Perren on Atkins, Lummel and Oddy, eds., _Food and the City in Europe since 1800_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (February 2008)

Peter J. Atkins, Peter Lummel and Derek J. Oddy, editors, _Food and 
the City in Europe since 1800_. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007. 
xvi + 260 pp. $100/£55 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-7546-4989-2.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Richard Perren, Department of History, 
University of Aberdeen.


This book has been published as a result of the ninth themed 
symposium of the International Commission for Research into European 
Food History (ICREFH) held in Berlin in 2005. The first of these 
symposia was held in 1989 and the first of its volumes was published 
in 1992. This latest addition to the series is divided into four 
sections (Parts A to D) and has nineteen short articles on various 
aspects of urban European food history since the industrial 
revolution, plus a general introduction and a brief conclusion, both 
of them by two of the editors, Peter Atkins and Derek Oddy. The 
introduction provides a good overview of the whole book and also 
indicates where there is a need for further research, but the 
conclusion mainly summarizes the ICREFH's work to date.

The first part called "Feeding the Multitude" focuses on supply and 
has five chapters. In this Hans Jugen Teuteberg presents a general 
survey of urban food history research; Peter Atkins compares the food 
supplies of London and Paris in 1850; Roser Nicolau-Nos and Josep 
Pujol-Andreu discuss urbanization and dietary change in Mediterranean 
Europe, using as their example Barcelona between 1870 and 1935; 
Corinna Treitel covers the contribution of the German nutrition 
scientist Max Rubner to that country's thinking on the feeding of the 
urban poor; and Jürgen Schmidt discusses how the Allies fed the three 
million inhabitants of West Berlin in the years immediately after 
World War II.

The second section, which has four pieces of work on "Food 
Regulation," deals with food adulteration and health issues. It 
begins with Peter Scolliers who outlines various food frauds and the 
city authority's attempts to eradicate them in nineteenth century 
Brussels; it is followed by Derek Oddy's study of food quality in 
London and the attempts of the public analyst to enforce the British 
laws against adulteration between 1870 and 1939; next, Alessandro 
Stanziani focuses on similar attempts by the Paris Municipal 
Laboratory between 1878 and 1907; and finally Vera Hierholzer looks 
at the role of municipal food monitoring and citizen self-help 
associations in Germany's 'war against food adulteration' in the 
1870s and 1880s.

The third section has six articles covering "Food Innovations - the 
Product Perspective"; Adel P. den Hartog discusses the links between 
nutrition science and the attitudes of Dutch producers of skimmed 
sweetened tinned condensed milk to health warnings about this product 
between 1890 and 1940; Jukka Gronow details the emergence of 
first-class restaurants and luxury food stores in Soviet Russia in 
the 1930s; Martin Franc's article concentrates on attempts to present 
Prague as a shop window of the Czechoslovak communist regime in the 
1950s and 1960s by the preferential direction of food supplies to the 
city in order to impress foreign visitors; Peter Lummel switches to 
the free world with a survey of the development of the supermarket in 
West Germany between 1949 and 1970; Anneke H. von Otterloo charts the 
various effects of immigration in increasing consumption of exotic 
foods in postwar Amsterdam; and Pnikos Panayi ends the section with a 
similar exercise for London since 1850.

In the final part four authors explore "Eating Fashions - the 
Consumer Perspective." Ulrike Thoms examines the menus of scientists' 
festive meals in Berlin between 1830 and the Second World War; Alain 
Drouard discusses diet reformers (as well as one or two food cranks) 
in fin de siècle Britain, Germany and Switzerland; Virginie Amilien 
writes about changing working-class and middle-class food habits in 
the Norwegian capital from 1860 to 2000; and Isabelle Téchoueyres 
bring the section to a close with an anthropological study of the 
food markets of Bordeaux since the 1960s.

It is inevitable that this collection of conference papers written by 
over twenty scholars drawn from different disciplines, with a variety 
of funding arrangements, often working independently, and covering 
such a wide geographical area over two centuries deals with some time 
periods and some aspects of urban food history in greater detail than 
others. In addition the sources that are available to the authors 
have imposed their own constraints. As Peter Atkins and Derek Oddy 
say in their conclusion (p. 252), the amount of archival material 
varies between states and in some cases has been reduced by wartime 
destruction. The uneven focus is also a question of numbers as more 
than half of Europe's 500 food historians are currently working in 
Germany, France and Britain, which is reflected in the geographical 
coverage of the papers of the current volume. The great majority are 
about Northern and Western Europe and only one of them (the paper by 
Roser Nicolau-Nos and Josep Pujol-Andreu on Barcelona) is on the 
Mediterranean region. It also helps to account for the lack of 
comparative studies which the editors suggest may be helped by 
collaborative research teams. Although this excellent suggestion 
would be the logical way to fill the gaps in our knowledge of the 
development of the European urban food industry, this reviewer thinks 
that the logistical challenges this could present could well be 
formidable.

Nevertheless, important themes and topics do emerge in spite of the 
culturally diverse range of subjects from which they are drawn. For 
example, the increasing consumption of animal proteins which is a 
feature of rising incomes seems to be apparent from places as far 
apart as Barcelona and Oslo (pp. 47 and 235). But this has not been 
the only agent of change. Technology has brought new products like 
condensed milk into being, and also increased their consumption, 
although in this case it was one of the earliest technology-based 
junk foods and as such did not improve the health of all of its 
consumers, particularly infants (pp. 136-38). But this was countered 
by the development of food inspection and regulation, covered by the 
papers in the second part of the book. However, as the four papers in 
this section all deal with Northern Europe the reader is left 
wondering what progress in this direction was like in Southern Europe 
where the pace of industrialization and economic growth was less. One 
is tempted to assume that it was slower, but given the regional 
coverage of the papers on food inspection one has no way of knowing 
this. The papers that touch on changes occurring after 1945 also 
highlight some intriguing cultural changes. Firstly, there is the 
introduction of supermarkets from the U.S. and the profound effects 
their development has had on food supplies and retailing. And 
secondly, the impact of migration in introducing new food products 
and diversifying European diets seems to have been particularly 
strong after 1945.

All in all, despite the uneven coverage there is much in this book 
that gives some fascinating insights into nineteenth and twentieth 
century European history. It also indicates how the valuable work on 
food and dietary history prompted by the ICREFH and its tradition of 
interdisciplinary research promises to provide much more information 
about the cultural, economic and social history of food.


Richard Perren's most recent publication is _Taste, Trade and 
Technology: The Development of the International Meat Industry since 
1840_ (Ashgate 2006). His next piece of work, "Filth and Profit, 
Disease and Health: Public and Private Impediments to Slaughterhouse 
Reform in Victorian Britain," is due to appear as a chapter in Paula 
Young Lee, editor, _Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the 
Slaughterhouse_ (University Press of New England) in July 2008).

Copyright (c) 2008 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be 
copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to 
the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the 
EH.Net Administrator (administrator at eh.net; Telephone: 513-529-2229). 
Published by EH.Net (February 2008). All EH.Net reviews are archived 
at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.