Krugman on English Food (2). Urbanization
To quickly recap what I said in the first post of this series, Krugman uses the presumed awfulness of English food from the early nineteenth century to the 1980s to support his thesis of bad equilibria in market economies, that is, that good things may never be supplied because they have never been requested. English food was awful, he says, because of early urbanization and industrialization.
“Victorian London already had well over a million people, but most of its food came in by horse-drawn barge. And so ordinary people, and even the middle classes,were forced into a cuisine based on canned goods (mushy peas!),preserved meats (hence those pies), and root vegetables that didn’t need refrigeration (e.g. potatoes, which explain the chips).”
In this second post I’ll simply tackle the question: Is urbanization a cause of bad food?
London certainly exploded in size in the nineteenth century, going from just over a million in 1819 (the beginning of the Victorian period) to seven million in 1901 (the end of the Victorian period).
Other nations, though, were also urbanizing. New York soared to four million. Paris went from 1 million in 1844 to 1.8 million in 1872. Edo (Tokyo) had had well over a million since the mid-eighteenth century. In 1800 Beijing and Guangzho had a million people. Istanbul was huge too, and had been for centuries, though, perhaps not reaching a million. By 1900, still in the Victorian period, Berlin, Chicago, Vienna, and St Petersburg also all had more than a million. Melbourne and Buenos Aires had half a million.
This list includes some of the most famed centers of gastronomy, including at the least Paris, Vienna and Istanbul; many would also want to put St Petersburg, Beijing, and Edo on the list.
From a historical perspective, this is scarcely surprising. Big cities have traditionally had the best food of their epoch, including Ancient Rome (a million), tenth-century Baghdad (probably half a million to a million), and thirteenth-century Hangchow (about the same). The reason is simple. Big cities are where the rich and powerful live. They have the power and the will to command (seize, grab, extract, or buy) the best food.
In short, urbanization does not generally produce awful food but the finest food of the epoch.
So even if we accept Krugman’s assumption that English food was awful, it’s not likely that this was because London was a big city.
What about industrialized? That’s for another post.
I had a long discussion with a Scottish cousin of mine who is an historian. He said UK food went downhill at the turn of the 19 to 20th century. Of course in cities poor people ate badly. But the middle classes and more did fine until the first war. Reliance on imported food as the ag workers went into industry meant that in the first war, when supplies were cut off by war, at one point the UK was down to six weeks or whatever (some small number) supply of food. This horrified the gov’t so that after the war the focus was on preservation, canning etc, (they could have tried to reverse the reliance on imposrt from the Commonwealth etc, but chose not to). Hence canned peas and a loss of knowledge about the taste and realities of good food. It took the Common Market and then end of currency restrictions (sometime in the seventies), plus food writers, to re-introduce the reality of good food to the UK/
Hi Naomi, thanks for this. It’s a slightly different twist on the usual story. I am, however, a little suspicious about the story in general for lots and lots of reasons that I will gradually get to. It’s a complicated issue and as you imply taking the Krugman line that you can talk about “English” (his choice) food without talking about class is hopeless.
My first visit to Britain (camping with my parents in 1974) left us with a culture trauma. It was very difficult indeed to get decent food (in our view). “Mothers’s Pride” bread. Not only couldn’t we find shops (no bakers?) on the road, we were bewildered with arcane opening and closure times, pubs where we weren’t allowed, and the very poor quality on offer in general, with types of food we were unacustomed to (like marmelade, breakfast cereals). Luckily we discovered Chinese restaurants.
Since learning to know the place better, I found out that generally there is very decent even delicious traditional food to be found, but at inns in rural areas. What we experienced in urban sttings I now attribute to ” the protestant attitude to food”(PATF), where the joy of eating is frowned upon as sinful. The same is to be found in Holland and Northern Germany, Scandinavia (cfr. the film “Babette’s feast”)
On the contrary, in the PATF, food has to serve, apart from strict nourishment, philosphical and political purposes: the countries listed above are the champions of ethical choices in food: Oxfam World shops, organic food, Rainforest Alliance, MSC, vegetarianism…, healthy food is also much more an issue than in, say, catholic Bavaria or Sicily.
In short: “Methodists are not supposed to enjoy teir meal”. Therefore there is no incentive for quality. I would throw in the hypothesis that the quality of food in British cities started to improve with migrant (muslim) influence.
Nick, Sorry you had such a bad experience. It’s very hard navigating foreign countries particularly if they do not have a public food tradition. I think there is a Protestant attitude to food though I might characterize it slightly differently. I will get to this about three posts on in this series. I am not persuaded that Muslim immigrants brought about a change in British food. My suspicion is that this was truer of France. But more coming.
I think that the discussion could benefit from a tighter definition of ‘good’ food. Does that mean tasty food? or nutritious food? or BOTH?
… and then! that sneaky little word ‘healthy’ comes in and one must look at the possibility that food that is tasty and nutritious may be UNhealthy? I can see that tasty food might be unhealthy and (know from experience) that nutritious food might not be tasty — might even be awful.
I’m also looking for more on the topic of public vs. private food.
Another thought about good food not being experienced in the 19th C. Wasn’t that the era of the “Grand Tour” or year abroad for British middle and upper classes? It seems to me that a year on the continent would have made an impression on several generation’s demands at home.
Yes, bad food is never defined. And yes, you are absolutely right, the public/private distinction is important. The Grand Tour is more usually associated with eightenth century but the British did have an empire in the nineteenth as well as building railroads everywhere and running most of the world’s steamships. Their first encounter with overseas was not in the late twentieth century. More to come on this.
> And so ordinary people, and even the middle classes,were forced into a cuisine based on canned goods (mushy peas!),preserved meats (hence those pies), and root vegetables that didn’t need refrigeration (e.g. potatoes, which explain the chips).”
Just from reading stuff like Mayhew and Victorian fiction, this sounds weirdly inaccurate to me. I’m thinking of regular references to all kinds of fresh food, and places to buy it: eels (which were live until just before cooking), whitebait coming into season, roasted chestnuts, whelks, market gardens around the edge of the city, costermongers, the vegetable market at Covent Garden and the meat market at Smithfield, Italian ice cream vendors etc. Live cattle were driven into the city down the Caledonian Road well into the 19th century.
Also, there is absolutely no English tradition of making pies from preserved meat (sounds revolting). And chips were a relatively late (and arguably Jewish) innovation – there’s a lot more mention of baked potatoes as a street food, IMO.
Yes, it’s not its accuracy that makes this piece interesting. Far from it. But when you get one of the world’s mpst influential columnists able to take for granted the awfulness of English food over a period of two hundred and fifty years, it’s worth seeing what’s up.
I think that if one considers the vast amount of cookery texts published during the 20th century by various British women’s institutes, the arguement that there is an overburden of Protestant attitude towards food a this stage doesn’t really stand up. People that don’t find enjoyment in food, don’t make elderflower champagne.
The first half of the 20th century was also a time when there was a strong desire to document and re-examin regional foods.
Deliciousness doesn’t translate very well at all. And when it does it can seem quite perverse, in many case a countries cuisine is derided for decades, suddenly it is ‘discovered’ and then we here endlessly about how the authentic cuisine is nuanced, inspired and generally brilliant.
Going back to the Krugman quote above, I would have to say that it does look wilfully ignorant. Maybe that is the angle?
I wonder if this is an example of a cultural attitudes not translating very well. There is a large streal of neo-Darwinian attitude towards food with many American commentators. Foods and food experiences tend to be ordered and ranked. When used to judge other countries foods and food cultures, it can end up in a whole bunch of cliches, much like the Krugman quote above.
Yes, the angle really is that Krugman can take this for granted. Actually a lot of English people do too.And I want to take it on, because it reflects anti-modern attitudes about food in influential people who are otherwise quite happy to accept the modern world.
Adam, I love this statement!
“Deliciousness doesn’t translate very well at all. ”
There are so many dishes or flavours, with which one or another culture grows up, which taste icky when encountered blind as an adult but which are delicacies to those who grow into them.
Nick, I’ve traveled a great deal in many countries and I do not find that opening/closing times are ever arcane. I just find them local.
Deliciousness certainly doesn’t translate. I quite agree.
> Yes, the angle really is that Krugman can take this for granted. Actually a lot of English people do too.
Agreed – there’s often a cultural cringe towards everything being better in France or Italy. Not just actual cooking styles and quality of ingredients, but also ways of eating (eg beliefs that other cultures always sit down to proper family meals, their children know how to behave at table, they drink with meals rather than binge-drinking in pubs etc).
You’re right, though perhaps it goes even further than you think. I will be talking more about this later.
Just came across this: https://prospectbooks.co.uk/books/0-907325-78-5. A history of the Neat House Gardens, a big and intensely productive market garden very close to central London (what’s now Pimlico) which survived well into the 18th century.
“First brought into garden cultivation around the beginning of the seventeenth century, Neat House became one of London’s principal sources of supply for cauliflowers, cabbage, artichokes and asparagus, with early beans and catch crops of spinach and radishes. Low-lying, with a high wafer table, the land finely balanced drainage and irrigation, and was supplied with copious quantities of manure from London’s laystalls to maintain fertility and fuel the hot-beds under glass that were the secret of early and unseasonal crops.”
Yup, places like that were certainly there. That’s why we are going to have to divide and conquer this issue.