Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Steven Kaplan is writing about how Paris is fed. He is interested in the supply of grain to Paris in the period just before the French Revolution and spends a great deal of time on how in Paris the king was known as the ‘baker of last resort’. In the minds of the people he was responsible for feeding the city. This put the king in a very difficult position: the problem is not only whether you can grow enough food, but also whether you can transport it and so on.
Next book, Provisioning Paris. Is it a similar exercise?
Yes and no. Provisioning Paris is a book as long as The Lord of the Rings – it’s over 1000 pages long. Similarly to The Food of London Steven Kaplan is writing about how Paris is fed. However, Provisioning Paris has a sharper focus: he is interested in the supply of grain to Paris in the period just before the French Revolution. I found that Paris makes an interesting contrast to London. For example, the London of George Dodd’s time finds it much easier to feed itself than Paris: London is on a navigable river, which made international trade much easier, and it was also the capital of an empire. Paris, in contrast, is about 170 miles from the sea, which limits the scale of importation.
What is the most interesting thing you learnt from the book?
Steven Kaplan spends a great deal of time on how in Paris, the king was known as the ‘baker of last resort’. In the minds of the people he was responsible for feeding the city. This put the king in a very difficult position: the problem is not only whether you can grow enough food, but also whether you can transport it and so on. This pressure crippled the city: Paris had this enormous ‘grain police’, made up of thousands of officials whose job it was to make sure that all the surrounding countryside was only growing grain for the city. As roughly one harvest in every three failed, this meant that the countryside didn’t have enough grain to feed the city, and the king, ‘the baker of last resort’, was forced to go further afield. When the city imposed, with force, this demand on the wider countryside, it caused huge physical and social tensions.
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Carolyn Steel is an architect, writer, lecturer, and director of Kilburn Nightingale Architects. She has taught at London Metropolitan University, at the London School of Economics where she was inaugural studio director of the Cities programme, and at Cambridge where she ran her own lecture series on Food and the City. Her book, Hungry City, which won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, examines the relationship between food and the city.
