Rumbles, page 13
Figure 15: The staff canteen and kitchen at Bournville, early twentieth century
Today, some employers – notably tech giants like Meta and Google – are following the example set by these nineteenth-century reformers and providing their staff with impressive onsite dining options. Lunch at Apple’s Californian headquarters might be a freshly baked sourdough pizza or a hearty bowl of ramen, healthy sushi or an indulgent burger, fish tacos or $1 oysters, all heavily subsidised, cooked by some of the country’s best chefs and consumed in a light-filled room surrounded by nature. Not all businesses are able to offer their employees such a pleasurable lunchtime experience, but more are now looking to the canteen to improve morale, foster stronger ‘company culture’ and boost productivity. The degree to which access to a salad bar impacts how you feel about your job – more than, say, higher wages or reduced working hours – remains to be seen, but the recent resurrection of the cafeteria suggests the question of what to eat for lunch and where remains key to understanding our complicated relationship with work.
The history of lunch, a meal born of Victorian industrialisation and urbanisation, still speaks to many of our own anxieties over how to eat, work and live well in the modern world. From the beginning, the consumption of lunch was bound up with the demands of the workplace and the hurried midday meal came to exemplify the pressures it exacted on the individual. Pressures that made themselves known in overstrung nerves and gassy stomachs. The construction of lunch as in some way inherently problematic, as inevitably a site of anxiety and ill health, might also – as we saw regarding the threatened postal strike – be read as a discursive strategy, as a way of voicing discontent at the precarious and pressured conditions of the working day. All of which suggests that there is rather more to the humble pre-packed sandwich than meets the eye. Work is, as the last three chapters have argued, essential to understanding the history of the gut. Connecting the individual body to the working world, the digestive system labours internally and is entangled with commutes, offices and factories. Lunch is, as this chapter has explored, one of the most obvious sites in which stomach and work become entangled with one another, where the rhythms of the gut meet the structures imposed by capitalism. This is, at least in part, a matter of temporality, where the peculiar cadences of the belly meet the carefully scheduled working day. Taking up the question of time in more depth, the following chapters consider the past, present and future of the gut.
TIME
In 1928 a distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins University published a bestselling guide to child rearing, Psychological Care of Infant and Child, that encouraged parents to treat their young offspring as ‘if they were adults’, to avoid excessive physical affection and to operate a strict unchanging daily timetable.177 Outlined in detail for the reader, this schedule dictated exactly when children should be woken, what they should eat for breakfast, how much time should be allocated to playful romping (7.30 a.m. to 8.00 a.m.), when bath time should occur and when it was time for bed. Its author, a behavioural psychologist by the name of John B. Watson, held that most responses to the world are learned rather than innate or inherited and that, as such, our early experiences play a definitive role in shaping what kind of person we will grow into. Parents should, he urged, devote themselves to instilling good habits in their children from an early age and nowhere was this more important than in the bathroom. As part of his prescribed daily routine, from the age of eight months the child should be put on a ‘special toilet seat into which he can be safely strapped’ and then left alone until they defecate. Isolation was key, the child should be ‘left in the bathroom without toys and with the door closed’, and it was advised that they remain there for up to twenty minutes or until the bowel movement was completed.178 The well-trained child was produced through regularity, an imperative that Watson extended to the functioning of the gut.
Today we might doubt the wisdom of dictatorial methods that discouraged parental tenderness in favour of lashing infants to toilets, but potty training still necessitates a kind of time management. Though the age at which children typically transition out of nappies has changed, it remains pivotal to infant development as a moment of entry into the rules, conventions and expectations of the wider world. It involves learning to exercise control over previously unconscious processes and, importantly, to measure and portion time appropriately. As Jean Walton puts it in Dissident Gut: Technologies of Regularity, Politics of Revolt (2024), ‘toilet training involves nothing less than the mastery of the bodily regulation of time: the division of duration into evenly spaced evacuations of the large intestine, the measuring of progress by rhythmic contractions of smooth muscle’. The temporal disciplining of the bowel integrates the child into society by distinguishing them from the ‘indiscriminately excreting animal’ and affiliating them with the ‘systematically excreting human being’.179 Recalling Galen’s attribution of all human culture to intricate coiling intestines that allow us, unlike animals with their short innards, time between eating and eliminating to think, make and create, toilet training has been similarly imagined as a way of civilising the body.
That there is a temporal dimension to this process – the unruly cadences of the child’s large intestine forced to keep pace with the exacting schedules of nursery, school and eventually work – speaks to the persistence of time as a key concern in the cultural history of the gut. Think of William Beaumont carefully recording how long a piece of chicken took to dissolve in the exposed stomach of his unwilling patient or the Victorian workers forced to align their digestive rhythms with the standardised tempo of the factory floor, the operations of the gut are entangled with time in many different ways. The following chapters weave together sewers, entrails and alimentary tracts to explore the belly’s temporal dimensions. Paying particular attention to bodily waste, how it has been utilised, managed, avoided, celebrated and theorised, they argue that the binding of digestion to time has had profound implications for how we understand our bodies and their place in the world.
7 Present
In 1851 London’s Hyde Park played host to the Great Exhibition, a celebration of culture and industry showcasing technological innovations from around the globe. Alongside printing machines, steam engines and the latest communication devices, visitors to the exhibition could ‘spend a penny’ to use the world’s first public flushing lavatories. Installed in the Retiring Rooms of the Crystal Palace, they were the work of George Jennings, a plumber based out of a small shop off Blackfriars Road in Southwark (Figure 16). More than a convenience, the toilets were a popular attraction, hailed in the press as an engineering triumph and cited as proof that Britain was leading the way when it came to the disposal of human excrement. In the World Fairs that followed, hosted by cities including New York, Chicago and Brussels, sanitation technologies were also prominently featured: the International Health Exhibition of 1884 held numerous displays of drainpipes, visitors to the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris were invited on guided tours of the city’s impressive sewer system and Dresden’s 1911 International Hygiene Exhibition showcased new architectural models that were set to revolutionise Germany’s sewage disposal plants. It is significant that in these grand exhibitions, where the spoils of empire were ostentatiously arrayed and the myriad achievements of the host country were broadcast to the rest of the world, the question of how best to dispose of human excrement should have demanded quite so much attention. Part of what it reflects is the belief, widely held at the time, that social and cultural progress could be best measured in sanitary terms. The nineteenth century was, among other things, the age of sanitary science, a discipline described in 1857 as that ‘which deals with the preservation of health and prevention of disease in reference to the entire community, as contradistinguished from medical science […] which has for its aim the restoration of health when lost’.180 Encompassing a wide range of individual and collective actions from improved personal hygiene to mass vaccination programmes, better-ventilated homes to safer food practices, at the heart of this scientific revolution was the question of how to collect and safely dispose of the waste produced by bodies thronging the streets of booming cities and industrial towns. Toilets were proudly showcased at the Great Exhibition because the onward march of civilisation appeared to rest on the successful management of waste.
Figure 16: Model of Jennings’ patent water closet, c.1900
To Victorians perched on its generous wooden seat, the flushing toilet was an astounding feat of modern engineering and ingenious design that encapsulated the unique drive and ambition of the age. It was an invention that seemed to speak directly to the present and in their enthusiastic advocacy of the toilet’s transformational potential, sanitary scientists elevated the gut as an arbiter of technological and medical progress. As we have already seen, throughout history the stomach – with its endless demands, pleasures and mysterious disorders – has served as a rich source of metaphor and a material site where social, economic and political conditions could be made manifest. This commitment to the organ’s storytelling power has, however, been typically accompanied by a countervailing impulse to distance the present moment from the digestive process and its more unappealing products. Another way to think about the temporality of the gut is to consider how the present has been defined against the excretory practices of the past. Conceptions of what it is to be ‘civilised’ or ‘modern’ have, across time and in different contexts, been forged in direct opposition to the perceived filth of the past. Focusing its attention on nineteenth-century London and Paris, this chapter will argue that how we think about the products of digestion reveals a great deal about how we have imagined ourselves and the kind of society that we want to live in.
Visitors to the Great Exhibition in 1851 might have been forgiven for doubting whether London was quite the magnificent centre of sanitary reform that it claimed to be. Throughout most of its history the city had used the River Thames as a watery dumping ground for human, animal and industrial waste. As its population grew, bursting with newcomers from the countryside, workers from all over Britain and immigrants from around the world, the river became increasingly polluted. Writing in 1855, the scientist Michael Faraday described peering down into the water and observing ‘feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface’181 and the Tory politician Benjamin Disraeli characterised it in Parliament as a ‘Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror’.182 Not only was the Thames a national embarrassment, a stinking cesspit at the heart of the capital, it was also feared as a source of illness. Between 1832 and 1866 the city was devasted by four major outbreaks of cholera, a terrifying disease that induces stomach cramps, diarrhoea, vomiting and severe dehydration in those it infects. Writing as the first epidemic was gathering pace, a reporter for the London Gazette described the distinct physical appearance of sufferers: ‘the eye sinks, the look is expressive of terror and wildness […] The skin is deadly cold and often damp, the tongue always moist, often white and loaded, but flabby and chilled, like a piece of dead flesh.’183 Today we know that these potentially fatal symptoms are caused by the presence of a particularly nasty bacterium, Vibrio cholerae, which is usually introduced into the small intestine through contaminated drinking water. But in the nineteenth century its origins were still a mystery. One idea posited that foul air, generated by rotting vegetables, decaying animal matter and putrefying human waste, was the cause and many looked to the river as the likely source of the noxious vapours. This explanation was grounded in the theory of miasma, the origins of which can be traced back to the Roman Empire, which held that bad smells, lingering in the atmosphere and poisoning the air, were responsible for causing illness. Though the miasmic hypothesis was eventually debunked, it is understandable that the horrible stink given off by the clouds of ‘feculence’ that Faraday observed roiling in the Thames could provoke disgust so visceral that it might bring with it the fear of death.
The malodorous issue was further exacerbated by the waste produced by new industries springing up along its banks and by the installing of household toilets that flushed directly into the river. Rather than precepting a sanitary revolution, these early domestic toilets upset the digestive system of the city. Until well into the nineteenth century, the disposal of human waste was primarily taken care of by a group of workers known as ‘night soil men’. Journeying through the darkened streets, they would collect the city’s ordure from communal cesspools and transport it to the surrounding countryside, where it would be sold on to farmers who would use it to fertilise their crops, which would then be shipped back to the city to feed its inhabitants. The increasing use of the river as a dumping ground for the excreta of the growing metropolis presented, according to the social reformer Henry Mayhew, two major problems. For one, it represented a grave mismanagement of the faeces that could be being used as fertiliser, as he estimated that with a return of £10 for each 100 tons of sewage Londoners were ‘positively wasting £4,000,000 of money every year’ or, put another way, flinging an annual ‘246,000,000 pounds of bread’ into the Thames.184 Profligacy that, in turn, had polluted the drinking water, disrupting the proper circulation and transformation of waste material. So that, as Mayhew complained, the ‘water in which we boil our vegetables and our meat’ is ‘impregnated over and over again with our own animal offal […] We drink a solution of our own faeces.’185 Without the intervention of the night soil man and the farmer, who worked together to transform waste into food that could be reincorporated back into the ecosystem of the city, sewage became a source of toxicity, contamination and disgust.
The situation in London came to a head in the hot summer of 1858, when exceptionally high temperatures and an extended period of dry weather resulted in a stench so rotten, so foul, that it threatened the very business of government. During what came to be known as the ‘Great Stink’ the Houses of Parliament were engulfed by a cloud of noxious gases and its members – many of whom had been previously reluctant to undertake the expensive and disruptive work needed to solve the malodorous problem – were forced to act. In a record eighteen days, a bill was written and passed that gave the go-ahead to an ambitious scheme to install a vast network of sewers under the streets of the capital. The architect of the project was Joseph Bazalgette, a civil engineer who planned and oversaw the construction of 1,300 miles of brick-built street sewers, as well as five pumping stations and several embankments along the river. Finally completed in 1875, Bazalgette’s system cleaned up the Thames and radically transformed the olfactory experience of the city.
The ‘Great Stink’ was widely condemned as a national disgrace, but London was by no means alone in its problem with waste. During what historian David S. Barnes has described as the ‘Great Stink of 1880’, Paris was gripped by a putrid honk emanating from overburdened sewage treatment plants.186 Residents were outraged, newspapers carried headlines condemning the government’s response to the crisis and scientists warned that the noxious atmosphere posed a grave threat to public health. This smelly episode was not the first or even the worst in the city’s history, yet the anger, fear and disgust it prompted outstripped anything that had come before. What was it that made this particular stench so intolerable? One answer might lie in the complaint voiced by the popular French publication Le Siècle that ‘our great and beautiful city’ was being turned into ‘an immense cesspool’.187 In other words, the fug of excrement hanging over the streets of Paris imperilled not only the wellbeing of its individual residents, but also the reputation of the city as the apex of European culture. Civilisation and shit do not, apparently, mix. In his famous history of smell, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (1982), Alain Corbin argued that over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a fundamental shift in attitudes regarding waste, privacy and hygiene occurred that impacted all aspects of life in France.188 Increasingly, according to Corbin, it was smell – from the pleasure of a fine scent to the visceral disgust induced by a foul one – that defined the parameters of the social world.
At the behest of Emperor Napoleon III, the topography of Paris had been transformed over the course of the nineteenth century by a programme of bold renovations. These were led by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, an ambitious urban planner who replaced the warren of streets and alleys that had characterised the medieval city with a system of wide, straight avenues flanked by impressive buildings and interspersed with large public parks. Renovations continued below ground, with the installation of les égouts, a vast network of sewers, and with the laying of pipes to bring clean water into the city from newly constructed reservoirs. Finally completed in 1870, Haussmann’s programme of works, which ripped up half the city, destroyed whole neighbourhoods and divided opinion then as now, establishing Paris as an exemplar of urban modernity. The ‘Great Stink’, which descended ten years later, threatened to unravel the city’s image as a clean, safe and rationally structured space. More than merely a blow to civic pride, the faecal stench of the streets compromised people’s sense of themselves. It was, as Barnes has it, ‘no minor offense; it undermined a basic element of the invisible foundation on which modern civilization rested: the protection of the human senses from all that was base, vulgar and suggestive of bodily function’.189 This psychological distance was made possible by the sanitary topography illustrated by Figure 17: vast subterranean structures whose pivotal role in the daily life of the city could remain unseen and unacknowledged by polite society. Along similar lines, one response to London’s ‘Great Stink’ saw the installation of the city’s first public toilets. In an 1858 letter to the Commissioners of Sewers, George Jennings – who had debuted the flushing toilet at the Great Exhibition – insisted that he was the right person to lead the effort, writing that ‘I think it only right to call attention to the efforts I have made to prevent the defilement of our thoroughfares and to remove those Plague spots that are offensive to the eye, and a reproach to the Metropolis’.190 He proposed that public toilets be installed beneath the pavements, so that ‘offensive’ bodily functions could be hidden from view and set apart from life on the bustling streets above. In Paris and London, the fantasy of the modern city as an ordered, enlightened place, emblematic of the glittering achievements of the present, could only be sustained by the disavowal of excremental processes.
