History 2158A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Condensed Milk, Pasteurization, Clarence Birdseye
30 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Industrial Food
●Difference between us and our ancestors: we don’t consider flour to be processed food, but it’s not like we harvest the
wheat ourselves - so what is “from scratch”?
○The base foods we eat are all produced in an industrial setting
●Mid 19th Century Food System
○Limited dietary change: by the mid 19th century most people’s diets hadn’t changed much
■Introductions of foods like potato and maize didn’t change diet, just swapped one food for another
○Wealth and social status still determined access
■Humble vs High cuisine
○Small scale food industry
■Most food processing was done locally
●Agricultural Revolution: beginning in 1750
○New farming techniques
○New crops
○Population Growth
■Urbanization
●One thing urban dwellers don’t do: grow it themselves, raising own animals
●Lose the ability/desire to provide their own food
●Poor farmers move to cities to not be poor farmers anymore, wanting something else
●This was a problem industrialization created and industrialization alone could solve
●Developments in the Rise of Industrial Food
1. Preservation
■Canning: Fixing the Seasons
●Nicolas Appert (1749-1841)
○In 1775 the French government offered a cash prize for whoever could find a
way to preserve food for a long time (for a way to feed the army)
○Discovered that if you sealed food in a glass bottle or jar and boiled it for
hours, it was preserved and was edible hours later
○The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for
Several Years
(1810)
○This process was viewed as revolutionary
○Glass bottles broke easily and were expensive
■The Tin Can
●Peter Durand (England)
○1810 took out a patent to use metal containers, iron coated in tin to prevent rust
○Idea came from French man Philippe de Girard
●Sold patent to Bryan Donkin - 1812
○Set up canning factory
○Lots of canned food in the first few years wasn’t safe because it wasn’t boiled
long enough or at a high enough temperature
■1852 - British navy did a quality control test and it went badly
■Sealed with soddering mixture of tin and lead (poisonous)
■People were hesitant to eat it
■Originally very expensive
■Hard to open
●Military Use
○Big boost to canning
○The reason why canning was originally invented
Document Summary
The base foods we eat are all produced in an industrial setting. Limited dietary change: by the mid 19th century most people"s diets hadn"t changed much. Introductions of foods like potato and maize didn"t change diet, just swapped one food for another. Wealth and social status still determined access. One thing urban dwellers don"t do: grow it themselves, raising own animals. Lose the ability/desire to provide their own food. Poor farmers move to cities to not be poor farmers anymore, wanting something else. This was a problem industrialization created and industrialization alone could solve. Developments in the rise of industrial food. In 1775 the french government offered a cash prize for whoever could find a way to preserve food for a long time (for a way to feed the army) Discovered that if you sealed food in a glass bottle or jar and boiled it for hours, it was preserved and was edible hours later.
