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Scholliers, Peter , and Patricia Van Den Eeckhout. "Feeding Growing Cities in the Nineteenth
and Twentieth Centuries: Problems, Innovations, and Reputations." The Handbook of Food
Research. Trans. W. Mintz Sidney. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 69–81.
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Feeding Growing Cities in the Nineteenth

and Twentieth Centuries: Problems,

Innovations, and Reputations
by Peter Scholliers and Patricia Van Den Eeckhout
DOI: 10.5040/9781350042261-ch-0003
Page Range: 69–81
Cities seem like enormous sponges that absorb masses of staple and luxurious
foodstuffs from nearby and distant shores. This image of the city, perhaps going
back to ancient Rome, emerged resolutely in the seventeenth century but boosted in
the late eighteenth century when Paris, for example, was depicted as a “voracious
beast” ( Radeff 2012: 30). With rapid urbanization during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, many more voracious beasts appeared, which increasingly
affected the entire food chain. Because of the cities’ multiple roles in this process, it
is difficult to separate urban food history from food history tout court, which implies
that this chapter should actually consider the all-inclusive history of food. This is not
viable, and therefore emphasis will be put on particular aspects in which cities have
played, and will play, a determinant role. The European city in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries will be taken as the prototype of modern urbanization, although

this cannot be seen as the model of cities in all places at all times. Besides, now and
then examples from outside Europe will be referred to.
This chapter has four parts. The first section surveys the general literature on “urban
food” history. The second section addresses the growth and emergence of cities
since 1800 and considers the way municipal authorities tried to overcome particular
food supply problems. The last two sections focus on aspects in which cities played
the decisive role, namely food retailing (see Hallsworth, Chapter 15, this volume) and
eating out (see Julier, Chapter 19, this volume). Two general questions steer this
chapter: how did townspeople obtain food, and how did they modify its meaning?
The relation between food and cities cannot only be conceived as the city being an
all-absorbing sponge; the city must also be viewed as a place of transformation that
radically alters the significance of food. Both questions are valid for ancient Rome,
medieval Córdoba or seventeenth-century Amsterdam, but the rapid post-1800
urbanization posed particular problems as well as offered new opportunities.
At the Crossroad of Urban History and Food History

This chapter cannot lean on stacks of to-the-point literature. Although the term food
inevitably and frequently appears in urban historiography and the term city in food
historiography, both (blooming) branches of history writing have rarely interlinked. A
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survey of the content of specialized journals in both fields (e.g., Urban History and
Food & History) shows the lack of the explicit presence of food and city, respectively:
the city is taken for granted in food history writing, just like food is an evident part of
urban historiography.
This relative scarcity of history writing on food in the city was the reason why in 2005
a colloquium was organized that focused on food and the city in Europe since
1800.[1] The introduction to the book that emerged from this colloquium emphasizes
the lack of pointed historical interest in the role of cities in shaping eating practices,
food safety, diets, food commerce, and so forth ( Atkins and Oddy 2007). The
editors of this book wished to fill some of these gaps by granting the city a chief role
in diverse developments related to food and drink. The titles of the four sections
that organize this book reveal the main considerations (“Feeding the Multitude,”
“Food Regulation,” “Food Innovations,” and “Eating Fashions”).
In surveying the literature on food and the city, the introduction to Food and the City
in Europe since 1800 shows that the food supply of preindustrial cities has benefited
from much attention. For example, the grain trade, bread baking, wholesale and
retail markets, slaughtering and butchering, public drinking, and per capita food
consumption were studied ( Abad 2002 ; Brennan 1988; Campbell et al. 1993 ;
Kaplan 1996; Marin and Virlouvet 2003 ; Murphey 1988; Smith 2002). There are only
a few monographs or collections that address the general food supply of cities in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries (e.g., Morris 1993 ; Scola 1992). Recently, studies
have begun to explore new themes and approaches (e.g., Csergo and Lemasson
[2008] on gourmet cities and regions; Hauck-Lawson and Deutsch [2010] on New
York’s tastes and flavors; Rich [2011] on middle-class eating culture in London and
Paris). Also, present-day and future problems of feeding the city are increasingly
addressed (e.g., Steel 2009), while particular aspects of provisioning cities are
investigated now and again (e.g., Philipp 2010 ). Two fields, though, have been
widely explored. From the early 1960s, estimates of per capita food intake up to
1940 for some European cities, for which adequate source material is available, have
been quite successful (e.g., Aron 1975; Gomez Mendoza and Simpson 1988 ; Lis and
Soly 1977; Mokyr 1988 ; Segers 2002; G. Shaw 1985 ; Vandenbroeke 1973). Many of
these studies contributed to the debate on the standard of living during the
industrial revolution,[2] which, generally, suggest deteriorating food consumption by
the working classes and increasing social inequality. Other research on (per capita)
food consumption in cities considered social prestige, cultural differences, or the
transition from poor to satisfactory and even abundant diets (Atkins 2007 ; Hänger
2000; Horowitz, Pilcher, and Watts 2004 ; Nicolau-Nos and Pujol-Andreu 2004).
Nutritional conditions in cities also led to frequent historical research, particularly
when dealing with harsh consequences of wars, the fate of the deprived is studied,
or class differences are considered (e.g., Amilien 2007 ; Bonzon and Davis 1997 ;
Davin 1996; Davis 2000; Trentmann and Just 2006). Urban food monographs, in
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which various themes combine, would be highly welcome to better interpret the role
of cities in the making of modern consumption (advocated, for example, by Cohen
2003).
Growing Cities and Urban Food Policies

European cities were confronted with immense problems of rapidly rising population
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a phenomenon that since 1950 has
accelerated worldwide. Old cities, like London or Paris, became ever more
congested, whereas new towns, like Essen or Newcastle, developed untidily. Neither
provided infrastructure or suitable housing for all until the 1870s. A direct
consequence was the dramatic rise of inequality that showed in the construction of
agreeable new residential districts for the richer layers, as well as in the
transformation of older buildings into degraded lodgings and the disordered
construction of new, modest houses for the poorer city dwellers ( Clark 2009 ). More
segregation appeared with regard to the utilization of the inner city that often
developed into loci of opulent consumption and diversions, aimed at locals and
visitors (theaters, parks, concert halls, opera houses, museums, and shops), with food
and drinks playing a prominent role (restaurants, cafés, and specialized groceries)
(Clark 2009).
New use of urban space also appeared with regard to food production. Up to the
1950s, many European cities had possibilities to grow food or keep animals within
the city (Atkins 2003; Clark 2009), but this practice disappeared in the second half of
the twentieth century. Yet food continued to be grown on small, systematically
organized plots in (the periphery of) cities, which was particularly successful during
wars (De Knecht-Van Eekelen 2003), and which regained interest in the last decade (
Hynes 2004 ). Production of food became a major feature of cities as new industries
developed in the course of the nineteenth century. Naturally, food has long been
produced in cities, but mechanization drastically altered products. Chocolate
illustrates this well. Up to the 1850s, chocolate was an expensive drink sold
exclusively at apothecaries and luxury grocers in cities. Mechanization (use of
cracking machines, blenders, and automatic wrapping machines—all driven by
steam) changed chocolate’s structure, form, wrapping, price, and significance,
turned it into an easily marketable bar, and made it a widespread item by 1900. This
was an urban phenomenon (for example, Cadbury in Birmingham, Toblerone in Bern,
Menier near Paris, or Côte d’Or in Brussels). Production of mustard, biscuits, sweets
(candy), and sauces went through a similar process of industrialization (about which,
however, little is known because of, among other things, lack of business archives).
With the intensification of international trade and enhancements of transport in the
nineteenth century, more products, originating from distant shores, reached urban
factories where basic foodstuffs, such as tea or exotic fruit, were transformed for
consumption that, at first was definitely urban, but as the overall purchasing power
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grew in the twentieth century, became nationwide.
Prior to this mechanized processing of food, cities had been the center of
manufacturing, commerce, marketing, and consumption: cities have always

appropriated products from the surrounding countryside, adding surplus value (
Montanari 2011: 210), which sometimes led to naming agricultural products by a
city’s name (e.g., Parma ham, Paris mushrooms [i.e., white button mushrooms],
asparagus from Malines, or wine from Porto). Unlike preindustrial times, however,
food produced in urban plants was seldom connected to the name of a city. In the
last quarter of the nineteenth century, (universal) brand names had taken over
topographical references. Still, some brands remained linked to the name of a city
(such as pâte alimentaire Bertrand de Lyon [1913], chocolat Meunier-Lombart de
Paris [1895], or Vermouth de Turin [1911]) (examples taken from the catalogs of
Brussels grocer Delhaize Le Lion). This shift from local/traditional to
international/modern modes of food labeling needs further investigation. Recently,
EU labeling of geographic origin revived the topographic mentioning of food, which
is not limited to towns and cities (see West, Chapter 12 , this volume).[3]
It took decades before city administrations could solve problems of rapid population
growth. In general, social inquiries were the first actions taken. Living conditions
were investigated, which included surveys of working-class diets and spending.
Particularly the huge immigration from the countryside to cities in times of economic
downturn (for example, 1853–1854) initiated inquiries and observations. These

brought about debate over wages, rent, hygiene, the role of the housewife, and very
general comments on social relations and individual and civic responsibilities (
Bruegel 2012: 6–7). Together with the establishing of social statistics (especially
about mortality), these inquiries and comments led, little by little, to general
interventions. One of these consisted of the construction of public sewer systems
and a public water supply that reached, at first, only very few private houses because
of the huge cost, but once municipalities organized these works in the second half of
the nineteenth century, more households got access to piped water (Clark 2009:
274, 335; Taylor and Trentmann 2011). This improved sanitary conditions in cities,
which, together with the progress of urban diets, resulted in decreasing infant
mortality rates around 1900, which, however, occurred later than in the countryside
(as shown for England and Wales by Gregory 2008 ).
Aid to the needy has long been well organized in European cities by both private
and public charitable institutions. The growing population of cities, however, caused
new, vast problems for which the habitual solutions, such as price control of basic
foodstuffs, hardly brought relief. In some cities during particular periods (the 1840s
crisis or both world wars, for example), special aid was offered to the needy (
Verschueren 2009: 351–352). Such initiatives ended as soon as normality resurfaced,
because of the general noninterventionist attitude of European municipalities. This,
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of course, differed from totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century, when cities
enjoyed a privileged position in matters of food for reasons of propaganda ( Franc
2007 ; Gronow 2003). Nonetheless, municipal control in the nineteenth-century
European town involved yet another initiative, namely the crusade against food
adulteration (see Atkins, Chapter 5, this volume). Food fraud is potentially ever
present, but in the early nineteenth century it was widely believed that dishonest
merchants adulterated food to a much larger extent than ever before ( Burnett 1989
: 87). National laws were inadequate to prevent this up to the late nineteenth
century, and therefore city administrations tried to restrain food fraud. In many
European cities around 1850, the police were authorized to control millers, bakers,
wholesalers, grocers, and eateries. The Brussels municipality went further, when in
1856 it set up a chemical laboratory for food analysis (Scholliers and Van den
Eeckhout 2011 ). This example was followed in other towns on the European
continent ( Pacquy 2004: 53), while private initiatives also emerged (Hierholzer
2007). By the 1890s, the industrialization of production (coloring, preservation, taste
supplements, or wrappings) had altered the nature of adulteration that was no
longer only a matter of fair trade and commerce regulation, but had primarily
become an issue of food safety, public health, and opinions about chemical
additives. Around 1900, many countries had passed national laws and established
state laboratories (in France, for example, in 1906, Stanziani 2007 : 113), but most
municipal laboratories continued playing their role. By then, chemical laboratories,

which not only analyzed food but also gave advice about the optimal diet, had
appeared in university cities.
Another action by municipal governments consisted of increasing the regulation of

food trading places like markets, slaughterhouses, and street merchants. Vegetables
and fruit were sold on particular squares, dairy products and fish in other
marketplaces; very diverse food products, raw as well as cooked, were supplied by
street vendors. Regulating this commerce gradually became a concern of
municipalities for economic, hygienist, and organizational reasons, although the
nineteenth-century laissez-faire ideology gave way in some cities to deregulating the
food market (as in London’s central districts; Oddy 2007: 91). The case of
slaughterhouses is illustrative. In Western Europe, up to the second quarter of the
nineteenth century, and in other regions up to the early twentieth century, animals
were slaughtered and meat sold in the streets (in spite of prohibitions). Apart from
the fact that some townspeople disapproved of this, physicians warned against the
lack of hygiene, while municipal authorities wished to control slaughtering. Hence,
confined public abattoirs and meat markets were built in cities in the course of the
nineteenth century (Young Lee 2005; see also next section).
Mass and Elite Food Retailing[4]

City dwellers obtained meat at the butchers’ stalls, bread at the bakeries,
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vegetables, fruit, and dairy products at public markets, groceries in specialized

stores, or fresh and cooked food with hawkers. Differences with regard to quality,
reputation, and price were huge, and social differentiation appeared via the places
where people purchased food. Some shops sold luxury foodstuffs that could not be
procured in small towns or villages, including game, canned lobster, truffles, or any
other extravagances (as the Ghent traiteur—chef Cauderlier sold in the 1840s), while
others specialized in offal, withered vegetables, or none-too-fresh fish. These retail
forms did not differ from those of the eighteenth century. In the first half of the
nineteenth century, market halls innovated in that new, large, and covered buildings
were erected in the growing towns, offering a safe and regulated space to sellers
and buyers ( Mitchell 2010). In big cities, these often were vast constructions that
redesigned the urban space, like Liverpool’s St. John’s Market (1822) with seven
thousand square meters. These market halls only gradually provided more comfort
and improved hygiene. The meat trade illustrates this well. In many cities, the old
ways of slaughtering persisted up to the early twentieth century, much to the
apprehension of the so-called hygienists (or the nineteenth-century experts in public
health). Although Paris was a forerunner with regard to establishing large, public
slaughterhouses (the first opened in 1818) and provided an example for other cities
(e.g., Rouen in 1830, Brussels in 1840, or Vienna in 1851), the vast abattoir of La
Villette (1867) offered but an “agglomeration of tueries particulières” without any
modern features, and was considered archaic by 1890 ( Claflin 2005 ). This
contrasted heavily with modern abattoirs in German and American cities of the
second half of the nineteenth century (“slaughter factories,” with Chicago
embodying the prototype), offering large-scale butchering (facilitated by machinery
for transport and washing), hygienic conditions, and constant surveillance, efficiency,
and cooling spaces.
Since the 1860s, various innovations altered the way townspeople, and later all
people, obtained food. Jefferys and Mathias coined the notion of “retailing
revolution,” associating it with the introduction of the multiple (or chain) store in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century (Jefferys 1954; Mathias 1967). In general, two
phenomena concurred that explained their success: the dynamism of retailing and
rapid societal changes. The former refers to the advent of mass production of food
(e.g., cans or prepacked biscuits) and the restructuring of the grocery trade; the
latter to urbanization and (relatively high) purchasing power (Jefferys 1954: 7–9).
These changes, intensifying after around 1890, offered retailers new opportunities.
While initially the individual store of a multiple was hardly larger than the traditional
corner or country shop, it benefited greatly from the fact that it was part of a bigger
organization. As a result of the elimination of intermediaries, the realization of the
vertical integration of production and distribution, and, especially, the exploitation of
economies of scale obtained by the bulk purchases of central warehouses and the
multiplication of outlets, food multiples were able to offer their clientele good
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quality groceries at affordable and fixed prices. Because of the advantages of scale,
multiples appeared and flourished particularly in big cities (for example, the Great
Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) in New York [1860s], Félix Potin in Paris
[1860s], or Sainsbury’s in London [1869]), but also settled in expanding working- and
middle-class towns (for example, Casino in Saint-Etienne [1890s]). The mere nature
of this retailing system implied the widespread diffusion of outlets, and by 1900
multiple stores had opened in many suburbs, towns, and villages. Delhaize, based in
Brussels since 1871, shows an extreme example of this, with 770 outlets throughout
the country by 1914, also in tiny, remote villages with barely a hundred inhabitants (
Van den Eeckhout and Scholliers 2011 ). These rural stores supplied the same goods
as the big shops of the Brussels conurbation (food could be ordered from the
catalog), thus diffusing fancy goods nationwide. In the United States, chain
companies grew steadily prior to 1914, but expanded particularly in the interwar
period, with 7,700 outlets in 1920, but 30,450 in 1930, to be found in city centers
and suburbs ( Mayo 1993).
While there is hardly any doubt that there was a causal relation between the
expansion of multiple grocers since the 1880s and rising purchasing power, there is
little information on these multiples’ overall clientele (marketing inquiries hardly
existed, and one has to make do with indirect evidence, such as the type of
advertisements or the range of goods for sale). Undoubtedly, the clientele varied
according to place and time. Before the First World War, British food multiples
allegedly catered mainly to the urban working classes, and they did so with a limited
range of products and a minimum of cost and service. In the interwar period, the
layout of the multiples’ shops, the display of products, and the service to the
clientele improved, while the product range was diversified. The emphasis of
competition began to shift from price to service, and they no longer solely served
the working classes but also the middle classes in large towns and cities. However,
the Belgian Delhaize seems to have had that profile since the early years of its
existence. A quickly growing product range (+ 5.5 percent per year between 1890
and 1910, including luxury goods such as champagne or canned salmon), the
emphasis on courtesy toward the clientele, the layout of the shops, the design of
advertisements, the possibility of home delivery and of selective credit facilities
suggest a chain store with an urban middle-class clientele. Yet Delhaize had settled
in industrial regions and rural villages too, and it proposed ranges of goods at low
prices: this multiple aimed at all consumer segments (Van den Eeckhout and
Scholliers 2011).
By 1890, multiples colored the streetscape of cities. The first shops had open
windows and outside stalls, thus replicating the old market booth, as was the case
with Sainsbury’s in London around 1875 ( Williams 1994: 18). Especially after the
Great War, however, shops were given a recognizable look with logos, exclusive
colors, emblems, and architecture (Mayo 1993: 80–82). The latter refers in particular
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to large display windows where foodstuffs were neatly piled and nicely presented
(amid advertisements, photographs, and other ornaments), which was planned by
the central management to create a distinguishable image (Teughels 2010). Some
multiples established flagship stores in mercantile districts of cities, like Selfridges in

London’s Oxford Street (1909) or Albert Heijn’s lunchroom in Amsterdam’s
Kalverstraat (1929), thus enhancing the district’s commercial image. Another feature
of these multiples was the insistent advertisements (in shops as well as newspapers),
not only for the products for sale, but also for the proper image of the shop that
became a brand in its own right. The latter was certainly the case with department
stores that not only sold food but also clothing, furniture, tableware, toys, and so
forth. An example is Chicago’s Marshal Field’s (1852), which sold luxury food and
started to open branches throughout the United States in the 1920s. A European
example would be Germany’s Kaufhaus Tietz, with branches in Weimar (1886),
Munich (1889), Hamburg (1896), and Berlin (1900), and which bought the Kaufhaus
des Westen (or KaDeWe) in the 1920s, today still a genuine flagship store that sells a
huge range of exclusive food. Investigating the development of this range would hit
the essence of the history of consumption.
In 1916, the first American self-service store (Piggly Wiggly) opened in Memphis,
Tennessee, which by 1932 had 2,660 outlets ( Deutsch 2010 : 53). The food-retailing
sector was the first to adopt self-service (see also Hallsworth, Chapter 15 , this
volume). The late 1920s and early 1930s witnessed the introduction of another
American innovation: supermarkets. These combined self-service with a minimum
sales volume or a minimum sales area (how big a self-service outlet had to be to be
called a supermarket differed through time and space) (Mayo 1993). In Europe, self-
service was introduced in the 1940s and the supermarket in the 1950s. While
supermarkets appeared in America’s suburbs where they could be reached by car, in
Europe they settled in the center of cities and towns because there far fewer cars
were in use in the 1950s and 1960s. In West Germany, for example, the supermarket
was a genuine urban phenomenon (seventy-six percent of them were situated in
cities with more than one hundred thousand inhabitants), with West Berlin having
seven percent of all West German supermarkets in 1962 (Lummel 2007). In London,
the cooperative movement pioneered self-service with the opening of such a store in
1942, and in Edinburgh the Co-op opened the first supermarket in 1959. In Paris, an
independent retailer opened the first supermarket in 1957, and in Brussels the
multiple Delhaize launched the first supermarket in 1957. Growth was sudden: in the
United Kingdom, for example, there were 50 supermarkets in 1950, 572 in 1961, and
3,400 in 1969 ( Alexander et al. 2009 ; Lescent-Gilles 2005). If initially the European
supermarket was a thoroughly urban affair, the success of the automobile and the
expanding scale of supermarkets (with the mammoth hypermarché in France as an
ultimate stage) pushed these retailers to the outskirts of towns ( Villermet 1991).
A broad range of factors should be taken into account to explain the diverging
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itineraries of self-service outlets and supermarkets: purchasing power, further

urbanization, labor-market participation of women, planning regulations, legislation
restricting large-scale retailing, diverging shopping habits (e.g., the perception of
supermarkets as providers of merely prepackaged food versus supermarkets also

selling fresh meat, fruit, vegetables, and bread), public and private transport
facilities, and so forth. In the 1950s, the promotion of self-service and supermarkets
in Europe was also part of an ideological war, disseminating the American way of life
and American retail formats ( De Grazia 2005 ). Numerous pilgrimages of European
retailers and other experts to the United States, sponsored, for example, by the
European Recovery Program, but also organized by producers of shop-fitting
equipment such as the cash register company NCRC, had to convert Europeans to
adopt American business practices (De Grazia 1998). Impressed by what they had
seen in the United States, quite a few European retailers were nonetheless skeptical
of European customers’ reception of these new shopping habits. The retail trade
press, exhibitions, and even a touring bus organized as a self-service shop were
important channels in the diffusion of the principles, practices, and know-how of self-
service and the supermarket.
One of the reasons that may explain European retailers’ reluctance to adopt self-
service is their expectation that customers would react negatively to finding that
they had to “serve themselves.” While working-class customers allegedly
appreciated the informality and the freedom to browse without buying, the middle-
class clientele was less charmed by this novelty. Retailers also feared shoplifting and
the substantial investment needed to convert their shop into a self-service outlet.
Supermarkets, in their turn, were perceived as inappropriate for the European way of
life, since European families had less purchasing power, fewer refrigerators, and
fewer cars than their counterparts in the United States ( Daumas 2006 ; Humphery
1998).
The retailing revolution of the last quarter of the nineteenth century was not only
accomplished by cities’ multiple stores, but also by consumer cooperatives. In
contrast to multiples that settled in commercial hubs of cities and large towns,
cooperative retailers were most successful in towns with a strong working-class
presence. So, co-ops barely appeared in Paris, London, or Berlin, but were quite
successful in Basle, Ghent, Leipzig, and Lille ( Purvis 1998), particularly in the
industrial suburbs of these towns. After the Great War, cooperative food stores
spread to small towns and villages too. There, modest grocery shops, with hardly any
allure, flourished, and, just like the multiples, supplied foodstuffs that, before 1900,
were almost inaccessible to rural households. Also like the multiples, cooperative
food retailers exploited economies of scale by multiplying outlets, centralizing
wholesale operations, and realizing a vertical integration of producing and selling. In
contrast with the multiples, however, cooperatives returned a share of their profit as
a dividend to their customers/members, in proportion to the goods they had
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purchased. Consumer cooperatives focused on selling their members, predominantly

townspeople, unadulterated and good quality bread, meat, dairy products, and
groceries at a fair price, but they were also known for their critical attitude toward
the temptations of consumerism and the creation of “false needs.” Cooperatives’

organizational and ideological development and the economic alternatives they
sought to promote have attracted historians’ attention rather than their day-to-day
activities as grocers. Consumer cooperatives’ relation to publicity could prove an
interesting line of investigation. Schwarzkopf found that in contrast to their
reputation, the British consumer cooperatives did not shun publicity; quite the
contrary, they appeared to be “at the forefront of a number of mid twentieth-century
innovations in marketing,” while their “advertisements between 1900 and 1940 were
at the vanguard of their time as regards design and the use of photographs and
colour” (Schwarzkopf 2009: 212, 214).
Eating Out[5]
Eighteenth-century luxury eating was a private affair. The rich and famous invited
guests to their mansions and offered food prepared by full-time employed or
temporally hired cooks, unless cook shops (traiteurs) delivered the food ( Kümin
2012). Urban-based guilds organized cooks, caterers, and other staff, but by 1800
these associations no longer existed. The job of traiteur for the wealthy lasted from
the nineteenth century until today. Yet around 1800 fancy dining became “public,”
which drastically and permanently changed the way rich (and, later, all) people ate
(see Julier, Chapter 19, this volume).
This is the history of the modern restaurant, an eminently urban place that, most
particularly, was linked to the “city of cities,” Paris. It may be defined as “a place
where food is sold, served and eaten in public without its patrons having to interact
with each other, and where a menu with fixed prices offers them a choice of dishes,
albeit where not eating is not an acceptable option” ( Van den Eeckhout 2012b ).
This history is known (Pitte 1991; Shore 2007 ; Spang 2000; Trubek 2000 ). Three
players concurred in Paris in the 1780s and 1790s: cooks, diners, and writers, who
created the modern restaurant (Scholliers 2011). Parisian caterers were mingled in a
competitive struggle and tried to shape a market niche. Some of them combined
commercial catering (their usual business) with serving cooked food in public (an
innovation), calling themselves “restaurateurs.” A few opened sumptuous places and
served varied and increasingly refined dishes that corresponded to current norms of
fancy eating, but soon they made the norms (which were put down in cookery
books). Innovations included the menu card (implying a wide choice and individual
meals and containing prices), flexible opening times, the paying of the bill after the
meal, supplying select drinks, and offering private tables (Trubek 2000 ). The
clientele consisted of old and new rich people, wishing to see and to be seen in
places that mattered. The new restaurants allowed for emphasizing, in crude or
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subtle ways, ambitions and successes in public. Moreover, luxurious eating was
highly enjoyed, and the cost seemed hardly to have mattered. Culinary critics
advised diners, A. Grimod de la Reynière being the archetype who published the
Almanach des gourmands from 1803 to 1812, judging the price, quality, freshness,
decorum, and patrons of Parisian restaurants ( Bonnet 1986; Ory 1998 ).
These restaurants were imitated in every European town throughout the nineteenth
century, particularly with the coming of the so-called grand hotel in the 1870s. How
this process of geographical dispersal exactly occurred is in need of attention. The
fact that French cooks started work in eating places in Berlin, Madrid, or Moscow is
only part of the story (the study of the labor market of restaurant staff has just
begun). Alongside cooks and waiters, an extensive group of wealthy diners, who
enjoyed the new fashion of public eating, had to be present. Also, local culinary
critics, who understood the new fancy eating codes, had to be writing about where
to dine (see Scholliers 2004, for the example of restaurants in Brussels in the second
half of the nineteenth century). Hence, studying the geographical dispersion of the
restaurant requires attention to cooks, diners, and writers in various places (that are
part of larger networks). As a general rule, prosperous cities with wide international
appeal had modern restaurants quite soon, but from the last quarter of the
nineteenth century most European towns had a restaurant culture, which means they
had well-established restaurants that adapted particular norms, a rather steadfast
clientele that knew the codes of conduct, a labor market for cooks and waiters, and
various guides to rank quality and prices (see Drummer 1997, for the example of
Frankfurt). This type of elite eating place flourished throughout the twentieth
century, frequently reinventing itself on the waves of general economic performance
and continuously adapting to new organizational forms (for the latter, see Ganter
2004 ). So around 1890 the new-type cuisine of Escoffier replaced the highly
structured cooking of Carême’s 1800 cooking; Bocuse’s nouvelle cuisine of the 1960s
abandoned Escoffier’s conventions; and Adrià’s molecular cooking of the 1990s
challenged Bocuse’s way of working. Each of these culinary innovations implied
changes about style (e.g., Ferguson [2012] stresses the recent informalization).
Initially, these reinventions were radically urban (Carême in Paris and Escoffier in
London), but Bocuse and Adrià worked in smaller boroughs (Collonges and Rosas,
albeit with one foot in Lyons and Barcelona, and both situated on highly frequented
tourist roads). The global diffusion of all types of restaurants in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries needs to be studied in terms of cuisine, culture, and urbanity (
Ray 2012 ).
People have always traveled for widely diverse reasons, and thus needed to eat
away from home. The success of the modern restaurant is partly due to the many
wealthy visitors to cities, who were advised, for example, by Bädeker travelers’
guides since 1828. These guides also mentioned humbler eating places that served
decent food at a fair price. In larger cities, there were countless possibilities to eat
12 of 15 1/2/23, 4:14 PM
out at cheap inns or estaminets. The rapid expansion of the railways, linking cities
and erecting superb termini, created new forms of sophisticated eating out (as the
Buffet de la Gare de Lyon in Paris [1905] or the Oyster Bar of Grand Central Terminal
in New York [1913]), although railroad eateries were commonly rather plain ( Gerbod
2000). Modest eateries went through rapid transformation after 1850. To various
degrees, luxurious restaurants influenced these places (décor, dishes, presentation,
hygiene, terminology), so much so that restaurant guides upgraded them and began
a rating system (e.g., the Michelin guide, launched in 1900 at the occasion of the
Paris World Fair). Around 1900, foreign restaurants (today’s ethnic restaurants) were
set up, which flourished in the last quarter of the twentieth century, first attracting
the migrant community and, in a few cases, ex-colonials, then young people, and
finally, but half-heartedly for long, a wide group of diners (Buettner 2008). All this
coincided with the emergence of tourism that fascinated wealthy as well as more
modest travelers. A particular attraction for mass tourism was the frequent
organization of world fairs—downright urban phenomena—where food took a
prominent role in forging cities’ reputations, as shown by the example of the
Swedish participation in these fairs between 1867 and 2005 ( Tellstrom, Gustafsson,
and Lindgren 2008 ). Restaurants that offer plain food have benefited twice from the
special attention of gourmets: first, around 1900, as offering local cuisine, then,
around 1990, as serving traditional food (which was local as well as “ethnic”). Hence,
plain restaurants made their way into present-day gastronomic eating.
Tourists of modest means search(ed) for good food at reasonable cost, and could
make use of the many eateries for urban workers. Such “necessity eating out” has
existed for a long time, and offered a wide variety of food of diverse price and
quality to people who worked away from home or who had no cooking utensils in
their homes. Bread, cheese, cold meats, or soup were sold in the streets or in very
simple eateries ( Kümin 2012). The selling of plain food expanded largely in the
nineteenth century. In 1850, for example, about 41,000 street sellers were active in
London, vending soup, fried fish, baked potatoes, sandwiches, pies, puddings, tarts
and cakes, muffins and crumpets, and drinks (Burnett 2003). In Paris and other cities,
cheap food could also be bought in the street (sold by women with “portable
stoves”), particularly in eateries of very different types and price categories
(cabarets, wine shops, estaminets, or traiteurs), and, for example, at La Californie
(1860s), which claimed to provide 3,000 meals per day in the self-service manner,
with waiters serving wine and cleaning up the tables (Lhuissier 2007). This world of
street merchants and shabby eating places is in need of attention.
The expansion of factories, services, and administration led to various new forms of
eating out. Big firms established canteens for their employees, selling plain and
relatively cheap food and (nonalcoholic) drinks. Initially, this was not very successful
(because of distrust by employees and still too high prices), but later these factory
canteens became quite popular ( Thoms 2003 ). Another institutional innovation
13 of 15 1/2/23, 4:14 PM
consisted of school cafeterias. Both new forms cared greatly about cost and health.
Yet another innovation consisted of the establishment of efficient, small eateries that
were thoroughly urban: the modern snack bar. In the United States, coffee and tea
bars like the Harvey House were set up in the 1860s, selling sandwiches and full
meals (Shore 2007). In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, such eateries
appeared in European cities, as illustrated by the London-based “food multiples” or
chain restaurants, Lyons and Aerated Bread Company (ABC) ( Shaw, Curth, and
Alexander 2006 ). More chain restaurants appeared in the twentieth century, such as
McDonald’s, which served standard meals and gave way to debate about foodways
and culture in general ( Oddy 2003). Alongside big chains, a multitude of small,
independent caterers appeared in every city (illustrated for Amsterdam in the
twentieth century by Albert de la Bruhèze and Van Otterloo 2003). By 1940,
teahouses, kiosks, automats, milk bars, lunchrooms, and cooperative eateries were
well established in the city, offering various sorts of food to wage earners, shoppers,
merrymakers, students, or travelers. Recently, this urban phenomenon was brought
to smaller towns and villages in the world’s four corners.
Conclusion
Cities transformed the way people thought about food, shopped for food, obtained
food, prepared food, and ate food. In the light of present-day unceasing
urbanization, this will go on well into the twenty-first century. “Cities” cannot be
conceived as an abstract agent, but should be seen as places of creativity,
experiment, investments, status building, social and cultural differentiation, conflicts,
anxiety, policy, and, especially, as ever-changing “voracious beasts.” The
combination of these factors leads to the point that almost every city has a specific
relationship with food. This may be the result of marketing strategies, but it also is
the outcome of historical processes, in which townspeople appropriate ingredients
and skills from nearby and distant shores to convert and upgrade these and give
them new significance. In doing so, each city created, and was certainly given, a
culinary reputation, whether this was good, mediocre, or bad ( Murdock 2011 ).
This chapter has listed various themes in need of attention, among which are the city
and manufacturing and transformation of food, the city as place of cultural
innovation and pleasure, the city and food labeling, urban food policies, the city and
the role of retailing, urban social and cultural inequality, and the just-mentioned
culinary reputations of a city. With regard to the latter, a brief discussion on the
Internet in early 2012 showed the relevance of this matter:[6] who created a city’s
culinary reputation, when was this done, which media or events (e.g., awards or fairs)
were involved, how did it develop, which elements were implied (manufacturers,
restaurants, patisseries, marketing), and, the most troubling question, what is the link
between reality and representation? Perhaps most of the aforementioned themes
may be seized by focusing on urban food monographs or a city’s food chain, which
14 of 15 1/2/23, 4:14 PM
involves research into production, manufacturing, trading, marketing, preparing,

consumption, and significance of food. Of even more relevance may be the
comparison between two (or more) cities regarding one of the elements of the urban
food chain. Imagine studying the development of street vending of food in Berlin,
Mexico City, and Kolkata: no doubt, such would advance our knowledge of the
urban social fabric as well as offer theoretical insights.
[1] Thecolloquium was organized by the International Commission for the Research
into European Food History (ICREFH, www.vub.ac.be/SGES/ICREFH.html ) that had
previously paid attention to the relationship between countryside and city (Hietala
and Vahtikari 2003).
[2] Using
food consumption as a proxy for standard of living in England was initiated
by Hobsbawm in 1957 and disputed by Hartwell a couple of years later; most of the
debate, however, was concerned with the development of real wages (purchasing
power).
[3] Seethe Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) that legally protects the name
and composition of, for example, oil from Jaén (Spain), Rillettes de Tours (France), or
Düsseldorfer Mostert (Germany); see “Geographical Indications and Traditional

Specialities,” Agricultural and Rural Development of the European Commission,
http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/quality/schemes/index_en.htm . Accessed
September 12, 2011.
[4] For
a literature survey on this theme, see Van den Eeckhout (2012a) , from which a
few parts are used in the present chapter.
[5] Fora general introduction, see Scholliers (2012) and Ferguson (2012) ; for the
historiography on restaurants, see Van den Eeckhout (2012b).
[6] “Discussion:
Culinary Reputations,” Association for the Study of Food and Society,
http://groups.google.com/group/food-culture/browse_thread/thread
/b4c270ca02c90a23#/ . Accessed March 4, 2012.
15 of 15 1/2/23, 4:14 PM

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Feeding Growing Cities in the Nineteenth

and Twentieth Centuries: Problems,

twentieth centuries will be taken as the prototype of modern urbanization, although

At the Crossroad of Urban History and Food History

Growing Cities and Urban Food Policies

grew in the twentieth century, became nationwide.

manufacturing, commerce, marketing, and consumption: cities have always

downturn (for example, 1853–1854) initiated inquiries and observations. These

municipal laboratories continued playing their role. By then, chemical laboratories,

Another action by municipal governments consisted of increasing the regulation of

Mass and Elite Food Retailing[4]

vegetables, fruit, and dairy products at public markets, groceries in specialized

multiples established flagship stores in mercantile districts of cities, like Selfridges in

itineraries of self-service outlets and supermarkets: purchasing power, further

supermarkets as providers of merely prepackaged food versus supermarkets also

purchased. Consumer cooperatives focused on selling their members, predominantly

the temptations of consumerism and the creation of “false needs.” Cooperatives’

plain restaurants made their way into present-day gastronomic eating.

involves research into production, manufacturing, trading, marketing, preparing,

Düsseldorfer Mostert (Germany); see “Geographical Indications and Traditional

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