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Transporting Food Over Oceans

Transporting Food Over Oceans

by | Mar 21, 2018 | Food Tracks Blog, Stories

“The use of ships to transport food begins at least with Viking and Roman ships that transported oil and wine over the ocean.”

I have a smartphone app that tracks marine traffic, and there’s no end to the amusement I derive from locating in real time the ships near me in almost any port. I can see where the ship is registered, its origin, and its destination. Unfortunately, I cannot see into the cargo hold, and therein lies the intrigue.

The use of ships to transport food begins at least with Viking and Roman ships that transported oil and wine over the ocean. Today, new Panamax container ships slip through the expanded Panama Canal. The tradeoffs between speed and carrying capacity seem to be part of the long evolution of ocean transport, not unlike the evolution of land-based transportation technology.

Liner Service and Tramp Shipping

Basic tutorials on merchant shipping reveal at least two relevant categories of cargo ships: liner service and tramp shipping. Essentially, liners have regular routes and schedules, and tramp shipping is chartered and has irregular schedules. Liners are generally more expensive than tramp services, and so bulk cargos like grain and sugar often travel with the tramp services. What this all means is unclear to a novice, but at least it separates two basic classes according to the types of foods that travel on ships.

Picking Up Speed

The business of shipping food rode on the innovations in naval architecture and energy. Relying on wind to move food around the world had its limits, most of which were reached by the end of the 19th century. Steam slowly entered transoceanic trade, but the problem of lugging all that coal over long distances slowed progress. Still, some food movers benefitted from the transition from wind to steam. Two New England entrepreneurs established the Boston Fruit Company, which became the United Fruit Company in 1899.

In spite of the slow beginning of transoceanic shipping of food, by 1915 the United Fruit Company and others were sending food in the cargo holds around Cape Horn and through the Panama Canal. That period must have been the tipping point in terms of speed and shipping capacity…although using the term “tipping point” to talk about shipping may not be a good idea.

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Food Preservation: It’s in the Can

Food Preservation: It’s in the Can

by | Mar 14, 2018 | Food Tracks Blog, Stories

Whether boxes, bags, or cans, food needs some sort of protection from the environment, and cans tell a story of multiple technologies, not all of which came together at the same time.

Nicholas Appert, a self-taught chemist who was a cook, chef, and confiseur in Paris experimented in his shop while the citizens of his city marched on Versailles over the price of bread. Times were tough if you were hungry and not the aristocracy.

Access to food was a concern for more than just the Parisians during the Revolution. When Napoleon began his sweep across Europe, he was aware that his army traveled on its stomach. So Napoleon challenged the citizens of France to come up with a way to make food last longer while the navy was at sea and his armies were assembling his empire. Appert responded with a way to sterilize food in glass bottles. His idea, he said, was a response to the general concern about over-consumption of sugar, which was used as a preservative. He saw his technique as a way to lessen the amount of sugar in preserved food. (Yes, that was in 1810. Our current concern about eating too much sugar apparently has a history of about 200 years.)

“When Napoleon began his sweep across Europe, he was aware that his army traveled on its stomach.”

Appert won the cash prize but not the patent. Almost at the moment he published his work, several British engineers and entrepreneurs scooped up the idea and received a patent, soon turning Appert’s invention from glass to tin.

Tin Can

Bryan Donkin’s tin can, based on Appert’s sterilization technique

Though Appert would die poor (no patent, no money), his discovery of sterilization as a way to preserve food was a foundational innovation. Cans and can production technologies followed as inventors experimented with heat, metal, and machinery to process food for longer durations before consumption. Of course, it wasn’t until 50 years after the can appeared that it became openable. The can opener didn’t arrive on the scene until 1866.

“Of course, it wasn’t until 50 years after the can appeared that it became openable.”

The idea of preserving food in tin cans attracted the attention of entrepreneurs in Britain and the U.S. during the Civil War. Like France, both sides of the American conflict wanted to feed their armies so they could remain in the field. Experiments for condensing food, like milk and soup, emerged as a way to package food without the additional liquid weight.

Food technologies that not only preserve food but also lessen its weight must relate in some way to the cost of transport. The connection between lighter food and lower fuel costs may have been an incentive for these early inventors.

There’s a lot more to explore about canning and other food packaging technologies. It’s intriguing to note that when canned food appeared, it became mysterious. Consumers began to demand labels and certification that would verify the contents of the can. The loss of transparency in the food supply chain may have begun with the tin can.

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No Lunch Pass

No Lunch Pass

by | Mar 7, 2018 | Food Tracks Blog, Stories

Not a day goes by when we aren’t told how Big Food conspires to make us fat while exploiting our environment. Is this really the end of our debate about the state of our food system?

Tyler Cowen’s book, An Economist Gets Lunch (2012), offers an alternative view, one that might spread the blame rather than give us all a pass. He suggests that regulation, television, war, and changing demographics in the 20th century shaped a food system that looks industrial and often tasteless — and in some cases, harmful to our health.

Cowen’s view is this: First, Prohibition in the 1920s put many restaurants out of business, since they relied on revenue from alcohol sales to financially sustain them. Many of the restaurants that went out of business were serving more creative, gastronomic meals to their customers. So culinary innovation left the American food culture with the closure of their restaurants. The restaurants that survived were those who catered to customers who did not drink alcohol with meals and were less discriminating, happy with diners, coffee shops, and less inventive cuisine. (Europe, on the other hand, had no Prohibition Era, so they kept their creative juices flowing, keeping culinary standards high.)

World War II kept culinary standards low with the onslaught of rationing, the disappearance of quality ingredients, and the entry of women in the workforce. Women moved their families to convenience food and stopped creating an American food culture while burying home economics in schools. More preservatives appeared in food as households relied on meals made in advance of the workweek. Long distance supply chains developed to enable more food to travel through a more industrialized system so that Americans could have low-cost, easy to make food while women disappeared from the kitchen. Convenience food arrived. Big Food, as it’s called today, was created by the consumer as the consumer changed, eating habits changed and American food culture stalled.

“Big Food, as it’s called today, was created by the consumer as the consumer changed, eating habits changed and the American food culture stalled.”

Added to this was a move toward nativism during the mid-19th century, depriving American cuisine of the lusty, creative, and diverse favors brought to the table by immigrants. That’s changed now, but in the 1920s and 1930s, restrictions collided with war, Prohibition, and the Depression. And the arrival of television, which, as we know, brought TV dinners, endless gawking at cheesy shows, the demise of family meal times, and the emergence of children as the arbiters of taste. Families, even now, allow kids to determine the food on the table. Usually, that’s not kale and brown rice, salads or vegetables.

Tyler Cowen offers us an opportunity to look in more places for the source of (and solution to) our current predicament. Maybe Big Food is an easy target, but our curiosity can be fed by a more diverse range of topics by diving into American culture, finding how to change our media addiction, being curious about new ingredients and cooking a meal in our own kitchen.

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What’s in a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich? Far More Than You’d Think

What’s in a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich? Far More Than You’d Think

by | Feb 28, 2018 | Food Tracks Blog, Stories

A PB&J is an exquisite example of how a simple snack belies a global network of humans and technology that operates with mystifying accuracy to deliver our food every day.

A few years ago, I took a break from writing and headed across the street for a snack. A peanut butter and jam on toasted whole wheat bread is my favorite, comforting, reassuring snack food. An espresso chaser makes the snack both calming and exhilarating — a good combination when I’m searching for a new gear in the writing process.

Always finding complexity in the nearest simplicity, I found the PB&J the nearest object of my obsessive nature to figure stuff out. I was down on my writing that day, thinking food logistics was hardly a story that would envelop a reader in mystery, suspense and joy.

But wait.

A PB&J is an exquisite example of how a simple snack belies a global network of humans and technology that operates with mystifying accuracy (most of the time) to deliver our food every day, in spite of trade sanctions, floods, labor strikes, crop failures, flat tires and fuel crises.

So, perhaps there’s an opportunity, after all, to tell a story about the seemingly mundane, industrial food supply chain that grabs readers at the start and holds them in suspense until the last page.

Going deeper, I imagined and then illustrated my PB&J’s story!

Since that day, I’ve been learning about the food supply chain and have bits and pieces of acquired knowledge squirreled away in digital files, in and off the Cloud, scrawled on bits of notepaper now lying at the bottom of my briefcase, underlined bits in books piled in towers around my office.

And, of course, I’m still writing, though it’s almost easier to acquire another amazing scribble of knowledge than to put down a few words that tell a story. Every time I hit a logjam, I think of how it all began with a simple little PB&J sandwich, and suddenly, I’m headed somewhere interesting—or at least across the street for a snack.

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Feeding Smart Cities

Feeding Smart Cities

by | Feb 21, 2018 | Food Tracks Blog, Stories

With more and more talk about tech-powered smart cities, what are we doing to ensure innovative food logistics are part of the conversation?

When William McKinley became president in 1897, he enacted protectionist legislation and began what could be called a “buy local” campaign. In the same year, a British writer known for books about fly fishing wrote “War, Famine and our Food Supply,” fraught with concern about England’s ability to feed itself. The author, Robert Bright Marston, was beside himself, calling attention to England’s reliance on Russia and America for wheat and corn. Noting how Napoleon’s army starved on the steppes of Leningrad, Marston wanted another flavor of protectionism — the construction of grain storage buildings that would enable England to live for three months if a war cut the country off from its main sources of food supplies in Russia and the United States. He wanted to buy time for British farmers to build local capacity to make up for any missing imports from Russia and America.

Both McKinley and Marston knew that food was critical to the health of their nations, both to maintain social stability and to enable economic progress for all its citizens. Today, cities like New Orleans and New York City are keenly aware that disruptions — whether hurricanes or other breakdowns of the food supply chain — have received only improvised protections. And yet, with all the talk about “smart cities” enabled by technological advances, we hear very little discussion about innovative ways to secure food supplies against further disasters. Cities routinely talk about their three- to five-day food supplies, but those fall dramatically short of the luxurious three-month supply Marston was angling for.

“Today, cities like New Orleans and New York City are aware that disruptions  have received only improvised protections.”

Whether or not a city needs enough food for three days or three months — or three years — is a question that deserves more attention. Syrians are happy to have three minutes to consume a hastily provided meal from the World Food Program. While the media talks about casualties caused by weapons, little is said about deaths caused by famine and poison through the food systems in countries now at war. Few are aware of the destruction of livestock and cropland, or the contamination of soil and water, over the long duration of some modern conflicts.

The ripple effect of the disruptions caused by wars is difficult to imagine. The most obvious is the breakdown of the infrastructure, especially in the transportation of food. In Syria, even the perception of a disruption in the delivery of food causes an increase in black market activity, rising food prices and higher incidences of hoarding. Pita bread, animal fat and potatoes quickly disappear into personal storerooms, and Syrians freeze and dry food for longer-term storage. As it becomes more and more difficult to transport food to Syria, Syrians are looking for more localized food sources. As commodities like fuel and flour diminish, people worry about being able to produce flatbread, a simple yet essential element of their diet. With the breakdown of Syria’s government comes the loss of state control of bread prices and ingredient supplies.

“The ripple effect of the disruptions caused by wars is difficult to imagine.”

While not as long term and uncertain as the Syrian crisis, Hurricane Sandy brought home how food supply disruptions can upset the stomach of an entire region. In the aftermath of the hurricane in 2012, gasoline was scarce, transportation broke down and food logistics professionals struggled to keep New Yorkers supplied with pizza and bagels. New York wants more than three days of food to keep it afloat in the future — 12 months would be nice. But who decides, and how do we accomplish what Marston argued for in 1897: at least enough food for a country to adapt and find new sources of sustenance? We need food to enter the conversations of urban designers, especially those engaged in creating those “smart” cities.

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The Return of Home Economics

The Return of Home Economics

by | Feb 14, 2018 | Food Tracks Blog, Stories

Long before STEM initiatives came about, home economics programs may have done more than we know to bridge the gender gap in science.

A colleague of mine at The University of Texas at Austin invited me to peer into some locked bookshelves located in a conference room in the School of Human Ecology. The bookshelves, hidden from view by wood cabinets that line the perimeter of the room, contain stacks of musty books that have been neglected since the school was renamed during the 1980s, when university administrators, flummoxed by feminists, scuttled home economics departments.

The books and magazines inside the wooden cabinets once stood proudly on the bookshelves of the home economics department. Now the books lie in disheveled stacks, enshrouded in a past of denial and self-deprecation. Most have names of students or faculty inscribed on their flyleaves. They all reveal a past in which we believed students should know how to cook, make and repair everyday tools and operate within a world that considered personal responsibility to be a life skill.

Looking up from your latest, Pinterest-fueled attempt to make artisanal bread, you note that those books sound like something you’d like to read. I say UT’s hidden books should come out of the closet, and so should all former home economics departments, declaring a new, informed purpose more relevant than ever before.

Some of the books are about topics that would be familiar and celebrated by admirers of Michael Pollan, David Chang, Mark Bittman or Marion Nestle. Authors who wrote about food science, chemistry and the science of nutrition could have been muses to modern day molecular gastronomists such as Heston Blumenthal, Nathan Myhrvold and Homaro Cantu.

UT’s hidden books should come out of the closet, and so should all former home economics departments, declaring a new, informed, purpose more relevant than ever before.

Take, for example, A Laboratory Course in Physics of the Household, written by physics professor Dr. Carleton John Lynde. Published in 1919, the book was for high school students preparing for their College Entrance Board exams.  The author points out that his book contains experiments and exercises — it is essentially a book of physics principles along with experiential learning activities. He also points out that any kitchen would serve as an adequate physics laboratory, equipped with standard weights and measures, both metric and non-metric.

Sure, it’s a guy writing for gals, but consider the times: Before 1920, American women did not even have the right to vote. But they were considered capable of understanding the principles of physics, a subject many women dismiss today. Barely 20 percent of all doctorates in physics are given to women, and our government has to develop programs such as STEM to encourage women to consider science as a course of study. Lynde’s book makes no apologies for his readers as it covers the principles of physics in 135 pages.

“Barely 20 percent of all doctorates in physics are given to women…”

The book is divided into the common categories of physics: mechanics, heat, electricity and magnetism, light and sound. You can see from this photo that a reader learns about the principle of levers by making a fulcrum with a yardstick and several weights made out of cotton bags filled with sand or shot. (Shot wouldn’t be something you’d find in a book today….) The reader becomes familiar with the scientific method and the careful processes required to create an experiment.

In setting up each experiment, Dr. Lynde encourages the reader to write down the expected results and, later, to compare what actually occurred with the imagined results. I wonder how many of us think in such constructive ways, allowing for imagined outcomes and then taking the time to carefully learn from the real outcomes of any endeavor we may undertake.

The author says, “You will get a great deal of pleasure out of this work at home, because you will find it very exhilarating to make experiments of your own; you will get a great deal of profit also, because when you have planned and made experiments of your own on a given subject, you will find that you know it in a way you never could simply by making the experiments in school.” Never has an experiment about levers promised such exhilaration, pleasure and satisfaction.

By the eleventh experiment, you learn about Boyle’s Law by setting up experiments that use a fire extinguisher and a vacuum cleaner. Boyle’s Law explains how the volume of gas varies inversely as the pressure on it. The fire extinguisher comes in handy as an illustration of how the contents behave under pressure, and the vacuum cleaner is a rough example of how air pressure creates a vacuum.

This book is only one of many chestnuts rumbling around in those wooden cabinets in the School of Human Ecology. Aren’t Michael Pollan and others making the same call to experiment by making things — even promising  “exhilaration” in much the same way as Dr. Lynde did in 1919? Perhaps it’s time to shine some sunlight on their covers and recognize how science education was reaching women even before initiatives like STEM, even if they were still confined to their kitchen laboratories.

So let the efflorescence of home economics begin. Let’s take home ec back, men and women, making useful stuff and learning about science and engineering along the way.

“You will get a great deal of pleasure out of this work at home, because you will find it very exhilarating to make experiments of your own; you will get a great deal of profit also, because when you have planned and made experiments of your own on a given subject, you will find that you know it in a way you never could simply by making the experiments in school.”

— Dr. Carlton John Lynde

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