The Social Cost of Cheap Food: Labour and the Political Economy of Food Distribution in Britain 1830–1914

Abstract

Reading this book brought to mind John Walton's Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, 1870–1940 (1992), one of the first books in food history and one that has remained a touchstone in the field. Like Walton, Rioux places working-class people and work at the center not only of the history of food but also of the tectonic shifts in capitalism and the relationship between capital and labor. Where Walton's book drilled down into everyday communities and family diets, Rioux takes a wide view of the transformations in global food distribution and their impacts on working-class food practices from market to table. Changes in distribution, he argues, point to an understudied aspect of political economy but one that was central to understanding capital accumulation. In particular, he says, the urban industrial world, fueled by imports of colonial agricultural commodities, created the need for a “food-related underclass” in domestic as well as colonial economies (8). This underclass was characterized by precarious conditions that included self-exploitation, family labor, low wages, and long hours. Ultimately, Rioux argues, “cheap food production was not merely the result of cheap food imports but also the result of a highly competitive, dynamic, and heterogenous sphere of distribution that was largely based on a cheap, labor-intensive logic of reproduction” (158). This system of distribution furthered capital accumulation via social reproduction, as the costs of cheap food fueled working-class reproduction itself. To put it simply, “One's ability to secure her or his physical integrity all too often came at the expense of someone else's growing inability to earn a decent wage and achieve adequate standards of living” (161).Covering a broad sweep of British history, Rioux traces shifts from national to global agriculture, transformations from medieval markets to capitalist wholesale urban markets, and the rise of a complex class of street vendors and shopkeepers—all in the service of cheap food for Britain's growing working and middle classes. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, expansions in colonial agriculture and free trade, along with technological innovations like phosphate-based fertilizers, industrial manufacturing, and concentrations of population in urban centers, enabled cheap food and rising living standards for certain sectors of British working-class families. But the cheap cost of bread and meat depended entirely on the exploitation, precarity, and food insecurity of colonial workers as well as the self-exploitation of domestic shopkeepers and street vendors. “The transition from national to world agriculture and the growing distance it created between farm and fork,” Rioux says, allowed Britain to “mitigate hunger . . . by exporting the contradictions between capital and labour” (36).Rioux marks the expanded significance of food distribution systems from the decline of medieval markets and the rise, first, of centralized urban markets controlled by municipal authorities, and, by the late nineteenth century, the appearance of large-scale wholesale warehouses and integrated grocery chains. Medieval markets, he says, existed in time and space. Consumers and producers traveled to markets that were held in certain towns on certain days. These markets served a broad range of purposes in addition to commerce, including entertainment and religious rites. By the nineteenth century, “the market” transformed its spatial and temporal meaning. Markets existed in set locations and operated at set times. Municipal markets were regulated by local officials and consolidated the supply of foodstuffs giving rise to a new class of street vendors and shopkeepers who distributed food throughout the town or city.Rioux devotes much of the book to a discussion of costermongers (street vendors) and shopkeepers. These groups distributed food from central markets and became the main conduit for working-class neighborhood provisioning. Costermongers were the most precarious class, but shopkeepers, whether poor or more affluent, also depended on family labor, long hours, and uncertain market prices. While the municipal markets made some attempt to regulate both the supply and the safety of food, this distribution system was highly competitive and often quite easily elided regulations by selling food of questionable age and quality, adulterating goods, or outright fraud. This class, familiar in Marxist language as lumpen, were unreliable in their business practices as well as their politics. But Rioux pretty much lets them off the hook for fraud and adulteration saying this was basically “the structural outcome of an expanding class of retailers trying desperately to survive” (105).By the second half of the nineteenth century, British food distribution became dominated by large-scale retail grocers, wholesale establishments, and cooperative societies. In the process, city markets lost their neighborhood provisioning role (that is, selling directly to consumers via small shops and street vendors) and took on the wholesale function of securing the entire town's food supply. While both wholesalers and cooperatives shared an interest in economic growth, they represented often divergent values and political aims. But despite those differences, both entities relied on the “rescaling of food relations at the international level,” as well as cheap, precarious labor practices (126). That is, despite their different social goals and values, both cooperatives and commercial wholesalers/grocers relied on imported food, cheap agricultural prices and low food production wages, and the persistent self-exploitation of food workers both at home and abroad.That the comfort and well-being of some working-class people entailed the exploitation of other workers might not seem surprising, but Rioux's book starkly demonstrates the implications of these contradictions. “The ability of food retailers to live on very low profit margins and therefore to transfer the full benefits of cheap food imports directly to the working class was accomplished by locking food distribution workers into poverty and insecurity and subordinating their material comfort and well-being to the imperatives of competition in the retail environment” (158). The Social Cost of Cheap Food shifts the lens through which historians of food, political economy, and labor might view their work. Although Rioux's work focuses on structural and systemic transformations and sometimes lacks the human element, the thesis is provocative and should inform discussions of food and labor going forward. The main problem might be that the book's high price may put it out of reach of many students.