Season 2, Episode 4: Carbs, Carbs, & More Carbs
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
On Today’s Episode:
People have been milling flour and baking bread variations for literally millennia. The Erie Canal has been moving wheat since day one. And yet, a few miles from the canal and it was almost impossible to find local wheat on my little food journey.
In this episode of Was Is Could Be: Some history on the industrialization of flour.
With Special Guests:
Michael J. Lansing is Associate Professor of History at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN. A historian of the modern United States, his current book project is Enriched: Industrial Carbohydrates and the Rise of Nutrition Capitalism—a history of factory-processed grains and the hidden logic that drives contemporary food systems. He is the author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as well as commentaries in MinnPost, BillMoyers.com, and Zócalo Public Square.
Derrick Pratt is the Museum Educator and Interim Curator at the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, NY. A native of Chittenango, NY, Derrick received a B.A in Social Studies Education from SUNY Cortland and a M.A. in Museum Studies from Syracuse University. Prior to his job at the Erie Canal Museum, Derrick served as Director of Programs at Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum for 3 years. Check out the Erie Eats Exhibit at the Erie Canal Museum.
The Was Is Could Be podcast is produced by Liz Russell at To Eat and To Love, LLC. Each episode is carefully edited by Joshua Rivers of Podcast Guy Media, LLC. Our theme music is made by Neil Cross and published by ImageCollect Publishing.
Want more? Follow the Was Is Could Be podcast on Instagram and Facebook.
For advertising or guest appearances, check out the media kit.
Liz Russell Narration:
The decision to move came on rapidly. My research about how to grow perfect tomatoes and the enjoyment of our meat was leading us to wonder what if we dove in more? What if we got some land and had a big garden and a huge chicken coop? We needed a place with a lot of sunshine and fewer black walnuts. We had agreed that we'd outgrown our two village house. Even though it was only the two of us, I worked from home and needed a home office, and I had enough hobbies to fill five rooms alone. Plus, we wanted a place for a workshop and to keep our canoe and our outdoor gear. So we jumped in. A few houses came and went. And before we knew it, we owned just shy of four acres, one county over surrounded by farms and farmers. All of whom had earned their name. We closed in August mid pandemic, and we wouldn't meet our neighbors for another 10 months.
[🎶Theme music🎶]
Liz Russell Narration:
The only thing left to do is finish out the dream: create a farm and eat as locally as possible. A month into our move, we were canning all of the apples from the trees on the property and planning out our vegetable garden for even more canning next year. We doubled down on our meat order, finding a farm literally a block away to source our beef and our pork. And in the next town over, we found chickens. Out of Michael Lansing's lists, we were doing pretty well. There was only one item left we hadn't even thought about.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
So this third category amongst that kind of first-generation of industrialized food is flour, made from wheat to make bread. And bread, of course, was a staple in many societies for millennia. And there are incredible numbers of variants of bread. If you think about different parts of the world and different traditions, but of course, bread made from grain was a marker of European experiences and became a marker of North American experiences very early on. And there had been flour milling also for millennia. Often just the grinding of stones. It usually required water power. And so mills were kind of localized and often along rivers and sometimes even creeks in different parts of the country. And those places had some kind of falling water, whether it was rapids. You think about northern New England, you think about rivers with a big waterfall or any number of places that you can find the power of falling water.
And that would power a flour mill and local grain farmers would bring their grain from some radius of, I don't know, 10 or 15 or 20 or 25 miles. And that's where their wheat would be turned into a sellable product. And that would be some form of flour. And that was usually a flour that was somewhat coarse. It was usually a bread flour that was by our standards kind of dark. Actually, it's something that many people now prize, it had more fiber in it. It was heartier, often a word that gets used to describe bread. And in fact, the highest grades of flour were considered at these little local mills scattered all over the country. The higher grades of flour were considered those that were less brown, that had less fiber, that were whiter. And this third category of industrial food emerges actually in Minneapolis. And in Minneapolis, the one major waterfall on the Mississippi River, St. Anthony Falls provides power for mills.
And it turns out the hinterlands of Minneapolis are a great place to grow wheat. And that kind of combination of kinetic energy turned into power in factories, along with access to this really important wheat growing region by the 1870s means that bread flour starts being produced at an industrial scale in Minneapolis by the end of the 1870s. And by the 1890s, there are still flour mills all over the country, but many of the smaller flour mills are being put out of business because companies like Pillsbury or a company called Washburn Crosby that is today General Mills, they become the kind of large flour makers and they're shipping their especially white, especially finely refined bread flour all over the country and even into other parts of the world.
Liz Russell Narration:
While the Midwest may have sparked the industrialization of wheat in the form of flour, the Erie Canal also played a huge role in the movement. Take a listen to Derrick Pratt of the Erie Canal Museum:
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
It took about a month, cost a hundred dollars to move a ton of wheat from one side of New York to the other. Afterwards, at first New York state kind of explodes in wheat production, especially in the incredibly fertile Genesee River Valley out by Rochester. People are able to grow tons of wheat there. It's American, kind of Western food culture that loves its bread. So wheat is a staple. Obviously you can't just eat wheat though. It has to be processed into flour. So the term boom town is coined to describe Rochester New York, which is right on the Erie Canal right next to the High Falls of the Genesee River. Great look at them from the Genesee Brewing Company nowadays, but with the power of the Genesee River, as well as the fertility of its land or growing wheat, settlers were able to pretty easily ship grain down the Genesee River, where it comes to Rochester and using all this natural water power, mills spring up all over Rochester and the place population triples in size in like a decade. It quickly becomes a city. It's known as the flour city.
It's Rochester. It's still known as the flower city, but back in the day it was F-L-O-U-R City and now it’s F-L-O-W-E-R City. That still actually relates to kind of flour and wheat production. So all these mills spring up in Rochester, they process it and Rochester becomes an incredibly prosperous city. However, also on the canal are immigrants moving west to these states like Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, so on and so forth. They will eventually settle those areas. Those states build their own canals, though none as successful as the Erie for a number of reasons. They also start building railroads and everything, and they have a lot more open ground there.
If you're from upstate New York, you know, we have a lot of our hills and everything. We have kind of rocky soil at certain points. There's areas like Indiana, much better for growing wheat. And they are able eventually to out-compete New York state farmers in wheat, however, they still have to ship it east to these cities where people need a lot more wheat even, and to do that, you still have to go to the Erie Canal. So then kind of the center of flour production moves west down the canal to its western terminus on Lake Erie. Buffalo, which also had already been exploding in population, but places like Gold Medal Flour, General Mills in general, they have extensive operations in Buffalo. By 1900, it's the eighth largest city in America. And a large part of that is it's kind of the grain capital almost of the east coast, at least. And they're processing all this grain, shipping it to New York City where obviously it gets shipped everywhere else in the world.
At that point, it is New York City. It's not like New York City, New York City. It's where everything happens. That sort of thing. So Buffalo’s the queen city, that's its nickname, a lot of nicknames on the Erie canal. And around this time, Rochester starts to lose its kind of prominence as grain center though. More industries had started to form there already, including one guy started and New York farmers in general, they move to more high value crops like fruits, dairy, and in Rochester, they started nurseries for gardening. So they started an extensive business planting flowers, more or less what it is. So eventually the folks in Rochester, I don't know who, who designates your nickname, but they went from the flour, F-L-O-U-R to the current flower city, F-L-O-W-E-R right there, lilac festival.
Liz Russell Narration:
I spent less than three seconds wondering if we should put our acreage to use growing wheat. We were brave, but wheat seemed like the real deal. And we were only barely adjusting to having a bigger place. So instead we hunted for wheat locally, which it turns out was pretty hard. It was hard because it took hours of research. I found a collective that seemed only to sell to grocery stores. So wearing my mask, I went to every grocery store on the list, but I couldn't find anything in stock. And I couldn't be sure if everything was low because of COVID or if the local nature of the wheat just made it scarce. And frankly employees didn't know either. And no one thought it was really a good time to ask. I found another company three hours away, but it would cost $11 to ship each pound.
I thought I needed about 40 for the year, which meant that I was looking at something like $440 in shipping costs alone. With some more frustrated Google searching, I found to my surprise, that literally just around the corner from our house was a massive farm that sold grains, Gianforte Farm. I ordered via email and when it was ready, I drove up to the house of the garage, let myself in, dropped off my money and took my order. I felt a little bit like a criminal sneaking in and out, but I was assured that this was how it worked and I've been doing it ever since. Even though I found my wheat, it's my big fear that this farm is going to go out of business one day and that there won't be a supplier nearby anymore. It's the thing that always makes me wonder how secure this local food chain really is. In a way, I feel kind of gypped by industrialization, but it happened for a reason. So I asked Derrick to talk me through the benefits of what people were seeing at the time. Why was moving flour further away from consumers a seemingly good idea?
Liz Russell:
How does the average person benefit from this type of movement?
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
The average person benefited there because all these goods are significantly cheaper than they would have been. Like with the grain, when it went from costing a hundred dollars to transport to less than $10, those savings were passed on to consumers ultimately. Yeah. That's really the big impact, I guess, is things were just cheaper. So with the cheaper goods you could afford to, you can take that money that you saved open a tannery or something, ultimately. Yeah.
Liz Russell:
So more money available for other things, right?
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
Everything costs a lot less thanks to the Erie Canal because it's not just food as well. That's moving, like lumber is moving down the canal in massive quantities. Coal, everything you need really for kind of industrial growth does that at exponentially cheaper prices. So that spurs growth.
Liz Russell:
Farmers, they benefit in that they really get access to sell their goods. Anything else?
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
So farmers benefit because they have this access and things like wheat, like salt, these bulk goods, they require to be shipped in bulk to make any profits because those cheaper prices that you have for transportation and that you can sell to people, that's how you're going to make your money. Otherwise some guy down the street or whatever from you can produce wheat at a cheaper price than in say Ohio. So having cheap wheat, lumber, salt - that allows you to compete on the market. Having these cheap transportation costs make it so you can compete in the market economy, which it was rapidly becoming. So that's the major benefit for the farmer.
Liz Russell:
I want to get into the hops, but I do want to kind of skip to that next question. We did talk about at one point farm land. So when it comes to benefiting the farmer, there was I'm sure farm land impacts in acquisition. We talked about your engagement a little bit. Can you kind of talk about that? How this all affected farmland?
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
Yeah. Immediately the state began to build the Erie Canal. Obviously they had to cut through tons of land. Some of it is already under cultivation and when they expand it infinitely more is under cultivation. So a state, this is really one of the first times they extensively use eminent domain and take the land that they need cutting through farmland. Sometimes farmers were compensated for it. Though state adjusters would deem whether your farm was going to benefit more. If you would profit more from the canal cutting through and your new access to markets and everything; if you would benefit more, they wouldn't pay you in that case. So farmers also complained a lot to the canal board about how a lot of times the canal cuts their property directly in half, which makes it incredibly hard to work both sides of your land. They petition the state for tons of bridges.
That's where we get our famous low bridge. Everybody down, back to the saw. It's always back to the saw. Yeah. So bridges cover the canal more or less, a lot of canal travelers talk about how they have to duck almost constantly, especially in cities, but even when you're out in kind of the more rural areas, all these bridges get paid for by the state in large part, but also farmers construct their own bridges over the canals so they can access property. However, that's not always. Sometimes the state denies their applications. So one of the major concerns of farmers at the time was they didn't have a bridge over. They would have to trespass on the land of their neighbor to get to the next bridge. And also if you have to travel a mile to kind of get between your two fields, which are technically like adjacent to each other, minus the large ditch in the middle, that just takes a lot of time. It’s a major inconvenience for you in farming. The farmer down the road, who has a bridge connecting his two properties is going to be able to kind of outperform you.
And also if you have to move over your neighbor's land, a lot of times you can work out an arrangement with them. But other times there are reports of these neighbors… if you got mad at your neighbor, you could be like, no, you can't cross my property. Otherwise you're trespassing. Or they could more, even worse, probably pretty much hold you hostage there. You could either pay them an exorbitant sum. You could sell them your property or whatever. And you had no real legal redress to like, well, I just need to get to my side of the canal by crossing over your land. So there's reports of that. Then if you hold a person hostage like that, you could buy their land. Let's say half price, because you can say like, you don't even have access to the other side of the canal, but then when you sell it back to someone, you sell it at full price with the agreement like, oh, and you can also cross my bridge. That kind of thing. Make tons of money off of that thing.
Liz Russell:
Wow. I didn’t expect that. That’s wild.
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
But they also do benefit from a lot of things. One of the things like that, the state, again, you have a lot more access to moving down the canal. Also the canal will occasionally wash out though. There's another issue of sometimes the banks of the canal would kind of collapse. And if it did it in farmland, it would ruin your canal. I mean, your farm crops they'd get flooded out because canalers were a rough lot. They apparently would just trample crops kind of for fun cause they could, that sort of thing. So there's a lot of those kinds of issues. But on the good side for farmers, like the state said, if a lock for instance was built on your property, you generally weren't going to get paid by the state because they argued that you could build a tavern or a grocery store at the lock because the way locks work, they take about 15 minutes for a boat to go through, which creates early traffic jams. So if you had a tavern or a grocery store, you could easily serve these canalers, especially the tavern. Canalers were never afraid to have a drink or two. So they would stop off there as they waited for their locks to move. So the state would argue you could profit a lot more off of like a lock being there.
Liz Russell:
But did they? I mean, was that common?
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
Yeah. Pretty much every block has its grocery store tavern kind of spring up. Whole communities form around locks. Oftentimes though, again, going back to Carol Sheriff’s book, one farmer who got told that by the state, it's like, well, I'm a farmer. I don't want to operate a grocery store. No, thanks. Sorry.
Liz Russell:
So that farmer was like, that’s not my business, but the state was like, but it could be.
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
Yeah. Yeah. But you also talked about irrigation, lots of issues about water usage on the canal, especially back in the 1800s where it was the modern canal, barge canal, as it's called, use a lot of natural waterways. Like we have fixed many of the problems of the Mohawk River, the rapids and everything. Tt's been canal-ized now, large boats can go up and down it if they choose. It's rare nowadays. But yeah, there's less water issues kind of back in the day. The state had like every, almost every lake and reservoir to the south of here was constructed or modified in some fashion to feed the Erie Canal.
I know you're in Caz, right? Caz Lake. If you go to the south end of it, right about where it empties into Chittenango Creek, there's a state dam there that regulates how much water goes in Chittenango Creek. There was a canal that hooked up Chittenango Creek to the canal, put water into it. So it was kind of heavily regulated, but there would be excess water. And you could use it for irrigation though. I don't know how in the 1800s how frequent that was. A lot of times mill owners want to use that excess water to power their mills. But now with the barge canal, especially over the last hundred years, I think it's become especially prevalent or more prevalent to irrigate crops with water from the canal. Pollution on the canal has also dramatically decreased. Yeah. Back in the early days of the canal, everybody who lived on the canal, they had their chamber pots, where they emptied those into the canal. Along the canal, they had waste products.
You could just dump them into the canal easy enough. The state actually regulated that ice harvested from the canal had to be specifically labeled as from the canal. You can only use it for refrigeration purposes. It couldn't come in contact with any produce and you had to sell it at like incredibly low prices as well because otherwise you've got diphtheria, cholera, and whatnot. But anyway, nowadays it's actually a really new initiative by the state. Some family farms have been using canal water to irrigate their crops for about a hundred years or so. Notably, there's an orchard out in, uh, Holly, New York, Herd Orchards that are actually where we got that from. They've been using the canal to irrigate their orchards for quite some time. Now the state is trying to encourage people, farmers, to use these waters that's right there in their own backyards to help irrigate their crops. And studies are showing that upstate New York due to climate change is going to have a lot more droughts possibly. And this would have a serious effect. They believe on mitigating the effects of, the negative effects of, climate change on agriculture in New York.
Liz Russell:
So that's the state initiative today. But back when the canal was in its heyday and people were using water or taking ice, was that structured? Were you paying for it? Were you interacting with the state to do that? Or was it sort of like first come first serve?
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
You had to get state permission. There were just massive, like tons of lawsuits seemingly over water rights. The state could make you stop operating a mill, for instance, if you were kind of stealing water from the Erie Canal and they found out about it, that kind of thing. So yeah. There's huge issues with that. The state could give you permission, but yeah. Water levels in the canal fluctuated tremendously, depending on time of the year, how much rainfall New York got over a specific year.
Liz Russell:
And certainly it sounds like the canal would have to come first. Like if you need the water… water level was everything right? So when you need the water then..
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
Yep, exactly. They could shut you down.
[🎶Theme music🎶]
Liz Russell Narration:
Next time on Was Is Could Be, we add some liquid food groups to our food journey. If you want to learn more about my food journey, follow me at @itslizrussell on Instagram, or check out https://www.itslizrussell.com/podcast-blog-transcripts/. To find more from Michael Lansing, check out Augsburg University's website, augsburg.edu. And to learn more about the Erie Canal and food head to the Erie Canal Museum in downtown Syracuse, or check out eriecanalmuseum.org/erie-eats/.