Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives by Carolyn Steel Read Free Book Online Page B

to practise what he preached with howls of derision. But it was Rousseau’s view that would prove the more enduring. By disparaging cultivated landscape in favour of wilderness, he paved the way for Romanticism, creating a schism in the urban view of nature that helped to shape the modern world.
The Invisible Land
     
    Any remaining pastoral fantasies in England were soon to be swept away by the onset of industrial farming. Half the iron produced during the eighteenth century went to make ploughs and horseshoes, and from the mid nineteenth century onwards, farm machinery began to transform English agriculture. Horse-drawn drills and reapers, and later steam-driven threshers, drastically reduced the number of people needed to work on the land, while various industrial by-products, such as the lime-rich slag created by steel production, allowed the manufacture of artificial fertilisers that could double farmers’ yields. Food was being produced in larger quantities than ever before, and by fewer people; and as rural workers headed to the cities, the social bonds that held rural communities together – and linked city to country – began to disintegrate. The gap between the feeders and the fed was widening, and it was about to get a whole lot wider.
    Ten years after Cobbett’s
Rural Rides
came an invention that would render all resistance to urban expansion useless. In the space of a few years, the railways removed all the constraints that had hitherto chained cities to their rural back gardens. From now on, cities would be able toget their food from more or less anywhere. The food economy was about to go global, and nowhere was the effect more dramatic than in the American Midwest, a vast prairie ripe for exploitation. By the mid nineteenth century there were some million and a half farmers in North America, most of them European settlers who had acquired their land along Lockean principles, by investing years of labour in it. Their combined grain-producing potential was enormous, but with the Appalachian Mountains in the way, there was no easy way of transporting the grain to the East Coast. The Erie Canal, a 360-mile-long, 83-lock ‘eighth wonder of the world’, completed in 1825, had shown the potential of such a connection, providing a water passage from the interior to New York. Thanks to its inland empire, New York soon outstripped its rivals Boston and Philadelphia, earning itself the nickname ‘Empire State’. But it was only when the Appalachians were breached by the railroads during the 1850s that the true impact of American grain would be felt on the global stage.
    The railroads brought thousands of acres of previously inaccessible farmland into the food chain for the first time, delivering efficiencies of which Arthur Young could only have dreamt. The American prairies weren’t worked by serfs enslaved by a noble lord or obliged to feed their local populace. They were commercial enterprises whose temples were the towering elevators that transferred their grain into ships bound for distant markets. Limitless quantities of cheap grain began to arrive in Europe in the 1870s, sparking an agricultural depression from which the continent would never fully recover. Rural Britain was hit particularly hard: with more than half the British population living in cities, food shortages were acute, and feeding the urban poor was a more urgent government priority than protecting local farmers. While most other European countries imposed import tariffs on American grain (Bismarck tripled import duties in Germany in order to protect its powerful land-owning classes), Britain went the other way. Having abandoned protectionism with the repeal of its Corn Laws in 1846, it once again felt the pain of agricultural reform as a short sharp shock, rather than dragging out the inevitable.
    Grain wasn’t the only cheap food coming out of America. The expense and difficulty of feeding cattle had always meant that meat wasa luxury