post-royal era (https://urbanfoodchains.uk/forging-urban-food-chains/). Bonaparte had the outward signs of a civic visionary and expected to lead from the front.

Employing a completely different set of skills, Nicolas Appert perfected the system of sealing food into bottles or cans and cooking it so thoroughly that the product would keep indefinitely. Sometimes referred to eponymously as Appertisation, the process has been used with very few changes, for more than two hundred years. Appert predated fellow Frenchman Louis Pasteur by just over 60 years and would not have predicted the link between heat treatment and killing pathogens that Pasteur would make in years to come.(https://urbanfoodchains.uk/time-travel-for-food-2/)

There are grounds to suppose that the Appertisation process was known to food producers, but not widely practiced in the 1790s. In place of a theoretical explanation for the incontrovertable success of the process, Appert constantly ran tests on batches of food, using bottles and stoppers of all sorts of material: ceramic, glass and metal. As the years progressed, his confidence in the process grew, as he learnt what cooking times different foods needed in a water jacket of boiling water. Nicolas Appert had been raised by an inn keeper working in Chalons-sur-Saone and was a competent chef. His entire working life was focussed on feeding people and by the 1790s Appert was working as a confiseur in a Paris suburb.

A confiseur is someone who cooks off food, usually with boiling water, to make range of “confits” or foods almost cooked to a mush. Confiserie refers to boiled sugar confectionery, while confits are table-ready dishes which can be sweet or savoury and typically capped off with a layer of fat. The aim is to cook off seasonal gluts, although meat-based confits had short shelf lives, since the melted grease did not offer any real protection to the dish. This was the reason for Appert’s interest in sealing his wide-necked bottles, in a bid to extend shelf life. Appert successfully got reliable results, which is why Appertisation is referred to as “Time Travel For Food” on this website.

Appert plied his trade as a confiseur and wholesale grocery from a workshop in rue des Lombards. He was a member of the militant Section des Lombards, who mobilised at moments of crisis during the revolution in Paris. An active Jacobin, Nicolas and his wife Elisabeth supported the revolutionary cause in practical ways, such as holding planning meetings in the workshop.

As readers will learn in the short history of Nicolas Appert, the confiseur was pulled into the Jacobin Terreur, saved only by the fact that Robespierre was executed 36 hours before Appert was due to go to the scaffold. The Appert household survive the latter years of the revolution: Nicolas is awarded an “encouragement” of 12,000 gold coins by Napoleon. This comes with a requirement to publish a manual to Appertisation at his own expense. Appert remained politically active during his life and was elected mayor of Ivry-sur-Seine.

Appert also makes a trip to England in 1814, at the height of the Napoleonic wars. The reason for the trip was for after-sales support for an English engineer who had licenced the process for commercial exploitation. The technology transfer had been overseen by Pierre Durand, a Bordeaux wine merchant turned intellectual property agent. Durand’s leadership style was simply blunt and overbearing. He met his match, however, in Bryan Donkin, his English client.

A highly regarded engineer, Donkin had undertaken  work for the Fourdrinier brothers, Henri and Seely, to make their purchase of a design for a papermaking machine work in a paper mill environment. As his French clients faced bankruptcy and Donkin still had a workshop to keep in production, there was a pause in proceedings during which Donkin tried to stake a claim on what is known today as the Fourdrinier papermaking machine. Resourceful as ever, Donkin contrived to settle the name of the machine on the brothers, but retained control over the crucial detail that allowed him to  sell working papermaking machines in his own name. Since he installed almost 200 machines across Europe, one can suppose that he was commercially successful. It should be added that Donkin also patented the dip pen and a number of nib designs, which generated far greater sales than could be earned from selling a papermaking machine. This management style is close to opportunistic, but shows a high level of resourceful thinking. Bryan Donkin’s grandson, called Bryan after his grandfather, developed and patented the Donkin gas valve, which is more widely known than Donkin senior’s achievements.