An Edible History of Humanity (17 page)

In 1795, in an effort to improve the diets of soldiers and sailors during military campaigns, the French government offered
a prize to anyone who could develop a new way to preserve food. The rules stipulated that the resulting food should be cheap
to produce, easy to transport, and better tasting and more nutritious than food preserved using existing techniques. Salting,
drying, and smoking had all been used to preserve foodstuffs for centuries, but all of them affected the taste of food and
failed to preserve many of its nutrients. Experiments to find better ways to preserve food had been going on since the seventeenth
century, when scientists had begun to take an interest in the process of decomposition and, by extension, how it could be
prevented.

Robert Boyle, an Irish scientist known as the “Father of Chemistry,” developed a vacuum pump and made many discoveries with
it, showing for example that the sound of a ringing bell inside a sealed jar diminished in volume as the air was pumped out.
Boyle also speculated that the decomposition of food was dependent on the presence of air, and he tried preserving food by
storing it in evacuated jars. But he eventually concluded that contact with air was not the sole cause of decomposition. Denis
Papin, a French physicist, extended Boyle’s work by sealing food in evacuated bottles and then heating them. This seemed to
work much better, though the food still spoiled sometimes. From time to time Papin would present his preserved food to other
scientists at meetings of the Royal Society in London. In 1687 they reported that he had preserved “great quantities” of fruit:
“He shuts up the Fruits in Glass Vessels exhausted of the Air, and then puts the Vessel thus exhausted in hot Water, and lets
it stand there for some while; and that is enough to keep the Fruit from the Fermentation, which would otherwise undoubtedly
happen.”

At the time the mechanism of decomposition was not understood, though many people subscribed to the theory of “spontaneous
generation,” an idea going back to the Greeks which held that maggots were somehow generated from decomposing meat, mice from
rotting piles of grain, and so on. Despite the experimental work of Boyle, Pa-pin, and others, the problem of food preservation
remained unsolved. The various preservation techniques developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were both
expensive and unreliable. Nobody managed to improve upon the traditional military rations of salted meat and dry biscuits,
which explains the conditions attached to the French prize in 1795.

The man who eventually claimed the prize was not a scientist but a cook. Nicolas Appert was born in Châlons-sur-Marne, on
the edge of France’s Champagne region, in 1749. His father was a hotelier, and he became an accomplished chef, serving in
the kitchens of various noblemen before setting up as a confectioner in Paris in 1781. In this line of work he was necessarily
aware of the use of sugar to preserve fruit, and he wondered whether it could be used to preserve other foods. As his interest
in food preservation grew he began to experiment with storing food in sealed champagne bottles. In 1795 he moved to the village
of Ivry-sur-Seine, where he began to offer preserved foods for sale, and in 1804 he set up a small factory. By this time some
of his preserved food had been tested by the French navy, which was impressed by its quality. “The broth in bottles was good,
the broth with boiled beef in another bottle very good as well, but a little weak; the beef itself was very edible,” its report
concluded. “The beans and green peas, both with and without meat, have all the freshness and flavor of freshly picked vegetables.”

Appert later described his method as follows. “First, enclose the substances you wish to preserve in bottles or jars; second,
close the openings of your vessels with the greatest care, for success depends principally on the seal; third, submit the
substances, thus enclosed, to the action of boiling water in a bain-marie . . . fourth, remove the bottles from the bain-marie
at the appropriate time.” He listed the times necessary to boil different foods, typically several hours. Appert was not familiar
with the earlier work of Boyle, Papin, and others; he had devised his method solely by experiment and had no idea why it worked.
It was not until the 1860s that Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, finally determined that decomposition was caused by microbes
that could be killed by applying heat. That is why Papin’s technique, which involved heating, had worked; but most of the
time he had not heated his food samples enough to kill off the microbes. Appert’s long process of trial and error had revealed
that heat had to be applied for several hours in most cases, and that some foods needed to be heated for longer than others.
“The application of fire in a manner variously adapted to various substances, after having with the utmost care and as completely
as possible, deprived them of all contact with the air, effects a perfect preservation of those same productions, with all
their natural qualities,” he concluded.

Within three months of his book’s publication, however, a businessman in London, Peter Durand, had been granted an English
patent for a preservation technique that was essentially identical to Appert’s. Durand sold the patent to an engineer named
Bryan Donkin for one thousand pounds, and Donkin set up a company in conjunction with two partners involved in an iron works.
Instead of preserving food in bottles, Donkin’s firm used canisters made of tin-coated iron, known today as tin cans. Durand
admitted that the technique was “an invention communicated to me by a certain foreigner,” and it has long been assumed that
he simply stole Appert’s idea. More recent research has indicated, however, that Durand may in fact have been acting on Appert’s
behalf in England, and arranged to patent his invention and sell the rights. Appert even visited London in 1814, probably
to collect his share of the proceeds from Durand. By this time the Royal Navy had tested the new canned food, and samples
had even been presented to the royal family. But Appert came away from London empty-handed. His English partners appear to
have cut him out of the deal; he could hardly expose them, since he had been trying to profit by selling his invention to
an enemy nation.

Appert concentrated instead on refining his process and supplying the French army and navy. He embraced the use of tin cans
for military supplies, but he continued to sell food in glass bottles to civilian customers. One French explorer, who took
Appert’s canned food on a three-year voyage, declared that the invention had “completely resolved the problem of feeding sailors.”
Canned food had obvious military advantages. It allowed large numbers of rations to be prepared and stockpiled in advance,
stored for long periods, and transported to combatants without the risk of spoiling. Canning could smooth over seasonal variations
in the availability of food, allowing campaigns to continue through the winter. The new technology was adopted very quickly:
Some of the soldiers on the battlefield at Waterloo in 1815, the scene of Napoleon’s final defeat, carried canned rations.
Canned meat fed English and French troops in the Crimean War, and tinned meat, milk, and vegetables were supplied to Union
soldiers in the American Civil War. Soldiers have carried canned rations of various kinds ever since. The early cans had to
be opened with a hammer and chisel, or using a bayonet. The first can openers appeared only in the 1860s, when canned food
started to become popular among civilians.

As far as the civilian population was concerned, canned food was still a novelty or luxury item. At the Great Exhibition in
London in 1851, the company founded by Bryan Donkin some four decades earlier displayed “canisters of preserved fresh beef,
mutton and veal; of fresh milk, cream and custards; of fresh carrots, green peas, turnips, beetroots, stewed mushrooms and
other vegetables; of fresh salmon, codfish, oysters, haddock and other fish . . . Preserved hams for use in India, China,
etc . . . all preserved by the same process . . . The whole preserved so as to keep in any climate, and for an unlimited length
of time.” Expensive preserved foods, including truffles and artichokes, were also exhibited by Appert’s company, now run by
his nephew.

But canned foods did not remain luxuries for much longer. Strong military demand prompted inventors to devise new machinery
to automate the process of sealing cans, and it was found that adding calcium chloride to the water in which they were treated
raised its boiling point and reduced the boiling time required. As volumes increased and prices fell, canned food became more
widely affordable. In America, the production of canned food went from five million cans a year to thirty million between
1860 and 1870; in Britain, an outbreak of cattle disease in the 1860s prompted people to turn to canned meat from Australia
and South America. Appert died in 1841 at the age of ninety-one, but his method of preserving food, heat-treated in a sealed
container, and inspired by the supply difficulties of the French Revolutionary army, is still in use today.

Canned food was one of two inventions that transformed military logistics during the nineteenth century. The second was mechanized
transport, in the form of the railway and the steam locomotive, which could move troops, food, and ammunition from one place
to another at unprecedented speed. This meant an army could be resupplied easily—provided it did not stray far from a railway
line. The impact of this new development became apparent during the American Civil War, a transitional conflict in which old
and new approaches to logistics appeared side by side.

When the war began in 1861 there were thirty thousand miles of railway track in America, more than in the rest of the world
combined. More than two thirds of this track was in the more industrialized northern states of the Union, giving the North
a clear advantage in supplying its troops. The Union’s strategy was to blockade the breakaway southern states of the Confederacy
in an effort to cause food shortages and economic collapse. A blockade of southern ports was imposed in 1861, and the Union
then set about seizing control of the Mississippi River and disrupting the southern rail networks, in order to hinder the
distribution of food and supplies. Between 1861 and 1863 the prices of some basic foodstuffs increased sevenfold, causing
riots in several southern cities in which angry mobs attacked grocery stores and warehouses. With many basic foodstuffs unavailable,
various ingenious substitutes were devised, and both soldiers and civilians resorted to eating anything they could lay their
hands on. One Confederate soldier wrote to his wife in 1862: “We have lived some days on raw, baked and roasted apples, sometimes
on green corn and sometimes nothing.”

By the time Ulysses S. Grant was put in charge of all Union forces in 1864, the Confederacy had suffered several significant
defeats and the blockade was causing severe food shortages. Grant devised a two-pronged plan to end the war: a large Union
force would take on the main Confederate army commanded by Robert E. Lee, and smaller Union forces would meanwhile undermine
morale in the South by attacking agricultural regions and cutting railway links to further aggravate the shortages. Accordingly,
Union forces attacked the agriculturally rich Shenandoah Valley, an important source of supplies to the Confederate forces,
and conducted a scorched-earth campaign, destroying crops, barns, and mills. But it is the campaigns undertaken by William
Sherman in Georgia and the Carolinas that highlight how much the field of military logistics had changed—and how much it had
not.

Sherman was under instructions from Grant “to get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all
the damage you can against their war resources.” After stockpiling supplies in Nashville, Tennessee, Sherman began the march
south toward Atlanta, Georgia, in May 1864, following the line of the railway so that food, fodder, and ammunition could be
delivered to his army by train. Special teams of engineers repaired the track as the retreating Confederate army attempted
to sabotage it. As he moved south through Georgia, Sherman established new bases in Marietta and Allatoona, supplied by railway
from Nashville which lay farther up the the line. In July he informed Grant that “we have been wonderfully supplied in provisions
and ammunition; not a day has a regiment been without bread and essentials. Forage has been the hardest, and we have cleaned
the country in a breadth of thirty miles of grain and grass. Now the corn is getting a size which makes a good fodder, and
the railroad has brought us grain to the extent of four pounds per animal per day.”

The age-old difficulty of finding enough fodder for animals remained, but when it came to food and ammunition, Sherman’s army
was exploiting a state-of-the-art logistics system. Delivering supplies from the rear by rail was a far faster and more reliable
alternative to the supply wagons, shuttling between the army and its nearest supply depot, that soldiers had depended on for
centuries. Sherman’s men only needed to carry a few days’ worth of supplies to sustain them between rail deliveries. The rail
link also meant that ammunition could be delivered in large quantities; Sherman’s army was consuming hundreds of thousands
of rounds per day as it fought its way toward Atlanta. Military logistics was starting to shift toward providing supplies
for machines, rather than for men and animals.