history Archives - Food+City

Protecting Provisions

by Cory Leahy | Dec 5, 2018 | Feature, Issue 5, Stories

Food packaging has been around as long as people have traded goods in markets. How else are you going to schlep that wine home across the desert? Given all that’s new in packaging and shelf-life technology, we’re taking a look back to some golden oldies, from skins and amphorae to the humble milk bottle.

Skins

Plants, animals and even humans have skins that inhibit the loss of water, so we will last longer. Food packaging performs the same function, inhibiting water loss and gain to extend freshness during transportation and storage. Too much water for any living creature causes cell death, so food scientists have been working for centuries to find the best way to provide a barrier between food and the environment.

Before the 17th century, that optimal barrier was literal skin. Leather bladders and other animal hides were convenient packaging materials beginning in prehistoric periods, and most “packages” for food were not removed during the cooking process. Animal bladders held meats and mixtures of vegetables and seasonings over the cooking fire. In a sense, haggis and natural sausage casings are modern-day versions of this ancient packaging.

Though we now have more options than our 17th-century ancestors did, we still protect many foods from spoilage by applying a protective skin.

Think of spoilage this way: Any perishable food ingredient, processed or unprocessed, breathes just like we do, taking in oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide. Bacteria grows faster if it exists in conditions that enable it to breathe, allowing it to break down the plant or animal cells. That’s why you frequently see cheeses and fruits covered with wax. The Chinese popularized this tactic during the 12th century, when they wrapped citrus fruits in wax to decrease the interior oxygen content and ensure the fruits made it to the emperor’s table. Different types of waxes (e.g., sugar cane and carnauba) are often applied by spraying or dipping fruits and vegetables to preserve or improve the appearance and protect the produce during storage.

Wax isn’t the only kind of protective skin: Victorians used lard to coat food, and M&Ms are covered with confectioner’s shellac, a substance made of an insect-derived coating that’s produced in India and called lac dye. Your french fries remain white and crispy because of a coating applied during processing to inhibit discoloration. Some other coatings aren’t so natural, including calcium acetate and calcium ascorbate. Even wheat gluten becomes a skin for some foods that are not grain-related at all.

Jars and Pottery

Three thousand clay jars of fermented fish sauce emerged gently from the sea in 2015. A team of archeologists led by Simon Luca Trigona celebrated their trove after two years of painstaking work around a Roman ship that was built sometime in the first or second century. These containters, called amphorae (singularly, amphora), have been around since the Neolithic Period (10,000 to 2,000 BCE). They were made of clay and often carried wine, oil or a fish sauce known as garum. The fish sauce, which resembled ketchup, was most likely from Spain and bound for Roman markets.

Fish sauce traveled in pottery vessels long before the sinking of the Roman ship. At the time, clay was also used as a sealant for baskets that carried grain. To eliminate the absorption of liquids by the vessel, clay, resin or pitch coated the interior surfaces. Manufacturers of amphorae applied a stamp to the outside that indicated its origin. In some cases, other information would be written or painted on to indicate weights, contents and market information.

Not often recycled, Greek and Roman amphorae were broken up after they reached their destinations. Rome’s Monte Testaccio is a mountain of these vessels, a Roman pottery garbage heap.

Clay amphorae

Glass, Crates and Cartons

Milk travels along the supply chain in bulk and consumer packaging, contained in glass, plastic and paper. A rusty milk jug worked its way up to the soil surface in our backyard last summer, with a metal label indicating it had belonged to the Turner Center Creamery in Auburn, Maine. The creamery, which operated in Auburn in 1893, manufactured the first commercial ice cream in New England. Customers would send jugs to dairies where the farmers would refill and deliver the milk back to the customer.

In more urban areas, metal milk jugs had been replaced with glass bottles topped with metal caps. Alexander Campbell introduced these bottles in 1878 in Brooklyn, New York, and by the early 1900s, fiber material and paraffin covered the metal caps. At first, customers resisted the glass bottles because glass was commonly used for medicines from the drug stores, and dairies worried about broken glass. But distributors preferred glass for sanitation and easy handling, so both dairies and consumers overcame their concerns, and glass replaced the metal jugs until paperboard appeared in the early 20th century.

In 1915, John Van Wormer patented a wax-sealed paper carton with a gable top that could be shipped flat for assembly at the dairy. Gallon and half-gallon plastic jugs became the preferred package for milk by 1970, but paper milk cartons have made a comeback since being fitted with screw tops in the 1990s.

Plastic jugs travel to stores in milk crates, which were once made of metal, but were replaced with plastic by the 1960s. Each crate carries four to six one-gallon plastic milk jugs. About 20 million crates go missing every year, stolen for shredding and reselling at a profit. The International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) estimates that U.S. dairy companies spend  between $80 and $100 million to replace stolen or missing plastic milk crates (read about another beverage container that often falls out of the supply chain).

Milk Can

Early 1800s – Metal cans stored milk and carried it from farm to town.

Milk Bottle

1880s – Metal-capped glass bottles improved milk’s hygiene.

Milk Carton

1950s – Paper cartons were the first single-use milk containers.

Milk Jug

1960s – Customers could buy more milk in lightweight plastic gallon jugs.

Milk Crate

1960s – Invented in Australia, the plastic milk crate holds four or six gallon-sized jugs.

The Return of Sail Cargo

by Cory Leahy | Dec 5, 2018 | History, Issue 5, Stories

For centuries, sailing ships offered the fastest, best option for transporting goods and people. The Age of Sail (1571–1862) marked the reign of tall ships, with clipper ships representing the apex of commercial sailing’s progression.

The visually striking clippers had strong lines, V-shaped bows that sliced through water and dozens of sails to capture wind. First developed around 1845 by American shipbuilders looking to give small fishing boats an edge over pursuing pirates, clipper ships evolved to carry modest amounts of cargo at unparalleled speeds. A clipper ship could reach more than 15 knots and cover 300 nautical miles in a day, easily outpacing a steamer ship’s 9 knots.

During the Gold Rush, in 1849 — 20 years before completion of the transcontinental railroad — ships carried 25,000 Americans west. While wealthier passengers could spring for Panama-bound steamers, take the train across Panama, then steam up the West Coast, most forty-niners endured a five- to seven-month journey around Cape Horn via clipper ship. Flying Cloud set a world record for this trip, which stood for more than 100 years, when it arrived in San Francisco after 89 days, 21 hours.

These greyhounds of the sea were the obvious choice for the British Empire’s most prized cargo: tea. Thirst for tea was such that a so-called tea clipper could earn £3,000 from one cargo load — roughly 20 to 25 percent of shipbuilding costs. The first ship of the season to reach London’s docks would win a premium.

The Great Tea Race of 1866 demonstrated the logistics underlying tea mania. Clipper ships lined the docks in Fuzhou. The first ship to clear customs had an early advantage, but favorable winds, stronger tugboats and the luck of the tides made for a competitive 16,000-mile race between five of the day’s fastest clippers, Flying Cloud among them. Ninety-nine days after leaving Fuzhou, Taeping and Ariel docked within 20 minutes of one another and split the premium.

But as 45 million pounds of tea flooded the market, tea prices plummeted, illustrating one of sail’s disadvantages: Ships couldn’t keep a schedule, which meant supply-side volatility.

The Great Tea Race occurred between two dips in the popularity of sailing. When American banks shuttered in the Panic of 1857, trade slowed, as did the demand for sailing ships. Later, in 1869, the Suez Canal opened and gave an advantage to steamer ships, which could complete the Europe- Asia route in 50 days. Overland transport improved, too, with railroad expansion.

By the turn of the 20th century, countries were abandoning sailing ships in favor of steamers, which offered reliability and greater cargo space. With the opening of the Panama Canal and the onset of World War I in 1914, sail’s demise seemed assured. By World War II, sailing ships were restricted to commercial fishing trades. Tall ships seemed destined for nostalgia, until — nearly a century later — the winds shifted once more.

From 2012 to 2017, shipping accounted for 3.1 percent of global CO2 emissions. The International Maritime Organization estimates that shipping emissions will increase by an additional 50 to 250 percent by 2050. As some in the industry look to lower their carbon footprint, there’s renewed interested in wind power.

In recent years, sail cargo projects have sprung up along old trade routes. U.K.-based Grayhound Lugger crosses the English Channel, trading Cornish ale and organic French wine. Dutch-based Tres Hombres crosses the Atlantic with cacao, coffee and rum. Schooner Apollonia plans to launch on the Hudson River by year end, bringing cider, beer and apples downstream to New York City.

In 2019, Sail Cargo Inc. will open a carbon-neutral shipyard in Costa Rica. Through its 3½-year build process for Ceiba (a 45-meter sailing cargo vessel with a chilled hold space and 25-ton cargo capacity, crafted from sustainably harvested wood), Sail Cargo Inc. plans to offer a traditional skills apprenticeship program, where participants can learn shipbuilding, blacksmithing or woodwork — all green jobs.

While sail may have traditional roots, its means have been updated. Today’s sailing ships have biodiesel engines or solar batteries to augment wind power, plus GPS and plotting technologies to plan efficient routes.

Still, challenges remain. Routes aren’t operable year-round, and — as in the past — sticking to a schedule can be difficult. Port infrastructure might be set up for recreational boats with floating docks that make loading tricky or for the giant post-Panamax cruise and cargo ships. What’s more, to realize a profit, sailing ships need premium cargo. Vermont Sail Freight’s founder, Erik Andrus, said only one crop would deliver an ROI of $0.50 to $1.00 per pound of weight: Pot.

Growth potential aside, modern sail freight has neither the capacity nor efficiency to supplant tankers. Instead, cargo shippers will look to wind to lower emissions. Maersk is trialing rotor sails (invented 100 years ago) to add wind power to tanker ships, which will conserve some 1,000 tons of fuel. And Cargill, which charters over 500 vessels, is co-funding SkySails, a kite sail initiative.

Sail freight’s early adopters are largely companies with the desire (and cash) to align their business with their values by using emission-free shipping for organic, hand-crafted products. Other clients value the interactive marketing experience sail cargo offers: Guests can board the ship, sample products and form a powerful brand connection.

Unlike sailing ships of yore — which competed as fiercely as any 21st-century big-business rivals — today’s sailing ships operate as a network, sharing tips and routes. That unusual collaboration highlights the focus on relationships that could cement this trend as a viable shipping option.

Jason Marlow of Schooner Apollonia acknowledges that sail cargo’s client base is limited at present. Yet, he is optimistic. The more people start to identify sail transport as an option, the more they will request it.

“As it starts to scale up and there are more vessels and it’s more connected, then it starts to compete pricewise with other modes” of transportation, Marlow says. In the meantime, the new-old industry breathes life into port towns that may be struggling to redefine their economies.

Watch Ceiba’s building progress through a collection of short films.

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Handoffs: Bills of Lading and the Cargo Custody Relay

by Cory Leahy | Jun 22, 2018 | Feature, Issue 4, Stories

We’re hearing more and more about high-tech ways to track and trace our food as it moves through the supply chain to our plates — from barcodes to blockchains. But the practice of tracking food shipments isn’t new. It has long been a way for shippers to make sure their cargo is safe and secure throughout its voyage.

At each step along the supply chain, anyone who handles a shipment has custody, a specific term that connotes legal responsibility. The chain of custody confirms the identity and quantity of the shipment (e.g., 400 bushels of Italian pears), declares that the pears were continuously controlled and transported by the carrier and identifies everyone who handled the pears throughout the shipment. Having a clear record of this chain makes it possible for the shipper to track any theft or contamination of the cargo on its way to the receiver.

The documentation that authenticates the movement of food between a shipper and a freight carrier is known as a bill of lading. It’s a receipt that confirms the transition of goods from one link in the chain to the next. This document notes the details of the cargo and its intended path to you, including the type and quantity of a shipment. It’s provided at the end of a shipment to verify delivery of the goods shipped and is the basis for payment for the goods at the receiving end of a shipment. Without these bills of lading, neither the farmer nor the exporter gets paid.

Going back to maritime practices — before planes, trains and automobiles got involved — the bill of lading would have been prepared by a merchant to indicate that the shipper was responsible for delivering the items consigned to him. These receipts were originally called “bills of loading” as far back as the Middle Ages, and they listed what a merchant actually loaded onto a ship. It was a sort of contract between a merchant and a shipper that confirmed the receipt and safe transport of a specific cargo list.

Since shippers often lost ships and their cargo at sea, the bills of lading helped account for losses and reparations. Like today’s tracking tools, bills of lading indicate a transfer of responsibility throughout the supply chain. They are legal documents that confirm ownership of the goods and, as such, are assets the shipper can use to secure credit against expenses.

As the bill of lading moves through the supply chain with a shipment of, say, bags of coffee beans on pallets, the legal notion of ownership and custody travels with the chain. But the cargo list and a receipt are only two tools that leave footprints along a supply chain. These days, we need much more data than these documents provide to effectively track food through our chain.

Newer tools include smart labels with barcodes that communicate harvest dates and times. Scans of smart tags indicate precisely when food passes through the supply chain, when a USDA inspector has certified a meat shipment or the temperature of the interior of a shipping container or a tractor trailer. All this data is being gathered as food travels to our plates.

These new tools go far beyond those old bills of lading, but the intention of those bills and the chain of custody remain the same.

Just wait until blockchain technology picks up where bills of lading and custody left off. Then you’ll be able to see the passage of ownership of your carrots all the way from the farmer’s plot to your pot, who handled your carrot and why, when, where and maybe even the weather outside when the carrots moved between buildings. Be prepared for some surprises.

Blockchain Explained

A blockchain is a distributed, digital ledger used to track shipments. Rather than a single document — the old bill of lading — traveling throughout a supply chain, the information contained in that one document exists in many computers in the network along the way. So every time a bushel of apples moves through its supply chain, information about its steps are recorded, including who moved it, when, why and what resulted from the movement. The data form blocks that leave unique “fingerprints” along the chain. Any attempt to change a fingerprint travels throughout the entire chain, alerting everyone that the integrity of the chain was compromised. If someone steals an apple, the blockchain will know where and when it disappeared. For the food industry, blockchain appears to be a way to prevent food fraud and ensure food safety. Real-time awareness of inconsistencies in the chain will enable faster and more precise responses to food-borne disease outbreaks. Consider the Romaine lettuce contamination in early 2018. Blockchains would have enabled investigators to track back all the way to rows of lettuce growing in the field. At least that’s the theory.

On Our Loading Dock: Food System Resources

by Cory Leahy | Jun 18, 2018 | Issue 4, Loading Dock, Stories

Our nightstands are loaded with books to read and our laptops are packed with websites to explore and unpack some wisdom about the global food supply chain.

Books

Before the Refrigerator (Jonathan Rees)

Before the refrigerator, there was the icebox. But if you didn’t live in the frozen tundra, getting ice required a complex choreography. Jonathan Rees traces the process of ice harvesting and distribution — a key method of preserving perishable foods — as it evolved in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As the country moved toward mechanical cooling, widely available ice played a vital role in transforming the American diet. (Read Jonathan Rees’s Food+City story about the cold chain.)

Coffee Lids: Peel, Pinch, Pucker, Puncture (Louise Harpman, Scott Specht)

Some things just seem like they were always there, as if no one could possibly have spent time inventing them. The ubiquitous plastic lid on the humble paper coffee cup is just such an item. But take time to consider its nuanced and varied design features, as architects Louise Harpman and Scott Specht have in this delightful mini-primer on industrial design, and you may enjoy your morning joe even more.

Barges and Bread (Di Murrell)

It’s not every day that a historian has lived the life she’s writing about. But for Di Murrell, barging has been her way of life for more than 30 years. Her book looks way back to 13th century London and the history of the grain trade on the Thames. Grains and bread — not coincidentally, a synonym for money — were staples for all citizens because, as a commodity crop, grain was stable, and large quantities could be transported efficiently over even the shallowest waterways. Take a trip back in time with the historian barge master. (Check out our story about the role of barges in moving food throughout history.)

The Flavor Thesaurus (Niki Segnit)

As we investigated IBM’s Chef Watson, another source of clever food pairings sprang to mind: Niki Segnit’s “The Flavor Thesaurus.” Structured like Roget’s classic, the book lists ingredients — such as beets, blueberries, oysters — and offers classic and novel pairings based on flavor themes. Recipes and other suggested preparations are included in the text. It’s a fantastic resource for moving off the beaten path and developing your own recipes.

Fishing Lessons (Kevin Bailey)

Bailey provides a glimpse of the future of the global fishing industry, documenting the rise and fall of fish populations, the loss of indigenous fisheries and the arrival of fish farms. He makes the case for a future seafood industry that includes “new” artisan cultures while incorporating new ways of selling direct to consumers. He says that his book provides “a fine-grained view of the larger issues in the world’s fisheries — too many fishermen with too few fish, conflicts with other resource users, loss of fishing rights and degraded habitats.” There’s room for hope, according to the author.

The Long Haul (Finn Murphy)

Finn Murphy dropped out of college in the late 1980s, much to the chagrin of his parents, and became a long-haul trucker. He’s a furniture mover, but his experience driving the nation’s highways — and navigating the small lanes of Lower Manhattan or the mountain passes in Colorado’s Rockies — runs in parallel to the thousands of other haulers who transport our food, our packages and everything else we buy and ship. This catchy memoir offers multiple tableaux, and lots of juicy slang terms, of one life on the road. (Read about another truck driver, Annette Womack, in our Food Mover story from Issue 2.)

Podcasts

Sourcing Matters

Host Aaron Niederhelman takes listeners with him as he examines problems with and solutions for feeding ourselves into the future. He finds leaders focused on food system reform and reducing environmental impact who tell stories worth pausing for. “Our goal with this show is to celebrate leading voices committed to promoting food values through proper natural resource management,” says the podcast’s website. “It is, after all, the sourcing which matters.”

Films

Rotten (Netflix)

This series of six episodes dives into various parts of the food supply chain, exposing some unsavory realities of the industrial food complex. Mass deaths of honeybees, the plight of peanut farmers in an age of allergies, the economics of dairy farming and the dwindling global fish supply are among the tough topics the filmmakers tackle. It may leave you wanting to move to the country and grow all your own food.

Magazines

Eaten: The Food History Magazine

Social and economic historian Emelyn Rude launched a new magazine in the fall of 2017 with a focus on the history of food. Filled with luscious eye candy, rediscovered recipes and gastronomic essays, the magazine transports readers through time on a common vehicle — food.

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The Bullwhip and the Beer Game

by Cory Leahy | Jun 18, 2018 | History, Issue 4, Stories

Only at MIT would students play a “Beer Game” to understand a supply chain phenomenon called the Bull Whip Effect. When you’re holding a whip, a small flick of the wrist creates ever-increasing amplitude down the length of the whip. It’s a problem food distributors deal with all the time because even the smallest variation in consumer demand can increase chaos and unpredictability upstream.

Jay Forrester, a professor at MIT from 1956 to 1989, devised the idea in the early 1960s to illustrate how supply chain forecasts can create inefficiencies. In the Beer Game, a single item — a case of beer — travels through a multilevel distribution system in a supply chain. Players operate four stages of the supply chain, and the objective is to order beer and deliver it to customers. Sounds simple, right? Not so fast. The simple act of a player changing the amount of beer ordered sends a ripple throughout the supply chain.

As consumers — the demand side — change their behavior, the supply side adapts inventory and warehousing activities. Players also blame each other for feedback failures that result in a lack of beer. But a build-up of supplies in a warehouse also reflects a communication breakdown between consumers and producers. You lose if you create a large inventory while trying to adjust to the change in orders. Product sitting in a warehouse costs money, so having a stable supply chain and deftly adapting to changes in demand is the winning play.

Research shows that a variation of as little as 5 percent can lead to a variation of 40 percent up the chain. For example, if consumers order fewer bottles of beer, the grocery store will send a message up the supply chain. (“Up” in supply chain lingo means moving from farm to the table; “down” means moving from table to the farm.) That 5 percent decline in beer sales in April could lead to inventory build-ups within the chain, over- ordering of packaging material, and misguided communication between brewers and ingredient producers and processors.

Another way this concept affects the food supply chain is when weather forecasters predict bad weather. A prediction of icy roads in Texas leads to a rush on grocery stores to purchase food while roads are clear. Store shelves empty, and the store’s procurement team returns to its inventory system to squeeze out more stock, while suppliers downstream scramble to find additional ingredients or sources.

As Beer Game players discover, one strategy for variation in consumer demand is to have extra inventory on hand so they can absorb a temporary uptick in demand. But storage costs money, and many food suppliers, intent on creating a “lean” supply chain, want to minimize inventory to save money and avoid food waste. Sometimes, when consumers stop buying a product, stores offer discounts and promotions, but that may cause unpredictable surges in sales that create more problems downstream. You can only hold onto tomatoes for so long.

Forecasts seem to be the culprit here, and the bullwhip effect is more about the problems in forecast-driven supply chain than in supply chain dynamics in general. If your supply chain depends less on forecasts and is more aligned with actual consumer behavior, the bullwhip effect may be dampened. Food companies that link point-of-sales data and supply chain planning can tighten the loop between consumer behavior and other activities throughout the supply chain.

If nothing else, the Bull Whip and the Beer Game reveal the systems effect of the food supply chain. Everything is connected, and one failure has dire consequences. Lack of beer is just one of them.

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Protecting Provisions

Skins

Jars and Pottery