The vital city: Public analysis, dairies and slaughterhouses in nineteenth-century Britain

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 13, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 517-537

  Otter, Chris ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DAIRY FARMING; FOOD POLICY; FOOD SUPPLY; NINETEENTH CENTURY; STATE ROLE; URBAN HISTORY;

EURASIA; EUROPE; UNITED KINGDOM; WESTERN EUROPE;

EID: 33845718309     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1191/1474474006cgj373oa     Document Type: Article

References (147)

1. E. Burke, Thoughts and details on scarcity', in I. Kramnick, ed., The portable Edmund Burke (London, Penguin, 1999), p. 195.
2. G. Dodd, The food of London; a sketch of the chief varieties, sources of supply, probable quantities, modes of arrival, processes of manufacture, suspected adulteration, and machinery of distribution, of the food for a community of two millions and a half (London, Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1856), p. 2.
3. H. Spencer, 'From freedom to bondage', in T. Mackay, ed., A plea for liberty (1891);
4. in M. Taylor, ed., Herbert Spencer and the limits of the state: the late nineteenth-century debate between individualism and collectivism (Bristol, Thoemmes, 1996), p. 16.
5. For the history of hunger, and more especially the 'socialization' of the problem of hunger, seej. Vernon, 'The ethics of hunger and the assembly of society: the techno-politics of the school meal in modern Britain', American historical review pp. 110 (2005), 693-725.
6. For the Irish famine, see C. Kinealy, The great Irish famine: impact, ideology and rebellion (New York, Palgrave, 2001),
7. and R.J. Scally, The end of hidden Ireland: rebellion, famine and emigration (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995).
8. C. Hamlin, Public health and social justice in the age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800-1854 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 144-45.
9. R. Howard, An inquiry into the morbid effects of the deficiency of food, chiefly with reference to their occurrence among the destitute poor (London, Simpkin, Marshall, 1839), p. 38.
10. An Inquiry into the Morbid Effects of the Deficiency of Food, Chiefly with Reference to Their Occurrence among the Destitute Poor, Ibid. p. 2.
11. Cited in J. Burnett, Plenty and want: a social history of diet in England from 1815 to the present day, rev. edn (London, Scolar Press, 1979), p. 178.
12. Howard, Morbid effects, p. 5.
13. J. Phillips Kay, The moral and physical condition of the working classes employed in the cotton manufacture in Manchester, 2nd edn (London, Frank Cass, 1970), p. 24.
14. The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, 2nd Edn, Ibid. p. 89.
15. Hamlin, Public health, p. 95.
16. Howard, Morbid effects, p. iv.
17. K. Polanyi, The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time (Boston, Beacon Press, 1957).
18. The term 'carbohydrate' dates from 1844, and 'protein' from 1838. The terms 'albuminous' and 'nitrogenous' were used interchangeably with 'protein' across the period.
19. Playfair published many of these studies over the years. See e.g. 'On the relation of the food of man to his useful work (I)', Chemical news 9 (12 May 1865), pp. 221-24. Such experiments usually involved simple measurements of the amount of food ingested, and the amount of waste leaving the body in the form of excrement, urine, sweat and exhaled air.
20. For an assessment of Smith's work, see C.B. Chapman, 'Edward Smith, physiologist, human ecologist, reformer', Journal of medical history 22 (1967), pp. 1-26,
21. and T. Barker, D. Oddy and J. Ludkin, Tloe dietary sunvys of Edward Smith: a new assessment (London, Staples Press, 1970).
22. Playfair, 'Food of man', pp. 221-24.
23. FAV. Pavy, A treatise on food and dietetics, physiologically and therapeutically considered, 2nd edn (London, Churchill, 1875), p. 32.
24. E. Smith, Dietaries for the inmates of workhouses, report to the president of the poor law board (London, George Eyre & William Spottiswoode, 1866), p. 24.
25. Dietaries for the Inmates of Workhouses, Report to the President of the Poor Law Board, Ibid. p. 51.
26. Dietaries for the Inmates of Workhouses, Report to the President of the Poor Law Board, Ibid. p. 20.
27. Dietaries for the Inmates of Workhouses, Report to the President of the Poor Law Board, Ibid. p. 31.
28. R. Owen, A new view of society: or, essays on the principle of the formation of human character preparatory to the development of a plan for gradually ameliorating the condition of mankind, 3rd edn (London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1817).
29. Howard, Morbid effects, p. 8.
30. Cited in J. Eyler, Victorian social medicine: the ideas and methods of William Fair (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 124.
31. W.J. Gordon, How London lives: the feeding, cleansing, lighting and police of London; with chapters on the post office and other institutions, new edn (London, Religious Tract Society, 1897), p. 14.
32. Burnett, Plenty and want, pp. 15-20, 185-87.
33. See e.g. J.D. Blaisdell, 'To the pillory for putrid poultry: meat hygiene and the medieval London butchers, poulterers and fishmongers' companies', Veterinary history 9 (1997), pp. 114-24.
34. Cited in G. Venables-Vernon, 'Dairy farming', Nineteenth century 128 (Feb. 1896), p. 282.
35. Cited in Burnett, Plenty and want, p. 145.
36. A. Hill Hassall, Food: its adulteration, and the methods for its detection (London, Longmans, Green, 1876), p. 849.
37. See e.g. A.H. Hassall, Report to the Right Hon. William Cowper, M.P., President of the General Board of Health, on the microscopical examination of the metropolitan ivater supply (London, General Board of Health, 1857),
38. and Food and its adulterations; comprising the reports of the Analytical Sanitary Commission of the Lancet for the years 1851 to 1854 Inclusive (London, Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1855).
39. See also C. Hamlin, A science of impurity: water analysis in nineteenth-century Britain (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990).
40. Hassall, Food, p. 870 (emphasis added).
41. For a comprehensive analysis of this and other legislation on adulteration, see M. French and J. Phillips, Cheated not poisoned: food regulation in the United Kingdom, 1875-1938 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000).
42. See also Burnett, Plenty and want, pp. 257-62.
43. B. Dyer, The Society of Public Analysts and other analytical chemists: some reminiscences of the first fifty years (Cambridge, Heffer, 1932).
44. Augustus Voelker, cited in R.C. Chirnside and J.H. Hammence, The 'practicing chemists': a history of the Society for Analytical Chemistry 1874-1974 (London, Society of Analytical Chemists, 1975), p. 9.
45. J. Muter, 'Society of Public Analysts', Analyst 5 (Feb. 1880), pp. 15-16.
46. Analyst 8 (Apr. 1893), p. 114.
47. O. Hehner, 'President's annual address', Analyst 8 (Feb. 1893), p. 36.
48. C. Cameron, 'Notes on the operation in Dublin of the acts relating to adulteration', Analyst 10 (Oct. 1885), p. 179.
49. P. Vieth, 'Discussion of Mr. Adams' new milk process', Analyst 10 (May 1885), p. 85.
50. G.W. Wigner, 'Abstract of a lecture on pure milk', Analyst 9 (Oct. 1884), p. 174.
51. Smith, Dietaries, p. 48.
52. J. Chalmers Morion, 'On London milk', Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 14 (15 Dec. 1865), p. 77.
53. A. Hill, 'Milk standards', Analyst 1 (31 May 1876), p. 40.
54. Hassall, Food, p. 350.
55. This method entailed first heating milk in a water-bath until the solids alone remained. These solids were split into 'fat' and 'solids-not-fat' (sugars and minerals) via the application of ether, and then the 'solids-not-fat' were separated with alcohol. The technique was fully described by J. Wanklyn, Milk-analysis: A practical treatise on the examination of milk and its derivatives, cream, butter and cheese (London, Trüber, 1886). Wanklyn's standard was 2.5% fat to 9% solids-not-fat.
56. A point made in greater detail by I. Hacking, 'The self-vindication of the laboratory sciences', in A. Pickering, ed., Science as practice and culture (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1992), pp. 29-62.
57. M. Adams, 'On a new method for the analysis of milk', Analyst 10 (Mar. 1885), p. 46.
58. M. Adams, 'On a new method for the analysis of milk', Analyst 10, 1885, p. 46. Ibid. The new standard was 3% fat to 8.5% solids-not-fat, and was now identical to that of the government chemists at Somerset House.
59. J. Long, British dairy-farming, to which is added a description of the chief continental systems (London, Chapman & Hall, 1885), p. 60.
60. P.J. Atkins, 'Sophisticated detected: or, the adulteration of the milk supply, 1850-1914', Social history 16 (1991), p. 331.
61. Wanklyn, Milk-analysis, p. 37 (emphasis added).
62. P. Vieth, 'Fat-extraction and fat-calculation in milk analysis', Analyst 16 (Nov. 1891), p. 206.
63. A similar process for grain is depicted by W. Cronon, Nature's metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, Norton, 1990, pp. 97-147.
64. H. Smith, The food of London (II)', Quarterly review 191 (1900), p. 118.
65. Burnett, Plenty and want, pp. 200-201.
66. P.J. Atkins, 'London's intra-urban milk supply, c.1790-1914', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s. 2 (1978), p. 383.
67. J. Burnett, Liquid pleasures: a social history of drinks in modern Britain (London, Routledge, 1999), p. 33.
68. Hassall, Food, p. 404.
69. A. Winter Blyth, A manual of public health (London, Macmillan, 1890), p. 274.
70. A Manual of Public Health, Ibid. pp. 274-75.
71. C.M. Aikman, Milk: its nature and composition: a hand-book in the chemistry and bacteriology of milk, butter and cheese (London, Adam & Charles Black, 1895), p. 109.
72. A. Smee, Milk in health and disease (London, Edward Newman, 1875), p. 10.
73. On tuberculosis and milk see B. Orland, 'Cow's milk and human disease: bovine tuberculosis and the difficulties involved in combating animal diseases', Food and history 1 (2003), pp. 179-202;
74. P. Atkins, 'Milk consumption and tuberculosis in Britain, 1850-1950', in A. Fenton, ed., Order and disorder: the health implications of eating and drinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centimes (East Linton, Tuckwell Press, 2000).
75. Aikman, Milk, p. 68.
76. Long, British dairy-farming, p. 300.
77. British Dairy-farming, Ibid. p. 6.
78. Blyth, Manual of public health, p. 278.
79. On normalization, see G. Canghuilhem, The normal and the pathological, trans. C. Fawcett (New York, Zone Books, 1991).
80. F. Vacher, The food inspector's handbook, 4th edn (London, Sanitary Publishing Company, 1905), p. 170.
81. K. Waddington, 'To stamp out "so terrible a malady": bovine tuberculosis and tuberculin testing in Britain, 1890-1939', Medical history 48 (2004), pp. 29-48.
82. See also D. Dwork, 'The milk option: an aspect of the history of the infant welfare movement in England, 1898-1908', Medical history 31 (1987), pp. 51-69.
83. A.M. Trotter, The inspection of meat and milk in Glasgow', Journal of comparative anatomy and therapeutics 14 (1901), p. 88.
84. A. Wohl, Endangered lives: public health in Victorian Britain (London, J.M. Dent, 1983), pp. 32-33.
85. See also Burnett, Liquid pleasures, p. 38.
86. For an analysis of this in an American context, see E.M. DuPuis, Nature's perfect food: how milk became America's drink (New York, NYU Press, 2002).
87. Burnett, Liquid pleasures, p. 42.
88. Long, British dairy-farming, p. 242.
89. th June, 1887', Analyst 12 (July 1887), p. 188.
90. Alfred Allen was public analyst for Sheffield; 'Hygeia' was the name given to B.W. Richardson's model city of health (1876).
91. Analyst, Ibid. p. 188.
92. S. Delépine, The Manchester milk supply from a public health point of view', Manchester Statistical Society, Transactions 56 (1909-10), pp. 1-2.
93. T. Walley, A practical guide to meat inspection (Edinburgh, Young J. Pentland, 1890), p. 3.
94. See e.g. T. Morton, Shelley and the revolution in taste: the body and the natural world (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994);
95. N. Fiddes, Meat: a natural symbol (London, Routledge, 1991);
96. K. Thomas, Man and the natural world: changing attitudes in England 1500-1800 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996);
97. C.J. Adams, The sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory, 2nd edn (New York, Continuum, 2000).
98. For economic questions, see R. Perren, The meat trade in Britain 1840-1914 (London, Routledge, 1978).
99. See also V. Knapp, The democratization of meat and protein in late-eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe', Historian: journal of history 60 (1997), pp. 541-51.
100. Gordon, How London lives, p. 23.
101. R.S. Ayling, Public abattoirs: their planning, design and equipment (London, E. & F. Spon, 1908), p. 4.
102. M.E. Haweis, 'Cattle ships and abattoirs', Westminster Review 143 (1895), p. 679.
103. For a compelling account of slaughterhouse reform and urban space, see P.Joyce, The rule of freedom: liberalism and the modern city (London, Verso, 2003).
104. Forrest, cited in E. Chadwick, Report on the sanitary condition of the labouring population of Great Britain, ed. M.W. Flinn (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1965), p. 108.
105. Manchester City Council, Minutes of Proceedings, 15 Jan. 1869, p. 291.
106. J. Turner, Reckoning with the beast: animals, pain and humanity in the Victorian mind (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 134.
107. 'Polishing' was the smearing of the meat of diseased animals with the fat from a healthy carcase to produce a bogus sheen or gloss. See Perren, Meat trade, p. 67.
108. H. Ritvo, The animal estate: the English and other creatures in the Victorian age (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 237.
109. Walley, Practical guide, p. 3.
110. Revd John Verschoyle, Slaughter-house reform,
111. cited in Ayling, Public abattoirs, p. 11.
112. Cited in C. Cash, Our slaughter-house system: a plea for reform (London, George Bell & Sons, 1907), pp. 23-24.
113. T. Walley, The four bovine scourges: pleiiropiieumonia, foot-and-mouth disease, cattle plague, tubercle (scrofula). With an appendix on the inspection of live animals and meat (Edinburgh, MacLachlan & Stewart, 1879), p. 202;
114. cited in Walley, Practical guide, p. 169.
115. For the genesis of the term 'abattoir' see N. Vialles, Animal to edible (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 22-27.
116. B. Ward Richardson, 'Public slaughter-houses: a suggestion for farmers', New Review 8 (Jan.-June 1893), p. 631.
117. Ayling, Public abattoirs, p. 25.
118. For an exhaustive list of the uses to which inedible animal parts were put, see Cash, Our slaughter-house system, pp. 66-67.
119. 'Abattoirs for St. Petersburg', Builder 41 (17 Sep. 1881), p. 352.
120. H. Heiss, 'The German abattoir', in Cash, Our slaughter-house system, p. 144.
121. Ayling, Public abattoirs, p. 42.
122. Cash, Our slaughter-house system, p. 52.
123. Cronon, Nature's metropolis, pp. 211, 229.
124. For a comprehensive discussion of the abattoir-railway-meat-packing company nexus in a Canadian context, see I. MacLachlan, Kill and chill: restructuring Canada's beef commodity chain (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2002).
125. Vialles, Animal to edible, p. 73.
126. Cash, Our slaughter-house system, p. 73.
127. Heiss, 'German abattoir', p. 164.
128. Benjamin Ward Richardson performed experiments involving numerous substances, including coal gas, carbon monoxide and electric currents. See e.g. his Hygeia: a city of health (London, MacMillan & Co, 1876)
129. and 'The painless extinction of life', Popular Science Monthly 26 (1884-85) pp. 641-52.
130. See also 'Slaughtering by electricity', Electrician 10 (1883), pp. 247, 276.
131. J. Verschoyle, Slaughter-house reform (London, Humanitarian League, 1900-1910), p. 15.
132. Vialles, Animal to edible, p. 22.
133. J. Galsworthy, The slaughter of animals for food (London, Daily Mail, 1913), p. 6.
134. D. Vogel, National styles of regulation: environmental policy in Great Britain and the United States (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1986) p. 26. Vogel finds these trends apparent in regulation like the Alkali Acts of 1863 and 1874.
135. Waddington, 'To stamp out "so terrible a malady'", p. 43.
136. Vacher, Food inspector's handbook, p. 4.
137. Trotter, 'Inspection', p. 86.
138. On animal geographies, see C. Philo and C. Wilbert, eds, Animal spaces, beastly places: new geographies of human-animal relations (London, Routledge, 2000);
139. J. Wolch and J. Emel, eds, Animal geographies: place, politics and identity in the nature-culture borderlands (London, Verso, 1998);
140. S. Whatmore, Hybrid geographies: natures, cultures, spaces (London, SAGE, 2002).
141. Burnett, Plenty and want, pp. 140-41.
142. W.F. Bynum, Science and the practice of medicine in the nineteenth century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 223-24.
143. On BSE, see P. Van Zwanenberg, BSE: risk, science and governance (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005).
144. The only historical study of e-coli, to my knowledge, is R. Piechocki, Das berühmteste bakterium: 100 jabre escherichia-coli-forschiing (Cologne, Aulis Verlag Deubner, 1989),
145. although Eric Schlosser discusses the rapid spread of the disease through industrialized food networks in Fast food nation (New York, Harper Perennial, 2002), pp. 194-204.
146. 'Bradford named UK's fattest city', Guardian (1 Feb. 2006).
147. Manchester has fallen to third in the rankings in 2006. For some of the historical origins of the 'epidemic' of obesity and the concerns surrounding it, see P. Stearns, Fat history: bodies and beauty in the modern West (New York, New York University Press, 1997).