Near a Thousand Tables (44 page)

It was an elemental odour, raw and crude; it was rich, almost rancid, sensual and strong. There were some who drank it in as if it were an intoxicant; there were others who put their handkerchiefs to their faces. The new emigrants were still tasting it, lost in wonder, when suddenly the car came to a halt, and the door was flung open, and a voice shouted—“
Stockyards
!”

The scene that greeted the travelers in Upton Sinclair's novel
The Jungle
was emblematic of the way food processing had aped and accompanied industrialization. Sinclair made it sound like hell. The smoke from the stockyards “might have come from the center of the world.” Twenty thousand head of livestock moaned. Flies blackened the air in Beelzebub's abattoir. It was

the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in one place. It employed 30,000 men. It supported directly 250,000 people in its neighborhood, and indirectly it supported nearly half a million. It sent its products to every country in the civilized world, and it furnished the food for no less than
thirty million people
!

It made food of old and crippled cattle, covered with boils. “When you plunged your knife into them they would burst and splash foul-smelling stuff into your face…. It was such stuff as this as made the embalmed beef that had killed several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards.” Dead rats were shoveled into the meal with the other floor sweepings. “There were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned
rat was a tidbit
.”

Industrialization bred impurity, corruption and adulteration. But in the industrial era, more industrialization was the only admissible solution. In the late nineteenth century food science became obsessed with purity and the course of development in the food industries was directed toward products that would be uniform, predictable and safe. All the old priorities of traditional cuisines were supplanted: pleasure, individuality, cultural identity. Farsighted food producers realized that purity legislation, by driving up unit costs, would favor economies of scale and bring more business to the heavily capitalized reaches of the industry. Hygiene was a selling point, which would enhance any brand.

The Cleanliness King of the late nineteenth century was one of the sector's biggest moguls. Henry J. Heinz of Pittsburgh was intended for the Lutheran ministry but he found his real vocation peddling his parents' surplus garden produce from the age of eight. He learned about the salability of purity in the 1860s, while still in his teens, hawking garden horseradish in clear glass bottles, which exposed the product to the buyers' eyes. At the end of that decade, he was gathering recipes for pickle in his notebooks: data on walnut catsup and a vegetable pickle he called “chow-chow” featured alongside analyses of cleaning fluid and horse colic cure. One hundred fifty biblical quotations were interspersed. After bankruptcy in 1875 he diversified into a range of pickles, expanded into canning and used packaging and advertising to turn Heinz into one of the biggest businesses in Pittsburgh—the capital of America's steel industry. He already made more than sixty products when he coined the slogan “57 Varieties,” but he felt drawn to the number, apparently for “occult reasons” during a visionlike experience on a New York elevated train.

He built a factory in the Romanesque style, with a vast auditorium where stained glass windows recorded Heinz's philosophy: the superiority of management over labor and capital. An employee who joined the firm in 1888 for five cents an hour on a ten-and-a-half-hour day could enjoy a free uniform, medical and dental treatment, and a daily manicure (if she handled food). She had the use of a dressing room with hot showers, a pool, a gym, a roof garden, a reading room and a dining room with an Orphenion and a hundred pictures on the walls. For treats, she could have occasional rides in the parks in the firm's wagonettes, lectures, recitals, free courses in dressmaking, millinery, cookery, drawing, singing and citizenship, and four dances a year at which “Mr. Heinz stayed on the balcony, waving down at us.” Members of her family could join her at the annual Christmas Party, when Mr. Heinz shook Santa by the hand, and the annual outing to a local beauty spot, when three special trains conveyed up to four thousand revelers. The founder's rewards included a “baronial castle in Pittsburgh's most opulent neighborhood” with a bathroom mural that showed a life-size nude naiad with conches at her lips and feet, and a formidable private museum of art. He did not perhaps merit the cognomina of “prophet” and “pioneer” bestowed on him after his death, but he had
made purity pay
.

Mechanization was hallowed by the rhetoric of purity “untouched by human hand.” In combination with industrial-scale food production, uniformity filleted out flavor. In pasteurized cheese originality and individuality are boiled out. The balance of microbial activity, which trades danger for flavor, is destroyed. Apple varieties which work best in the mass market are those which look attractive: big and glossy, like witches' gifts. Fruit is sold immature to increase its shelf life.
Some fruits survive freezing without much sacrifice of flavor: others, such as strawberries and bananas, are ruined by the experience. Parallel with the war against impurity, the modern food industry has exploited health scares to produce “phony foods.” The search for salable substitutes for sugar and butter has become a food industry grail quest. Together with salt, sugar and butter form an unholy trinity, anathemized by fashionable dietary orthodoxy. None of them deserves the obloquy flung by health scaremongers. Like most foods, they are good for you in normal quantities. Salt has a seriously adverse effect on the blood pressure of a small minority of people—8 percent in America, where the statistics are probably most reliable. Though saturated fats, including butter, are statistically associated with heart disease, normal consumption rates do no harm except to the small numbers of people who have exceptionally high cholesterol (above, p. 53-4). Sugar contributes no more to disorders for which it is commonly blamed—such as fatness, hyperactivity and bad teeth—than other fermentable carbohydrates; most people probably eat no more than is good for them, without having to be restrained by officious dietitians and nutritionists. The idea that health generally is served by ingestion of laboratory concoctions such as artificial sweeteners, margarines and sucrose polyester is offensive to brain and palate alike. Untargeted health advice on these matters from governments and health education agencies does no good, except to vested interests. In the long run, it subverts rational public health policy by inducing a cry-wolf mentality and discrediting health campaigns generally. In consequence, people probably take less notice of official advice about hygiene, smoking and sexual behavior—all of which genuinely are important.

The willingness of the public to accept ersatz foods is surprising, but, if indefinitely extended, it could inspire nightmares. “Textured” soya products already imitate meat: why, if one rejects meat, should one want a vegetable textured to feign it? Hi-lysine corn, which adds the essential amino acid in which traditional corn is deficient, has been brokered as a potential way of replacing meat with a cheap alternative protein source. Perhaps the ultimate mockery is to make food from microbes. They are organic, malleable and so plentiful as to be inexhaustible. Some have already been exploited for the purpose. Chlorella is made from mass-cultured algae and, allegedly, is good for cakes, biscuits and ice cream. The cyanobacterium spirulina can be sun-dried and nibbled as a biscuit: it had a certain faddish following
in the 1980s
, The microbiologist J. R. Postgate reported that

a process was developed in the 1970s in the USA for growing mushroom mycelium on meat residues (apparently about three quarters of the material
handled by a modern slaughterhouse is thrown away), but I do not know what became of it. Mushroom soup? … No doubt chlorella biscuits and methano-burgers will one day be a delicious meal that one will take for granted; as one reconstitutes one's dehydrated Château Latour (esters specially blended to reproduce that greatest of years, 1937), one may wonder at the barbarian habits of one's ancestors who grew large animals, killed them and actually
ate their flesh
.

Meanwhile, it is not clear whether industrially processed food delivers the promises of hygiene its advocates made for it in the last century. When foods are mass-produced, one mistake can poison a lot of people. Life after cooking carries serious health hazards. Every time prepared food is unfrozen, or ready-meals reheated, an eco-niche opens for microbial infestation. Listeria proliferate in refrigerators. In 1988 a new strain of salmonella appeared in chickens. This was almost certainly the result of the abuse of antibiotics in livestock feed. With a rapidity few biochemists could forecast, bacteria respond to antibiotics by adapting successfully, exchanging genetic material and emerging in new, resistant forms. A salmonella outbreak at a trade exhibition buffet in May 1990 affected 100 out of 150 guests. Chicken drumsticks had been delivered partially frozen, then placed in a fridge, cooked next day, coated in egg and breadcrumbs, placed in a freezer for two days, defrosted for three and a half hours, deep-fried, left to cool, then refrigerated for three hours and
reheated before serving
. Joints cooled overnight affected hundreds of children in the same school in incidents a year apart. At about the same time, there were reports of a case where wedding guests were poisoned by an antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus identical to the strain in the nasal mucus and septic spots of the person who sliced the turkey and ham. The hazards of imperfect hygiene in food processing are obvious; but microbial mutations are always threatening to outflank vigilance and outstrip science. In 1964 a typhoid outbreak in Aberdeen claimed four hundred victims before the cause was traced. A new strain of typhoid bacteria, invulnerable except to chlorine, infected cans which had escaped the chlorine rinse usually applied to cool the cans down after heating. The beef had in turn left traces of the infection on the blade of a mechanical slicer, which then
infected other meat
.

Industrialized eating has, at best, equivocal implications for health. It is surely corrosive of society—at least, of lines of continuity in the pattern of family life which has become traditional in the modern West: the focus for family life which the warmth and aromas of the kitchen provide; the fraternity of the shared meal. In one respect, the power of industrialization to change family feeding habits is apparent to everybody who has experienced it: mealtimes have adjusted to new
patterns of work. Soup has become “of the evening” in
modern France
. In America and Britain, the four-meal day has long been over. Lunch has almost disappeared in favor of daytime snacking and evening “dinner.” That British institution—
le fifoclock,
when “everything stops for tea”—has vanished. Even in Germany and Italy—lands that lunch—the main meal has to be taken in office cafeterias to save time in the working day. In Spain, one can hardly imagine the national culture surviving if mealtimes were disturbed: in the 1920s, the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera was doomed when he planned to “modernize” Spanish mealtimes in line with the industrial working day by instituting “fork lunch at 11
A.M.
” In Spain today the needs of the modern economy are met by two recourses: the
día intensivo,
which enables people to work continuously from 8:00
A.M.
to 3:00
P.M.
before retiring for a traditional family meal, and the cell phone, which means that lunchers can stay in touch with the rest of the world during the extended afternoon lunch break.

Family life could survive in its traditional form, no doubt, even if families normally ate together only once a day. Even that, however, seems increasingly unlikely. In 1887, Edward Bellamy's
Looking Backward
appeared. In his socialist utopia there were no homes with kitchens. Instead, people ordered their dinners from menus printed in newspapers and ate them together in huge and solemn but comfortable people's palaces: though supplied by private enterprise, such eateries have now, in the form of fast food outlets, materialized. People still eat, ever less regularly, at home but mealtimes are atomized; different family members choose to eat different things at different times.

It is comforting to reflect that fast food is not in itself a new phenomenon. Hot ready-to-eat meals have served the urban poor in almost every city dwelling
culture in history
. Flats in ancient Rome rarely had any cooking space or apparatus on the premises: people bought their meals ready-made from vendors. On the streets of Becket's London public kitchens were open day and night for food to suit all purses, selling game, fish and poultry roasted, fried or boiled. In Paris in the thirteenth century you could buy boiled and roast veal, beef, mutton, pork, lamb, kid, pigeon, capon, goose; spiced pasties filled with chopped pork, chicken or eel; tarts filled with soft cheese or egg, hot waffles and wafers, cakes, pancakes, simnels and tarts, hot mashed peas, garlic sauce, cheese of Champagne and Brie, butter, hot pasties. In the fourteenth century, Piers Plowman heard the vendor's cry: “Hot pies, hot! Good piglets and geese!
Go dine, go
!”

In some ways, nothing seemed to have changed by 1928, when the
Ladies' Home Journal
boasted, as if announcing a historical “first,” that “there are few things except soft-boiled eggs that you can't buy almost ready to
eat today
.” Nevertheless,
there are obvious differences between what might be called the fast food of tradition and the convenience eating of today. The street vendors of antiquity and the Middle Ages were for the most part small, artisanal, human-scale enterprises, providing local services to supply households with the means of common meals. The fast food industry today is dominated by the products of industrial processing, designed to be eaten “on the fly” or in front of the television or computer screen. Instead of a bond, meals are becoming a barrier. “Convenience” enjoys a higher priority than civilization or pleasure or nourishment. Surveys regularly claim to show that people know processed food tastes worse than fresh. They also believe that it is less nutritious. Yet they are willing to make the sacrifices for convenience.