Reading notes: Food Processing and the Growth of Cities

Rachel Lauden a historian who has a wonderful blog about the history and politics of food, recently had a great post  ( with wonderful vintage photographs of cod and pasta drying, well worth a look) wondering aloud about the amount of space that traditional food processing takes and how this may have impacted the growth of cities.

"I’m toying with the idea that one factor contributing to the growth of cities was the development of space-saving methods of processing foods, such as commercial drying facilities for pasta.

In early days (ancient Rome, for example) this commercial milling and baking would have dramatically reduced the space needed to produce daily bread. In the Industrial Revolution, steel roller mills, huge bakeries, vacuum pans for evaporating liquids, and so on would similarly have made operations more compact."