Hunger, Contamination and Food in the Half-Acre

In the late autumn of 1860, at the busy Newgate Market in London, a sausage-maker living in Kingsland bought a fore-quarter of beef. Upon returning to his shop, he proceeded to turn the beef into sausages, which he promptly sold. In the coming days, of the sixty-six people who ate the sausages, sixty-five became seriously ill, suffering from a mixture of symptoms that included vomiting, diarrhoea and dizziness. In one case, a person became so ill that they lay down, closed their eyes and never opened them again. With police suspecting poison, a doctor was called in to investigate, but when traces of poison couldn’t be found, the conclusion was that the illness had been caused by eating diseased meat.

Finding one’s food in an advanced state of decay wasn’t anything new, and the fact that the story of the diseased sausage meat was published on the other side of the world in the Otago Daily Times, four years after it happened, shows just how widespread the problem had become.

Just the year before, in 1863, a ship arrived at the Dunedin port carrying a cargo of ham, rolled beef and salted meat. While the ship was at dock, the payload was inspected and, due to the goods spoiling on the journey, the whole load was declared “unfit for human consumption”. Not wanting the food to go to waste, it was promptly sent to a local auction house. There, it was sold in portions to small local dealers who passed it on to customers at a very reduced price.

Stories of rancid food appearing on people’s plates weren’t anything new in the 19th century. As goods were sent to distant markets, a lack of hygienic transportation and storage methods meant it was extremely easy for food to pick up all manner of diseases without anybody even realising it.

A public debate swirled around Dunedin in 1865 regarding this very issue. It all started when a selection of meats went on sale at a local Dunedin store from an animal that was suffering from pleuro-pneumonia, or lung sickness, a highly contagious respiratory disease affecting cattle. Fortunately, the disease is not zoonotic, but the fact that portions of lung and liver were being cut up, put on display, sold and eaten raises the question: just what were people living in the Devil’s Half-Acre actually eating?

Faced with the choice of spending a few pennies on a cut of rancid meat or some belts of whiskey, it’s not hard to see why they often chose the whiskey.

If we were to step inside your average dwelling within the Devil’s Half-Acre, we would not so much find a kitchen as we would find a room that was, among other things, a kitchen, laundry, bedroom, illegal bar, brothel or opium den. A kitchen could effectively be a corner of a room with a fire that was used for cooking food, boiling water, heating the room, drying clothes and providing light after dark.

Most kitchens were little more than an open fire with a few meagre possessions that could include a cooking pot, a kettle, a frying pan, a knife, a wooden spoon or two and perhaps a tin or bowl. When you look at the meagre selection of kitchen utensils that individuals or families had to cook with, it isn’t surprising when the buildings themselves were sometimes made out of wooden palings, kerosene tins, boxes and corrugated iron. More permanent structures that might resemble what we typically think of as a house today might have been lucky enough to contain a cast-iron range, but it certainly wasn’t common.

Maintaining a healthy, regular diet wasn’t common either. People with little control over their diet ate very poorly. The average meal in the mid-19th century for someone living in the Devil’s Half-Acre commonly consisted of bread, potatoes, oatmeal or porridge, tea, dripping and whatever cheap meat, offal or vegetables they could afford. If there was one commodity that a poor household could build a meal around, it was bread.

Bread has a long and remarkable history and has been considered part of the family meal for thousands of years. It was already a staple of the diet in ancient Egypt, where it was eaten alongside vegetables, fish and other foods. When food was scarce, bread was the one staple most households could turn to.

Take this story from 1863 in Dunedin, when a man called into a three-roomed house off Walker Street to seize goods in lieu of unpaid rent. After entering the property, he found a woman sitting beside a desperately ill child. When he asked whether there was anything to eat, the family showed him some stale bread, a saucer half-full of dripping and some salt. These were the provisions the family had been living off for three weeks. Taken by their situation, the visitor gave the family half-a-crown, and one of the children was sent out to buy butter, cheese and a fresh loaf of bread. Upon arriving back at the house, the family happily tucked into the fresh new goods.

Even bread wasn’t immune from being a questionable product and was often far from being something made from flour, water, yeast and a little bit of salt. The list of contaminants that were found in bread at one time or another in the mid-1880s included potatoes, ground stone, bone dust, dirt, sulphate of copper, sulphate of zinc, carbonate of ammonia, carbonate of magnesia, bean flour, pea flour, rice flour, sawdust, sand, pipeclay, plaster of Paris and soap. Most of these products were deliberately added as an inexpensive way to increase the weight and bulk of a loaf of bread. Others, such as pea, bean and rice flour, were simply cheap alternatives. All of these products enabled bakers to produce more loaves of bread at a much cheaper price.

By the early 1880s in Dunedin, it had been discovered that a large amount of the bread being produced was underweight or short in size, with many of the dishonest loaves coming from bakeries in poor areas such as the Devil’s Half-Acre. For people who already had very little choice or control over what they were eating, the food available to them could sometimes be awful.

To solve this problem, the Bread Ordinance Act of 1863 had been introduced to regulate the baking, quality and sale of bread in Otago. The Act required bread to be sold in specific weights, regulated what could be put into a loaf, and required bakers to have scales and weights available so customers could demand that their bread be weighed. Despite the law being on the books, it seems that some bakers were still finding ways to give their customers less bread for their money.

In 1864, the Otago Daily Times decided to investigate after hearing complaints about short-weight bread in Dunedin. One householder, who had a large family and therefore got through a considerable amount of bread, had become suspicious of his baker and decided to weigh his loaves himself. Of thirty supposedly four-pound loaves, he found that each was, on average, six ounces short. He tried another baker and then a third, with similar results.

The newspaper then did its own experiment, buying a four-pound loaf from seven different Dunedin bakers and weighing them while they were still fresh from the oven. Four were four ounces short, while the others were short by one ounce, three-quarters of an ounce and half an ounce. To make matters worse, not only were people being short changed but the dishonest loaves were coming from bakeries in poor localities, meaning that the people who could least afford to lose a few ounces of bread were the ones most likely to be getting short-changed.

To make matters worse, even when our local residents of the Half-Acre had purchased their cut of rancid meat or underweight loaf of bread, getting the goods home wasn’t as easy as you might think. They still had to carry their purchases through the stagnant, putrefying water pooling in the streets.

And that’s where we head next. We’re going to take a walk through the streets and alleyways of the Devil’s Half-Acre and see just how bad things could get as the road people walked on could be almost as dangerous as what was being sold in the shops.

Next Dispatch: Friday 28th August, The Foul Streets