Near a Thousand Tables (41 page)

The most influential exponent of “animal chemistry,” Baron Justus von Liebig, regarded the investigation of the world of meat extracts as an adventure comparable to those of the intrepid explorers of the age, a frontier terrain where

adventurers of all kinds roam about; and it is on the observations made, and the tales related by these adventurers, during their occasional expeditions or excursions, that the greater part of our knowledge of this district rests. But how few of them have attained so accurate a knowledge, even of the small tract over which they have passed, that those who follow them run no risk of losing their way! It is one thing to travel through a country, and another, very different, to establish a
home therein
.

He aimed to be at home there himself. He was obsessed by transformation: indeed, he equated it with nutrition, which he defined as the process of changing food substances “into the constituents of
organized tissues
.” Before his researches, the nutritional value of concentrated meat juices, or “osmazone” as some scientists portentously called it, already commanded general respect. Meat bouillon had an honorable history as invalid food. Consommé en gelée rendered the same nourishment in semisolid form and, if enough gelatin was used, could be turned into “portable soup”: tablets which fed sick or wounded men in late-eighteenth-century armies and navies. Beef tea—raw meat scrapings infused in hot water—had its advocates. Early in the nineteenth century, François Magendie discovered that foods containing nitrogens contribute to growth. In the 1840s Baron Justus von Liebig believed—until his own experiments disproved it—that nitrogen “formed” flesh. His early efforts focused on squeezing raw meat to produce “the juice of flesh,” but this was an uneconomical method, compared with “extraction” by adding water, and produced a liquid with no particularly concentrated nutritive
properties. Liebig kept going through his disappointments because he could foresee the enormous financial rewards of success. Before refrigeration, there was a vast, underexploited surplus of cattle in the Southern Hemisphere and an enormous, unsatisfied market in the North. In 1865 Liebig created Oxo to mobilize the former and supply the latter. He steeped raw, pulped beef in water, strained the liquor, boiled it, evaporated it and pressed the residue into cubes. Bovril followed, invented in Canada by John Lawson Johnson in 1874: this was similar, but sold as paste rather than compressed, crumbly cubes. These products were marketed as equivalent to much larger quantities of beef. They drew the ire and fire of the apostles of low-protein diets (above, p. 43): Halliburton described the infusions they yielded as “simply an ox's urine in a cup.” Kellogg called them “
putrefactive bacteria
.”

Meat extract is an equivocal product: one can see its usefulness even if one finds the idea repulsive. How margarine survived the context in which it was invented seems much harder to understand. It belongs in the nineteenth-century world—in that brief period of the crisis of fat supplies early in the second half of the century. The want of fat drove European powers into colonial ventures in potential areas of palm oil production. It stimulated the technology of whaling: the industrial whaler equipped with explosive harpoons was introduced in 1865. It encouraged the exploitation of fossil oil, first skimmed out of the ground in Ontario in 1858 and pumped in Pennsylvania in 1859. The crisis in edible fat, however, which was growing ever more acute in industrializing countries, could not be satisfied by these means. By offering a prize for the invention of a “product suitable to replace butter for the navy and the less prosperous classes of society,” Napoleon III hoped to solve the problem. The specification was: “this product must be inexpensive to manufacture and capable of being kept without turning rancid in flavor or
smelling strong
.” Hippolyte Mège-Mouriés, who responded successfully to the challenge in 1869, adopted an approach which seems more magical than scientific. He mixed beef fat with skimmed milk and stirred in a bit of cow's udder. He called the result margarine because he thought its anemic, pinguid sheen resembled the small pearls known as
marguerites.

The result only made a marginal contribution to increasing the exploitable amount of edible fat in the market, and even sophisticated modern variants of the recipe have never produced a substance which can convincingly replace butter, though there are forms of margarine which some pastry cooks prefer for particular recipes. The original margarine did provide a model for the conversion of vegetable oils into butterlike substances, which probably stimulated the development of the oils which are commonly used to make margarine today, such as cottonseed, sunflower
and soya. Only big, heavily capitalized enterprises could exploit the invention of margarine, because the business of making it was extremely complicated, demanding a great deal of space and machinery for repeated heating, hydration, precipitation of the fatty acids, hydrogenation, filtering, blending and flavoring.

Still, margarine attracted investment because it could be made from cheap ingredients and sold in bulk. Throughout industrialization, costs were the motor force. Cities and factories were expensive to provision until the output and supply of food adjusted to meet their needs. Under that temporary stimulus, food production outstripped the growth of population. The result, for people privileged to live in industrializing economies, was cheap food. This was not an accident or by-product. It was the conscious strategy of industrializes in every field of endeavor to expand markets by lowering unit prices. In an era of demographic buoyancy it worked. The cheaper the food, the bigger the profits.

At some levels the “Nutrition Revolution” that has accompanied the industrialization of food in the Western world seems a rather trivial affair: a matter of shifts of taste or fashion. Some trends, however, have been sustained over remarkably long periods. The retreat from red meat, for instance, in developed economies has recently attracted much attention and—in the industries concerned—much anxiety, as if it were a new phenomenon. Really, however, it is a historic trend. American beef consumption fell from an annual average of 72.4 pounds per person in 1899 to 55.3 pounds
in 1930
. This is the sort of change which is easier to document than to explain. Diversification of taste is partly responsible, but so is industrialization, which has made cheaper, more efficient animal proteins available through poultry and fish farming on an industrial scale and, more generally, has concentrated on efficient types of energy conversion, which imply a prejudice in favor of vegetable food sources.

Social changes in the wake of industrialization may also be involved. In the developed world, no trend in the nutrition revolution has been more marked than the equalization of diet between regions and classes. Daily meat consumption in mid-nineteenth-century Paris was double that of Caen, Le Mans, Nantes and Toulon, and between 20 and 40 percent higher than in a range of other cities including Marseilles, Toulouse, Reims, Dijon, Strasbourg and Nancy. Today, these differences
have disappeared
. The embourgeoisement of shopping—the relentless upmarket march of food shops aimed at the mass market—has been one of the marked features of commonplace social observation of the last couple of generations. Between the two surveys of the life of the poor in his native York which
R. Seebohm Rowntree—scion of another Quaker chocolate-making family—undertook in 1899 and 1935, the working class had, to an amazing degree, closed the nutrition gap which formerly separated them from their employers. He defined most of the families he studied as underfed—but that was because his standards were unrealistically high: he defined adequate nourishment at a level of caloric intake well above the average for all classes. Moreover, his research was distorted by the agenda he shared in common with most professional social scientists at the time: he sought to show that even families on relatively high incomes needed education in nutrition to change their shopping habits. Nonetheless, what is really remarkable about his findings is the fact that whereas the subjects of his earlier study had a monotonous diet with only traces of animal protein on a regular basis, the menus he collected in the 1930s showed that even his poorest families were able to achieve some variety and to include roast beef once a week, fish once a week and another fresh source of animal protein, such as liver or rabbit or sausages, at least
twice a week
.

Rowntree did, however, find genuine malnutrition among York's unemployed and the city's most abject menials: his lowest category of employed heads of household was represented by a van cleaner, who earned only just enough to feed his family on a standard diet. One of the ironies of the embourgeoisement of recent years is that it has been a cause of heightened suffering for those left out of it. For a while, in the wake of studies like Rowntree's, social-democratic welfare experiments narrowed the “wealth gap.” In most of the developed world, it began to grow again in the 1980s, as governments adopted aggressive free market principles to drive on economic growth. To keep up with the Joneses—to sustain, that is, a middle-class type of diet on an “underclass” income—became increasingly hard. The way to eat cheaply and well, if you have a decent larder, stove and cooking pans at home, remains essentially what it has always been: buy seasonal vegetables, abundant potatoes, garlic and onions, pulses and milled but uncooked grains. Use whatever is left over for treats. When Jeffrey Steingarten tested the American government's Thrifty Food Plan, which is intended to enable welfare families to eat adequately on a budget of $3.53 per person per day, he made four remarkable discoveries. First, the average American family spends only marginally more than the poorest families on food prepared at home; so the poorest sector is still in touch with average standards. Second, the government plan aims at “departing as little as possible from the current eating patterns of American families”; in other words, even the poorest are still expected to ape the eating habits of the middle class. The effect is that the suggested meals are sparse and second-rate, whereas a fresh approach, unprejudiced by convention, would produce better,
bigger and healthier—as well as more original—meals. Third, the Thrifty Plan had an ideological smack. The menus, wrote Steingarten, “stress the kind of weakly flavored mock-ethnic dishes that American dietitians love and I despise. Green peppers found their insidious way into everything.” Steingarten detected a racist assumption underlying the prolific use of collards: the devisers of the Thrifty Plan clearly assumed that most welfare dependents would be black. Finally, the menus were marred by dogmatic nutritionalism. “The recipes expressed a complete catalog of modern nutritional superstitions: salt, cooking oil, and sometimes sugar were reduced to ridiculously small amounts; the turkey was wastefully relieved of its proudest part, its skin; butter was eliminated entirely (even though the transfatty acids in margarine are nearly as dangerous as saturated fat); and milk was always the non-fat dry version, which produced a gray and watery
bread pudding
.” One benefit was that all precooked and convenience foods were eliminated. But not even the poorest people in the privileged West seem able to elude embourgeoisement.

Allowing for such differences in class and income as persist, the big change in Western nutrition has been unremitting overall increase in the average amount people in the developed world eat. The average intake was probably under two thousand calories at the end of the eighteenth century. It is well over three thousand today. Since the exceptional privations of the Second World War, the industrial and postindustrial underclass of the Western world has gone from undernourishment to overnourishment. In the United States and some parts of Northwest Europe, obesity is now a bigger social problem than malnutrition. Fatness is prima facie evidence of social deprivation. As Arthur Odell, General Mills' product development specialist, said in 1978, “You can't sell nutrition. Hell, all people want is
coke and pot chips!
” The predicament of the overfed West has been depicted most vividly in the cinema, in Marco Ferreri's fascinatingly repulsive
La grande bouffe,
a Sade-like fantasy in which the characters eat themselves to death, or Monty Python's all-devouring character, Monsieur Creosote, who is tipped into death by his last after-dinner mint. But the film-makers' satire was mistargeted: in Western society, the victims of overabundance are likely to be people classified as poor. The very cheapness of food is life-threatening. Most of the world, meanwhile, has not had a chance to contract the diseases of affluence.

For famine, until now, has been the historic counterpart of abundance. A hint of what would happen to the parts of the world omitted from the benefits of industrialization occurred with the Irish potato famine of 1845-49, which caused a million deaths and drove a million migrants overseas, ending Ireland's history as a populous country. Reliance—utter reliance—on a single variety of potato
exposed the Irish to destruction by a blight that wiped out the crop. Though the crisis was mismanaged by the imperial government in London, incompetence in famine management was not a peculiarly English, or even a peculiarly imperial vice: similar potato famines devastated Belgium and Finland in 1867-68. Yet the world was genuinely divided, in the industrializing era, into haves and have-nots. While industrializing societies solved their problems of food supply, much of the rest of the world starved.

Outside Europe, North America and a few other lucky locations, the last three decades of the nineteenth century were an age of famine which exceeded all others for mortality and perhaps for every other kind of measurable severity. In the years when the monsoon failed from 1876 to 1878, five million Indians, by the official count, or seven million by an objective estimate, died of famine. The famine that afflicted China at that time was officially “the most terrible disaster in
twenty-one dynasties
.” Equally adverse conditions, associated with a series of El Niño events—the Pacific countercurrent which periodically drenches Peru and spreads droughts around much of the rest of the tropical world—returned toward the end of the 1880s and in the second half of the 1890s. Lake Chad shrank by half. Nile flood levels fell by
35 percent
. Estimates of the ensuing mortality range, for example, between about twelve and thirty million in India, twenty and
thirty million in China
.