William Sitwell’s book Eggs or Anarchy tells of the logistical struggle to feed the UK during the second world war. Its quality lies in the author’s insight into the interplay of power, politics and military muscle. Verging on understatement, Sitwell’s account of a gargantuan effort to achieve the almost impossible.
Among the illustrations that appear is a map of the world showing the sea routes taken by different wartime food imports, listing the distance travelled by each commodity. The map once hung in the Minister of Food’s office and carried a stern warning about not wasting food that had travelled so far and was part of the war effort.
A seasoned business man, Frederick Marquis was elevated to the House of Lords, taking the title Lord Woolton. He was appointed food minister by Neville Chamberlain. Retained by Winston Churchill, Woolton worked tirelessly to overcome the ever steeper challenges that he faced in office. His lack of experience in political life was both a hindrance and a blessing in disguise, giving him the freedom to pursue policy targets without compromising political goodwill.
Woolton demonstrates the complexity of real world logistics and how political considerations can deflect attention from operational necessities.
In today’s economy there is a big difference between the place of production and the place of importation. The place of importation today is the customs post which is clearing goods for onward travel. At the turn of the twentieth century in the days of empire, it is arguable that the UK national frontier included or contained the colony concerned. One can be sure, however, that customs duty would not have been expected on goods leaving a colony and arriving in the UK.
In today’s post-Brexit economy, however, things are a bit different. The place of production determines the rate at which duty is payable (or zero percent, depending on the provenance of the goods). Regardless of duty, however, import VAT is due and can be considered a fiscal rite of passage. A consignment of goods arriving at a UK border post will have a customs value: this is the aggregate of the value of the goods, insurance, shipping and administrative costs (such as phytosanitary checks for plant material).
Zero duty goods will not be charged import VAT on the zero duty, but will be charged VAT on the rest of its customs value, at the applicable UK rate. Since import VAT is an aggregate, it will be levied on each component of the consignment at the applicable rate of VAT, for example haulage from point of origin to the customs post will be charged at 20%; food safety checks at, say, GBP 450 per container will be taxed at 20%, likewise freight insurance and office admin costs. In short, zero-duty goods will escape customs duty but not import VAT. The implementation of Sanitary and PhytoSanitary (SPS) checks in July 2023 will add another administrative layer to food imports as well as increased levels of import VAT when customs values rise.
The increased cost of importing food — or anything else for that matter — will not go unnoticed. The government’s additional tax revenue will take a bit of explaining. There is not a queue of UK politicians waiting to sell this delicate state of affairs to the electorate.
Until the latter years of the twentieth century, bacon followed a parallel path to the rest of the pig sector, taking its share of knocks on the way. Processors could sell as many loins of bacon as they could get their hands on, but they were held back by a balancing act, otherwise known as balancing the carcase.
The common sense, sturdy construction of this wooden egg crate and thousands like it ensured that once the eggs had been wrapped with a layer of crepe paper, they were good for journeys across Europe. France, Holland and Denmark all exported eggs to England in the latter half of the 19th century and on into the 20th.
The truth is unlikely ever to emerge from the rubble of world war two, but the British ruling class was convinced that there was a significant black market trading in the wartime British Isles. The obsession with even the possibility that spivs might be getting away with crimes against upstanding citizens is captured by William Sitwell in his book Eggs Or Anarchy.
At this time, the House of Lords could be relied upon to make the most fuss over the least incident supported by little or no evidence. The sensitivity of the establishment to the idea that people might be getting away with crime, be it real or imagined, beggars belief. One particularly paranoid peer accused Lord Woolton, then minister of food, of failing to act in a timely manner to pre-empt the spread of profiteering, which he now believed to be out of control.
Woolton was, of course, held responsible for this state of affairs, be it real or imaginary. A man of humble origins, his arrival in the upper house was a reflection on his achievements in business rather than his birthright. To be sure, he was as irked by tales of black marketeering as his fellow peers, yet he was to be judged on getting results that were far from being attainable.
In his book Against The Grain, James C Scott discusses the use of fire as a tool to manage the environment. Through clearing rain forest with fire, prehistoric hominids discovered that the burnt areas recovered rapidly, becoming more attractive to the species that were hunted for food. Attracted by tender green shoots and lush grass, grazing herbivores were followed by their carnivorous predators, much to the satisfaction of the hunter gatherers.
By creating productive oases of harvestable food, the hominids no longer needed to travel so far to find food. The pressing need to move on and start looking for fresh sources of food started to lose its urgency. But Scott has a more intriguing discovery to relate.
The closest relative to hominids is the chimpanzee, which has a significant difference, despite sharing almost all its genetic traits with humans. The chimp’s digestive system is elaborate and robust, allowing it to digest cellulose and tough vegetation. This heavy duty digestive function is absent in homo sapiens, Scott argues, because the use of fire for cooking food makes it easier to digest. It is as though homo sapiens has externalised the digestive functions by cooking on fires.
Having made the transition to a lighter, swifter digestive system, humanity is not going to reverse the process any time soon. Humanity is committed to maintaining a pattern of routine burning in the rain forest, just to carry on eating. We are now dependent on the restraints that we took on willingly millennia previously and are irrevocably committed to cooking and eating food, ranging over shorter distances than before. The domestication that came with fire changed humanity’s future development.
Members of the public eating oysters and other shellfish generate large volumes of shells, most of which will end up in landfill and incinerators. Local authorities on west coast of France are taking the opportunity to encourage householders to recycle empty shells at local recycling centres. Their work is simplified because the local economy already includes a significant proportion of the nation’s oyster producers.
The adjacent estuaries of the Charente and Bordeaux’s Gironde are the beating heart of France’s ostreiculture sector and generates huge quantities of waste oyster shells. Local processor Ovive converts oyster shells, grinding them down into a poultry industry supplement for laying birds. Operations director Coline Saunier told the local France Bleu news team that the company processes about 3,000 tonnes of oyster shells a year, of which 95% comes from industry professionals.
Oyster ponds at Marennes, on the estuary of the Charente.
Further south, alongside the Gironde estuary, local authorities are using oyster shells to make a special mortar for use on the roads, filling in damaged roadsides. There are no tonnage figures for this use of oyster shells.
The cost of collecting shells from householders in the Charente departement all the year round then, is incremental rather than requiring capital expenditure. Waste contractor Cyclad gathered 71 tonnes in 2021. But as the consumer waste stream grows, so will the time spent sorting and cleaning the shells.
The professional waste stream needs to be sorted to make sure that stray lengths of polypropylene rope, metal fragments or glass are removed before processing the shells. Compared to these fairly basic requirements, the consumer waste stream brings with it an unknowable quantity of ring pulls, party napkins (the stronger felt-like matted ones) lemon slice debris, not to mention plastic cutlery.
A major risk for shell processors is picking up the stainless steel wires used to turn ordinary oysters into easy-open gourmet mouthfuls. The wire is thin and the easy-open components are easily missed on a busy sorting line. While the consumer waste stream is counted in tens of tonnes, the additional sorting requirement can be carried by the revenue earned on the industrial waste stream.
The feasibility of setting up a consumer-specific sorting line in parts of France without an existing industrial user base is a very different proposition. It will be more onerous than adding a modest increment to existing capacity and will be a challenge to future planners.
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The opening of the Paris – Cherbourg railway in 1846 gave a decisive boost to the development of a group of cake and biscuit factories in Caen. With easy access to Paris Saint Lazare, the rest of the French network was available for the onward shipping of perishable goods in a timely manner. From Cherbourg, orders could be forwarded to the Channel Islands and ports such as Weymouth on the south coast of England.
By the end of the 19th century, the scene had been set for biscuit maker Lucien Jeannette to buy out his two partners and develop the multi-site business. The company did not adopt the Jeannette name until 1927.
Its branding was founded on the quality of its regional ingredients, namely Isigny butter and Normandy eggs. Many years later, in the 1960s, the use of cheaper ingredients wreaked havoc with the brand’s standing at the time and was remedied by restoring the original premium line-up.
When the second world war broke out in 1939, nobody would have imagined that the ministry of food would disappear off the map. Stranger still was the process by which the ministry morphed and started to manage the nation’s food procurement arrangements from a top secret seaside town in Wales. A narrow strip of sea separates Colwyn Bay from the country’s pivotal international port of Liverpool, routinely a target for German air raids.
Had this been known to the Luftwaffe, the British food procurement system would have been destroyed in a matter of days and European history would have taken a very different course. At the time it was a well-kept secret, today the story is told by William Sitwell, in his book Eggs Or Anarchy. http:williamsitwell.com/books
The book traces the challenges that faced food minister Lord Woolton, who applied the lessons he learnt in the world of business to a series of desperate logistical impasses. These were complicated by the antipathy of a less than enthusiastic civil service with its procedural agenda.
Conventional economics makes no allowance for the inherent costs that are part and parcel of animal products. Every egg producer faces regular bills as part of raising chickens, regardless of whether or not they are in lay. If the birds are to live, let alone lay eggs, feed bills are non-negotiable.
For most of the egg-buying public, this upstream reality is literally history. Without an idea of the real world implications, an egg is no more than a disembodied food ingredient. Its price is more complex than than any monetary value that might be assigned to it. In one context it can be priceless, when it is part of a cohort destined for breeding the next generation. This is also the start and the end of humanity’s grasp of the forces of nature.
Back in July, The Guardian ran a story about the building of a Border Control Post (BCP) at Portsmouth (The Guardian, July 6 2022, page 33). Port owners, Portsmouth City Council stumped up half of the GBP 25 million price tag for a building that remains firmly shut. There is still no sign of the UK being in a position to staff or operate these facilities. Despite Britain’s commitment to carrying out phytosanitary tests on plant matter and veterinary inspections of animal products, not to mention animals, there is no political will to deliver. For a start, any tests carried out in the BCP will be charged to the owner of the goods in transit, pushing up the customs value and with it the VAT levied on the goods. To be sure, food may be zero-rated but haulage and product testing are not, nor is import VAT, the running total of the VAT chargeable on crossing the border. Home truths like this can really mess with support for the Tories, who might be regretting the talk of an “oven-ready” Brexit deal. Instead, they have spent a total of GBP 450 million on port facilities they appear to have no intention of using, at a number of ports around the UK.
