Stopping good food going to waste
LEFTOVERS A history of food waste and preservation
ELEANOR BARNETT 352pp. Apollo. £27.99.
TINNED MEAT IS MIRACULOUS. Before canning was invented, the food options available to sailors on long journeys used to be few and horrible: ship’s biscuits, limited vegetables, a dried, jellified soup. Whatever meat was available was preserved in so much salt that sailors would drag it through seawater in a bid to desalinate it. But with the arrival of canning in the 1810s – the result of both French and British innovations – food stuffs could suddenly be kept for tremendous new durations without changing consistency or rotting. In the 1820s, a Captain William Parry was travelling on a mission through the Arctic with a number of tins of preserved food. With his ship damaged, and needing to transfer to a new vessel, he was forced to abandon them on the nearby shore. Four years later, Sir John Ross, charting a similar icy path, passed those same cans and discovered the contents were still just as edible as the day they’d been sealed. Indeed, a fourpound tin of roast veal from one of Parry’s earlier missions ended up over a century later, unopened, in a museum. 118 years after his voyage, curious scientists decided the time had finally arrived to crack it open. It was still preserved, and eaten by one grateful cat and ten lab rats.
The invention of the tin can is just one step in the centuries-long mission to stop good food going to waste. It is a story of vinegars and jams and e-numbers and freezers, and Eleanor Barnett tells it well in her engaging new book, Leftovers. The book is structured roughly chronologically, beginning with the Tudors. The Tudor kings, as Barnett writes, “delighted in culinary burlesque: Henry VIII commissioned a sugar sculpture of a dungeon on a lake with swans; his leading statesman Thomas Wolsey created an entire sugar chessboard complete with moving pieces”. For others, however, this was a time of food scarcity, and for many households a period of experimentation with salting and pickling.
We move from there on to the challenges of raising, slaughtering and consuming animals in the early modern city, and the filth and disease that accompanied them. We read of the Victorian love of thrift, as characterized by Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, and the emergence of the rag-and-bottle shops in which “piles of rags, wastepaper and books, old clothes, broken saucepans, sacks of bones, tubs of kitchen grease and rows of dusty bottles” were gathered to be resold, and then of the pressures on national food supplies that accompanied the First and Second World Wars. After that, things get a lot more familiar: the rise of globalized food supply chains, the horrifying growth of sing
