Contenu du sommaire : Produire les aliments

During the first half of the 19th century, cities were supplied with milk by a network of dairy barns within the city limits: the vacheries. Thousands of cows were housed in the city in order to supply markets with a rapidly perishable product. Paris had the highest density of dairy barns in Europe, which meant that a hygiene police force was needed to monitor the quality of the milk, to reduce nuisances caused by these barns, and to ensure that inflows of cattle feed and outflows of manure were organised properly. The Conseil de salubrité (health council), headed by veterinary surgeon Jean-Baptiste Huzard, was in charge of this policy. The Conseil adopted regulations that were fairly lenient towards these “milk factories”, giving priority to ensuring the food supply of Parisians. As a result, although the number of dairy barns in central Paris declined in the 1820s, this had more to do with changes in the way milk was marketed than with strict enforcement by hygiene authorities.

This paper looks at the relationship between feminisation and industrialisation by focusing on a sector that was feminising while maintaining a significant proportion of men: the industrial biscuit factories that developed in France from the 1870s onwards. From a standpoint of the social history of work, we examine the tasks assigned to women in these new factories, and look at gender as an organisational category in the mechanisation of production. Women occupied a subordinate position in the hierarchy of skills and pay, but were key to the processes of industrial rationalisation. A study of horizontal segregation shows that women were not only employed in packaging and glazing, while an analysis of vertical segregation reveals limited opportunities for promotion. The paper describes one engineer's actions to “Taylorise” a biscuit factory by implementing a collective work rhythm based on a scientific approach.

Meat products were an essential part of soldiers' rations during the First World War. Faced with the challenges of food security, armies modernised their supplies, making massive use of industrially processed, frozen and tinned meat products. The French army took part in this rationalisation drive, reducing its dependence on beef while ensuring the acceptability of meat substitutes, an essential command tool. Through an integrated approach to meat processing, which was gradually becoming more global and prescriptive, it developed refrigerated abattoirs that were better suited to mass supply, harnessed butchers' expertise to create new products, and processed inedible by-products. These initiatives contributed to the Allies' food supply advantage, but in France, where many obstacles to the transformation of the meat industry persisted after 1918, modernisation of the sector remained limited.

In the last third of the 19th century, a new form of speculation emerged in France: the large-scale fattening of pigs. Fed on food waste and various agricultural products, the pigs were reared in stalls, some of which housed several hundred animals, from the beginning of the 20th century onwards. This article shows that the use of urban and industrial waste as pig feed played a central role in the development of new ways of breeding pigs between the 1860s and the 1930s. The intensive diet fed to pigs had major consequences for their living conditions and health, as well as for the quality of their meat. The main response to these problems was to find breeds that could cope with this diet. The emergence of large fattening piggeries thus contributed to the emergence of a new animal: the industrial pig.

The development of the agrifood sector in France in the 1960s was part of an “agricultural modernisation” policy. Economists and government decision-makers were quick to express their preference for production chains designed by private industrial players and regulated within an inter-professional framework. However, the historical commitment of the Ministry of Agriculture and of farming institutions in favour of cooperative ventures, along with the activism of farmers' unions, resulted in continued and expanded public support for farmers' co-ops. Against this backdrop, the main cooperative processing companies were created; these would later grow to hold a prominent role in the French agrifood sector today.

This paper looks at the history of the modernisation of pig farming in Brittany between the 1940s and the 1970s through the prism of one cooperative in particular: the Coopérative des éleveurs de la région de Lamballe (Cooperl). In the first part, we look at the role of three local players (the JAC, the CETA and the feed merchants who travelled the countryside) in the early stages of the intensification of pig farming in the 1940s and 1950s, paving the way for cooperatives that emerged in the 1960s. The second and third parts look at the beginnings of Cooperl, between the 1960s and 1970s: its origins, its operations, its development, its relationship with farms, and its role in standardising technical procedures, farms and pigs.

The sugar industry in mainland France expanded significantly in the second half of the 19th century and became highly concentrated in the 20th century, when the number of beet sugar factories was divided by ten, while total sugar production increased fivefold, albeit with high social and environmental costs. This article looks at the regulation of ‘industrial overflow' from a sugar factory in a village in the Seine-Maritime département of Normandy, combining a material history of the accumulation of hazardous products with a history of awareness about nuisance and pollution. Through an analysis of archives and interviews with local councillors and former employees, we show how this awareness spread to the general public, beginning with the first warnings from experts and complaints from local residents in the 1970s, and leading up to workers' struggles to have their occupational illnesses recognised when the factory closed in 2003. This approach uses local surveys over the long term in order to decompartmentalise the issues of environmental health and workplace health.

Based on a study of a food processing plant, this article looks at the repercussions of just-in-time production on employees' working and employment conditions, and on relations among workers. It does this by analysing the segmentation of the work group resulting from workforce flexibility. The study of the use of labour as an adjustment variable shows that this approach requires a pool of available workers to be created and refreshed. This process mobilises local employment intermediaries as well as the employees themselves to produce this temporal availability. The employment and working conditions underlying these just-in-time labour arrangements tend to increase gender, class and racial inequalities in employment.