Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology

By Chris Otter

A history of the unsustainable modern diet—heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar—that requires more land and resources than the planet is able to support.

We are facing a world food crisis of unparalleled proportions. Our reliance on unsustainable dietary choices and agricultural systems is causing problems both for human health and the health of our planet. Solutions from lab-grown food to vegan diets to strictly local food consumption are often discussed, but a central question remains: how did we get to this point?

In Diet for a Large Planet, Chris Otter goes back to the late eighteenth century in Britain, where the diet heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar was developing. As Britain underwent steady growth, urbanization, industrialization, and economic expansion, the nation altered its food choices, shifting away from locally produced plant-based nutrition. This new diet, rich in animal proteins and refined carbohydrates, made people taller and stronger, but it led to new types of health problems. Its production also relied on far greater acreage than Britain itself, forcing the nation to become more dependent on global resources. Otter shows how this issue expands beyond Britain, looking at the global effects of large agro-food systems that require more resources than our planet can sustain. This comprehensive history helps us understand how the British played a significant role in making red meat, white bread, and sugar the diet of choice—linked to wealth, luxury, and power—and shows how dietary choices connect to the pressing issues of climate change and food supply.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226705965

Book preview

DIET FOR A LARGE PLANET

DIET FOR A LARGE PLANET

Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology

CHRIS OTTER

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-69710-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-70596-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226705965.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Otter, Chris (Christopher James), author.

Title: Diet for a large planet : industrial Britain, food systems, and world ecology / Chris Otter.

Description: Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019046573 | ISBN 9780226697109 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226705965 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Diet—Great Britain—History—19th century. | Diet—Great Britain—History—20th century. | Food consumption—Great Britain—History. | Nutrition—Great Britain—History. | Food supply—Great Britain—History. | Human ecology—Great Britain—History. | Human ecology—History.

Classification: LCC TX360.G7 O88 2020 | DDC 363.80941—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046573

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

FOR TINA

CONTENTS

Introduction

1.  Meat

2.  Wheat

3.  Sugar

4.  Risk

5.  Violence

6.  Metabolism

7.  Bodies

8.  Earth

9.  Acceleration

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 millions took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.

—Mahatma Gandhi, Discussion with a Capitalist (1928)

I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion.

—George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

Food systems have the potential to nurture human health and support environmental sustainability, announces the report of the 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems. However, it continues portentously, they are currently threatening both.¹ The commission’s second report outlines today’s global syndemic of obesity, undernutrition, and climate change.² Diets high in calories, added sugars, saturated fats, processed foods, and red meats are causing surging rates of metabolic disorders, greenhouse gas emissions, and extinction.³ These reports are the latest in a series of studies arguing that giant global food systems and meat-rich diets are inching us toward crisis. The 2014 UN Report on the Right to Food concluded that global food systems are causing dangerous levels of phosphate and nitrate leaching, soil erosion, and greenhouse gas emissions.⁴ Tim Lang, a professor of food policy at City University, London, put it bluntly in 2009: The world cannot eat as the United States or UK eats. There are, he argues, not enough planets to feed the world with the volume or range enjoyed by Americans or Europeans.⁵

The language of not enough planets echoes Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971), which firmly blamed a diet rich in meat and refined carbohydrates for manifold environmental and health problems. Lappé urged people to eat low on the food chain and touted the revolutionary potential of a plant-based diet. She also firmly blamed the emergent food crisis on the post-1945 American world food system, which had helped create a world of hamburger and wheat bread lovers.⁶ Dramatic change in planetary food systems, the UN and EAT-Lancet reports agree, is a consequence of tremendous shifts in the global economy, technology, and geopolitics over the past fifty years.⁷ This global dietary transition aligns neatly with the proposed 1945 birth of the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration, a historical phase when every indicator of human activity underwent a sharp increase in rate.⁸

Acceleration is real. Global rates of meat consumption are rising, as are the rates at which food systems devour nitrogen, water, and fossil fuels. If we are to understand such acceleration, however, we must explore how such food systems were formed and how and why diets rich in meat, wheat, and sugar became so cheap and desirable. To understand the logic behind Lappé’s diet for a small planet, we need to understand how a diet for a large planet, with little regard for ecological limits, was created in the first place. Almost all humans who have ever lived have eaten predominantly locally produced, plant-based food. The diet for a small planet is the historical norm, not the exception. Abandoning this small-planet diet was one of the most fateful processes in our planetary history.

This book argues that, in order to understand the deeper history of today’s global food situation, it is necessary to explore post-1800 Britain. The British world food system usually makes little more than a passing appearance in histories aiming to comprehend today’s compound food crisis.⁹ Diet for a Large Planet contends that, more than anywhere else, Britain laid the foundations for contemporary food systems. It was the nineteenth century’s dominant world power, controlling immense global resources, and creating long-distance food chains to supply vast quantities of meat, wheat, and sugar. Its precocious industrialization, urbanization, and population growth, combined with abundant fossil fuels, a vast empire, and liberal political economy, created the conditions under which the idea of using the entire planet as a food source became thinkable, viable, and systemically embedded. The Western diet—rich in animal proteins, processed grains, and sugar—became inseparably associated with power and progress. The British diet appears less an object of ridicule than something worthy of serious, critical historical inquiry.

This book does not assume any kind of firm break dividing past from present. Many of the phenomena it studies—atherosclerosis, the anthropogenic nitrogen cycle, food processing, meat love, metabolic disorders, tooth decay, economic development, climate change—have no precise point of emergence. They unfold slowly within bodies and across planetary space. Their effects are incremental and cumulative, and they take decades, even centuries, to become fully apparent. They cannot be straightforwardly categorized as belonging to modernity, the Anthropocene, or the Great Acceleration.

The focus, instead, is on food systems as material, spatial, and temporal phenomena. These systems connect animals and plants, laborers and consumers, agricultural technology and transport, information networks and processing plants, eating habits and dietary desires. They did not emerge fully formed. Constructing them was hard and sometimes violent. As they became established, the arrangements between these various elements created what Keller Easterling has called disposition. British food systems formed a massive, semioccluded set of infrastructures disposed toward increasing fossil-fuel and fertilizer use, rising consumption of meat and processed foods, inequalities of consumption, and emergent health issues. Another important concept is that of the multiplier.¹⁰ When systemic elements are multiplied, their effects become recursive. A planet with 1.5 million cows is one thing, a planet with 1.5 billion quite another. Many seemingly trivial new technologies—roller mills, hydrogenated fats, milk chocolate, tractors—have tremendous long-term multiplying effects on human populations when articulated within large-scale food systems. Over time, such systems acquired what Thomas Hughes called momentum: they come to have mass, velocity, and direction.¹¹ Reversing their course appears increasingly difficult. They appear autonomous and inescapable. Eating large quantities of meat, wheat, and sugar became remarkably easy, even effortless. The bodily and ecological effects of this diet became harder to escape. These three concepts—disposition, multiplication, momentum—help explain the enduring influence of the British food systems discussed in this book.

The remainder of this introduction outlines four key aspects of these systems: outsourcing and distance; meat, wheat, and sugar; power and violence; and ecological costs. These general themes are explicated in much greater detail in the rest of the book, demonstrating how today’s multifaceted food crisis has a deeper history than we might imagine.

THE LARGE-PLANET PHILOSOPHY

Urban development has always necessitated command of agrarian hinterland and the mobilization of food across distance. Some ancient cities, like Rome, drew basic resources from overseas via tightly coordinated supply chains. During the medieval and early modern periods, the growing power of multiple imperial cores—Portugal, Russia, the Netherlands, China—was expressed through the exploration and control of more distant agrarian zones.¹² The province of Holland imported grain from at least 1350, while sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch commercial power utilized large quantities of Polish land and labor and large numbers of fluyt ships.¹³ The Netherlands became much more than marginally dependent on foreign grain, and, by the seventeenth century, around one-third of Holland’s grain was produced from heavily cerealized overseas landscapes.¹⁴

By 1300, London’s grain came from as far afield as eastern Oxfordshire, and, by the later sixteenth century, the city had a well-developed coastal grain trade.¹⁵ Although Britain was largely dietarily self-sufficient in the seventeenth century, it became reliant on Baltic and eastern European imports thereafter, a phenomenon most evident in the urbanizing parts of England.¹⁶ The English also practiced internal outsourcing, using Scotland and Ireland as a contiguous agrarian hinterland, and they drew salt cod and sugar from their Atlantic commodity frontiers.¹⁷ By the 1790s, population growth was straining domestic resources, and, during the Revolutionary Wars, Britain suffered from food shortages and rising prices.¹⁸

What happened next was not predetermined. There was nothing inevitable about the radical shift to outsourcing that followed. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson has shown how in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth many influential figures proposed more ecologically cautious and autarkic systems: cultivating wastelands, growing new crops, or encouraging emigration.¹⁹ While the naturalist Joseph Banks was cautiously supportive of using imperial territory for staple production, he expressed mercantilist concerns about capital leaving Britain to purchase food.²⁰ Malthus was apprehensive about food imports and worried that rising meat consumption would undermine British self-sufficiency.²¹ The consequences of growing Europe’s grain in America, he said, ought justly to be dreaded and would produce evanescent prosperity, culminating in a long period of retrograde movements and misery.²² In 1791, John Sinclair argued: "If we cannot supply ourselves with bread we are not an independent nation. Free trade was an unpatriotic Pandora’s box from which would cascade insecurity, unscrupulous mercantile profits, and an almost perpetual scarcity of grain. Protection and high prices, conversely, encouraged more productive agriculture.²³ In 1801, James Anderson described grain importation as insanity, adding: What wickedness ought it not to be deemed in any man or body of men, to contrive plans, and adopt measures that have a direct tendency to render us dependent on other nations for our support!!²⁴ Six years later, the anti-Smithian William Spence evoked Berkeley’s notion of a wall of brass" surrounding Britain in urging independence from international commerce.²⁵ Other parts of the world, facing similar problems, made different choices. Japan, for example, pursued a considerably more self-sufficient pre-twentieth-century trajectory.²⁶

These views, however, became marginalized over the nineteenth century. Steven Kaplan has argued that the dismantling of what he calls this subsistence mentality was a monumental collective transformation, at the psychological, economic, and political levels.²⁷ That dismantling involved abandoning the fears of Sinclair, Anderson, and Malthus and embracing an opposing argument: that opening Britain to free flows of food from overseas would power industrialization and progress. The political economist Robert Torrens urged that importing grain would generate lower domestic food prices and overseas markets for manufactured goods.²⁸ The result would be a mutually beneficial territorial division of employment between industrializing Britain and its manifold dispersed agricultural provinces.²⁹ This was a highly historical and frequently willfully conjectural reading of political economy, one that routinely evoked the Dutch model and suggestions that Britain could develop this system much further.³⁰ Another political economist, James Wheatley, argued that exploiting long-distance agricultural surpluses was a revival of ancient Roman practice, terminating the long and despotic reign of the theory of the balance of trade, although critics suggested that Roman outsourcing presaged decay and collapse.³¹

With the Dutch and Romans as models, the focus was on boundless exchange, which would cover the globe just as the globe itself converged on the Great Exhibition.³² This model was not imperial: there was no Seeley-style unity of blood and religion.³³ It was structured by what I call the large-planet philosophy. By this I mean the premise that the entire earth was a potential source of material wealth and capital investment. As Mill observed, England no longer depends on the fertility of her own soil to keep up her rate of profits, but on the soil of the whole world.³⁴ Britain’s overflowing capital moved easily around the world to fund agricultural infrastructure: between just 1907 and 1913, Britain invested over a billion pounds overseas.³⁵ An anonymous 1899 writer argued: The English people nowadays keep . . . many of their fields, factories, mines, railways, &c., in foreign countries.³⁶

Karl Polanyi noted that it was through British political economy that the industrial-agricultural division of labour was applied to the planet.³⁷ Classical liberals saw no fundamental problem with the ensuing decline of British agriculture. In 1881, the liberal economist Robert Giffen suggested that it would not be a very bad thing for the country generally if substantially more land went out of cultivation and was used for residential purposes.³⁸ British wheat acreage plummeted. The last remnants of an older, self-sufficient way of life were crumbling.³⁹ This was despite Britain being the world’s most capital-intensive agricultural area.⁴⁰ Writing in 1951, Erich Zimmermann stated that England was the country that had come closest to presiding over the extinction of agriculture.⁴¹ As Joel Mokyr concludes, there is no better historical illustration of the Ricardian concept of comparative advantage: the idea that individual countries naturally direct their capital and labor toward what is most beneficial to them.⁴²

The results were spectacular. The quantity of grain and meal imported from Ireland into Britain practically doubled between 1820–24 and 1835–39, by which time Ireland contributed over 85 percent of England’s imports of grain, meat, butter, and livestock.⁴³ Britain also exploited German, Polish, and Russian wheat supplies and, following the loosening of imported livestock regulations in the 1840s, began importing cattle from the same sources. The critical scalar leap, however, was the exploitation of immense tracts of highly fertile New World and Australasian land. The ensuing New World windfall, combined with the rapid adoption of coal, allowed Britain to overcome the threat of scarcity and reach economic takeoff, as Pomeranz has shown.⁴⁴ The British were effectively using the resources of what Donald Worster calls a Second Earth.⁴⁵ The volume of British food imports rose almost eightfold between 1850–52 and 1910–12, by which time they represented around two-fifths of all British imports by value.⁴⁶ Over four-fifths of bread consumed in Britain came from imported grain by 1909.⁴⁷ Moreover, a strikingly high proportion of food entering world trade went to Britain, which became the world’s richest single consumer market for food and raw materials.⁴⁸ In 1860, Britain received 49 percent of total Asian, African, and Latin American food exports.⁴⁹ In 1930, with under 3 percent of the world’s population, Britain imported 99 percent of the world’s exports of ham and bacon, 63 percent of its butter, 62 percent of its eggs, 59 percent of its beef, 46 percent of its cheese, and 28 percent of its wheat and wheat flour.⁵⁰

Outsourcing was, Avner Offer argues, Britain’s great economic innovation of the late Victorian period.⁵¹ Some European countries—notably Belgium—followed somewhat similar paths, but none imported on a British scale. There were limits and dead ends: late eighteenth-century schemes to develop commercial agriculture in Sierra Leone, for example, failed.⁵² Production of some foods remained largely localized, notably potatoes, vegetables, and liquid milk, whose perishability provided natural protection from foreign competition.⁵³ Milk products, however, were rapidly outsourced. Factory-made American cheese was already cheaper than British cheddar in the 1860s, and it arrived in Britain in increasing quantities thereafter.⁵⁴ The age of generic, homogenized Anglo-world cheddar was dawning, facilitated by mass production, pasteurization, and standardized rennet. One 1888 Suffolk observer noted: Foreign cheese, butter, and condensed milk are distributed in every village.⁵⁵ By 1913, following the adoption of the Lurbrand trademark, 40 percent of British butter came from Denmark, which was becoming Britain’s butter, bacon and egg factory.⁵⁶ In 1935, Britain produced only 9 percent of its butter and 30 percent of its cheese, while two classic industrialized food products—margarine and condensed milk—also arrived in massive quantities, particularly from the Netherlands.⁵⁷

In 1935, Astor and Rowntree suggested that such startling levels of imports were the result of a system involving massive overseas investment of British capital and export of manufactured goods.⁵⁸ Relying on domestic agriculture while increasing standards of living would have been impossible.⁵⁹ They were reflecting on a uniquely ‘British’ pattern of development—one combining free trade, falling transportation costs, cheap raw materials, and the creation of an industrialized core—that necessitated multiple distinct world food markets.⁶⁰ Although the British associated free trade with prosperity, continental farmers had, by the 1870s, learned to associate it with depression.⁶¹ By 1900, most European countries, with the exception of Britain, Denmark, Belgium, and Holland, were practicing some form of protection.⁶²

Creating markets in beef, wheat, and sugar required what we now call agro–food systems, which were multiscalar assemblages binding disparate elements together into enduring spatial arrangements: prairies, ranches, pastures, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, inspectors, paperwork, refineries, warehouses, wharves, mills, abattoirs, and bakeries. As systems expanded in size and material complexity, managing, monitoring, and standardizing predictable flows of carcasses, grains, and sugar became increasingly challenging. Mechanical handling technologies—overhead rails, band conveyors, derrick elevators, self-emptying railway trucks, automatic scales—made such circulation faster and easier.⁶³ The result was a networked food economy, a forbiddingly complex structure through which nutritional matter flowed from its site of production to those of processing, sale, and consumption.⁶⁴ Food chain management was a coherent practice long before the age of pallets, containers, and food logistics software: without it, comparative advantage would never have escaped the pages of political economy texts, and food systems would never have acquired the momentum necessary to become planetarily consequential.

The period 1820–1914 is a vital phase in the very long history of agro–food systems, involving a palpable rise in neo-European settler societies providing staples through emergent world markets, using extensive agricultural and technological systems. This system was truly international and multilateral, unlike older European trading monopolies.⁶⁵ Without it, there would be no post-1945 acceleration. It had no single center, but, because Britain absorbed by some distance the most imported food, it was the most important node in the network. These systems linked British consumers with Danish pig farmers, Indian peasants, New Zealand cheesemakers, and Argentinean ranchers. New World and Australasian systems were commodity frontiers: places where long-accumulated soil fertility, abundant resources, influxes of capital, cheap labor, and tenuous state authority allowed the immensely productive and rapid accumulation of nutriment and capital.⁶⁶ This was thus a new phase of capitalist frontier expansion, as political economists recognized.⁶⁷ Waste lands of the greatest natural fertility, enthused Adam Smith, are to be had for a trifle.⁶⁸ Such lands cheap and fresh or virgin soil could be mined as effectively as the Tyneside coalfields whose black diamonds powered agroindustrial Denmark’s creameries and bacon factories.⁶⁹ Uncultivated land would be improved and rendered productive: economic motives merged with religious imperatives to subdue the earth.⁷⁰ This catalyzed mass migration, significant amounts of which came from Britain: colonization would restore the balance of population between the industrializing metropolis and its agrarian dominions. Between 1841 and 1900, 25 million people left Europe, mostly for American and Australasian commodity frontiers. From 1870 to 1910, the developed arable area in North America, Argentina, Uruguay, and Australia surged from 82 to 185 million hectares.⁷¹ This Golden Age of resource-based development increasingly mined vertical frontiers too, devouring iron, guano, coal, coprolites, and petroleum.⁷²

In Ecological Imperialism, Alfred Crosby observed how these neo-European commodity frontiers (Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Uruguay) still produce one-third of all agricultural material crossing international borders. These places are to food, he argued, what the Middle East is to petroleum: surplus zones supplying resource-poor industrialized regions with essential energy inputs.⁷³ Their ratio of biomass production to biomass consumption remains the world’s highest.⁷⁴ This ratio is rooted in Britain’s food history, which produced commodity frontiers specializing in specific foodstuffs that moved over enormous distances: Canadian wheat, New Zealand mutton, Argentinean beef. The whole world, concluded the Royal Statistical Society fellow Stephen Bourne in the mid-1870s, could become tributary to our necessities.⁷⁵ Colonial economies became particularly closely linked to Britain, and these connections were tightening by the early twentieth century.⁷⁶ Over 70 percent of South African food exports went to Britain in the 1930s.⁷⁷ This orientation toward export was exceptional: before 1945, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada collectively exported 45 percent of the wheat, 40 percent of the butter, 46 percent of the cheese, and 78 percent of the mutton entering the world market.⁷⁸

Smith made free trade in food central to The Wealth of Nations, arguing that government intervention in the food supply caused, rather than prevented, famines and that, if commodities could be procured more cheaply from overseas, then Britain should import them.⁷⁹ During the nineteenth century, agricultural progressives adhered to this Smithian line. The political economist Richard Whately noted how rational free agents responding to price signals kept London fed with machine-like regularity.⁸⁰ The antiprotectionist James Caird celebrated the fact that there was no Minister of Agriculture in Great Britain . . . no State flocks, or herds, or horse-breeding establishments, nor any State schools of agriculture.⁸¹ Words were matched by policies. The embargo on live animal importation was lifted in 1842. The Corn Laws were repealed in 1846. Trade in other foodstuffs was also liberalizing, culminating in the 1874 repeal of sugar duties.⁸² The Ricardian model of comparative advantage was practiced, vindicated, and perpetuated.

Smithian and Ricardian ideas became interwoven with British identity via the experience of cheap food. As Frank Trentmann argues, cheap food, open markets, and vibrant civil society composed Britain’s rational and affective version of freedom, pointedly contrasting with the militarist path of protectionist countries like Imperial Germany.⁸³ Britain ostentatiously eschewed what Offer called new intellectual neo-mercantilism.⁸⁴ By rejecting protectionism, the narrative ran, and bravely pursuing free trade, Britain escaped the Hungry Forties and feasted on cheap beef, wheat, and sugar. Who wanted to eat black bread and horse meat, the coarse, repulsive diet of autarky?⁸⁵ Attempts to reintroduce protectionism failed at visceral, imaginary, and rational levels. As Robert Roberts recalled, a Conservative victory in the 1906 election would mean the ‘little loaf,’ a Liberal win, the ‘big loaf’: These were the politics the poor could understand!⁸⁶

Free traders constantly argued that economic liberalism maintained low food prices.⁸⁷ The agro–food systems connecting Argentinean ranching with British dinner tables produced a cheap meat regime.⁸⁸ Cheap fuel and cheap labor on commodity frontiers brought prices down. Wheat prices fell by around 51 percent between 1871–75 and 1894–98.⁸⁹ Cheap food underpinned rising working-class living standards after 1870 (see fig. 0.1), which undoubtedly contributed to domestic satisfaction and quiescence.⁹⁰ Food prices were generally lower in urban areas.⁹¹ Neoclassical and Keynesian economics recognized the essential link between cheap food and European prosperity.⁹² In Germany, everything but potatoes and liquid milk were more expensive than British food.⁹³ French prices were also more expensive than British ones.⁹⁴ The point here is not that all food was cheaper but that outsourced foods (meat, wheat, sugar) were. In Britain, liquid milk was relatively expensive and its consumption quite low.

Figure 0.1. The age of cheap food. Falling commodity prices in the late nineteenth century. From Royal Commission on Agriculture, Minutes of Evidence Taken Before Her Majesty’s Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Subject of Agricultural Depression, 3 vols. (London: HM Stationery Office, 1894), vol. 2.

Cheapness, however, has many hidden labor, ecological, and physiological costs. Cheap, argue Raj Patel and Jason Moore, is a strategy, a practice, a violence that mobilizes all kinds of work—human and animal, botanical and geological—with as little compensation as possible.⁹⁵ Cheapness was integral to the disposition created by food systems: it made certain foods particularly appealing. But, by making more calories available per hour of labor, such systems created the conditions of possibility of vast global inequalities, metabolic disease, and ecological collapse, precisely the object of today’s concerns about food system crisis.

MEAT, WHEAT, AND SUGAR

This epochal dietary transformation is often called the nutrition transition, although other terms, including the rise of middling cuisines and the dietary revolution, have been used to equal effect.⁹⁶ This transition has several salient features. First, an increased percentage of protein intake derives from meat and dairy products. This meatification involved a global rise in the human trophic level: humans began eating higher up the food chain.⁹⁷ Second, wheat—particularly roller-milled wheat—became the dominant grain. Third, fiber intake lowered.⁹⁸ Fourth, sugar consumption increased steeply. Fifth, the consumption of fat (meat, cheese, butter, margarine) rose significantly. Thus, we see the erosion of complex-carbohydrate consumption [from] . . . two sides—sugars on one, fats on the other.⁹⁹ In the 1880s, fats provided around 22 percent of total British calorie consumption. By 1961, this figure was 41 percent.¹⁰⁰ Sixth, this cuisine was industrial, typified by mechanization, processing, and packaging. Seventh, the meat-wheat-sugar complex became increasingly available to everyone, particularly in urban areas.¹⁰¹

With the exception of meat, this diet was very different than the diets humans evolved to digest. In the Upper Paleolithic period, cow’s milk, refined grains, and sugar formed no part of human diets, which consisted of water, vegetables, fruit, nuts, roots, fish, and, occasionally, meat. The nutrition transition is a critical watershed in human nutrition history, equivalent in significance, perhaps, to the Neolithic Revolution itself.¹⁰² In every developing, urbanizing part of the globe, the nutrition transition unfolds—often rapidly—through the adoption of the carnivorous, saccharized norms of Western capitalist society. Latin America is an excellent example.¹⁰³ The more urbanized the population, the sweeter and less fibrous its diet becomes.

Britain was, after the Netherlands, the first place on earth to undergo the nutrition transition.¹⁰⁴ By the early twentieth century, it consumed the most meat and sugar in Europe.¹⁰⁵ By 1909–13, meat, wheat, sugar, and dairy were the four most significant contributors to national food supply, together constituting 76 percent of Britain’s total food energy.¹⁰⁶ This is why this book focuses on meat, wheat, and sugar and, to a lesser extent, milk: these were the foods that powered nineteenth- and twentieth-century British bodies. These foods (with the exception of liquid milk) were cheap, outsourced, and produced and distributed through long-distance agro–food systems.

Meat—particularly roast beef—had become the British diet’s symbolic heart by at least the early modern period.¹⁰⁷ By 1800, this was embodied in the Sunday roast, a sacred meal, often the only meal at which families dined together.¹⁰⁸ Bacon at breakfast was becoming common among middle-class families by the 1880s.¹⁰⁹ The ‘British breakfast’ has long been a source of national pride at home and a byword abroad, noted Crawford and Broadley in 1938.¹¹⁰ Heavy British meat consumption was from the early eighteenth century noted by overseas visitors, who often connected it to higher levels of industrial output. Not only was meat consumption high, but the idea that meat was culturally necessary was also pervasive.

Britain has, it must be admitted, a long tradition of culinary economy and blandness, surely not helped by long-standing xenophobia toward those eating frogs, snails, bird’s nest soup, or horse-flesh steak.¹¹¹ [The British] have only three vegetables, and two of them are cabbage, snarled the American diplomat Walter Hines Page, who also disliked British hairdressers, pens, and newspapers.¹¹² British food also acquired a reputation for being overcooked, with oversimmered stewed meat compared to gutta-percha.¹¹³ Recipes suggested alarmingly long boiling times for vegetables, although small pans, unreliable heat sources, and tougher vegetables probably produced firmer results than we might predict.¹¹⁴ Historical sources discuss culinary indifference, limited repertoires, and kitchen incompetence.¹¹⁵ The British became Europe’s most avid consumers of prepared foods.

Some regional variety persisted. Bread assumed different local shapes from saffron dough cakes in Devon and Cornwall to tea cakes in Yorkshire.¹¹⁶ Cakes and confectionery were routinely named after their region of provenance: Chelsea buns, Bakewell tarts, Eccles cakes, Darlington granny loaf, Jedburgh snails, Everton toffee, Doncaster butterscotch.¹¹⁷ Orwell venerated English biscuits.¹¹⁸ Sweets and crisps appeared in endless innovative shapes and flavors. Nonetheless, the momentum of Britain’s food systems meant that the British diet was becoming increasingly homogenized.¹¹⁹ The traditional Scottish oatmeal diet retained its adherents, as one writer pungently asserted: We back the oatcake and the porridge against all the wheaten messes in the world. We swear by the oatcake and the porridge, the substantial bannock and the brose.¹²⁰ But, in early twentieth-century Edinburgh, porridge was falling into disuse, and a subsequent Glaswegian study revealed that white bread, jam, and tea had usurped oats.¹²¹ Wales underwent a similar transition to tea and emasculated wheat bread and butter.¹²² Irish sugar consumption rose around tenfold per capita between 1859 and 1904.¹²³ One consequence is that contemporary Britain has fewer regional food varieties than other EU countries. In 2005, Italy had 149 foods with protected geographical indication status, France 143, and Britain only 29.¹²⁴

The momentum of the nutrition transition was first apparent in urban areas. Meat eating was more evident in cities: As life in England becomes more concentrated in towns, more laborious, and more artificial, animal food must become more and more essential to the population.¹²⁵ The same was true of white wheat bread and sugary tea. Urban regions siphoned liquid milk from rural ones. It is an anomalous and disturbing situation, noted The Times in 1936, that the countryside which supplies the nation is no longer able to benefit fully by its own product.¹²⁶ Lengthening supply chains made urban food more processed, packaged, and adulterated: junk food was urban, which might explain height disparities between rural and urban areas.¹²⁷ Although immigrant communities—notably Jews—retained many dietary traditions and imperialism stimulated the incorporation of novel flavors into British cuisine, these were relatively small islands of culinary diversity in an ocean of comforting, bland homogeneity.

By this date, the average height of Britons was rising, and diet was contributing to resistance to some infectious diseases, notably tuberculosis. The British diet produced bigger, stronger people. But it also produced increasing heart disease, type-2 diabetes, and obesity, along with morbidities from tooth decay to constipation. Blood sugar and cholesterol accumulated more rapidly in urban veins and arteries.¹²⁸ Such conditions were palpable by the early twentieth century. The nutrition transition thrust the body into a novel dietary ecology, often characterized as overnutrition, a historically remarkable situation for which we are not evolutionarily equipped. This was a reasonably slow, even imperceptible process historically but a very fast one evolutionarily. As Western human beings increasingly succumbed to degenerative diseases, food generated anxiety and health dilemmas.¹²⁹ Ancient and non-Western human diets became increasingly appealing: development was, for some, actually decay and degeneration. But, as British and, later, American power spread across the world, the contradictory complex of effects associated with a meat-wheat-sugar diet became manifest at larger scales.

POWER

While dietary inequality is something of a historical constant, it is always inflected by historically specific power relations. Britain’s world food systems articulated inequality along lines of class, gender, race, and species. Within Britain, dietary provision was unequal. The physical strength of the very poor was etiolated by a diet often consisting largely of white bread, margarine, sugary tea, and condensed milk, a nutritionally debased form of the nutrition transition. The politically powerless, observed one newspaper, are badly fed.¹³⁰ We now know that being born into poverty can have deleterious, possibly transgenerational effects on stature, long-term metabolic health, and human capacity.¹³¹ Women consumed less protein and fewer calories than men, and differential gender roles and experiences had (and continue to have) a pronounced dietary substrate. Despite their veneration by some, colonial populations usually consumed worse diets than did the British elites. Linking their diets to relative powerlessness became a cliché. Winston Churchill noted that yellow men, brown men, and black men had not yet learned to demand and purchase a diet superior to rice.¹³² As the nutrition transition unfolded, then, its worst health effects affected the most powerless, whose diets ultimately left them most vulnerable to the emergent diseases of overnutrition, particularly those relating to obesity. The momentum of this process is a critical aspect of today’s global syndemic. Fat undermined and clogged individual power and capacity, something most palpable in the diminished capacities and stigmatization of the overweight poor and obese women.¹³³ The insidious accumulations of blood sugar, cholesterol, and visceral fat are slow, invisible, and desperately hard to reverse. They are examples of what Rob Nixon calls slow violence: Incremental and accretive.¹³⁴ These public health disasters are among the slowest and most imperceptible forms of slow violence—metabolic violence—unleashed by the nutrition transition and its manifold, interdigitated agro–food systems. This is not so much a history of the body as history in our bodies.

Another dimension of slow nutritional violence is famine. It is now commonplace to regard famines as entitlement crises, caused not by absolute lack of food but by lack of purchasing power, by structural powerlessness and economic dislocation that appear natural owing to the slow momentum of food systems.¹³⁵ Through the control of resource frontiers and agro–food systems, Britain came to command, operationalize, and metabolize tremendous quantities of animal and plant food. It could deny food to starving populations or supply it by dictating the terms on which it would be granted. Slow violence was the result in Ireland (1845–50) and India (1876–78, 1896–1902, 1943–45). Crisis was initially caused by phytopathological or climatic crises striking populations in states of extreme economic precariousness. The British used these crises as opportunities to further marketize, depeasantize, and depopulate such fracture zones and absorb them into their agro–food systems. Hobson noted that importing food allowed some nations to evade the population question by ripening it more quickly in other places. Famine was effectively outsourced.¹³⁶ We can conservatively place the death toll in nineteenth-century Ireland and India at around 13 million people.

Britain’s command of global food systems also created domestic vulnerabilities. In 1898, Rear Admiral Lord Captain Beresford argued that, by necessitating massive food imports, Britain’s planetary commercial structure created vulnerability in the very part of our system from which our greatness springs.¹³⁷ During both world wars, Britain abandoned economic liberalism and recalibrated its command of global and domestic agro–food systems through numerous techniques, from revived domestic agriculture and rationing to employing convoys and arming merchant ships. The effort was, from a British perspective, extraordinarily successful: in neither war did Britain approach starvation. In the First World War, it mobilized its control of agro–food systems, intelligence networks, and logistic capacities to enforce a blockade that killed around 800,000 German and 400,000 Austro-Hungarian citizens and clearly contributed to Axis collapse. Fears of future starvation underlay Hitler’s genocidal visions of dominion over eastern Europe and the Ukraine.

The command of agro–food systems also involved restructuring power relations across commodity frontiers, usually acquired by purchase, occupation, conquest, or treaty or sometimes, as with Australia, through declaration or assumption of legal emptiness, or what became known as terra nullius.¹³⁸ The idea that land could be claimed by Europeans was justified in various, sometimes conflicting ways, not least via the Lockean idea that those who improved unassisted nature radically increased productivity and generated value and, hence, acquired ownership rights.¹³⁹ In Australia, British settlers found no farms and claimed that hunter-gatherer populations were at the lowest level of socioeconomic development: Aborigines were akin to animals or plants.¹⁴⁰ Ownership was inseparable from productive use: merely occupying land did not mean possessing it, a position that, while never totally dominant, hardened during the nineteenth century.¹⁴¹ The imposition of individual property rights was essential for agrarian improvement and surplus generation. This is most apparent in the forced killing or displacement of first peoples, for which the Highland Clearances provided a blueprint. Indeed, many Highlanders emigrated to Australia, where they displaced native populations who were deemed unproductive.¹⁴² Tasmanian Aboriginal populations, replaced by sheep, were swiftly eradicated, many perishing in a Flinders Island camp ostensibly provided to shelter and Christianize them.¹⁴³ Creating plantations for imperial tea production in Assam involved violent military conquest.¹⁴⁴ The resistance of Canadian métis populations was crushed during the 1885 Northwest Rebellion. Argentinean gauchos were subjugated to the Buenos Aires government by the early 1870s.¹⁴⁵ From 1879, native Patagonians were moved into restricted settlements and debarred from assuming their previous lifestyle.¹⁴⁶ The gaucho’s way of life disintegrated from the 1870s, enclosed within fences and barbed wire. He was subjected to the rhythms of capitalist agriculture, which reduced the amount of labor needed on ranches, and ultimately peonized.¹⁴⁷

Human violence toward animals, however, took faster and increasingly mechanized form. Before 1800, slaughter was a small-scale, familiar, often social practice, producing relatively small amounts of meat and other animal products. However, as demand for meat rose, traditional slaughtering systems became bottlenecks. The result was industrialized slaughter, a practice distanced from human communities and undertaken at hitherto unimaginable scales. This abattoir system was pioneered in France, expanded in Germany, and reached its zenith in giant New World and Australasian slaughtering plants. These complexes performed a triple act of separation and obfuscation. Killing became absolutely hidden from society, albeit slowly; within the abattoir, killing was occluded from nonkilling activities; and animals themselves were confined to waiting pens partitioned from the slaughtering zone. Meat eating and meat production become spatially and phenomenologically dissevered, making slaughter anonymous and invisible.¹⁴⁸ As Rebecca Woods argues, the most successful technique of mass obfuscation was to remove slaughter to distant commodity frontiers: Slaughter . . . was removed to the outskirts of empire, literally to the ends of the earth.¹⁴⁹ The deepest violence of agro–food systems became largely invisible, something equally evident in the twentieth-century rise in global chicken consumption.

ECOLOGY

There is scarcely a vegetable which we at present employ that can be found growing naturally, argued the doctor John Paris in 1826.¹⁵⁰ Britain’s food systems required novel biological material, forged through selective breeding, scientific feeding, hybridization, and artificial insemination.¹⁵¹ Such new life-forms included Hereford cattle, Danish Landrace pigs, Corriedale sheep, Red Fife wheat, POJ 2878 sugarcane, and white Silesian beet. These entities were designed to mesh with the imperatives of capitalist agro–food systems, to resist pests and mature quickly, and to extract the most nutriment from the least amount of manure or fertilizer. They produced standard commodities—streaky bacon, gluten-rich wheat—to form the high-energy foodstuffs demanded by the nutrition transition. Britain’s food systems intensified biological control over nonhuman life, and this phase of evolutionary history moved well beyond domestication.¹⁵²

Concerns about alienation from whatever nature might be appear throughout this history. Livestock were increasingly placed within barns, byres, and, later, batteries and factory farms where their biology, nutrition, and physical surroundings could be closely regulated. By control of the environmental conditions, declared the agricultural physiologist John Hammond, it has been possible to breed and select for early maturity in our domestic animals, which it would have been impossible to do under the natural conditions of intermittent food supplies.¹⁵³ This process had unintended consequences, however, including vulnerability to disease or psychological disorders. Food itself has become increasingly processed, from roller-milled white bread and refined sugar to mass-produced frozen ready meals. Fear of the artificial explains the dynamics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century countercultural activity, from movements for wholemeal bread and vegetarianism to the veneration of non-Western dietaries and organic farming. Food thus became perhaps the major axis around which revolved interminable debates about progress, nature, health, morality, and the ultimate viability of the Western way of life.

This book mobilizes several distinct critical frameworks to capture these complex processes of artificialization and ecological transformation, the emergence of which is coterminous with dietary transition and marks a reflexive dimension of its history. First, it uses Marx’s concept of second nature, as developed by William Cronon. Urban growth, Cronon demonstrated, drove frontier expansion: the story here, however, is not of Chicago and the Great West but of Britain and the globe itself. This was a transcontinental second nature orienting the flow of foodstuffs to Britain.¹⁵⁴ Large-planet thinking has created the apparatus through which nature is appropriated and experienced. Second, the book uses Jason Moore’s concept of world ecology, which again emphasizes how the relationships living things have with each other and with humans have become increasingly shaped by capitalism over the past few centuries, even if my emphasis here is on the industrializing world rather than the early modern Atlantic. "Capitalism as world-ecology, Moore argues, is therefore not the ecology of the world, but a patterned history of power, capital, and nature, dialectically joined."¹⁵⁵

Third, the book adopts, again via Marx, the idea of social metabolism, which demonstrates how the disposition of food systems generated tremendous ecological imbalances between urban and rural areas, and, on a planetary scale, between developed and underdeveloped regions.¹⁵⁶ The large-planet philosophy captured and channeled critical flows of planetary energy. Schandl and Krausmann pithily diagnose this British model as not a sustainable and generally applicable blueprint for European industrialization.¹⁵⁷ However, it allowed Britons the luxury of behaving as if growth was potentially unlimited and sustainable, not least because advances in chemistry and biology promised endlessly improving crop yields.¹⁵⁸ Britain’s diet required an expanded metabolism that was disproportionate to the tiny islands devouring the frontiers’ surplus.¹⁵⁹ Powering this expanded metabolism led to rising fossil-fuel use, the accumulation of animal waste, the reconfiguration of nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and the leaching of fertilizer and effluent into circumambient ecosystems. Fourth, the book utilizes Rockström and Klum’s notion of planetary boundaries, the crossing of which threatens irreversible ecological damage. Two of these boundaries’ zones of uncertainty have been exceeded: those relating to biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus and the extinction rate.¹⁶⁰ Other planetary boundaries in the zone of uncertainty—land-system change and climate change—cannot be disaggregated from the effects of global food systems.¹⁶¹

Fifth, the book uses the concepts of ecological footprint and ecological overshoot. The ecological footprint simply measures the area of biologically productive land and water that a population . . . uses to generate the resources it consumes and absorb its wastes under prevailing technology.¹⁶² There is a long history of using such measurements—with varying degrees of accuracy—to conceptualize the ways in which human consumption affects the planet. In 1903, Robert Turnbull calculated that, every day, Britain needed 1000 acres of additional land, equal in productive power to that of the United Kingdom, to feed its increasing population, and he did not include meat in his calculations.¹⁶³ Later versions of the concept include Georg Borgstrom’s ghost acreage or the environmental sociologist William Catton’s phantom carrying capacity.¹⁶⁴ William Rees developed the ecological footprint concept in 1992. Britain’s heady combination of capitalism, coal, meat, wheat, and sugar produced Malthus’s worst nightmare: a nation materially requiring far more land area than it actually possessed. The country’s demand for dietary resources significantly exceeded its ecological carrying capacity and implanted the large-planet philosophy in greasy, pleasurable everyday dispositions and desires. British growth was built on the thermodynamically implausible premise that growth could continue without biogeochemical consequences.¹⁶⁵ Economists, as Kenneth Boulding grumbled, have failed to come to grips with the ultimate consequences of the transition from the open to the closed earth or with the shift from large- to small-planet philosophies, a shift that the new images of the earth as a lonely, shiny Blue Marble seemed to demand.¹⁶⁶

But how much more land was available, and how fertile was it? In 1939, the geographer George Kimble noted that, while there were still millions of square miles of potential farmland scattered about the earth, these lands were essentially marginal zones battered by rain, frost, and wind. He added, however, that there was "no purely areal reason why every man should not have land enough and to spare on which to feed himself and his family" and urged the technological development of the habitable planet. Crisis was not imminent, even if soil erosion was markedly increasing.¹⁶⁷ Carl Alsberg, of Stanford’s Food Research Institute, was less sanguine, arguing that sheer cold made around one-third of global land area practically useless for food production.¹⁶⁸ Estimating global carrying capacity, then, became a veritable cottage industry long before Paul and Anne Ehrlich argued, with characteristic hyperbole, that, if everyone on the planet consumes like a contemporary American, we would need five earths.¹⁶⁹ Catton thought, straining credibility, we would need ten earths.¹⁷⁰ Such views could slide into crude Malthusianism, but they usually emphasized, not population alone, but populations consuming a particular portfolio of resources—red meat in particular—supplied by global food systems. The connection between meat and excessive land use was recognized in The Wealth of Nations.¹⁷¹

The footprint model suggests that we are "currently using at least 50% more of nature’s goods and services than ecosystems regenerate. The metabolism of the human economy now exceeds the regenerative capacity of the ecosphere."¹⁷² In order to maintain a safe operating space, one proposal—the half earth strategy—aims to conserve 50 percent of the earth’s ecosystems in a fundamentally intact condition: global food-system expansion would be halted.¹⁷³ This is considerably more than the