The rotten history of keeping food fresh

Leftovers: A History Of Food Waste And Preservation

Feelings ran high at the Goose Fair in Nottingham in 1766, when local citizens spotted some Lincolnshire merchants buying all the cheese at the market, hoping to take it home and sell it there. Fights broke out, pistols were fired, warehouses were looted and the mayor was knocked over by a giant cheese wheel.

What kicked off the Great Nottingham Cheese Riot was the poor harvest, which led to food shortages and inflated prices across the nation. It’s a salutary tale of what happens when the balance between weather, crops and human husbandry breaks down.

As Eleanor Barnett reminds us, ‘from the moment food is harvested or slaughtered, it risks becoming inedible as it begins to ferment, rot or decompose’. Her book shows how, over the centuries, we’ve employed a million ingenious procedures to keep it safe to eat. She ranges widely among the classes. We meet the Lady Elinor Fettiplace of Appleton Manor near Oxford, who pretty much invented marmalade and other fruit preserves.

We find the medieval Church instructing its flock to skip supper on Wednesdays and Fridays, both to avoid ‘nedeless waste and riotous consumption’ and donate food to poor neighbours. We get a chapter on the leftovers from butchery, and how their dumping on 17th-century London streets in ‘muckhills’ (full of ‘vegetable waste, malt-dust, offal, carcasses of rotten fish’) spurred the development of public health initiatives.

Barnett argues that the American Revolution was kicked off in 1773 by ‘food waste’, when American colonists dumped 342 chests of British East India Company tea into Boston Harbour in protest at the British government’s taxes. And she notes that, although the first ‘food bottling factory’ was the invention of a Parisian chef called Peter Durand, the world’s first-ever food-canning factory opened in south London.

Tin cans revolutionised the ways food could be transported and seafarers’ diets improved, but they weren’t without problems. One of this book’s villains is a Hungarian businessman called Stephen Goldner who won the contract to supply the British Navy with tinned food. It became apparent that the contents of some cans were putrid. In 1845, two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, crossed the Atlantic looking for the North-West Passage. Abruptly they disappeared: all contact with them was lost, though it was found that they’d probably been stocked with Goldner’s cans. Both ships’ crews died.