To Feed a Nation: A History of Australian Food Science and Technology

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TO FEED A NATION

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TO FEED A NATION A history of Australian food science and technology

Keith Farrer

© 2005 Keith Thomas Henry Farrer All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, duplicating or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Contact CSIRO PUBLISHING for all permission requests. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Farrer, Keith Thomas Henry, 1916– . To feed a nation: a history of Australian food science and technology. Includes index. ISBN 0 643 09154 8 (paperback).

ISBN 0 643 09217 X (netLibrary eBook).

1. Food – History. 2. Aborigines, Australian – Food. 3. Food – Preservation – History. 4. Food – Research Australia. I. CSIRO. II. Title. 641.3 Available from CSIRO PUBLISHING 150 Oxford Street (PO Box 1139) Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia Telephone: +61 3 9662 7666 Local call: 1300 788 000 (Australia only) Fax: +61 3 9662 7555 Email: [email protected] Web site: www.publish.csiro.au Front cover Top, from left: The Government Cool Stores, Melbourne; Cream separator; The City Brewery, Melbourne. Reproduced courtesy of the La Trobe Library, Melbourne. Bottom, from left: Wine bottles perspective, istockphoto; Food Science Australia, CSIRO; Fruit, istockphoto. Set in Minion 10/13pt Cover and text design by James Kelly Typeset by Paul Dickenson Printed in Australia by BPA Print Group

THE AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE OF FOOD SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY INCORPORATED

Kraft Foods Limited Australian Blending Company Pty Ltd

Halcyon Proteins Pty Ltd

Foreword

Although elements of food technology are visible in ancient documents, the most significant developments in food science and technology have taken place in the second half of the 20th century – the evidence is on supermarket shelves. With constant press reports and scare stories about the food we eat, there is a rising interest in the general community in its food supply – what it is, where it comes from and so on. Simultaneously, there has been a growth in interest in the historical background to our Australian life. This book is timely, therefore, on both counts. It gives us the technological background to our important food industry and outlines the ways in which technology is being applied to matters of safety and quality. Dr Farrer is well qualified to write it. On graduating from the University of Melbourne in 1938, Keith Farrer joined the forerunner of Kraft Foods Limited as a Research Chemist and retired from the company in 1981 as Chief Scientist. Since then he has been a consultant to Australian Government instrumentalities and industry. He has served on numerous professional industry and government committees and played a significant role in the foundation of the Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology, of which he is a Fellow. He is also a Fellow of the sister institute in the United Kingdom, an Honorary Fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Food Science and Technology, of the International Academy of Food Science and Technology, and of similar Chemistry institutes. In the 1970s Dr Farrer was the convener of the committee which led to the foundation of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, and Vice-President (1975–82) to Sir Ian McLennan, the founding President. He is now one of only nine Honorary Fellows of the Academy. A scientist with a lifetime’s experience in food science and technology, Dr Farrer has published more than 140 scientific, technical and historical papers in local and international journals, and several books. Remarkably he also has a Master of Arts for his pioneering studies on the history of food technology, especially in 19th century Australia. His writing skills are legendary, more recently seen as the author of the series of ‘Letters from London’ that appeared regularly in Food Technology in Australia (now Food Australia), the technical journal of AIFST. His passion for food science and technology, and especially its history, is a natural precursor for To Feed a Nation. In 1979 Dr Farrer was appointed an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to science and industry. He is an outstanding Australian, and there is no more qualified person to write of the role of food science and technology in the development of this country. Alan Mortimer President International Union of Food Science and Technology (2003–2006)


Contents

Foreword

v

Preface

ix

Introduction

xi

Part One: FROM TECHNIQUES TO TECHNOLOGY 1

Before the First Fleet came

3

2

What the First Fleet brought

9

3

The village technologies

17

Part Two: FROM TECHNOLOGY TO SCIENCE 4

Meat processing

29

5

Refrigeration

51

6

Sugar: a major ingredient

59

7

Fruit and vegetable products

65

8

Milling and flour-based products

77

9

Fermentation: brewing and winemaking

85

10 Dairy products

97

11 The emergence of food science

107

12 Into the 20th century

117

Part Three: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 13 The 1940–60 watershed

129

14 Consolidating the science base

145

15 Challenge and change

161

16 Nutrition: a branch of food science

179

17 Response to anxiety

189

18 Epilogue

201

Acronyms

203

Sources

205

Bibliography

215

Index

221


Preface

This book was suggested to me by my friend, the late Dr FH Reuter, founding head of the Department of Food Technology (now Food Science and Technology) in the University of New South Wales, who urged me to write a more general account of the development of food technology in Australia using the references to my earlier surveys of the subject, A settlement amply supplied, and the chapter, Food Technology, in Technology in Australia: 1788–1988. Many years later, I have done so. However, it was not nearly so simple as Dr Reuter suggested, and the result is a synthesis of primary sources from the latter half of the 20th century and my own and other acknowledged secondary sources all of which are based on fully referenced primary sources. This book is intended to be of value to secondary and tertiary students and the general reader. It follows the development of the Australian food industry from its early struggles for survival to the present-day sophisticated instrument for feeding our own people and exporting the now enormous excess of production over local consumption. It also relates the first hesitant, then rapid emergence of food science and technology as the scientific discipline underpinning this industry that, from farm to table, employs more Australians than any other. The account ends at the year 2000, when processed foods represented about 75% of world trade in agricultural products; trade, not production, for vast quantities of unprocessed foods are consumed daily in the developing world. In writing a book of this nature, I had to be selective. Postharvest technologies for the conservation of food between farm and plate or processor are mentioned but only in relation to the beginning of Australian trade in, mainly, fruits. Fish and cereals, other than wheat, are barely mentioned, and confectionery, which poses some challenging scientific questions, is totally neglected. Edible fats and oils, that increasingly important segment of food technology, are barely acknowledged, and only passing references are made to food habits and food selection. Other gaps will be evident to the cognoscenti. Of products, processes and research, examples selected are inevitably coloured by my personal experience. I have no doubt that some readers will identify serious omissions; however, in view of the impossibility of completeness, especially post-1950, the principal purpose of this book is to illuminate the broad sweep of the development of Australian food science and technology. I have avoided disturbing what I hope is the flow of the text by scattering it with references. Rather, I have included for each chapter a list of sources with which, by reference to titles and sometimes to authors, specific portions of the text may usually be identified. Although the final editing was completed in Australia, the book was written in England. While I was fortunate in having a mass of material with me, I called upon these friends in Australia for help which was willingly given: Messrs JF Kefford, KC Richardson, L Higginbotham, Miss Margaret Dick, Mrs Beverley George, Mrs EP Jones, Doctors Beverley Wood, FHC Kelly and BC Rankine, Professor AL Halmos and my daughter, Jennifer Farrer. My thanks to them all and

x

To feed a nation

especially to Dr Barbara Munce, editor of Food Australia, for permission to quote long parts of one of my papers published therein; to Mr John Bignell of Bothwell, Tasmania, for permission to reproduce his diagram of the Thorpe water mill; and to Professor KA Buckle, University of New South Wales, for help and advice. In Britain I am grateful to Dr Neil Chambers of the Banks Archive Project and Mr Peter McDonald of the Queensland Government Office, London, who were especially helpful, the latter with a wealth of information on the Centre for Food Technology, and to my wife, Marilyn, who suffered long hours of my absent-mindedness. It is one thing to write a book and quite another to have it published. I am therefore especially grateful to my friend, Mr Alan Mortimer, President of the International Union of Food Science and Technology, who, with the willing support of the Food Technology Association of Victoria, enlisted the financial help of the Australian Blending Company Pty Ltd, Halcyon Proteins Pty Ltd, Kraft Foods Limited, the Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology, CSIRO and the Food Technology Association of Victoria in bringing this work to fruition. To all those, therefore, who were thus involved in this publication, I offer my sincere thanks. Finally, in spite of the help I have received both now and in the writing of the earlier works, it is always possible to misinterpret or inadvertently distort what one is told. Accordingly, all the inevitable errors of commission and omission are mine and mine alone. Keith Farrer, Melbourne, May 2004

Introduction

The word ‘technology’ means different things to different people. It derives from the Greek, tekhne = skill or art, through tekhnologia = systematic treatment. It is used in two ways. The first meaning is the application of science in the development of useful products and processes and the methods used to achieve these ends. The second, more diffuse, meaning is the body of knowledge available to a group or civilisation for achieving certain aims, for example the technology of the Iron Age. In this book the word is used in the first way. ‘Science’, it has been said, ‘is about knowing, technology about doing’, but much technology in the first sense was developed long before the background science was known.‘Doing’ preceded ‘knowing’, but there is no doubt that the procedures used amounted, in the main, to a ‘systematic treatment’. Certainly, this was the case with food technology, which is taken to mean ‘the reduction of the art of preserving food to a set of principles the application of which will ensure that the processes used are reliable and repeatable, and that the products are safe, will keep, and are acceptable to the consumer’. Food technology is concerned for the most part with making raw foods edible, and with the transfer of food from a time of plenty to a time of want and from a place of plenty to a place of want. This involves methods of preparation, processing (apart from cooking), storage, and transport, and is based on the control of micro-organisms and the prevention or minimisation of chemical and physical changes. Both of these are intimately concerned with food quality— flavour, texture, and nutritive value—and the control of micro-organisms, particularly, is related to safety. It is still sufficient for the food technologist to achieve desired results without necessarily being able to explain in scientific terms all that happens in the process. Food science, on the other hand, seeks the full explanation of what happens in food raw materials and the processes to which they are subjected, in the confident expectation that such understanding will bring greater control of, and important improvements in, quality and safety. While some production methods, such as cheese processing, are still not fully understood in scientific terms, few advances are now made other than by the application of scientific results. Interdisciplinary collaboration, for the solving of problems, introduction of new products, processes, and packaging, and overall improvement of the food supply, dates from the middle of the 20th century, and the integrated body of knowledge thus produced is now referred to as food science and technology. Food technology takes a raw material and turns it into a finished product attractive enough to make people buy it according to their culture and food habits and the product’s perceived value to them in quality and price. The science behind food technology includes elements of chemistry and biochemistry, biology and microbiology, physics, engineering and materials science, psychology and sociology. Above all, food technology must come to terms with nutrition, itself a branch of food science. Food science and technology, then, constitutes a spectrum

xii

To feed a nation

with science in all its diversity at one end and technology at the other. Each is clearly identifiable, yet merges into the other so that it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins. It is best, therefore, to follow the term, ‘food science and technology’, with a singular verb. No discussion of this discipline can be divorced from food per se. Food production is a major part of agriculture—which, indeed, began with the growing of food—and both scientist and technologist are vitally concerned with the conditions under which any given food is grown, for these conditions influence its composition and properties. Nor is food science and technology divorced from the diet of the people, whoever and wherever they are. Apart from questions of nutrition and safety, the food of the people at any particular time and place throughout history is an important indicator of local agricultural production, of contemporary food technology (or techniques), and in some cases, such as the availability of spices and tea in Britain, of imports. Anderson, writing of China, provides an example. At the end of the Ming period—that is, in the mid-17th century—China’s food was virtually as it is now. Rice (70% of the total) and wheat were the grains; sugar, oil, and tea were as important as they are today; and diversified and specialised production of fruits, vegetables, and so on, were widespread. This tells us that the Chinese had developed technologies for boiling sugar, expressing oil, and curing tea, though green tea is not fermented, and also that the consumption of fruit and vegetables was general. It implies that the Chinese had mastered the art of dehulling rice, as indeed they had, producing a semi-polished product, and that they were milling wheat, as they were, with the familiar stone mills followed by sieving to produce a not more than 80% extraction flour. (The ‘extraction rate’ is explained on p. 80). They knew nothing of the phase changes in sugar boiling, the mechanisms of oxidative rancidity, nor the enzymes inactivated by the preliminary steaming of green tea leaves. They were totally unaware of the thiamin in their semi-polished rice, or of the anticarcinogenic properties of some of their fruits and vegetables. They had no food science, but they had developed some food technology. At the end of the 18th century, Nicolas Appert, a French chef, successfully pioneered the heat processing of food commercially. He was a food technologist—indeed, modern food processing is dated from his work—but his methods were empirical, not scientific. Much later, from emerging science, came knowledge and understanding, prediction, control, and regulation. So, also, ancient fermentations for beer, wine, cheese, sauerkraut, and so on were accomplished by art rather than science, but all these, and the soy sauce and other fermented foods of the Orient, have now yielded to scientific study. The various micro-organisms responsible for the end results have been identified, the optimum conditions for their activity established, and consistent products thus obtained by careful attention to the conditions which science prescribes. The reason jams, conserves, and salted meat and fish—high-sugar and high-salt products—can be stored is now understood in scientific terms, and sugar, salt, and acidity (expressed as pH*) are used intelligently in establishing biological stability in a whole range of what are now referred to as intermediate-moisture foods (IMF). Food science is now well established. Part One of this book begins with a look at Aboriginal techniques and considers the food technology, such as it was, available to the men and women who founded the colony of New South Wales. The familiar ancient and emerging technologies that the colonists brought with them settled

* pH is a numerical scale expressing from 1 (very acid) to 14 (very alkaline) the acidity and alkalinity of a solution, pH 7 being exactly neutral. In chemical terms, pH is approximately equal to the reciprocal of the logarithm of the hydrogen ion concentration of the solution.

Introduction

more or less comfortably into the new land. However, changes were afoot. Initially, these technological changes came in response to specific opportunities and needs, slowly at first, but with a rush in the last quarter of the 19th century. For the most part they were not peculiarly Australian, but they established the face of Australian food technology up to the Second World War and in some cases beyond. They were commodity driven and have been so treated in Part Two. Although Appert began heat processing with fruits and vegetables, and the Americans introduced canning with these same raw materials, Australian canning began in the mid-19th century with the drive to preserve meat for shipment to Britain. Within 20 years jam was being canned in Hobart, and fruit canning followed. The same imperative led to the development of refrigeration, which was soon applied to dairy products and fruit as well as meat. Sugar, originally from India, had been exported from Brazil in the 16th century. When the French pushed the American rebellion into the background, George III was concerned for his ‘sugar islands’ in the Caribbean. It was inevitable that a sugar industry should begin in Australia’s tropics and semi-tropics; this, too, began in the mid-19th century. From 1870 fundamental changes occurred in milling, brewing and dairying, but these changes were not so much in understanding as in doing. They were largely, especially in milling, dairying and sugar boiling, clever engineering responses to the needs of a specific segment of the food industry, but technological advances were then applied to different commodities. Australia was innovative in refrigeration, which had arisen in response to the need to preserve meat: TS Mort immediately saw its value for milk distribution; then it was applied, first in Tasmania from 1885, to the cool storage of fruit for export, and to butter a year or two later. Dehydration arrived in two unconnected forms: the production of ‘evaporated’ apples, which led the world in the introduction of mechanical dehydration, and the sun drying of ‘dried fruits’. Late in the 19th century and in the first years of the 20th, through engineering of can design and production and through understanding of microbiological constraints and imperatives, canning developed as a technology of general application. Nineteenth century food science was at best very sketchy. In Australia it consisted of the demonstration of the value of chemical analyses in winemaking, the control of the sugar industry and food adulteration, work on brewers’ yeasts, and, spectacularly, the emergence of cereal science. Slowly, the scientific background to food processing and nutrition began to unfold, but, for most of this period up to the Second World War, Australian food technology was just that, technology, and, as already stated, it was commodity driven. The last quarter of the 19th century, especially the 1880s, was a watershed in food science and technology, especially technology. The years 1940–60, especially the decade 1945–55, constituted another period of great change when food science and technology matured rapidly and set the pattern of today. Part Three of the book discusses how Australian food science and technology discovered itself. Stimulated by the war, driven by opportunities and consumer expectations deriving from new packaging and processes, and faced with demographic change, government regulatory initiatives and new concerns about nutrition and food safety, the Australian food industry discovered that it needed to be based on science. Australian food science and technology have since continued to surge forward through industry and professional organisation, educational advancement, industrial innovation and government encouragement.

xiii


PART ONE: FROM TECHNIQUES TO TECHNOLOGY


Chapter 1


People are thought to have come to Australia 60 000 years ago and slowly spread over the continent and into Tasmania, evolving into a great diversity of cultural adaptation with hundreds of languages. What follows is a brief survey of traditional Aboriginal food and techniques for handling it. It must be understood that food supplies and their treatment were anything but uniform throughout the country, and that specific foods and their usage may have been, and probably often were, related to only part, and sometimes a very small part, of the Aboriginal world. Annual feasting on the Bogong moth and triennial enjoyment of bunya pine kernels are examples of diversity and the local availability of a specific food. No attempt is made here to place any particular practice in a specific time frame. Aboriginal people were themselves part of a total ecological system in which slow changes forced some adaptation, but within which most of their food culture was still of great antiquity. It is perhaps convenient to think of the Aboriginal world in four main divisions: coastal, riverine/plains, desert, and Tasmanian. Common to all four was the nomadic culture of the hunter-gatherer. In general, men hunted large marsupials and emus with woomera and spear, boomerang and throwing stick, and women gathered natural vegetable products, the honey of the native bee, shellfish and crustaceans, but also caught reptiles and small mammals. The women thus contributed up to, say, 80% of the food consumed, including a significant proportion of the protein foods. Nowhere, not even on Cape York, were gardens cultivated (as they were in New Guinea and even on some Torres Strait islands), probably because such activity is time-consuming and there was no need for it: Australia was an affluent hunter-gatherer society with no stimulus for labour-intensive activities. Food was abundant, and when it became scarcer in any given area the nomads moved on. In the meantime they made the most of the local game and the seeds, fruits, and nuts of their immediate surroundings. About 25 000 years ago the Tasmanians crossed the land bridge that now lies beneath Bass Strait. They ate fruits, roots, the pith of ferns, fungi, and seaweed but lacked the major vegetable foods available in Australia, and their diet was heavily dependent on flesh foods: marsupials, seals, birds, and shellfish, but for some reason not, for the last 4000 years, fish. They did, however, have ‘the nearest thing to an alcoholic drink in prehistoric Australia’, the sap of Eucalyptus gunnii. In addition to the marsupials, the coastal Aboriginals had access to plentiful marine foods. They fished with hook and line and bone-tipped spears, taking dugong and turtle as well, and gathered turtle eggs and shellfish as evidenced by sometimes-enormous middens from Cape York to Tasmania. Yams and roots were dug by the women, and water lily roots collected from billabong and river, and fruit and seeds from the bush. Further inland the food supply was

4

To feed a nation

similar, the marine foods being replaced by river fish, often caught in nets made from the fibres of bullrushes, and freshwater shellfish and crustaceans. Ducks, too, were netted over rivers and lakes, and in Victoria very clever and elaborate fish and eel traps were developed, especially in the Lake Condah area where the people seem to have lived a semi-sedentary life in villages. Seeds were collected and ground by hand in the Darling Basin at least 15 000 years ago, and the flour obtained was baked to yield a kind of bread as early as anywhere else in the world. As the lakes dried, the Aboriginals of what is now western New South Wales gradually changed their staple food from grass seeds to this flour, and, as the ‘dry heart’ of Australia was occupied some 12 000 years ago, the inhabitants, far from the foods of river, lake, and sea, developed techniques for hunting the large kangaroo and the use of the grindstone. They were also forced to include a greater variety of seeds in their diet, some 45 species as compared with nine in Arnhem Land where there was a greater variety of fruits and roots. Grinding of seeds was accompanied by a rough winnowing, and tools for cutting, scraping, and pounding food included crude pestles and mortars used to crush bracken and other roots. As the Aboriginals carried fire with them as fire sticks, flesh foods were grilled and, with vegetables, cooked in ground ovens. Perhaps surprisingly, Aboriginals did not, as Torres Strait Islanders did, boil food; that technique does not appear to have reached Cape York. Some Aboriginal practices have been termed ‘incipient agriculture’, and Australian vegetation and fauna have been described as artefacts of the Aboriginals with their fire sticks. They altered their food supply by firing forest and scrub deliberately and according to plan to promote the growth of lush green grass, thus increasing the supply of edible seeds and encouraging the grass-eating game on which in part they depended. They did not cultivate cereals; yet, when the seeds were full but the grass still green, they harvested the native millet, Panicum decompositum, by pulling it up or reaping with stone knives, then stacked it in heaps and left it to ripen and dry before it was threshed. In some parts this ‘in field storage’ was practised on a large scale. They did not plant gardens; yet, in some cases, yams were planted on offshore islands, and in others the top of the tuber was left attached to the plant so that it would grow again, and the vines marked to indicate ownership. Fruit trees were deliberately ‘sown’ by spitting seeds of fruit into the debris of fish and shells, and in other places water was diverted into channels to water existing trees. In arid areas plant foods abounded after good rains. In the early 1980s, staff of the Armed Forces Food Science Establishment at Scottsdale in Tasmania carried out an extensive evaluation of Australian survival foods, in effect an assessment of Aboriginal foods. With a slightly different emphasis, a study of the nutritional composition of dozens of Australian Aboriginal bush foods was undertaken practically simultaneously in the Human Nutrition Unit, Department of Biochemistry, University of Sydney. Fruits, vegetables, animal foods, and seeds and nuts were analysed, and in general the compositions and nutritive values found were similar to those of comparable Western foods. Animal foods are good sources of protein, vegetables of carbohydrate. The witchetty grubs, larvae of Cossidae spp., were high in protein (15%) and fat (19%). There were some surprises. The green (or Kakadu) plum, Terminalia ferdinandia, was found to have the highest recorded vitamin C level, up to 5 per cent! High thiamin (vitamin B1) values were found in cooked candle nut (Aleurites moluccana) (4 mg/100 g) and in wild cucumber or bush banana (Leichhardtia australis) (3 mg/100 g), and many seeds are nutrient rich—high in fat, protein, and minerals (seeds of Grevillea leucopteris were reported to contain up to 1.5% of calcium). The Bogong moth (Agrotis infusa), gathered and eaten in the Australian Alps in springtime for at least 1000 years, is highly nutritious. The edible portion, the abdomen,


contains about 22% protein and 39% fat and is thus a high-energy food. The bunya pine in the hinterland of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast provided kernels that were eaten raw or toasted and were rich and fattening. Overall, the traditional Aboriginal diet, low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fatty acids, is demonstrably more healthy than a poor Western diet. Such information not only confirms the favourable nutritional status of the original inhabitants of Australia, but also is of inestimable value in showing the men and women of the armed forces that they can, in an emergency, live well off the land. Also, one might say, it is a sad and belated postscript to the Burke and Wills expedition whose members died, essentially, of ignorance. It is well known that the Tasmanians, in spite of plentiful supplies, did not eat fish, but the archaeological record suggests that up to about 4000 years ago they did. A possible explanation of why they stopped has been advanced by HR Allen, who suggests that as the climate grew colder the more highly calorific flesh of seabirds and seals came to be preferred, especially by those on the harsh west coast. Had the Tasmanians had the service of a consultant nutritionist, they would probably have been advised to give up fishing and concentrate their energies on more profitable foods. There is evidence in the post-3000 BP archaeological record that this is just what they did. There was a limited trade in foods, mainly yams and the like, between some of the islands of Torres Strait where canoe travel was relatively quick, but on the mainland where the speed of communication was walking pace, foods were virtually absent from the Aboriginal system of ceremonial exchange. This is not surprising. The transport and distribution of food presupposes that there is some method of storing it or making it keep, and the Aboriginals had no great incentive to store food any more than they had one to sow, because nature was bountiful and, when necessary, they simply moved on. Apart from that, the climate favoured the rapid deterioration of all foods, especially flesh foods, once gathered or killed, so perhaps they moved on because they could not store food. Nevertheless, it has been suggested that the extent of food storage has been underestimated. Yams were sometimes dug and stored in stacks for winter consumption. The storage of grass seeds under bark has been recorded. The stacks of native millet have already been referred to, and some seeds were stored, in skin bags or wrapped in grass and coated with mud, or even in wooden dishes. Fruits were allowed to desiccate, and some of this dried fruit was packed in large balls of ochre and stored in trees. Nuts of the bunya pine were buried for later use and cycad nuts sliced, wrapped in paper bark, and buried in grass-lined trenches. There was, therefore, some storing of present surplus for future use. Salting was unknown, smoking virtually so, but there is some evidence of the crude smoking of eels on basalt hearths in Victoria’s Lake Condah region. In general, the Aboriginals did not try to store flesh foods, but there is at least one example of carefully stacked fresh water mussels being buried alive in wet sand as a food reserve. This was a ‘living larder’, as were pockets of game deliberately left, say, round a waterhole, for use in an emergency. Various taboos involving the forbidding of certain foods to certain groups of people also served to conserve game. There is evidence to support the view that, when the people were ready to leave the mountains following the annual feasting on Bogong moths, they carried with them a paste prepared by grinding de-winged moths. The composition of this paste, based on modern analyses of moths, was very close indeed to that of Cheddar cheese. In spring it would have had a life of a week or even longer, more than justifying the effort of preparation for taking this highly nutritious food with them.

5

6

To feed a nation

In ancient times and in many countries, cycads (Cycas spp. and Macrozamia spp.) were a source of food, but the untreated nuts were known, no doubt by trial and error, to be poisonous. Macrozamia nuts have been identified among the foods of the prehistoric Aboriginals. The active principle, macrozamin or cycasin, has been identified as a [beta]-glycoside yielding on ingestion the toxin, methylazoxymethanol. Joseph Banks described the dramatic ill effects of the ingestion of the untreated nuts by members of the Endeavour expedition. Assured that the Aboriginals ate them, he thought it probable ‘that these people have some method of Preparing them by which their poisonous property is destroyd [sic], as the inhabitants of the East Indian Isles are said to do by boiling them and steeping them 24 hours in water, then drying them and using them to thicken broth’. Banks concluded that the poison was ‘intirely in the Juices’ as ‘in the roots of the Mandihocca and Cassada of the West Indies’. He was right; the Aboriginals knew, too, using the leached toxin from cycads and other dangerous foods to stun animals and fish at waterholes. Later in his journal Banks described the method of treatment used by the ‘Batavian Indians’ as ‘first to cut the nuts in thin slices and dry them in the sun, then to steep them in fresh water for three months, afterwards pressing the water from them and drying them in the sun once more’. He also noted that they consumed them only in times of food scarcity, when they mixed them with their rice. The Aboriginals had no rice. Empirical knowledge of the preparation of wholesome food by leaching, fermenting, drying, and roasting was, and is, widespread among unsophisticated peoples. Such methods for the removal of cyanogens (substances capable of producing cyanide) from cassava and of alkaloids (nitrogenous organic compounds, some of which are drugs) from bitter lupin seeds also are ancient, and cycads are prepared for food in similar ways in other places besides Australia. Here, as elsewhere, leaching, fermentation, and the roasting of leached or fermented product were practised. The suggestion that Australian Aboriginals ‘imported’ the methodology some 4000 years ago was based on its use in islands close to Australia’s north and its apparent sudden appearance. However, later evidence shows that macrozamia nuts were known and consumed in the south-west of the continent at least 13 000 years ago and the practice has endured. Pulverised or sliced nuts, with or without pre-drying, were leached for days or even weeks in running or stagnant water: thus, the toxin was either washed out, in a short time, or else hydrolysed (that is, it underwent a chemical reaction with the water) and washed out, in a longer time. Fermentation was accomplished by leaving the comminuted nuts in still water for several months, a form of storage. Here there would have been diffusion of the toxin outwards, plus hydrolysis of it. The product from both methods was dried and roasted, or baked like a damper leading to thermal decomposition or accelerated hydrolysis of residual toxin. Old nuts that had shrunk in the shell to the extent that they rattled were apparently eaten with impunity, lending point to the view that the toxin slowly hydrolysed as the nuts dried. However, variations in methods used in various places—time of leaching, pre- and post-drying, and roasting or not roasting—emphasise their empiricism. These were techniques, not a coherent technology. Like cycads, yams are known in many countries, and wild ones especially are bitter and/or toxic and eaten only after special preparation. Of the three species indigenous to Australia, the ‘cheeky’ yam (Dioscorea bulbifera) is a bush food in the north. It is very bitter, but, as research has shown, not poisonous, the bitter principle being the terpene, biosbulbin D. The incident described by Lewis is a classical angioneurotic oedema which may or may not have been an allergic reaction and may or may not have been induced by the bitter principle. It has been suggested that the bitterness


protects from predators yams stacked for the winter. These yams, whether from the storage stacks or freshly gathered, are prepared for consumption by a number of methods including boiling and baking the sliced tubers, and/or exposing them to the sun, sometimes followed by leaching. It is very reasonably suggested that the pre-treatment opens up the tissues to permit easier leaching. Macrozamia spp. and the ‘cheeky’ yam were not the only poisonous or inedible foods made edible by the Aboriginals, but leaching and roasting were the favoured techniques. The Aboriginals had no facilities for, and therefore no knowledge of, alcoholic fermentation, but when it occurred naturally, they drank the liquor. As already mentioned, the Tasmanians had learnt to tap E. gunnii, and eagerly drank the sap which flowed from it. George Robinson, the Protector, recorded ‘I am told that it frequently makes them drunk’. It seems highly unlikely, however, that the sap had time to ferment. There are many forms of ‘in-toxic-ation’. In arid areas water was a problem. The Aboriginals made full use of dew, but also developed extraordinary skills in finding water where to the untutored eye none existed. In addition, they identified a number of trees and shrubs whose roots, when cut into segments, leaked potable water. There is evidence that in some places dams were built to hold water after rain, and the diversion of flow in order to water fruit-bearing trees has already been noted. To sum up, the Aboriginals hunted and gathered, with great cleverness. They did not produce food, but created conditions with their fire sticks that favoured food production. For whatever reason, their methods of storing food were crude and rudimentary, confined almost entirely to ‘dry’ foods such as seeds and foods that had been allowed to dry in the sun. By acute observation they identified, possibly independently, food sources made safely edible only after careful and sometimes prolonged preparation. Their variable techniques for this were successful, but, as already noted, they were not technology. The Aboriginals, with traditional knowledge of and skill in controlling their environment, have bequeathed to urban Australians a vogue for ‘bush tucker’. A number of books on Aboriginal foods have resulted, and a strong plea has been made for the inclusion of native foods in a unique Australian cuisine. Far more importantly, the Aboriginals have shown the armed forces, and all others who would challenge the harsh Australian environment, how to survive in it.

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Chapter 2


When they came to New South Wales in 1788, the colonists brought a distillation of thousands of years of slowly gathered experience in getting and handling food. More specifically, they brought the food habits and embryonic food technology of the Britain of that time. What else could they bring but what they knew? And when they came and starvation threatened, they ignored the traditional knowledge of Aboriginal people. In truth, it had little to offer the food habits of the white people who desperately tried and finally succeeded in transplanting what they were familiar with. Australia derived from late 18th century Britain, and the imprint is still evident. Where did the food knowledge come from that the colonists brought with them? Having largely given up hunting and gathering in favour of keeping herds and farming, humans then attempted to bridge the seasons between harvests and plentiful supplies of meat and times of scarcity. Cereal crops emerged many thousands of years ago, and techniques for their storage from season to season followed. The drying and smoking of meat is of great age and was widespread. It probably arose as an extra benefit from hanging meat inside huts to dry, but the sun-drying of meat, fish and fruit is also very old and is still widely practised. Both smoking and drying are bacteriostatic, and the smoke contains antioxidants. The use of salt to preserve food was also known, and salted fish was an article of commerce in the ancient world. The Romans were familiar with sausages to which salt, smoke and spices gave stability. Methods for preparing secondary foods appeared, mainly by accident. Cheese, a means of preserving milk solids, and wine, a method of preserving grape juice, but effectively much more than that, are mentioned in the Bible and other ancient texts. The early Egyptians mastered the essential techniques of wine making. Other fermentations, though not understood, were widespread. Brewing and breadmaking, though crude by today’s standards, were developed by the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, and the sofu, tofu, and tempeh of the East, all relying on moulds, go back thousands of years. The Romans developed factory production of liquamen, a highly salted fermented fish sauce, which had its counterparts in south-east Asia, where they are found to this day; but factory production implies a degree of sophistication considerably greater than, say, the smoking of meat in a hut. In Classical Greece the expression of oil from the olive was a major industry; the making of, and trade in, wine was equally important. Thus slowly, very slowly, from early blind techniques emerged the co-ordinated application of knowledge of materials and methods—in a word, technology. The milling of wheat also is of great age, and milling technology was unchanged for centuries. Two millstones are set one on the other, the bedstone fixed beneath the runner which, driven by an energy source, rotates. The grain is fed centrally through the ‘eye’ in the runner, and both

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To feed a nation

stones are grooved to cut the grain, grind the liberated starch cells, and deliver the flour to the periphery. The product, wholemeal flour, may be sieved, now through nylon screens, to produce various grades of flour. Even in ancient Egypt there was some removal of the coarser material by sieving through screens made from the papyrus reed. Mills producing stoneground flour still exist, though in small numbers and catering for a specialty market. In the first century BC, the Romans improved milling by harnessing water power to drive the stone, and later applied gearing so that a vertical water-wheel could drive a horizontal stone. A Roman mill of sixteen waterwheels capable of producing up to nine tonnes of flour per day is known. The consumers wanted white bread, and they got it by a combination of sifting the flour and adding alum—an addition that was still being made, illegally, at the end of the 19th century. Every village had its own, usually water-driven, stone flour mill, and for centuries there was little change. Windmills were introduced late in the 12th century and steam was applied to milling in the 1780s, but neither altered the technology of the millstones whose preparation, maintenance, and setting called for skill of a high order. In the Tudor period white flour was obtained by sifting whole meal through linen cloth and was used to make manchet bread, the finest kind of wheaten loaf. The practice continued, and in 1765 and 1770 John Milne of Manchester patented sieves. The first was an inclined wire cylinder with mesh increasing from top to bottom thus producing several grades of flour in one pass. The second was a bank of three sieves of decreasing mesh set one above the other and shaken from a central shaft. By the end of the 18th century, mechanical threshing and cleaning of grain were well known, and the latter included use of the smutter to remove spores of smut, a black fungus (Ustilagineae spp.). These advances were available to the colonists, and can be seen in Fig. 2 (page 19). The Albion mill at Blackfriars in London was a forerunner of the merchant mills of a century later. In 1786, just before the First Fleet sailed, it began to produce flour from 20 sets of stones driven by two steam engines, but the ordinary millers saw its capacity as a threat. It burnt down in 1791 and was not rebuilt. Originally, the wholemeal flour from the stones was sieved and sifted by hand through screens to yield bran, pollard (a finer bran containing some flour), and perhaps two grades of flour. In the Middle Ages these screens were made of coarse cloth, but from the latter part of the 17th century Swiss silk gauze was used to yield the finest grades of flour until nylon took over in our own times. British practice was to mill low—that is, with a small gap between the stones—and rely on the sieves for the final white flour. The French were then milling high, with a larger gap, which yielded bran, wheatgerm, some flour, and particles of the wheat endosperm, semolina, which could be separated and milled separately to give a whiter flour. For a long time, bread was home-baked, although town bakers were organised in London in the 11th century and town baking spread as the population gradually became more urban. The Assize of Bread of 1266, which dealt with weight and quality, was not replaced by the first Bread Act until 1822. During the Middle Ages and in Tudor England almost all the food consumed by a family was produced by it. The variety was very limited and the meat often tainted, which is why loaf sugar coming from the Orient was welcome and the spice trade became so important. By the 18th century hams and bacon were being cured by several methods, such as pickling in solutions of brown sugar, salt, saltpetre and sal prunella (sloe). Sometimes vinegar and spices were included in the pickle, and the value of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) in producing the still-desired pinkness was known. Smoking followed, preferably over a wood fire; when coal fires were introduced, the hazards were realised and this smoke was ‘filtered’ through brown paper. Sausages were based on


meat, frequently pork, but contained cereals, usually breadcrumbs, and were well spiced. There was much variety as they were mainly domestic products in the 18th century. However, the towns were growing and sausages were made also in the town shops where continental sausages, adding further variety, also were obtainable. The preparation of sausages led logically to potted meats which, too, were known before the First Fleet sailed. The Romans used ice to extend the life of foods, and the preservative effects of some spices and other aromatic plants, and of the fumes of burning sulphur, were well known. Until quite recently, however, there was no inkling of the scientific background to any of the results obtained. Technology, yes, and art as well, were used to achieve the best results, but all was empirical. The technology of the times was simply a collection of techniques by whose careful application (‘systematic treatment’) people obtained reasonably consistent results. By the time the Normans came to Britain in the 11th century, ale—an unhopped, fermented, sweet malt liquor—was the established drink of men, women and children. Brewing includes a boiling stage, so ale was part of the diet because it was safe and water and milk were not. Brewing is more complicated than baking bread, and for centuries household production was generally limited to manor houses and castles, monasteries, colleges, and institutions, and houses of the better-off farmers and villagers for their own use. Nevertheless, by the middle of the 13th century the taverns of the towns and inns of the countryside were brewing for their customers, and already there was some government regulation and control. Common Brewers were mentioned in the Court Rolls of 1336–38. Beer, a hopped, fermented, malt liquor, arrived in the 15th century from the Low Countries (the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg) where hops had been used in brewing for 400 years. Hops have antiseptic properties and prolong the shelf life, so beer was more stable than ale in transport and storage and could be distributed more widely. Gradually, hops became an essential flavour ingredient, beer supplanted the old drink, and the two terms, ale and beer, slowly became interchangeable. In the 15th and 16th centuries, breweries became established in the towns to meet a growing demand. Some London breweries employed numbers of men, and by the end of the 17th century town supplies especially were being brewed by independent brewers. However, most breweries were still small and attached to inns and alehouses. Land transport by dray limited distribution to a radius of about six miles; in the country, therefore, brewing was a local village technology depending either on home brewing or a small Common Brewer. By the end of the 17th century production of hopped pale ale had increased, but large breweries were confined to the cities, especially London. Here the 18th century was marked by the rise to dominance of porter, a dark, thick, bitter beer derived from overheated (caramelised) malt, the wort heavily extracted in the mash tun, fermented out and clarified with isinglass. This drink was favoured by London porters, hence the name. Less susceptible to temperature than ale, porter was very stable. It was also more potent. It travelled well and was known in Sydney from the earliest days. Ale brewing, in effect, marked time during the 18th century. It began to expand only at the beginning of the 19th with the greater control of fermentation—especially the dissipation of heat by the attemperator—and the prevention empirically of aerial contamination by the use of deeper vessels, the blanket of carbon dioxide on top of the fermenting wort, and vat covers. Several London breweries that continue to this day were established during the 18th century. Samuel Whitbread’s is a good example. Beginning in about 1742 Whitbread prospered exceedingly, in 1796 brewing 200 000 barrels of porter in one season. This relied on a plant, with stocks, worth more than £500 000. It was a big enterprise, one of several. The scale of operation of these

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To feed a nation

breweries led inevitably to measures to control quality and avoid waste by applying the thermometer to measure temperature, the saccharometer (hydrometer) to control concentrations, and the attemperator to control the temperature of fermentations. This last was a coil of copper pipe, which could be lowered into the centre of a fermenting vat and through which warm or cold water could be circulated. Small Common Brewers were still doing well in the smaller towns, and in the country the innkeepers were still applying what Mathias in The brewing industry in England 1700–1830 refers to as ‘the rules of brewing inherited from the rustic traditions of a cottage economy’ (p. 65). In the north, herbal ales, more lightly hopped than those in the south, were still popular. It was these contrasts that the First Fleeters brought, and one of them, James Squire, Australia’s first brewer, was not a Londoner. He was a countryman convicted at Kingston, Surrey. In 1785 Whitbread had installed a Boulton and Watt steam engine. It was ‘one of the wonders of contemporary London’ and was installed to grind the malt, but it was also used to ‘raise our liquor’: that is, to pump water. This introduction of the steam engine to the food industry by brewers and, as already noted, millers occurred contemporaneously with the sailing of the First Fleet, but the technology was not taken to Australia until, as in Britain, it was made available by an engineer. John Dickson, a Scot whose steam mill in Sydney was opened by Governor Macquarie in 1815, was an engineer who manufactured steam engines in London in the first decade of the 19th century. He arrived in Sydney in October 1813 bringing one with him, and with it the equipment required to install and maintain it. Wine was made in the Mediterranean countries and in Germany, and some even in England. Its quality was extremely variable but generally poor. Distillation originated probably ‘somewhere east of Suez’, but was practised in Europe at least as early as the 12th century. Spirits were being distilled in London in the 15th century, and the rise in consumption in the 16th led to the excesses and social problems of the 17th and 18th centuries that were highlighted in Hogarth’s prints, and also to the promotion of beer as a preferable alternative. Dairying was in the hands of the farmers’ wives and daughters. Milk was widely drunk, but although the need for the cleanliness of utensils seems to have been recognised, the milk itself was often contaminated. The safest milk was that sold in the towns directly from the cow. Buttermaking was a tedious affair. There were no separators, and milk was allowed to stand in shallow containers for up to three days to permit the cream to rise, whereupon it was skimmed by hand and the cream churned, also by hand, to butter. Salt was an essential preservative. The many varieties of regional cheeses also were handmade by the women, though in some cases milk in the village was pooled to produce cheese of larger sizes. Rennet extracts from chopped and macerated vells (a calf ’s fourth stomach) had been used for centuries to set the curd, and sundry extracts of natural products, such as saffron, were used as colourants. In the 18th century annatto, a carotenoid-containing extract of the berries of the tropical shrub, Bixa orellana, was introduced for the colouring of cheese, and its use endures. Buttermilk and whey, large-volume and nutritious by-products from the two basic dairy products, were popular drinks in the countryside. Pickled, dried, and salted fish were common foods, and meat preservation was still accomplished by salting. The Salters Company dated from 1394, and salt meat, with ships’ biscuit, a hard and uninviting product, was at once the mainstay and the downfall of those who went down to the sea in ships. It had been for hundreds of years, and it still was in the 18th century. Such a diet inevitably led to scurvy, but in 1753 James Lind, a Scottish physician, showed that this was a dietary deficiency disease and, by curing it with citrus fruit, pointed the way to its prevention. Captain James Cook may not have known of Lind’s work, but on the famous


Endeavour voyage, though required to try a number of dubious preventatives, he demonstrated that scurvy could be kept at bay by serving sauerkraut, reducing stress, and taking every opportunity to obtain fresh food, especially greens. For this he was rightly honoured by the Royal Society. Throughout the 18th century, where people lived and the size of their incomes determined how well they ate. The landed gentry and the well-to-do town dweller lived extremely well. They ate and drank to excess from very varied, even lavish, menus. In the first half of that century the country folk were quite well served: in the south, with bread, butter, cheese, meat once or twice a week, and a variety of vegetables from their own cottage gardens; in the north, with oatmeal, less meat, more milk, and potatoes. Both had tea and sugar, the tea imported from the Orient, and the sugar by then from the Caribbean. Unsurprisingly, major changes followed the agrarian revolution of the first half of the 18th century that was the culmination of a number of developments in agriculture. The gradual enclosure of open fields and commons led through much social pain to more efficient farming: better land use, improved stock breeding, new fodder crops, major developments in cultural practices, and the introduction of new farm equipment of which Jethro Tull’s seed drill was, perhaps, the most effective. One result of the advances in agriculture was a great increase in the production of wheat, and in the proportion of wheat in the total cereal crop. Bad harvests in the period 1764 to 1775 interrupted this trend and stimulated potato growing, especially in the north, but in the south of England—whence the First Fleet sailed under Governor Phillip, who had been farming for years in Hampshire—by the end of the 18th century wheat accounted for 80% of the cereals grown compared with only 60% at the beginning of the century. The social cost of the agricultural advances was high. Especially in the south, when common land was enclosed, country people lost their grazing land, and the milk on the enclosed farms went to the manufacture of butter and cheese for sale in the burgeoning towns and cities. The buttermilk and whey went to feed the pigs that were helping to satisfy the growing urban demand for meat. One result of this major shift was that, almost of necessity, poaching became common, and many poachers were transported to New South Wales. The Industrial Revolution is generally considered to cover the period 1740–1850 and thus coincided with the agrarian revolution. It was well under way when the colonisation of Cook’s New South Wales was decided upon and Australia was founded. It began in England for a number of perceived reasons, and was marked by the shift from domestic to factory production. This was made possible above all else by the harnessing of steam power through Watt’s improvements to the Newcomen engine, and his partnership with Matthew Boulton. As we have seen, the first steam mills were introduced in London in the mid-1780s, shortly before the First Fleet sailed, but flour milling in its modern form did not develop until late in the 19th century though Oliver Evans in America had built a mechanised mill by 1789. He introduced vertical and horizontal conveyors for grain and meal, and devised equipment (a ‘hopper boy’) to spread the meal for cooling before it moved on to the sifters which produced flour, bran, and pollard. These labour-saving developments, all driven from the same steam engine, were incorporated into a specially built mill and were a significant advance; but Evans’s ideas were greeted with indifference, so that brewing was the first of the food industries to become a truly factory operation. However, the milling and much of the brewing that came to Australia were the farmhouse and village procedures of rural 18th century Britain, and they endured for almost 100 years. Eleven ‘Noblemen, Clergy, Gentlemen, and Merchants’ met in Rawthmell’s CoffeeHouse in Covent Garden, London, on 22 March 1754 to form the Society for the Encouragement of Arts,

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To feed a nation

Manufactures, and Commerce. The society flourishes today as the Royal Society of Arts and works from the impressive Adam-designed house it has occupied since 1775. From the outset, by the award of cash premiums and medals, this society encouraged invention and development. It was immediately successful in recognising and encouraging enterprising people, including some in food production (agriculture) and, eventually, processing. They included some pursuing in 19th century Australia aspects of what we should now call ‘food technology’. Some 200 years ago, however, food preservation was still very much a hit-or-miss affair, and scientists were for the most part too involved with trying to gain an understanding of the nature of matter to attempt to relate what was known to a study of food. The change began with a French chef-turnedconfectioner, Nicolas Appert, who began in the 1780s to experiment with the heat preservation of food in glass jars. He did not invent heat processing, but by trial and error he established heat processing on a commercial basis. In the middle of the 17th century, Robert Boyle knew that heat could be used to preserve food, and for the next hundred years a succession of British kitchen recipes for bottling fruit was in use. Boyle also cut roasted meat into small pieces, packed them into a container and covered them with melted butter, a method known in Elizabethan times. The meat kept for at least six months on a voyage to the East Indies. We shall meet this method again. Whether or not Appert knew of what was being done sporadically, and essentially domestically, in Britain, we do not know. We do know that he was born in 1749 in Châlons-sur-Marne the son of an innkeeper, that he had quite extensive experience as a chef in the houses of the great, and that in 1780 he set himself up in Paris as a confectioner. Shortly after, he began to experiment with the heat processing of fruit in glass jars closed with corks constructed in such a way as to give him a hermetic seal. He was assured by GayLussac that the secret of preserving food was to exclude air, and that the food had to be heated until this was accomplished. There is evidence in Appert’s own writings that he was close to the true understanding of what went on, and indeed Pasteur himself said that Appert had anticipated pasteurisation. However, Appert bowed to the scientific authority of Gay-Lussac, and this fallacy bedevilled heat processing for most of the 19th century. Nevertheless, Appert was able to produce saleable goods and was so successful that he had to move out, first to Ivry-sur-Seine and then to Massy, to ensure a better supply of raw materials. Eventually his products were tested and passed by the French navy, and in 1810 he was offered Fr12 000 if he would provide 200 printed copies of his methods. This he did, and the myth arose that he had won a prize for a method of preserving food. No prize was offered. He was selling his products while Napoleon was still an obscure artillery officer, but Appert’s success led the government to approach him. By trial and error, Appert established heat processing on a commercial basis. A skilled observer, he was quick to apply the lessons of his observations. He knew nothing of micro-organisms, but he worked out the time/temperature requirements for different products. He recognised the importance of fresh raw materials, and of quality control for his containers and closures. He knew the dangers of overcooking and, later, of damaged cans. He had no faith in French tinplate, and long continued to use bottles, but English tinplate was a different matter and in 1810 Peter Durand was granted a British patent for what was, in effect, Appert’s process. Cowell has shown that there is evidence for believing that Durand was acting with, and for, Appert himself. In any event, in 1811–12 the British company of Donkin and Hall at Bermondsey in London began to package food in tinplated iron containers. The food canning industry had begun, and it very soon became important in the supply of preserved provisions to a number of exploring expeditions, many of them going to the Arctic, most of them British. Thus, the possibility of


preserving food for long periods of time by enclosing it in cans and then heat processing became thoroughly established, and by 1815 Donkin and Hall’s products were known as far away as Australia. By 1818 Donkin, Hall and Gamble, as the company had by then become, was supplying quantities of canned food to the Admiralty, and by the 1830s it was advertising a comprehensive range of canned foods, and practising incubation of the cans before releasing them to the market. Heat processing crossed the Atlantic to the United States of America in 1819 and canning there began in 1839. From the beginning there was a greater variety of raw materials available in America, and canning was more diverse. In 1841 an Hungarian named Stefan (later Stephen) Goldner obtained a British patent for heating sealed containers in a bath of calcium chloride brine and so raising the processing temperature. It was an important development, but when he rushed into large containers to fulfil an Admiralty contract, lack of knowledge of the basic science led him into deep trouble with incompletely processed foods. The scandal of putrefying product in Royal Navy stores in many locations led to the parliamentary Select Committee of Enquiry on Preserved Meats (Navy) and a serious erosion of confidence in the new product. Nicolas Appert was developing his process contemporaneously with the settlement of Sydney Cove; commercial heat processing was not known before the First Fleet left England. It was known in Sydney by 1815 at least, and would be applied by a colonist who arrived in 1835, was familiar with the products, and, in the mid-1840s, worked out a method for himself. Others who learnt the technology in London quickly followed him.

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Chapter 3


Governor Phillip’s instructions, so far as they related to feeding the colony, reflect the breathtaking, but inevitable, ignorance of those who wrote them: ‘The Increase of the Stock of Animals must depend entirely upon the measures you adopt on the outset for their preservation; and as the settlement will be amply supplied with vegetable production and most likely with Fish, Fresh Provisions, except for the Sick and Convalescents, may in great degree be dispensed with’ (Author’s emphasis). The expedition was supplied with salt pork, salt beef, ships’ biscuits, flour, pease (split peas), butter, and rice so that the First Fleet brought the foods with which its people were familiar. At the Cape, Phillip obtained grain, but although four millstones were landed at Sydney Cove from the Scarborough on 22 February 1788, there was neither a millwright nor a suitable and reliable millstream so there was an anguished return to primitive milling techniques. The first grain in New South Wales was ground, day and night, in 40 iron hand-mills. They were blunt within a year and there was no one who knew how to maintain them so the colony turned to querns and pestles and mortars, tedious and time-consuming methods that had to suffice until the middle of the 1790s. The poor soils of the Sydney area militated against the ‘vegetable production’ envisaged by the Colonial Office in London, and for years the colony lived a hand-to-mouth existence. The hungry years (1788–92) have been well described in a paper of the same name which discussed in detail the rations available on the voyage out and in the first five years of the settlement at Sydney Cove when it came so close to failure. It assessed the nutrients present in and missing from the diet and related them to the health of the colonists. It described how the whole settlement, from the Governor down, more than once went onto reduced rations during the anxious waiting for the store ships from England, the Cape, or India with more provisions, especially grain without which there was no bread. It concluded that though there was food in the bush, ‘the early settlers clung as closely as they could to the dietary pattern to which they had been accustomed’. That they continued to do so is reflected in their foods and in the accompanying technologies that they established in the succeeding years.

Milling and baking Governor Phillip yearned for a windmill. He had the stones, but he had no one who knew how to erect a mill and make it work. Nevertheless, those stones and the desperate need for any kind of flour stimulated a convict, James Wilkinson, to make a two-man treadmill. It worked but was

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To feed a nation

not good enough, and a bigger treadmill employing six men followed in 1794. That failed, however, in competition with a man-powered capstan mill built by John Baughan (or Bingham) that was less complex and more efficient. In January 1794 John Hunter was appointed to succeed Phillip, and when he left for New South Wales he took with him the essential working parts of a windmill, and a model as a guide to its installation. All arrived safely in September 1795, and the first windmill began operation on Miller’s Point in January 1797. Yet Hunter was not much better served than Phillip. Means were at hand to mill the corn, but milling expertise to do it efficiently was still lacking. No one is as important as the millwright who builds the mill and gets it working, or the miller who controls the setting of the stones, maintains their grinding surfaces and the patterns of the grooves, and supervises the dressing of the meal. Unfortunately, Hunter’s key men were incompetent. Efficiently or not, Norfolk Island had a watermill operating by 1795 and two windmills in 1796, but the first watermill on the mainland was that at Parramatta in 1804. It was unsatisfactory because of an intermittent water supply. By 1809 there were seven windmills in Sydney, and Sydney’s first successful watermill—the work, it is said, of Thomas West, a convict—dates from 1812, but in 1815 Governor Macquarie opened John Dickson’s steam-driven mill which could grind 10 bushels of wheat per hour. Other mills, some driven by horses, appeared in the country, but by the end of Macquarie’s rule there were 11 mills in Sydney: eight wind, two water, and one steam. So by 1821 the new colony had had mills powered by men, horses, wind, water, and steam, but in every case the milling technology was the same. The grain was ground by a runner stone revolving on a fixed bedstone as it had been for centuries, and the flour was sifted through silk screens. At first Sydney was the centre of milling, but as agriculture moved outwards, farmers found the loss of time and product associated with the slow transport of the day, and the cost, insupportable. The mills followed the farms to the country as these translated Britons reproduced in the new country the village technology with which they were familiar. New South Wales had 46 mills by 1830, about 100 by 1840, many of them steam-driven, and upwards of 200 before the introduction 200 180 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20

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Fig. 1 Mills in New South Wales 1800–1900.

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1890

1900


Fig. 2 The Thorpe water mill, Bothwell, Tasmania, 1822. (Reproduced with the permission of Mr John Bignell and the editor from Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings, 45 (2), 102, 1998.)

19

20

To feed a nation

of roller technology in the 1880s (Fig. 1). In Van Diemen’s Land with its abundance of streams, watermills flourished. The first was probably Robert Nash’s in Hobart Town in 1810. The first windmill dates from 1817 (there were three of them), and steam milling was introduced in 1829. By 1830 there were 37 mills; by 1840, 67; and by 1867, 107. Nearly half were watermills, the remainder powered by horse, steam, and wind, and they milled for export to the other colonies. John Bignell describes the Thorpe mill at Bothwell (Fig. 2), which dates from 1823, as ‘the only known Australian example of a traditional water-driven flour mill still operating in its original manner’. In 1840 iron hand-mills were still being advertised in Melbourne. However, in the period 1839–41, a tidal mill was set up at Bass Landing on the Bass River on the shores of Westernport; two steam mills began operation in Melbourne; two watermills followed, Dight’s on the Yarra and another at Morang on the Plenty River; and Peter Hurlstone soon after began to operate his windmill at Brighton. By 1864 there were 93 mills in Victoria, by 1875, 161, and almost all of them were steam-powered. Altogether from 1840 to 1880, 283 mills began milling in Victoria, and 237 were steam mills. A hundred of them had gone by 1900. In South Australia by 1879, when Duffield installed rollers experimentally at Gawler, there were 103 mills. Very few of them were watermills; South Australia is very different from Tasmania. By the early 1880s, 23 had closed. There were few flour mills in early Queensland and Western Australia, the latter importing flour for most of the 19th century. Such mills as there were repeated the experience of the other colonies. So, for almost 100 years following European colonisation, poor transport and traditional equipment and methods drew the mills to the country in all the colonies and reproduced the village technology of the world the colonists had left behind them. The local mill milled for the immediate community of which the miller was a member. Eventually the railways, better road transport, and a new, more capital-intensive milling technology destroyed the country millers and led to the massive centralisation of modern milling. Traditionally, the miller was often the baker, too. James Badgery was one such in Sydney. But this changed rapidly, and by 1821 Sydney had 11 mills but 52 licensed bakers. The centrality of bread in the food supply, recognised for centuries by the Assize of Bread, was reaffirmed in New South Wales by the ordinance of 5 May 1801 which brought milling and baking under direct government supervision. The extraction rate, or percentage of flour obtained from the wheat ground, was fixed at 76 and a loaf of 2 lb 1 oz (936 g) was to be bartered for 3 lb of wheat. In 1804 the price was reduced to 4 d or 2 lb 4 oz of wheat. This price and quality control over bread continued until 1822 in London and the 1830s in the Australian colonies, but baking, another village technology, remained in the hands of individuals, many of them housewives, as an art and tradition, and from time to time some were punished for dishonesty. Indeed, the first instance of food adulteration in Australia is believed to be that of a woman who, in 1792, paid at the public bakehouse with ‘flour’ containing 40% of powdered stone. In 1864, instead of the normal panary fermentation, the Melbourne Aerated Bread Company began to make bread with soda water as a source of carbon dioxide. The dough rose quickly, but the result was unacceptable and the company did not survive for long.

Brewing and other fermentations Brewing In the 18th century the water supply was usually polluted and it was far safer for the ordinary man to drink ale or beer. In any case, Sydney was settled by hard drinkers, and though beer and


porter were imported from the beginning these drinks were not cheap, so home brewing of a sort was resorted to almost as soon as the colonists settled down. James Squire, an emancipist, was Australia’s first commercial brewer. He began in a small way in 1790, but lack of suitable bitters was a drawback. He did, however, get some hops from the Daedalus, which arrived in April 1793. His sources of fermentable sugars were maize and colonial grown barley, which he used in his early brewery at Kissing Point (Ryde). He preferred the reliability of the maize ‘as the barley is so bad’, though that from the environs of Launceston was good. At Kissing Point he also had a tavern for the refreshment of travellers on the river between Sydney and Parramatta. There was a strong demand for spirits but until 1821, when the threat of famine was past, distillation was forbidden, and the government’s desire in the early days to supply an alternative to spirits— an echo of the English campaign against the excesses highlighted by Hogarth—led Governor King in 1804 to establish the first brewery at Parramatta. It is highly likely that the idea emanated from Sir Joseph Banks. In 1798 King, of whom Sir Joseph approved, was in London preparing to sail to succeed Governor Hunter, and Banks was organising a ‘Plant Cabbin’ similar to the one that had been tried and removed from Cook’s Resolution. This one failed, too, but before it did, Banks, in a letter of 20 June 1798 to John King, Under-Secretary of State, Home Office, had said, I have consulted Col. Paterson about the European Plants and Fruit Trees that have already been introduced into the Colony and I find that many of importance are still wanting, Particularly the hop, which, by Enabling the Colonists to brew beer, will diminish the consumption of unwholesome spirits, and add materialy [sic] to the health and comfort of the inhabitants. * But successful hop growing was a quarter of a century away and the problem of a suitable bittering agent remained. In 1794 John Boston, a surgeon and apothecary, had tried the leaves of love apple (Lycopersicum spp.) in the beer he brewed from malted maize. Some native plants were tried in Van Diemen’s Land—reminiscent, perhaps, of the herbal beers of the English north—but there was no substitute for hops. Without them, the government attempts to overcome the demand for spirits by providing beer were doomed. James Squire was probably also the first to grow hops. From 1805 he developed hop fields near his brewery, and several others followed; but New South Wales was not really suitable for hop growing. Van Diemen’s Land was. It still is. Squire’s contemporary judgement was ‘I find the Colonial Hops very good, but I think they grow better at the Derwent’. Some hops were grown there before the 1820s, but from 1822 this agricultural industry was firmly established in the Derwent Valley by William Shoobridge, who hailed from the hop fields of Kent. Between 1804 and 1809 other breweries appeared in Sydney, and still more were established during the Macquarie years (1810–21). However, these breweries, such as they were, were often attached to individual public houses, and much Australian brewing was still a farmhouse and village technology governed by rule-of-thumb methods unsuited to Australian conditions. Also, these nascent enterprises suffered from raw materials of indifferent quality and Macquarie’s licence fee of £55. Therefore, especially in the country, they came and went with some regularity. Squire’s brewery closed in 1822, but others of greater substance, and approaching contemporary London practice, arose. One such was the Australian Brewery, which was set up in Sydney in 1826 with kiln, cellars, fermenting room, and distribution system, but Terry’s Albion Brewery, * I am indebted to Dr Neil Chambers, Banks Archive Project, Natural History Museum, London, for this quotation.

21

22

To feed a nation

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

10 1840

1850

1860

1870

1880

1890

1900

Fig. 3 Breweries in New South Wales 1840–1900.

built in 1827, was even larger. Terry grew his own barley, but imported Kentish hops. The site of his brewery eventually passed to Tooheys, and the Australian Brewery was taken over by Tooth’s in the 1850s. John Tooth, from Kent, began his brewery in 1835. His nephews, Robert and Edwin, took over in 1843 and outlasted many who came and went. Some others, such as Marshall’s Paddington Brewery, prospered, but as small towns grew in the farming areas, breweries multiplied throughout New South Wales (Fig. 3), and they, too, were small. In Van Diemen’s land the yearning for the familiar alcoholic drinks was such that LieutenantGovernor Collins was forced to forbid home brewing in order to conserve wheat for bread, and even to put sentries in the cornfields to protect the ripening grain. But by the end of 1819 it was seriously suggested that brewing and distilling were necessary to use up excess wheat. In fact, James Austin had been brewing on a small scale for some time, but in the early 1820s several breweries began in Hobart. In 1832 Peter Degraves established the Cascade Brewery, which continues, and by 1850 there were 48 breweries in the colony. At least five breweries began in Melbourne before 1840, and by 1871 there were 125 in Victoria, 99 in the country. The same proliferation of breweries to serve small populations was apparent in the other colonies in the same period, and emphasised not


only a dependence on the old empirical village technology, but also the constraints of the Australian climate. Colonial brews were very variable and often poor because of substandard raw materials, not only hops, but also barley. The climate of New South Wales favoured neither, but that of Van Diemen’s Land produced better barley as well as hops. Higher ambient temperatures, which accelerated fermentation and contaminants even as they retarded the cooling of the meal from the millstones of the flour mills, forced brewers to juggle their British procedures. Nor could it be assumed that the need for cleanliness, well recognised by then, was being satisfied, especially in the many mini-breweries. The resulting beer was unstable, there was no means of keeping it cool, it deteriorated rapidly in transit, and, with poor and costly transport, there was no alternative to dispersion of production however varied may have been the products. Fig. 3 vividly illustrates this for New South Wales. It was the same pattern in the other colonies, but a more stable product from the city breweries and the coming of the railways led to the swift disappearance of the ‘village’ breweries that was clearly evident in the late 1880s and the early 1890s. Distilling Distilling, though forbidden until 1822, was, of course, practised illicitly as early as 1794, and continued in spite of stern measures from 1796 to suppress it. Robert Webb of Parramatta, in Collins’s picturesque words, ‘found it more advantageous to draw an ardent diabolical spirit from his wheat’ than to sell the wheat to the government. At first distilling relied on imported sugar, and colonial grain was made available only in 1827, but the irregularity of supplies of raw materials, and the empirical methods used, interrupted production, and distilling as a market for grain was a failure. Winegrowing Phillip had brought some vine cuttings with him, but nothing eventuated, and the first vineyard was a small one of one acre planted by the German, Philip Schaffer, in 1791. But, again, nothing eventuated. In 1816–18 Gregory Blaxland planted vines from the Cape, and in 1823 and 1828 he was awarded medals by the Society of Arts for samples of wine he sent to London; but it is evident that these were for a good try rather than excellence. However, the Macarthurs had begun planting at Camden in 1820, and at Penrith in 1827 they had a vintage of 20 000 gallons. Winegrowing was introduced to the Hunter Valley in the early 1820s by officers from Wellington’s campaigns in the Iberian Peninsula who brought with them knowledge acquired in Portugal and Spain. Surprisingly, in 1823 Bartholomew Broughton began a vineyard just outside Hobart Town. It was carried on until 1850 but was wiped out by a bank crash. Even more surprisingly, John Reynell is said to have taken vine cuttings from Port Arthur to Reynella in South Australia. Winegrowing in that colony quickly followed settlement in 1836, especially when Germans settled the Barossa Valley. Winegrowing was an old empirical village technology which progressed only after Pasteur’s work on fermentation, but three men, James Busby in the Sydney area, James King in the Hunter Valley, and Dr AC Kelly in South Australia, published books on viticulture. They knew less of the fermentation than of the varieties and cultivation of the grape, but all three of them were influential in the early days of Australian winegrowing. Yeast Baking bread, brewing beer, winemaking, and distilling all depend on yeast. Where did the yeast for these activities at Sydney Cove come from? Before recorded history began, naturally occur-

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24

To feed a nation

ring yeasts were used in fermentations for food (bread) and drink (wine and beer). So, the collection of yeast from one fermentation for the pitching of the next, or the sideways diversion of it for breadmaking, came about; and it continued. For example, a Tudor recipe for bread included ‘ale barme’, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the froth that forms on the top of fermenting malt liquors; used to leaven bread and ferment other liquors’. In 18th century Britain, brewers’ yeast was still top yeast; at the end of a brew, free from hop residues and other vegetable detritus that sank, this was skimmed off for pitching the next brew. The excess was available for sale to distillers, bakers, and in ‘penny packets’ to domestic users for home baking. Towards the end of that century Matthew Felton, ‘learning from Admiralty experiments in dehydrating [sic] beer’, filtered yeast through sailcloth or worsted serge, pressed the cake, and spread it out to dry, presumably in air, to yield an easily transportable, viable product. In 1796 he set up a factory to produce this product and got his raw material from the skimmings of ‘six of the biggest porter breweries’. The records are frustratingly silent on the supply of yeast in the victualling of ships. In port, bread meant bread, but at sea it meant ships’ biscuits for which yeast was not required. If bread, as normally understood, was baked at Sydney Cove from the first day, it seems certain that yeast had been included under the general heading of Sundries. If not, perhaps the bakers simply boiled up a mixture of flour and sugar, and possibly potatoes, let it stand to catch wild yeasts as their forebears had done when there was no access to brewers’ yeast, and carried on day-to-day by the rule-of-thumb methods of the time. This yeast could have been, and probably was, used for brewing—or perhaps dried yeast, like canned meat, found its way to Sydney not long after it became available in Britain.

Salting Salting is an ancient empirical technology, and the products were only too familiar to the colonists. For a long time it was the only method available to them for preserving meat and fish. At first an attempt was made to recover salt by shaking it from salted provisions, but as early as 1790 some sea salt was produced by boiling down sea water. In spite of the bitterness of the crude product, solar salt pans were established in the 1790s at Sydney and some 20 years later in two locations in Van Diemen’s Land. However, imported salt was preferred for the salting of such meat as there was, notably pig meat from Norfolk Island. In 1801 Governor King sent a ship to Tahiti for salt pork, but the salt had to be sent from Sydney or obtained from Hawaii. This was the beginning of a trade that went on until the 1820s. Surgeon George Bass was an early participant in it and in 1802 he made it clear that he was well aware that ‘the salting of pork within the tropics has been reckoned to require extreme care and attention’. The method was that devised by Cook and Vancouver: careful cleaning of the meat, rubbing with salt, pressing for 24 hours, pickling in brine for six days, and, after a further light press, packing in barrels between layers of salt. There was much handling in this, but also opportunity for inspection. By early January 1813 colonists at Windsor were suggesting, prematurely, that excess meat at that time should be salted and sent to Britain. This came to nothing, and by 1817 salt meat was being imported in significant quantities from Van Diemen’s Land into the commissariat stores in Sydney. However, by the late 1820s there was a glut of livestock in New South Wales, and the export of salted meat to Britain began in 1830. It soon became clear that colonial beef and salt were quite suitable for the production of salt meat by a procedure similar to that of Cook and Vancouver. The product was well received in Britain, Mauritius and elsewhere. The trade was


steady but received a boost in 1843 when sheep prices plunged. It continued with wide fluctuations for the rest of the 19th century.

Dairying Governor Phillip brought with him from the Cape a bull, a bull calf, and seven cows. The two bulls and four cows were landed at Sydney Cove, but in July 1788 the convict herdsman in charge of them lost them. They were found some miles to the south in November 1795—by which time their numbers had increased to nearly 40. In the meantime other animals had been obtained, and butter and cheese, farmhouse products, were on sale in Sydney and Parramatta at least from 1792. John Macarthur had a dairy at Elizabeth Farm by 1795, but it was making enough butter only for the household. Dr John Harris was milking nine cows at Ultimo in 1805, but in effect the first dairy herds were established in the 1820s in the Illawarra District. Farmers were able to send butter and cheese from there to Sydney by packhorse and ship. Butter was made as in Britain, the only way possible: long standing to let the cream rise, hand skimming with a piece of perforated tin, and hand churning. Under the primitive conditions, the quality of such products in the Sydney market can only be imagined. Also in the 1820s, the Van Diemen’s Land Company had a herd and dairy at Circular Head and made butter and cheese in the traditional way. In the Australian climate cleanliness was even more important than in Britain and spoilage was higher so the dairymaids had to add more and more salt. Small lots of butter and cheese were exported from the Illawarra in the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s, and in 1844 some butter and cheese were sent to California. These attempts, and others later, were unsuccessful, and until the separator became available in the 1880s buttermaking remained a village technology serving local needs. Churning and working were tedious and labour-intensive: ‘fresh butter’ had to be hand formed into 1 lb units, clothwrapped and packed into boxes; and ‘potted butter’ was more heavily salted and packed into kegs which were kept until filled—and that could take up to three weeks. Summer temperatures, rancidity and weed taint, added to enormous variations in farm hygiene, combined to ensure that farm butter was a very varied product. For most of the 19th century cheese, too, was essentially a farmhouse product, but moves towards the factory production of it anticipated the revolution in buttermaking. If the delivery of milk from farms to a central point for the manufacture of dairy products is an essential part of the definition of the factory system, then this system was in operation in North America and Britain from the middle of the 19th century when the Americans developed the equipment but accepted the pre-eminence of Joseph Harding of Somerset in his emphasis on and practice of hygienic production methods. In Australia in the same period TS Mort was establishing his famous Bodalla estate. James Manning and then the Tooths opened cheese factories in the Bega district of New South Wales, and John Orlebar at Allansford in the Western District of Victoria successfully used factory methods. The 1870s were transitional years.

Fruit and jam Jams and marmalades, made by boiling fruit pulp with sugar, and the bottling of fruit were well known in the kitchens and farmhouses of 18th century Britain, and by the late 1780s Appert was bottling fruit and vegetables commercially. The temperate climate of Van Diemen’s Land suited fruit growing, and by the 1830s a great variety of fruits, including small fruits, could be found

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To feed a nation

growing in colonial gardens. The Sydney area was less suitable, but the outer areas permitted some fruit growing, and bottled fruits were offered for sale in both colonies in the 1820s. On 30 September 1846 the Australian Floral and Horticultural Society held its spring exhibition in Sydney. ‘In the conserve line’, a report said, ‘Messrs Staddon and Price have also added some novelties … we particularly noticed the Guava Jelly, the Leptoma Jelly and the Banana Conserve’. Novelties indeed, but shortly after, Staddon and Price were offering colonial bottled fruits and preserves for sale. There are records of the export of such products from both New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land in the 1830s and 1840s, but they, too, were essentially products of a farmhouse technology. Of these traditional technologies (or techniques), salting virtually disappeared by 1900; jams became factory products from the 1860s; and milling, brewing, and dairying were revolutionised in the last two decades of the 19th century. In the meantime, other technologies, notably heat processing (canning) and refrigeration, were introduced; a sugar industry arose; and winegrowing became established.

PART TWO: FROM TECHNOLOGY TO SCIENCE


Chapter 4

Meat processing

The old village technologies—milling, baking, brewing, and dairying—settled down to await their renaissance in the latter part of the 19th century, but the revolution in food preservation, heat processing, was introduced before 1850 and for a time enjoyed vigorous growth. To satisfy an unexpectedly strong demand for meat from Britain in the years 1865–75 alternatives to canning also were tried. Apart from meat extract and refrigeration, which was, and is, so important as to demand separate treatment, they were failures, but large volumes of canned meats were sent to Britain, especially in the 1870s. First, however, salting provided an example of local ingenuity.

The Sydney Salting Company Early in 1843 the Sydney Salting Company was formed to salt the settlers’ own meat and deliver it back to them cured and in barrels for export under the company’s brand. The method used was possibly the first Australian innovation in food technology, and moved salting from village to factory production. A British patent of 1840 described a salting method in which the meat was placed in brine and a vacuum applied to remove all gases from it. On readmitting the air, the brine was forced into the tissues. The patentee would not supply his equipment, so the company designed and built its own. It was entirely successful and the meat was thoroughly salted within a few minutes. For most of the 19th century there was an export trade in salted meat from the Australian colonies, but it was subject to big fluctuations (Tables 1 and 2), and was eventually overwhelmed by heat processing and refrigeration.

Heat processing: canning begins Meat canning in Australia was a derived technology. Essentially, it came from London; but before it came, paradoxically, an enterprising colonist, Sizar Elliott, had already introduced it. Elliott was born in Essex the third son of a miller. His father died when he was three and his mother took her three boys to Canada to be with her brother. Sizar grew up in Saint John, New Brunswick, and worked for a merchant who handled a wide range of products including some preserved foods. As canning crossed the Atlantic in 1819, these would almost certainly have included some canned products. When he was 20, Elliott finally accepted a repeated invitation to join another of his mother’s brothers, who had settled in Launceston, Van Diemen’s Land. This uncle, Joseph William Bell, had a flour mill and biscuit factory in which Elliott worked for a few years, but in 1839 he moved on to Sydney and eventually set up in Charlotte Place (now Grosvenor Street) as a grocer and ships’ chandler.

30

To feed a nation

Table 1 Exports of salted meats from New South Wales 1843–80 (produce of the colony excluding tongues, hams and bacon) prepared from Colonial Statistical Registers Casks

Tons

1843

2867

856

1844

4292

295

1845

1142

426

1846

721

1126

Table 2 Tons of salted meats exported from Victoria 1870–1900 (produce of the colony including salted beef and pork, hams and bacon, of which the last two were a very small proportion) prepared from Colonial Statistical Registers Tons 1870

133

1871

198

1872

359

867

1873

77

1847

4335

1848

2308

616

1874

107

1849

4

1397

1875

78

1850

308

1876

62

1851

222

1877

66

1852

1122

1878

237

1853

914

1854

798

1879

496

1880

491

1881

509 668

1855

2433

1856

2002

1857

3314

1882

1858

2822

1883

635 767

1859

662

1884

1860

804

1885

424

1861

620

1886

305

1862

594

1887

180

1863

935

1864

1091

1888

214

1865

1166

1889

164

1866

1452

1890

123

1867

352

1891

62

1868

445

1892

80

1869

330

1893

70

1870

473

1894

74

1871

505

1895

30

1872

540

1896

9

1873

411

1874

388

1897

15

1875

430

1898

55

1876*

329

1899

14

1900

27

1877

370

1878

406

1879

536

1880

426

* Statistics are unclear after this year and include beef exports only.

Meat processing

40

1849

30

1850

20 1848 1847

1844 10

1845

1846

10

11

12

13

14

15

Fig. 4 Relationship between boiling down and wool prices (derived from figures quoted by GJ Abbott, The pastoral age, p.123).

In the early 1840s the price of wool fell, the value of sheep plummeted, and pastoralists turned to boiling down animals for tallow. Some of this had been done in the 1830s, but the response to the crisis of the 1840s was initiated by Frederick Ebsworth, a Sydney woolbroker, and systematised by Henry O’Brien, pastoralist, of Yass. It is too much to say that boiling down saved the wool industry, but for the rest of the decade there was an inverse linear relationship between the wool price and the number of sheep boiled down (Fig. 4). In spite of attempts to recover wool, pelts, and even some meat, the only real product of boiling down was tallow. The ragged meat tissue that remained was spread on the fields as a nitrogenous fertiliser, and it was this waste that stimulated Sizar Elliott to begin experimenting. A letter in the Sydney Morning Herald of 30 June 1843 had already suggested preserving the meat, but salt and preservatives were proposed. Elliott had every opportunity to see this letter, but ‘knowing as I did that in the old country meat was preserved in tins, the idea struck me that the same thing could be done in the new’. The first canning period: Elliott, Joseph and Dangar Just when Elliott began his experiments is unclear, but it was not before 1843 because he said they were stimulated by sheep boiling. He began with the kitchen fire, possibly in 1844, and then tried salt brine, but he did not know of the calcium chloride brines introduced in Britain in 1841. He did realise that he needed more heat, and it seems that he was working out his proce-

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To feed a nation

Town gas became available in Sydney in May 1841. Sizar Elliott was possibly the first to use it under factory conditions to fire his processing equipment. (S Elliott, Fifty years of colonial life.)

dures in the years 1845–46 for he moved out of his kitchen ‘and erected for [himself] a small factory’. To get the higher temperatures he wanted he processed sealed tins of product in a bath of whale oil adventurously heated by gas. He used a thermometer but, tantalisingly, in his accounts made no reference to the temperatures tried. He later admitted that he had not realised the risks he took because one day he forgot to look at the thermometer, the temperature rose, and tins exploded. He was processing sealed cans (!), and was lucky to escape disaster; but he took the hint and changed his procedure to process at atmospheric pressure. For almost all of the 19th century, cans were handmade and the lids soldered on after they were filled with product. Elliott’s first modification was to punch a hole in the lid, fill the can with hot ‘soup’ after it was partly cooked, solder a plate over the hole and complete the processing. Next, he included a soft metal tube in the lid; when the processing was complete, the tube was bent into a siphon, boiling gravy sucked in by cooling the can, the tube nipped off, and the can sealed by soldering. Elliott also had a ‘testing room’ in which he maintained a temperature ‘to what I considered the average heat of a ship’s hold under the equator’. It worked. While waiting in Liverpool for his ship to Hobart Town, Elliott had approached, and been allowed to inspect, several factories, but he did not say what kind of factories. Both the siphon and the incubator were quite well known in Britain, and Elliott may have seen them or at least been aware of them. On the other hand, it is possible that he developed both of them independently. In any case, he applied them successfully because he won prizes in local exhibitions and, more importantly, he sold various products to the masters of a number of visiting merchantmen and whalers, and obtained enviable testimonials from them. But there were difficulties in marketing

Meat processing

such new products, and Elliott was a ‘little man’. He lacked capital and was forced out of business by the strength of those who followed. He had to be content, later in life, with the knowledge that he started the Australian canning industry. The first of those who followed were the Josephs in Sydney and the Dangars in Newcastle. Moses Joseph was a prominent Sydney businessman who, in the 1840s, operated ships on the run to California. On 27 July 1847 an advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald announced the opening of M Joseph’s Patent Preserved Provision Manufactory in the Camperdown area, and the availability of a range of soups, meats and, surprisingly, milk. Two days later a news story told of Mr Israel Joseph’s visit to London, where he paid to be trained in how it was done before returning to Sydney with the necessary equipment and materials. The lids of the cans carried the siphon used by Elliott, and processing was in a bath of calcium chloride brine at 250°F (121°C). There is little doubt that Israel Joseph, probably Moses’s brother or son, was taught Stefan Goldner’s method by Goldner’s London agents, Messrs Ritchie and McCall, of 137 Houndsditch. Elliott visited Joseph’s factory. It could produce a modest ton a day, but this was beyond Elliott. He later visited the Dangars’ operation at Newcastle and realised that he could not compete. Wisely, he withdrew. According to Elliott, most of Joseph’s production was exported, but the Camperdown factory had a short life. Perhaps it was overwhelmed by Dangar’s activities at Newcastle. In February 1848 it was announced that Henry Dangar was preparing to manufacture in Newcastle preserved provisions for export to Britain. Henry Dangar, one of six brothers who came to Australia, was a Cornishman and prospered in his new country. Two of his brothers were associated with him in the colony and a third, Richard, returned to London to represent the family interests there. As preparations for meat preserving were being made in what is now Wickham, Richard Dangar arranged for Charles Gedye, a connection by marriage, to be taught the process, which turned out to be Goldner’s calcium chloride brine bath method. Dangar claimed to be very familiar with it, ‘I know it pretty well: I have seen it frequently’. His office in Billiter Street was within easy walking distance of Houndsditch. Goldner’s brine bath raised the temperature of processing, but others in Britain also used raised temperatures. The essential difference between Goldner and them was that he, and therefore Ritchie and McCall (and Joseph and Dangar), closed the cans against an issuing jet of steam (the siphon had been discontinued) whereas the others processed sealed cans. There seems little doubt that Gedye, too, was trained by Ritchie and McCall at 137 Houndsditch. Dangar planned to, and did, export most of his production so Newcastle was an ideal location for his plant. First, it was closer than Sydney to the source of raw material, the cattle stations, thus saving cost of transport and loss of condition; second, cheap coal for the boilers was at hand; third, there was a good harbour for materials in and product out. The major imported material was tinplate. All cans were made and sealed by hand, and availability and dexterity of tinsmiths were determining factors. Anything that could facilitate their work was a plus, and the tinplate used by Dangar was imported with the tops and bottoms of the cans already stamped out and the sides cut to shape. The cans were made up by forming the cylinders, side-soldering them, and then soldering on the bottom. After they were filled the top, carrying a pinhole, was soldered on. Processing in the brine bath followed, and the pinhole was sealed after a time that was empirically determined. Any danger from contamination was obviated by continued heating of the sealed can. The production of a vacuum in the can was evident from some ‘collapsing’ of the sides when cooled. Some of the meat was cooked before packing, and some was packed raw. As there seemed to be no appreciable difference between

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them, it is evident that both were overcooked. The sizes favoured were 4, 6, and 8 lb but the optimum size was considered to be 6 lb because the larger pieces of meat required more processing. Dangar did not incubate his products before sale. He used the voyage to London as an incubation test of the whole consignment and accepted a three to five per cent loss, some of which would probably have been due to the fact that the cans were stored loose in the hold and thus subject to some can damage in transit. The cans of the day were exceedingly robust, but serious damage was well known. Dangar may well have been lucky that the long voyage to England was an extended incubation test. In 1846 the Admiralty adopted canned meat as a general ration; Goldner won the contract and the next year began to supply. From 1849 serious complaints were received about putrid meat in some of these cans. These complaints were publicised in the press in 1852, whereupon the parliamentary Select Committee of Enquiry on Preserved Meats (Navy) was set up. Its detailed record of evidence, including that of Richard Dangar, and the accompanying report are important documents in the history of food technology. It found evidence of malpractice in Goldner’s Moldavian factory, but also found that most of the trouble was confined to large-size cans from 9 to 32 lb. Thus a major cause was the general ignorance of micro-organisms and the spoilage they could cause in incompletely processed cans. The larger sizes were too large for effective heat penetration. The damage done to the reputation of preserved meats was almost fatal in spite of the fact that little trouble was met with in the normal 6 lb cans. The Dangars canned in this smaller size. Their factory produced a variety of soups and meat packs and supplied the commissariat in Sydney and the retail market, but most of the production was exported to Britain and sold on the open market to ships’ owners and ships’ chandlers. Its shelf life and overall quality were looked at carefully as all canned meats were under suspicion at the time of the naval enquiry, but the official report was very favourable. A medal was won at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and another at the Paris Exhibition which followed. Even more important, considering how critical it could be, the Lancet’s Analytical Sanitary Commission rated the Newcastle products highly. However, in 1851–52 the selling price for canned meat in London fell to 4 3/4 d per lb, and this was uneconomic for the Australian factory. The grievous handicaps were the costs of shipping tinplate to Newcastle, making it up into tins at local wage rates, and shipping it back. The answer was increased volume, but the company was defeated by three things beyond its control. First, the Royal Navy scandal engendered suspicion of canned meats; second, the Navy consequently established its own cannery at Deptford; and third, the gold rushes of the 1850s pushed the cost of the raw material out of reach and also drained the company of efficient workmen, especially tinsmiths. Export ceased in 1855, but it had been shown that under normal circumstances a canning industry could offer pastoralists an alternative to their traditional products. The second canning period: Tindal, Ritchie and their associates If the decade 1845–55 was Australia’s first canning period, then the period 1865–1900 (that is, virtually up to the introduction of the American open-top can) was the second. These were years of great expansion—and contraction; but canning did not cease altogether between 1855 and 1865. It seems that some production for local purposes may have continued for a time at Newcastle; then Robert McCracken, a Hobart butcher, produced limited quantities that he sold to ships in port. He was awarded a medal at the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866–67 for canned meats dated 1861 and 1862. They had been on long whaling voyages, so he had been

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canning at least as early as 1860. Also in Hobart, George Peacock began in 1861 to can jam. However, the economic downturn in Australia in the 1860s reduced the cost of meat, the rinderpest plague in Britain opened up a market, and men of foresight saw the opportunity and took it. Charles Grant Tindal, a Devonian, came to Australia in 1843 when he was barely 20, and prospered by hard pastoral work in northern New South Wales. By 1852 he was settled on his own properties on the Clarence River and had a small boiling down plant at one of them, ‘Ramornie’. He was interested in preserving meat, but probably luckily for him at that time he lacked the capital to begin. He was in England during 1855–57 and returned to find that goldinduced prosperity had generated a demand for fat stock so it was no time to try to set up a cannery. In 1862, when the demand for fat stock had fallen and boiling down had been resumed, Tindal took his family and went to England to study meat canning. In 1863, while he was there, rinderpest struck the English herds. It was a disaster. Butchers’ meat became scarce and poorquality salted meat from abroad was in demand (see Table 1). So in 1865 Tindal launched the Australian Meat Company to can Australian meat and manufacture Liebig’s Meat Extract (see page 45). The general manager was Mr CG Tindal of 137 Houndsditch, and the company leased land at Ramornie, Tindal’s property, with a frontage to the Orara River. The local manager was Joseph Page, and Alban Gee and Thomas Cordingley were sent to the Clarence to manage production. Plant and tinplate were shipped to Ramornie, buildings were erected, and production began in September 1866. At first the company’s agents were John McCall and Company (as it had now become) of 137 Houndsditch, but later the Australian Meat Company had its own offices. It was immediately successful, exports from the Clarence in the early years being: 1867 8140 cases 1868 11 339 cases 1869 14 331 cases 1870 12 068 cases In 1871 Ramornie was employing 150 people, turning off 1000 head of cattle per month and despatching 50 tons of canned meats each week, with a ready market for the by-products (tallow, hides and bones). Tindal bought out the other shareholders in 1879, and in 1894 the factory was greatly extended. However, the emphasis was changing; in 1896 the main export was 475 000 lb of prime edible fat which went to Holland for the manufacture of margarine, and by the end of 1897 Ramornie was making almost only Liebig’s Meat Extract for Britain. Tindal, long resident in England, died in 1914 and Ramornie closed. The factory was sold the next year, worked for a year or two after the First World War, and was then demolished. Today the only memorial to that once thriving enterprise is a boiling down vat mounted on a concrete plinth where the Gwydir Highway crosses the Orara River. In 1866 Tindal had sent two men, Alban Gee and Thomas Cordingley, from England to Ramornie to supervise production. Because of Tindal’s close association with McCall and the technology used at Ramornie, it seems certain that both were trained at 137 Houndsditch before they left England. In due course Gee and Cordingley moved on from Ramornie, taking their experience with them, and both men came to occupy influential positions in the burgeoning Australian canning industry. Gee became sub-manager (to Ritchie) of the Melbourne Meat Preserving Company in 1868, and in 1872 was appointed manager of the Sydney Meat Preserving Company where he remained until he died in 1917. Thomas Cordingley established his own cannery in Sydney, the Botany Meat Company, in 1875. There in the 1880s his output was comparable with that of the Sydney Meat Preserving

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Company. In 1888 Cordingley again became associated with Tindal, and with local Townsville people, in the promotion of meat processing in north Queensland. The Sydney Meat Preserving Company was set up in 1869, but made a hesitant start. The intention was to help smooth out the fluctuations in the demands for stock, but initial reluctance of shareholders to pay up and difficulties in securing a suitable site both delayed progress. Finally, the company was established close to the Homebush stockyards, and Alban Gee was appointed manager. It was an excellent appointment, and production finally began in May 1872 at the peak of the English demand, which thereafter declined. Nevertheless, the Sydney company became an important manufacturer and produced a large range of canned meat products for which it won gold medals at a series of international exhibitions from 1873 to 1884. The company also produced tallow and meat extract, sold hooves and horns, built up a trade in tendons with Japan, and manufactured a series of blood and bone fertilisers most of which went to Mauritius. The company deliberately set out not to pay a dividend, but to benefit its pastoralist shareholders by stabilising stock prices. Undoubtedly, this policy enabled it to survive into the 1930s when it became part of the FJ Walker group. In 1868 HM Whitehead of Sydney bought the boiling down and salting works which Clark Irving, among his many other interests, had set up on the Clarence before 1850. Here he canned for a time but was not successful, and his later interests were mainly in Queensland. Tindal was the dominant New South Wales producer of his period, and, through the later moves of his former staff members, he influenced the canning of meat in Sydney, Melbourne and Queensland (Fig. 8). Tindal canned beef. His counterpart in Victoria was Samuel Sextus Ritchie, whose major product was canned mutton. Ritchie was an experienced canner before he came to Australia. Though a young man, he was the senior partner of Ritchie and McCall, 137 Houndsditch, London, agents of Stefan Goldner who introduced the calcium chloride brine bath. Goldner’s factory was in Moldavia, but supplied the Admiralty. Ritchie had visited the Moldavian operation and his London factory was itself a canner of meat products. In that factory Israel Joseph, probably, and Gedye and Tindal’s men, certainly, were trained. As agent for Goldner, Ritchie was implicated in the Royal Navy meat scandal, and was debarred from tendering for navy rations. By 1856 the company had become John McCall and Company. Ritchie had gone. He arrived in Melbourne in 1857 and from 1858 to 1868 was a wine and spirit merchant, for part of the time in partnership with Charles Moulden Farrington. Early in 1867, when Intercolonial Exhibition medals were being awarded to Tindal for contemporary products and to Elliott and McCracken for samples canned years before, Ritchie carried out experiments to demonstrate that meat could be canned in Victoria. Later in the year his samples stimulated John Hughes, then living in Victoria, to convene a meeting which led to the formation of the Melbourne Meat Preserving Company with the objects of buying stock, preserving, smoking, freezing, drying, or otherwise curing meat by any process, manufacturing tallow, and engaging in the export trade. Ritchie was appointed manager and in nine months had the plant operating. It was situated on 170 acres on the Maribyrnong River and included the old rundown Raleigh’s boiling down establishment and some other buildings. A bridge was built over the river, and the Yan Yean water supply connected via a lead pipe on the riverbed. All the equipment apart from a 16 hp steam engine was made in the colony, saving valuable time. This company had a life of only 20 years, but was the most important of the 19th century Victorian meat canneries. The London agent was Ritchie’s former partner, John McCall, 137 Houndsditch. The company began production in September 1868 with an order for 200 000 lb for the French Government, and by the

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Fig. 5 Flow sheet of operations of the Melbourne Meat Preserving Company, February 1870 (derived from the description of the factory, Argus, 26 February 1870).

end of that year 35 000 sheep had been slaughtered, and 54 000 cans of meat and 190 tons of tallow sent to London. The demand in England outstripped the capacity of the factory to supply, and there was some concern in Melbourne when drought led to a cessation of production in April and May 1869. However, rains in May changed the position and production rose. Butchers’ meat and canned product were sold locally, and pigs fattened on the offals. The plant was a highly sophisticated, even modern, operation as is evident from the flow sheet (Fig. 5), but the success of the company was largely Ritchie’s, and the responsibility and the work he put in took its toll: he died suddenly on 8 March 1879. He was succeeded by Augustine Jones, but Ritchie’s creation, the most powerful of the early Victorian canners, was wound up on 18 April 1889. The opportunities offered by the British market and the Franco-Prussian war led to a surge of canning activity in Victoria unmatched in New South Wales. John Hughes urged the establishment of canneries in the pastoral areas in the same way as flour mills in the wheat districts. It was a vain hope. Four other meat preserving companies were registered in Victoria in each of the three years 1869–71; and they were not the only ones. A few were either stillborn or scarcely breathed, and others rose phoenix-like from the ashes of the old, for in most cases they were woefully undercapitalised, frequently from lack of local support, and unprepared for minor setbacks let alone the competition which came from North America in the mid-1870s. By 1875 all but one had gone. The Ballarat Meat Preserving Company graduated from a boiling down works and was successful at first, but by 1874 it had gone. The Warrnambool company was well sited and its equipment came from Otto Bobardt of Melbourne, supplier of equipment to Ritchie. It began with good sales in London and won a medal at the Intercolonial Industrial Exhibition in Sydney in 1870, but at the end of 1871 the company collapsed. The Echuca company, which became the Riverine Meat Preserving Company (Echuca), should have been successful. Sheep from the Riverina were cheaper and in better condition than those received in Melbourne, and the savings greater than the extra cost of bringing in the tinplate. The Geelong

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company also was well situated and was managed by Robert McCracken, formerly of Hobart and the Victoria Meat Preserving Company, but it, too, survived for less than three years. John Little of Ararat, boiling down from the 1860s, began to can in 1872, but he could handle only two bullocks and 50 sheep per week. His raw material was in excellent condition, but transport costs beat him; the railway came too late. The Lake Boga Game and Fish Preserving Company at Swan Hill and JJ Winter and Company of Colbinabbin also were shortlived, and it is probably just as well for the proposers that the plans for plants at Bendigo, Gippsland, Belfast (Port Fairy), Coleraine, and Little River came to nothing. The most successful provincial cannery was the Western Meat Preserving Company at Colac. As the Colac Meat Preserving Company it had failed for the familiar reasons: lack of financial strength to cover the hiatus between production and payment, and the fluctuations in price of stock in Australia and selling price of product in Britain. The raw material in Colac was rabbits, which had already become a pest, and the manager was Charles Moulden Farrington, Ritchie’s erstwhile partner in the wine and spirit trade. The Colac company had canned beef and mutton as well as rabbits, and Ritchie was a consultant to it, but it was caught in a slump and wound up in 1872. The factory was sold as it stood to the new company in which, backing his optimism, Farrington was a large shareholder. The major raw material was rabbits, but poultry, game, and even plum puddings were canned. In 1881, to frustrate a local move, a branch factory was opened in Camperdown. But in 1885 the Stonyford Pastoral and Preserving Company was formed by a Melbourne syndicate headed by a former Colac man, Robert Inglis, and began in the Stony Rises a diverse agricultural activity coupled with the canning of rabbits and a village for the employees. In 1886 the Western Meat Preserving Company closed. Rabbits had become less plentiful in its area and the Stonyford company was paying more for them. The Goulburn Meat Preserving Company, though in New South Wales, was a derivative of the Melbourne company. It was set up in January 1870 for preserving meat in any of the familiar enumerated ways, but was essentially a cannery, and James Hayes and ES Antill were sent to Melbourne to study Ritchie’s methods. There were two steam engines available in the rented premises in Goulburn, but Otto Bobardt of Melbourne supplied the can-forming machinery. Transport was not a serious problem because the Goulburn company had the advantage of the railway to Sydney, but, unable to survive the collapse of the sales of canned meat, it had a short life and was wound up in 1872. The Victoria Meat Preserving Company Limited was different. In 1867, in a lane off Bourke Street, Melbourne, it began to can meat in cans supplied to it. The manager was Robert McCracken, formerly of Hobart, and although 40–50 tons of canned meats were shipped overseas, lack of control over the can making led to trouble. While in Hobart, McCracken had successfully packed meat in molten tallow, and in December 1867 he received an order for 300 tons of this product for Japan. The shipment was successful, and the product was subsequently supplied to the Royal Navy and, using kosher meat, to English Jews. The recovery of the refined tallow for use in cooking was a bonus. The company was reorganised in 1870 and the works moved to Footscray. Here it cured and canned meats, and supplied large quantities of the tallowpacked meat to Britain, where it was cleverly marketed by Daniel Tallerman. Unfortunately, on 3 May 1871 there was a fire that crippled the company, but it continued in operation for some years. McCracken had gone to the Geelong company either just before or just after the fire, and in 1883 Augustine Jones, who had succeeded Ritchie at the Melbourne Meat Preserving Company, became manager of the Victoria company as well until in 1889 the two companies ceased to exist.

Meat processing

In Queensland there was sporadic canning, but the considerable Queensland meat industry was not really established until freezing became available. Anthony Trollope recorded visits to Queensland meatworks, with which he was not impressed. There was boiling down and export of tallow, hides, and salted meat from the Wide Bay district and ‘Laurel Bank’ on the Fitzroy River, and the manufacture of meat extract. In 1868 Hogarth of Aberdeen established a boiling down works at Oakey Creek, near Toowoomba, and in 1870 registered in London the Hogarth Australian Meat Preserving Company. Canning of beef and mutton began in 1871. Although the plant stood idle at times, 10 years later it processed nearly 80% of the mutton and 12% of the beef canned in Queensland. The Central Queensland Meat Preserving Company operated at Lakes Creek from 1871 to 1874, and in 1872 turned off about three-quarters of all the sheep slaughtered by Queensland canneries. Thomas Archer became manager in August 1872 when the company was heavily in debt partly because of expenses associated with the Jones patent process; but all was muddle, and by April 1874 the company was bankrupt. In 1888 Thomas Cordingley was instrumental with Tindal and others in setting up the North Queensland Meat Company. It bought the Alligator Creek boiling down works, but adverse weather conditions forced a rethink and in mid1889 the North Queensland Meat Export Company was registered in Brisbane with Cordingley as managing director. Tindal was a major shareholder. The immediate product was meat extract, but canning began in the 1890s. The company was bought by Swift (Australia) Ltd in 1914. Several other meatworks began in the 1890s, mainly for freezing meat, but they also canned meat in the dying days of the old technology. Some continue to this day under internationally known names. South Australia also provides examples of canneries founded to take advantage of the fluctuating demand from Britain. Some were very short-lived but in the 1890s South Australian production surged, and almost all of it went to Western Australia. The rabbit cannery at Compton, near Mount Gambier, was founded at that time and lasted for 30 years. It was, to an extent, a forerunner of the new technology because it processed in pressure retorts. The fundamental problem for most Australian meat canners in this period of opportunism is summed up in this cri de coeur of Thomas Archer when his Central Queensland Meat Preserving Company became bankrupt in 1874: The calculations on which this, and all other meat preserving companies were based are fallacious. It appears to have been assumed that because fat stock were abundant and cheap, they would continue so, that the supply was inexhaustible and that prices would consequently remain as they were. …I see now, when too late, that the greatest mistake I made was in commencing work at all without adequate capital. The technology Heat processing had succeeded in France, Britain, and the United States and had been brought to Australia, but the rationale on which it was based was false. The French chemist, Joseph GayLussac, persuaded Appert that his products kept because he had succeeded in expelling all the air from the containers. This fallacy persisted for most of the century even after Louis Pasteur, another French chemist, had shown beyond all doubt that decomposition was due to microorganisms and that pasteurisation, a heating process, could prevent or at least delay it. If a product failed, it was assumed that the heating had been insufficient to expel all the oxygen. The ‘quantity’ of heat—time or temperature, or both—were then adjusted until stable product was obtained; the lower the temperature, above a specified minimum, the longer the required

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A

B

Fig. 6 Heat transfer in canned foods, especially solid packs such as meat. If the temperature required to inactivate spoilage organisms is not reached past the arrowheads in A, the contents will putrefy. If this temperature is maintained for the prescribed time at the arrowheads in B, the product will keep.

processing time, and the higher the temperature the shorter the time. We now know that what was happening was the inactivation of contaminating organisms, and for canned foods Prescott and Underwood put this on a true scientific basis in the last decade of the 19th century. But in 1851 Richard Dangar knew, for the wrong reason, that heat had to ‘get at’ the centre of the cans (Fig. 6). The temperature had to be high enough and maintained long enough to inactivate all the organisms in the centre of the can. When this was achieved, the product would keep as long as the can remained unopened, or no leak developed. Elliott, Joseph and Dangar, and Tindal’s men at Ramornie (and then Sydney), and Ritchie in Melbourne all used the same process, although Elliott at first was at least ‘finishing off ’ in sealed cans. All cans were handmade from heavy tinplate so tinsmiths, and the reliability of their work, were at the heart of the technology. The lids and bottoms of the cans were stamped out with a press, and the body cut out with a guillotine and rolled, eventually mechanically, into a cylinder for soldering the side-seam and soldering on the bottom with a lead/tin solder. Revolving tables for rapid soldering and hoods for carrying away the high-lead fumes were introduced. Animals were slaughtered, butchered, and the meat hand packed into 4, 6, and 8 lb tins; 6 lb was the preferred size. In the Sydney company the meat was scalded for seven minutes in boiling water before packing, and 1 and 2 lb sizes also were packed. The lid carrying the pinhole ‘to allow the air to escape’ was soldered on and the cans processed. All processed at atmospheric pressure and elevated temperatures were attained by heated whale oil (Elliott) or steam-heated calcium chloride brine baths (all others). Elliott recorded no temperatures; the others processed at or about 250°F (121°C). After a specified time, the cans were sealed and given a final heating in which the pressure inside the cans would have increased. Gee, at the Sydney company, first processed for one hour in a water bath and then sealed the hole and finished with an hour and a half (variable according to the size of the can) immersed in the calcium chloride brine at the higher temperature. At Ramornie, and probably elsewhere, cans were ‘tested’ to see if there was

Meat processing

any air left in them. The test was not described but was probably the familiar, and still valid, tap test whose sound makes it easy to determine on the production line whether or not there is a vacuum in the can. In addition the Ramornie people warned against any can which showed no concavity. The processed cans were cleaned, dried in sawdust, painted and labelled. They were then shipped loose by Dangar, but later practice was to pack them into cases for shipment. In the 1870s, in an attempt to reduce overcooking, the cans were water-cooled after processing. Ritchie is credited with introducing this. It was being done at Ramornie in 1866, but Ritchie could have introduced it at 137 Houndsditch. General practice in the second canning period was to check the process, as Elliott did, by incubation. Ritchie incubated the whole production at 100°F (38°C) for seven days in a bluestone building heated with flue gases. Gee in Sydney incubated for 10 days at the same temperature. This technology (Figs. 5 and 7), vertically integrated from animal to can, was followed for the rest of the 19th century. Such changes as did occur were of scale, factory layout, and organisation. For example, at Ramornie there were 12 baths of calcium chloride brine, each of 100-can capacity and heated with steam pipes, and Ritchie in Melbourne presided over an essentially modern operation (Fig. 5). Animals were received into recovery paddocks for grazing and watering prior to slaughter. Modern scientific studies have confirmed the wisdom of this. The factory could handle 1500 animals per day in two shifts, and the detailed treatment of meat, by-products and waste can be followed in Fig. 5. The Melbourne Meat Preserving Company, using Goldner’s brine bath and incubation techniques, reflected Ritchie’s overseas experience. The organisation of production was well thought out and efficient. Raw material preparation and container manufacture were arranged to flow together for easy packing. Mechanical aids to manufacture and handling were used. Processing, rapid cooling after processing, and incubation of finished product have a modern ring, and the outpack was well organised with easy access to water for shipment out. Waste treatment, with associated by-product manufacture, was handled efficiently and there was no pollution. Ritchie was innovative. Steam was introduced to the heating pipes at one end of the bath, and towards the other end the temperature fell. He had probably been anticipated by others, but Ritchie’s solution was a parallel set of pipes to introduce steam at the other end also. He attempted to obviate overcooking by introducing a rissole partially precooked before canning and thus requiring a shorter processing time. It was technically successful, but the market rejected it. In 1878 Australian round tins were being ousted from the British market by American rectangular ones, so Ritchie imported an American canning machine and modified it to pack four tins a minute instead of the specified 10 per hour—a 24-fold increase in productivity. Ritchie was not the only innovator. In 1864 Alfred Simpson of Adelaide had improved the methods for cutting and bending tinplate and the tools for soldering it, and in the early 1870s William Anderson of the Geelong Meat Preserving Company modified the geometry of the cans to reduce overcooking. When that company failed he took his ideas to the Melbourne company and changed the dimensions of the cans from 7 1/4 x 6 inches to 4 x 8 thus reducing the maximum required distance of heat penetration from 3 to 2 inches. Cutting the cooking time improved the quality. He also put the pinhole on the side of the can and so increased the proportion of can submerged in the brine. The necessary engineering modifications were all done in-house. Contemporaneously, the Melbourne company began to lacquer the outside of its cans with a methylated spirits solution of the gum of the grass tree. This lacquer was made in Geelong. Was Anderson responsible for this also?

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Lids (with pin hole) soldered on

First heating – at atmospheric pressure (time determined by product and can size)

Pin hole soldered against issuing steam

High temperature (about 250ºF) processing of sealed tins in brine bath (time determined by product and can size)

Finished cans cooled in cold water to reduce overcooking

Test room (100ºF for seven days)

Cans painted and labelled

Cans packed into cases

Despatched Fig. 7 Flow sheet of the canning process used generally in 19th century Australia.

The brine bath technology, the dominant technology in 19th century Australian meat canning, was derived directly from Ritchie and McCall, 137 Houndsditch, London. All the major meat preserving companies used it: Newcastle in the first canning period, and the Australian Meat Company and the Melbourne and Sydney companies in the second. The clearly identified links with other companies are shown in Fig. 8. Victoria dominated the second canning period at first because of the financial strength of Melbourne deriving from the gold discoveries, and the glut of stock. Most meat preserving companies that sprang up in the years 1868–72 were local, under-funded, and poorly equipped to face the imminent fall in demand that followed; yet they, too, used ‘the technology of the day’, the brine bath technology from 137 Houndsditch that served the Australian so colonies well. But it should not be forgotten that the first to bring heat processing technology to Australia was the struggling English/Canadian colonist, Sizar Elliott, who worked out for himself a way of doing what he knew could be done.

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Fig. 8 Derivation of the major meat processing technology used in 19th century Australia. The dates are those of the years in which production began. The same ‘technology of the day’ was used in most of the more transitory companies also.

Alternative heat processing technologies Richard Jones had a UK patent for a combined heating and vacuum process which was tried in Australia. Meat was packed into a can, then a lid bearing a tube was soldered on and the can connected to a vacuum line and processed in a brine bath at 225°F (107°C). Air and water were sucked out, and after three hours the tube was pinched off and soldered, and the can thus sealed. An attempt was made in Melbourne to float the Victoria, Twofold Bay and London Meat Preserving Company to apply the patent at Eden. It was unsuccessful. A trial of the process at the Melbourne Meat Preserving Company, a proposal to use the method in Tasmania, and one in

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London to apply it in New Zealand and Argentina were also unsuccessful. But at a lunch in Sydney the visiting Anthony Trollope was served roast beef preserved by the method, and was impressed. His host was CH Allen, manager of the Central Queensland Meat Preserving Company. It would have saved that company much anguish if it had never heard of the Jones patent process because it could not work consistently. The equipment was costly and cumbersome, and it was based on the fallacy that removal of air was the critical requirement and that the cooking could be done at a lower temperature in a vacuum. No wonder it failed. The directors of the Sydney Meat Preserving Company, too, toyed with the idea of the Jones process. One likes to think that it was scotched by the arrival from Melbourne (and formerly Ramornie) of the experienced Alban Gee to manage the plant. D Hogarth of Aberdeen had been supplying the Admiralty with canned meats. In his evidence to the Select Committee of Enquiry on Preserved Meats (Navy) 1852, W Hogarth said that Hogarths used high-pressure steam, and had done so since 1837. This was a retorting process using sealed cans, and the Royal Navy adopted it in 1856 for its own cannery at Deptford. The Hogarth Australian Meat Preserving Company used retorts at Oakey Creek in Queensland, and its canned meats were well received in Britain where the reduction in overcooking was appreciated. The Ballarat Meat Preserving Company, when it was floated, said: ‘A man who understands the carrying out of a very successful process has been engaged; and he has been nearly three years at the same work’. Who was he, and where had he worked? We were not told, but was it at Oakey Creek? Unfortunately, the technology did not save the Ballarat company. In March 1872 it got an Admiralty order, perhaps because it processed in retorts as did Deptford, but it had ceased production by 1874. By the time the rabbit cannery was established at Compton, South Australia, in the 1890s, retorts were becoming standard equipment. Processing with steam under pressure was essentially the same heat process as the brine bath, but quicker and more controllable so overcooking was minimised; and it was carried out safely on sealed cans. The Hogarth and Ballarat companies were blazing an Australian trail into the future. They failed for financial reasons, but the Compton cannery stood successfully at the gateway of a new era. The Victoria Meat Preserving Company canned some products and cured others. Its major product, of which it exported considerable quantities to London, was unprocessed meat packed in fat—a part answer to the British housewives’ preference for butchers’ meat. This meat was not heat processed, but very hot fat was the key to its success. Sheep carcasses were boned in such a way as to leave the meat in one piece. This was washed once or twice in low-salt, sulphited brine, then gently spiced, sometimes lightly smoked, rolled tightly, and packed into casks or tin-lined boxes of 48 lb capacity. As demand increased, sheet iron tanks of up to two and a half tons capacity were used. The bottom of the container was first covered with molten mutton fat, the rolls packed tightly in, and the whole covered with hot molten fat. The combination of preservative and the partial sterilisation by hot fat, which filled the interstices and lightly cooked the surfaces, sufficed to get the product safely to Britain. This technology was a bridge between heat processing and chemical preservation.

Chemical preservatives The traditional technologies of pickling and smoking were practised in New South Wales to the extent that by 1840 there was an excess for export. After the slump of 1843 the first attempt to use cheap meat was the production of mutton hams. A solution of salt, sugar, and saltpetre was forced into the meat through a metal tube, and the hams were soaked in the same brine for seven

Meat processing

days, dried, and smoked in red gum smoke. By the 1870s a significant ham and bacon curing industry had emerged. But hams and bacon were not the butchers’ meat wanted in England, and to some in the 1860s, chemical preservatives seemed the only way of supplying it. In 1863 Dr John Morgan was granted a British patent for a procedure by which a brine of salt, saltpetre, sugar, phosphoric acid and spices was forced through the circulatory sytem of a newly slaughtered animal. It was tried with limited success in Queensland, but there was no possibility of it preserving meat during the long voyage to England. Also in the 1860s, several attempts were made in Victoria and New South Wales to preserve meat with sulphites. They were variations on the same theme, namely the destruction or inhibition of micro-organisms by sulphur dioxide, but its mechanism was not known to the patentees, whose methods were entirely empirical. James Manning at the Pambula Meat Preserving Company packed sulphited sliced meats in internally lacquered cans, but nothing came of it. A method that combined a preservative, said not to be sulphite, had some very limited success in Melbourne, but was hopeless for export. So, by the end of 1871 it was generally accepted that chemicals alone would not preserve uncooked meat. In fact, the only method apart from canning that could get meat safely to England was Caldwell’s that combined sulphite with hot fat, the method used successfully by the Victoria Meat Preserving Company.

Meat extract Meat extract was invented in 1847 by the famous German chemist and biochemist, Justus von Liebig. He extracted meat with hot water and concentrated the liquid. Such an extraction occurred in the boiling down vats, and indeed it was proposed in 1862 that the liquid remaining after the removal of tallow should be so concentrated. This was not done, but attempts had already been made to manufacture other products. Portable soup, hard dry cakes of soluble meat solids, sometimes with added vegetables, had been carried by Cook in the Endeavour voyage, and brought to New South Wales by the first colonists. In 1845 John Inches of the Sydney Salting Company supplied concentrated soup for the Port Essington expedition. In the same year G Warriner was awarded the gold Isis medal by the (Royal) Society of Arts for his essence of beef in tablet form which he demonstrated to the Westminster Medical Society. Warriner was ahead of Liebig, but Warriner’s product was inferior. Liebig’s method was to trim the fat from fresh meat, comminute the meat, boil it with a lot of water to yield a liquid of six to eight per cent total solids, and finally stir it in an open shallow pan fired from below to concentrate it to a thick (80% solids) paste of characteristic texture and flavour. This was meat extract and a number of nutritional claims were made for it, the most supportable being that it stimulated appetite and digestion. Robert Tooth made meat extract near Maryborough, Queensland, in 1866–72, and Tindal’s Ramornie works began to make it in August 1866 as follows. The trimmed meat was chopped with machines (four of them) in which the blades moved vertically against a rotating wooden block carrying the meat. After boiling the meat ‘for a sufficient time’ for the extraction, the liquor was decanted and the residual meat tissue pressed ‘dry’. The combined liquors were concentrated in open shallow pans relying on the heat and the high concentration of inorganic salts, that is, the low water activity, for protection against the inevitable contamination. This, essentially, was the process used everywhere. It was Liebig’s, and his permission to use it had been sought and received. Charges in London that the Australian companies, specifically Tindal’s Australian Meat Company, were using inferior meat were vigorously and satisfactorily refuted.

45

46

To feed a nation

Meat extract manufacture went hand in hand with the canning industry of the day, and other companies, especially the Melbourne and Sydney meat preserving companies, manufactured it as a matter of course. However, for some companies it was the primary product. Thus, as already noted, in 1866 Robert Tooth was making only meat extract at Wide Bay; the North Queensland Meat Export Company began in 1890 with boiling down and the manufacture of meat extract; and by the end of the 19th century the only product of the Ramornie works was meat extract.

The market At first the market was the shipping in Sydney Harbour; Elliott lacked the resources to export. The Dangars supplied the commissariat in Sydney, but when they opened up a British market the purchasers were the merchant marine. From March 1849 to March 1852, 51 000 tons were delivered into their London store, but when the Admiralty invited Richard Dangar to tender for an order of 1 000 000 lb, he was unable to do so. In the mid-1860s, British households were short of meat and willy-nilly Australian canned meat became a consumer product. Table 3 shows the exports of heat processed meats from the various Australian colonies for the period under review. They include intercolonial trade. Of the 281 311 tons exported over the whole 35 years, 74% went to Britain: from 1866 to 1892, 82%, but from 1893 to 1900, only 66%. Western Australia had no meat canning industry and, as the goldfields developed in the 1890s, imported heavily from the eastern colonies, especially South Australia. At the end of the 19th century large quantities were bought by the British Government and shipped to South Africa as rations for the troops fighting the Boers. Other destinations, apart from intercolonial trade, included New Zealand, New Guinea, Fiji, Chinese and Indian ports, Java, and Mauritius. A little went to Japan, and some went to France during the Franco-Prussian war. In Britain the products had been bought by housewives and institutions. For a time, Mrs Beeton’s Book of household management carried a recipe for preparing Australian canned meat. But canned meats per se suffered by association from the Royal Navy scandal, and other methods proposed for the preservation of meat also resulted in putrid or tainted products. This was inevitable when the whole approach was empirical. It was also inevitable that when the Ramornie products arrived on the British market, they should be examined by Dr AH Hassall, who acted as the Lancet’s Analytical Sanitary Commission. Unfortunately, Hassall’s report was very critical. This seems a little odd as years earlier he had praised Dangar’s product, processed in the same way. The market seemed to shrug its shoulders and make the best of it, though canned meats were accepted more readily by the upper and middle classes. The cost of the large sizes (mainly 6 lb) that were offered perhaps discouraged poorer people as much as the unfamiliarity of a new product. In 1868 Daniel Tallerman, an entrepreneur of wide and varied experience, perceived a market opportunity and went to Britain to assess it for himself. He was impressed and came back deriding canned meats because of the market preferences. In the long run he was right, but he did handle the canned product to some extent. Nevertheless, he was more interested in the meat packed in fat. He understood that the market wanted identifiable, preferably butchers’, meat and that the Victoria Meat Preserving Company’s product offered the best alternative. Accordingly, he initiated the export of this product and energetically set about promoting it with dinners for the great and good, and demonstrations for working people. He set up a hall in which very cheap dinners based on this Australian meat could be had. It was very successful in the short term, and he used it to show the many dishes that could be prepared with this product.

Meat processing

Table 3 Exports of preserved meat (other than frozen or salted) produced and manufactured in the Colonies (tons) prepared from Colonial Statistical Registers. Year

NSW to UK

1866

–

Victoria

Total

to UK

7

0.3

Total 0.7

Queensland to UK Nil

South Australia

Total Australia

Total

to UK

Total

to UK

(32 cases)

Nil

Nil

3

Total 14*

1867

243

254

73

113

Nil

63

Nil

Nil

316

430

1868

329

352

–

591

4412

74840

Nil

Nil

329**

943***

(casks)

(casks)

1869

426

449

1471

1550

31

84

Nil

Nil

1928

2083

1870

1573

618

2821

2901

203

280

238

244

3835

4043

1871

2105

2137

6564

6638

215

644

499

500

9383

9920

1872

2520

2590

4789

4914

926

1259

617

626

8852

9389

1873

2101

2420

3946

4116

421

1173

665

677

7133

8386

1874

2055

2224

2883

3017

486

1063

558

562

5982

6866

1875

1038

1140

2132

2246

55

1017

135

143

3360

4546

1876

1382

1487

2683

2862

857

1804

21

28

4943

6181

1877

2684

2879

1993

2193

1476

1633

77

95

6230

6800

1878

605

961

1208

1333

39

88

106

122

1958

2504

1879

2420

2861

1132

1280

383

458

84

93

4019

4692

1880

3204

3510

2643

2741

532

1631

6

10

6385

7892

1881

3905

4105

1624

1797

842

1016

0.4

37

6371

6955

1882

3302

3638

442

568

1435

2540

0.3

10

5179

6756

1883

5694

6090

1241

1440

1002

3004

5

14

7942

10548

1884

3740

4263

963

1191

484

1026

4

18

5191

6498

1885

4285

4467

563

664

807

3708

Nil

8843

1886

1644

1745

175

275

1887

4278

4358

242

283

1888

1964

2022

287

319

1889

1197

1285

347

360

153

0.1 748 0.3

5

0.1

2354

Nil

1770

Nil

381

0.6 0.1

4

5655

15

1819

2040

34

5268

7029

36

2251

4147

29

1697

2055

1890

1978

2078

386

399

1021

1237

49

3385

3763

1891

2655

2938

468

470

984

1488

Nil

73

4 107

4969

1892

3641

3849

882

885

1504

2694

4

59

6031

7487

1893

5420

5845

338

347

1887

3840

4

66

7649

10098

1894

5520

7314

955

1012

3550

6940

I

380

10026

15646

1895

7996

9993

1255

1302

9317

11529

117

501

18685

23325

1896

3955

7300

1984

2075

6633

9550

3

472

12575

19397

1897

3532

4868

2468

2528

5042

6943

232

683

11274

15022

1898

4460

6219

1268

1273

3114

5839

282

490

9124

13821

1899

3146

5113

1830

2135

5575

10991

473

555

11024

18794

1900

2542

5342

1730

2132

4082

11218

585

737

8939

19429

*

Plus ‘32 casks’ from Queensland

**

Plus ‘4412 casks’ from Queensland

***

Plus ‘74 840 casks’ from Queensland

47

48

To feed a nation

Anthony Trollope, before his visit to Australia, disdained Australian canned meat; the inmates of at least two workhouses rebelled against it; and the Admiralty complained to the Victorian Agent-General that a large quantity of Australian preserved meat had been found unfit to eat because it was badly packed. This came just after what amounted to a sensory assessment panel in Melbourne in which samples from several Victorian canners were compared with some of the Admiralty’s own product from the Deptford dockyard. Six Victorian companies accepted an offical invitation to submit samples, which were kept for six months by the Department of Trade and Customs and then examined by a governmentappointed panel made up of goverment officials, men with technical knowledge, merchants, master mariners, and two parliamentarians. There was no producer, but it was as good a crosssection as could be expected. The samples were examined blind and the Melbourne Meat Preserving Company’s were marginally preferred over those from Echuca and Warrnambool, with Deptford’s graded last. Was it a fair trial? First, different numbers of cans were opened: three from Deptford, two each from three Victorian companies, and only one from two others. Second, the Deptford samples were older and had been shipped through the tropics. And third, the Deptford (and Ballarat) samples had been retorted and could be differentiated from the others. A British panel, no doubt preferring the more familiar product, reversed the result. In December 1870, a conference attended by several Australian agents-general and others concerned with Australia was held in London to consider the general acceptability of Australian canned meats, and criticism of underweights, overcooking and taints. With meat so cheap, the underweights were the result not of dishonesty but of the problem of weight control in the days of hand filling. Overcooked flavours were, and to some extent still are, inherent in nutritionally unimpaired canned foods, and complaints of taints almost certainly resulted from the sulphite used in the Victoria Meat Preserving Company’s product. Both derived from absence of scientific knowledge of the heat and concentration of sulphite required for microbiological stability. The conference recommended that institutions be shown the advantages of using Australian meats, that retailing be extended into the more populous areas, and that shopkeepers be urged to avoid the poorer quality brands. This, in 1871, was in the period when the short-lived producers were in full swing, but, at the end of that year, the Lancet reversed its earlier opinion and praised the Australian products. In 1872, in the scientific evaluation of a number of foods, the London Medical Press and Circular praised Australian canned meats; Dr Edward Smith, famous for his dietary survey of 1862–63, emotionally condemned them; and two articles in the Melbourne Argus were essentially a sociological assessment. Smith overstated the case against the Australian products, and the editor of the Medical Press and Circular answered his criticisms seriatim. The Argus correspondent examined the reluctance of the market to accept the products and concluded that: Englishmen preferred real English meat, like to see what they bought and ignored much scientific testimony in favour of the Australian product. Servants would not eat it and served it poorly and the poor had their prejudices strengthened by the use of the Australian products in workhouses and other public institutions. Butchers were opposed to it for their own reasons and ‘republican and communist agitators’ were identified as having a vested political interest in seeing that cheap meat was not available. 1872 was the peak year for Australian meats in Britain. English meat was becoming cheaper and more plentiful, and institutions began to turn against the Australian products. The United

Meat processing

States had recovered from the Civil War, and imports of American canned meats increased from the mid-1870s onwards. The Americans outsold the Australian products because they were closer, they used more attractive cans, and they were cleverer at marketing; they even sold a 13/4 lb can for 10d as against the Australian 2 lb for 11d! So, as the century drew to a close, the Australian meat canning industry declined. Not only did competition from North America intensify with American advances in the microbiology of canned foods and the invention of the open-top can with its filling machinery, but also, and even more deadly to the Australian canning industry, refrigeration offered the British market the carcass meat it preferred. Technology push / market pull Heat processing is a basic food technology. Its introduction offered for the first time food that was safe, that would keep, and that could be transported safely across the world. In the beginning it offered the mariner release from the tyranny of salt meat and hard tack. It had a marked impact in Australia because the Admiralty adopted canned foods as part of the normal ration scale (though called into question by faulty processing) and because demand for meat suddenly rose when the rinderpest plague in the 1860s decimated British herds. In the latter part of the 19th century the establishment of two things derived from it: the Australian canning industry with its spread into products other than meat, and the Australian meat industry with a technology (refrigeration) other than heat processing. Looking down the 19th century one can see: • a mild market pull for salted meat from habit and necessity rather than preference • a technological push providing shipping with a new and welcomed product based on good food that was being wasted in Australia • a hiccup in England as the technology faltered there, but without effect in Australia where production faltered because of the gold rushes (and the consequent demand for fat stock rather than canned meat) • a market pull for meat per se which gave Australian canned meats a second opportunity and finally established an Australian meat trade • an understanding that that this market pull was, in the long run, not for canned meat but for carcass meat. Then, as will be shown in the next chapter: • a slow realisation that this pull could be met from Australia only by developing a new technology, refrigeration, to freeze carcasses • a firm push in Australia in the 1880s to get this technology fully established • a refined market pull for blemish-free carcasses calling for more technological response. Australia possessed salting from the earliest days, derived its canning, and was innovative in refrigeration. Canning technology was also applied to jam, then to fruits and other products, and so into the modern industry; refrigeration was quickly applied in the dairy industry. Both these developments were by-products of the British market pull for meat, and the technological response to it. Once the technologies became available, their extension through technology push into other products was inevitable.

49


Chapter 5

Refrigeration

In the 1880s Australian meat canning was languishing. Because of the Boer War, it revived towards the end of the 19th century, but, in spite of the improved high-speed technology of the now familiar sanitary can, refrigeration became the preferred technology for the export of meat and made possible Australian overseas trade in dairy products and fresh fruit as well. That food keeps better cool, and especially cold, has been known for centuries. From ancient times snow and ice for use in summer as a coolant, mainly of food, had been collected in winter and stored in ice houses. Such were in use into the 1890s on Mount Wellington behind Hobart, and during the 19th century there was still a vigorous trade in natural ice from Norway and North America, even across the equator to Australia. However, in 1824 Nicolas Sadi Carnot described what is now called the Carnot cycle, which demonstrates the interchangeability of heat and work. Thus if, in a system in which heat neither enters nor leaves, a gas expands, its temperature will fall; if the gas is compressed, its temperature will rise. So, if the compressed gas is cooled and then allowed to expand, and compressed, cooled and allowed to expand again and again, the temperature will be progressively lowered as the cycle continues. From this point mechanical refrigeration was possible. Cooling by evaporation is a natural phenomenon, and the evaporation of ether was a wellknown example of it. In 1755 Dr William Cullen, lecturing to medical students in Glasgow, reduced the vapour pressure in a flask of ether and produced ice on the wet outer surface. He made no attempt to recover the ether by compression and to reuse it. He simply wrote a paper on it and left it at that. Other inconclusive experiments followed; in 1834 Thilorier released liquid carbon dioxide through a nozzle and got ‘dry ice’, but this was possible because the freezing and boiling points of carbon dioxide are only a few degrees apart. At the same time, Faraday mixed ‘dry ice’ with ether and got down to below -110°C, but these were just laboratory demonstrations. In the same year, however, Jacob Perkins had a patent for producing low temperatures by compression and expansion of vapour, and John Gorrie introduced a cold air machine in Florida, but the first successful ice-making plant was that in 1851 of James Harrison at Geelong, Victoria. James Harrison was a Scot of humble background, but while apprenticed to a Glasgow printer he bettered himself by attending night classes in the sciences. After experience with printers and publishers of books in Glasgow and London he came to Australia and gained some years of experience in Sydney and Melbourne in the publication of newspapers. At the end of 1840 Harrison went to Geelong and established the Geelong Advertiser, which he edited, printed, and wrote for. He was a natural journalist and remained one for the rest of his life, but he was

52

To feed a nation

much more. He served in parliament, was prominent in many public activities in Geelong, and showed himself to be a useful mechanical engineer. It is very likely that in his evening chemistry classes he heard of Cullen’s work for, when Harrison began to experiment at Rocky Point on the Barwon River in the mid-1850s, he used ether as the refrigerant and referred to Cullen’s experiment. Harrison made ice in sufficient quantity to be noted locally, and in November 1855 lodged an application for a Victorian patent for an ice-making machine. In 1856 he went to England, lodged applications for British patents, and arranged with Siebe and Co. for the manufacture of his machine. He had in mind domestic use, cooling of brewers’ worts, air conditioning for buildings, and ice making. The first machine was sold to an English brewer. Back in Victoria, Harrison founded the Victoria Ice Works and ordered machines from PN Russell and Company of Sydney, but he was less than successful because of the vested interests of those who imported lake ice from North America. The Bendigo brewer Glasgow, Thunder and Co. installed a machine in 1860, and Harrison, in partnership with Russell, set up the Sydney Ice Company. But in 1862 Harrison was bought out in Sydney by Eugene Nicolle and others whose sole purpose was to clear the way for Nicolle’s refrigeration ideas based on Carré’s principle of heat exchange by the liquefaction of ammonia. To this point, Harrison had been concerned solely with the production of cold.* His companies marketed ice. He was not involved in any way with food technology; only the brewers in England and Victoria perceived the application to food. However, some years earlier a pastoralist, Augustus Morris, had put forward the idea of trying to get fresh meat to Britain by some means of artificial refrigeration. Unsurprisingly, he was derided, but in 1865 he became associated with Nicolle, and the next year introduced Nicolle to the Sydney entrepreneur, Thomas Sutcliffe Mort. Mort was a Lancastrian who arrived in Sydney in 1838 at the age of 22. Five years later he entered business as an auctioneer and broker, and prospered. As early as 1846 he had been interested in sending meat to Britain, and his imagination was fired by Nicolle’s work. Before long he had committed himself publicly to the project of getting fresh meat to Britain under refrigeration. Nicolle had the benefit of engineering support from Mort’s dockyard but kept changing his ideas, and time went by. In Melbourne in April 1868, JD Postle presented to the Royal Society of Victoria a paper that demonstrated a grasp of the principles and practice of refrigeration by air expansion. The discussion which followed showed that a number of men were well aware of the difficulties of achieving mechanical refrigeration of food, but equally well aware of the possibilities, and the rewards to be expected from a successful outcome. The French also were experimenting, with partial success. It was apparent that the direct application of mechanical refrigeration to the preservation of food would not be long delayed. Harrison almost succeeded. His finances had been strained by his activities in the 1850s and 1860s, but at the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition of 1872–73 his exhibit, No. 639, was ‘Fresh Meat, frozen and packed as if for a voyage, so that the refrigerating process may be continued for any required period’. It was taken up by the Rev. Dr JI Bleasdale, a Roman Catholic priest of wide interests, something of a polymath, who was deeply involved in the Royal Society of Victoria and in the organisation of exhibitions. Bleasdale was aware of the inadequacy of the North American shipment of meat protected by ice across the Atlantic, and was therefore sceptical. Harrison’s cold room was in an iron building at the end of November 1872 and after 40 days, Bleasdale *For a full account of Harrison, see WR Lang, James Harrison—pioneering genius. Newtown, Victoria, Neptune Press, 1982.

Refrigeration

found the meat to be not just surface frozen, but frozen to the bone. Thawing and cooking tests convinced him, and the immediate result was £2500 from a number of pastoralists to enable Harrison to send 20–25 tons of frozen meat to London. Further tests were carried out before the Norfolk was fitted up for the voyage. The meat was frozen on shore and packed in a jacketed tank. Ice and salt were placed on top of the tank and cold brine circulated round it. The temperature could be manipulated to some extent by varying the concentration of salt, and the whole was insulated with tanning bark. This was not shipboard refrigeration: it was essentially a cold bank, and it failed because faulty construction of the tanks led to a greater consumption of ice than planned, the temperature rose, and the meat putrefied and was thrown overboard. Harrison was broken financially and retired from refrigeration. He stayed in England for 10 years living by his journalism, but eventually he came back to Geelong and lived in poverty and obscurity near Moolap until his death in 1893, aged 77. In Sydney, Mort and Nicolle had made progress. By 1872 Mort was making preparations for the refrigeration of meat at a slaughterhouse at Bowenfels in the Blue Mountains. In 1875 he had built frozen storage facilities, the first in the world, at Darling Harbour in Sydney to receive this meat. He deplored the poor quality of Sydney milk and knew that it could be improved even by cooling to the temperature of the coldest water available, but he also knew that with no railway he could not get milk to Sydney from his Bodalla property. However, he could and did initiate milk depots for cooled milk on the Southern Tablelands and its subsequent transport to Sydney. Iced railway vans for milk and meat followed. Together, Mort and Nicolle had effectively established terrestrial refrigeration, but shipboard refrigeration for the long haul to Britain still eluded them. In July 1875 Mort reorganised his refrigeration interests into the New South Wales Fresh Food and Ice Company, and in November he and Nicolle presented papers to the Agricultural Society of New South Wales. They were good papers and effectively summarised the current knowledge of refrigeration. They, and the discussion that followed, made the case for support of the technology. For Mort the crisis came in 1877. Refrigeration machinery was installed in the Northam and worked well in the hold, but it was found that in some parts of the machinery the ammonia was reacting with the iron, so the ship sailed without its meat. It was later claimed that the defect was only a small one but that it could not be repaired in a hurry. The failure was a severe blow to Mort, who died at his Bodalla estate on 9 May 1878, the month in which a shipment of frozen mutton from South America arrived in France. In spite of the obvious deficiencies, meat relying on natural cold was being shipped successfully within the northern hemisphere. Canadian meat, wrapped in canvas and frozen outside in the winter, was shipped to Britain as deck cargo during the winter months. From Europe meat was transported in ice, American meat was being sent long distances by rail in iced vans, and in 1875 meat was shipped to Britain in a cold bank similar, but inferior, to Harrison’s. This trade continued for a time because the northern winter, short distances, no tropical temperatures, and transfer on arrival to refrigerated storage, by then established in London, all favoured it. That it, with competition from American canned meats, hurt the Australian trade in preserved meat has already been noted, but it was clear that this reliance on natural cold was inherently unsatisfactory and would be swept away by the prize of shipboard refrigeration. The French led the way. Charles Tellier had been experimenting in South America. In 1876 the Frigorifique sailed to the River Plate carrying a small quantity of meat experimentally in a chamber refrigerated with ‘methylic ether’, Harrison’s refrigerant. The next year it returned to France with 100 tons of beef in the insulated hold, but the temperature of the meat was only 32°F (0°C): chilled,

53

54

To feed a nation

but not frozen. However, in 1878 the SS Paraguay with ammonia compression refrigeration, the method with which Nicolle almost succeeded, carried frozen meat from the Plate to Le Havre, and news of the Paraguay’s success stimulated a group of Queenslanders to decisive action. One of them, Mr (later Sir) Thomas McIlwraith, a future premier of Queensland, asked a brother of his in London who, with Malcolm McEacharn, was involved in overseas trade, to assess the Paraguay voyage. The result was the chartering of the SS Strathleven. Scottish Bell and Coleman refrigeration machinery, which worked on air compression and expansion, was installed and powered by the main boilers or the donkey engine. The refrigeration chamber was insulated with charcoal and the temperature lowered and controlled in a closed system by which air was withdrawn from the chamber, dried, compressed, cooled, and expanded directly back into it. An engineer, James Campbell, and a science graduate, MT Brown, travelled with the ship to oversee the refrigeration equipment and the refrigerated cargo respectively. The Queenslanders organised the cargo, but the financial risk was borne by McIlwraith McEacharn and Company. Meat was loaded in Sydney and Melbourne and frozen on board. The ship left Melbourne on 6 December 1879 and arrived in London on 2 February 1880. The voyage of 59 days was uneventful, and, by turning off the machinery for hours at a time, it was found that there were considerable reserves of refrigeration capacity. These interruptions may have contributed to the wide range of cold room temperatures (-5 to 27°F [-21°C–-3°C]) logged at sea, but, while this was far too wide a range, the important fact was that on arrival in London the cargo of 34 tons was in excellent condition. Later in the same month, February 1880, the Paraguay arrived in Le Havre after the shorter voyage from the Plate with 10 000 mutton carcasses. The Strathleven voyage was accomplished by a steamship through the Suez canal, but in May 1882, the Dunedin, a sailing ship 98 days out from New Zealand, arrived in London with 5000 mutton carcasses kept in perfect condition by Bell and Coleman refrigeration equipment. The point had been made, and emphatically reinforced, that fresh meat could be shipped successfully from the antipodes to Britain. Frozen meat was immediately successful in Britain and caused some anxiety in the British meat industry, but plans to exploit this new opportunity were being made in Australia as early as December 1879, as soon as the Strathleven sailed. In the succeeding years, frozen meat export companies were set up and freezing works built, and ships began to install refrigeration chambers. But it was not long before drought increased the cost of raw material, and hesitant shipowners, unsure of a continuing demand for refrigerated space, imposed high cargo rates. In the mid-1880s these factors, combined with lower prices in England as supplies from other sources began to arrive, spelt the end for the Victorian enterprises, but, as Victoria fell, New South Wales forged ahead (see Table 4). Queensland began in 1881, but misfortune in the shape of fire and cyclone inhibited progress until, in the 1890s, it got well into its stride and became the major meat-exporting colony, soon to be state. The Australian Frozen Meat Export Company is an example of what happened but also, in its demise, of Victoria’s salvation. It was formed in May 1880 and was at first successful. It had, however, arranged to establish its refrigeration plant in the Melbourne Meat Preserving Company’s works at Maribyrnong where there was space for the installation of refrigeration chambers and machinery. There was logic in this as stockyards, slaughtering and meat handling facilities were available (Fig. 5), the carcasses being diverted to the freezing chambers instead of going directly to the butchers. In addition, the freezing chambers added to the meat preserving company a facility no modern meat cannery lacks. There was no problem with the refrigeration, which worked well, but the cannery was in its twilight years and in the absence of refrigerated

Refrigeration

transport the location was wrong for the frozen meat exporter. Frozen carcasses spent up to 10 hours at ambient temperatures, on land and by lighter, en route from meatworks to anchored ships. This was disastrous, and should have been foreseen. It led to the deterioration of some 50% of the shipments made under these conditions. Accordingly, early in 1883 the company transferred its operations to a newly built freezing works at Newport, one hour from the ships. But almost at once the cost of raw material rose and market prices in Britain fell. High cargo rates and continuing drought added to the difficulties and the company failed. Its new Newport works were bought by the Victorian Government in 1886 and used by it to begin an export trade in dairy products, specifically, butter. In 1886 it was a vote of confidence: there were no Victorian factories dedicated to butter production. By 1900 there were 300 of them. Freezing works were mooted for several New South Wales country towns, but such enterprise was frustrated by the lack of refrigerated rail transport and adequate frozen storage in Sydney and Newcastle. Only one freezing works, that at Orange, eventuated (in 1881), and it failed within a year or two because the meat consigned for shipment ex Sydney thawed en route to the port. Later in the decade, the Victorian Government, promoting the butter industry in

Table 4 Export of frozen meat 1881–1900 (tons) Export of frozen meat 1881–1900 (tons) New South Wales 1881

Victoria

Queensland

South Australia

499

Total 499

1882

511

926

1437

1883

1457

497

1954

1884

665

2069

2274

1885

314

1995

2269

1886

243

1969

2212

1887

1092

771

1863

1888

2613

1889

1893

1214

1890

3615

2703

6318

1891

5251

5315

10566

1892

11153

8470

19893

1893

10773

11312

22085

1894

16909

16679

1895

52781

24604

29

77414

1896

27712

23333

204

51249

1897

21608

28053

71

49732

1898

22134

26217

430

48781

1899

17624

34246

1155

53029

1900

14190

35379

1905

514742

2613

The figures are compiled from the Statistical Registers of the various colonies.

3107

33538

55

56

To feed a nation

addition to supplying refigerated storage at Newport, secured refrigerated space in ships and accelerated the production of refrigerated railway vans. Even in the midst of the euphoria over the Strathleven cargo there were warning signs. Some of the meat had to be cleaned and the lesson, quickly absorbed, was that Australian carcasses, like the American meat, had to be wrapped in cloth. Less easily solved was the problem of thawing. Frozen meat was a new product and it took time to understand it. It had to be thawed to grade it properly and to sell it. More to the point, lest normal cooking heat and time be taken up in melting ice, and incompletely cooked meat presented at table with potential risks of food poisoning, the meat had to be thawed completely before being cooked. The solution was the education of consumers in the proper treatment of frozen foods—a lesson still incompletely absorbed at the end of the 20th century. There were, however, greater problems of presentation than were apparent in that first shipment. Neither was harmful, but both were unsightly. The first was freezer burn, the heavy dehydration of the surface of the meat by sublimation of ice. As the name implies, it resembles a burn in appearance, alters the texture of the affected part, and leaves it inedible. The simple solution was the appropriate protection of the surface of the carcass. The second problem was ‘drip’, the loss of bloodstained liquor on thawing, and this was a serious aesthetic problem whose solution came many years later. The Rev. Dr Bleasdale, when examining Harrison’s frozen meat at the Intercolonial Exhibition in November 1872, had anticipated ‘drip’ and found it. But he discounted it, not unexpectedly, because the advantages offered by frozen carcass meat over the canned product then on the market far outweighed the perceived disadvantage of ‘drip’. However, when chilled meat—meat not frozen but held just below 0°C and free from this defect—began to arrive from South America in the mid-1890s, the British consumer preferred it. Naturally, the Australian exporters tried this, too, but the voyage from the antipodes was longer, long enough for mould to become established on the surface of the meat and for other microbial spoilage to occur. The solution of one problem simply led to another, and early attempts to overcome ‘drip’ were aimed at preventing microbial growth on the chilled carcasses. Thus, the Linley process of South American origin exposed meat held at chilling temperatures to formaldehyde vapour for one hour each day. It was moderately successful and was used by Queensland exporters, but the British Government, hardly surprisingly, ruled against formaldehyde. LF Bullot proposed the exposure of chilled meat to the combustion products of a mixture of sulphur, nitrate, wattle bark, and certain essential oils. It seemed to work, if only because of the sulphur dioxide, but the appearance suffered, it did not solve the ‘drip’ problem, and it, too, fell down on British objections to the preservatives. Finally, an Australian engineer named Perfect suggested that the circulation of cold air of controlled humidity would reduce microbial growth and extend the shelf life of chilled meat. Three shipments under this system went to Britain in the 1920s, but it was not the answer. Microbial growth was limited, but drying out was excessive. The Australian refrigerated meat industry, so full of promise, struggled from the outset. The freezing works, especially in Queensland, began as pastoralists’ co-operatives, and Duncan, in his survey of the early meat export trade, emphasised the difficulties facing the Queenslanders in their attempts to compete with South America, especially the Argentine. Deriving, in essence, from the unforgiving land in which the cattle were raised, the problems were fluctuations in herd numbers and therefore export volumes through drought and, in the 1890s, tick fever; the ‘tyranny of distance’ both within Queensland and from the markets; and, from all of this, poor quality. As big international companies inevitably acquired the freezing works, high processing

Refrigeration

costs vis-à-vis the South Americans continued, as did the cost of excess capacity. Commercial agreements in the 1930s helped sales in Britain, but the ‘drip’ problem remained. It was ultimately overcome by Australian food scientists but did not finally benefit the industry until after the Second World War. Work, supported by the industry and taken over by CSIR (the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) on its foundation in 1926, began in the Biochemistry department of the University of Melbourne in 1924. It was found that ‘drip’ could be reduced by faster freezing that caused less rupture of the cells and by steps to maintain the post mortem pH of the muscle in the range 5.4–6.8. It was also found that creating an atmosphere of 10% carbon dioxide in the hold inhibited microbial growth. It followed that improved hygiene in abattoirs to reduce the microbial load on the meat must help, and indeed was essential. These measures were successful in the run-up to the war, but were negated afterwards by the high costs of making cargo compartments gas-tight, and the advances in frozen meat science and technology which finally overcame the problem. Dairy products The shipment of meat was the imperative that drove the quest for mechanical refrigeration, but when the SS Protos, fitted out by the Australian Frozen Meat Export Company, sailed from Melbourne in November 1880 she carried 4000 carcasses of frozen sheep meats and also 100 tons of farm butter. Early attempts to export butter had failed. Everything was against it: the long period for cream separation; the laborious and unhygienic buttermaking procedure; and the climate, not only in Australia, but through the tropics to Britain. All changed with the introduction of the cream separator and refrigeration. The former virtually eliminated standing time, thus greatly reducing contamination, and the latter halted the proliferation of those organisms present. Cheese was a little less vulnerable, but the climate, and transport through the tropics, favoured the leakage of fat. Refrigeration prevented this and retarded ripening, which could then be completed to the taste of the English cheese vendors. Cool storage The value of refrigeration for the storage and transport of meat and dairy products was obvious. Less obvious, perhaps, was its value to fruit growers, but they, too, were shortly to benefit. Although the principles were not then understood, the essential objective is to arrest the normal respiration of the fruit without damaging the tissues in any way. Storage below freezing point is out of the question, but fruit may be damaged at temperatures above its freezing point, and the optimum temperature for cool storage varies with each fruit and often with the variety of the fruit. Apples generally are best held at 30–32°F (-1°C–0°C), but this may be too low for some varieties. Some earlier experiments seem to have been carried out, but WD Peacock of Hobart is credited with beginning in 1885 the successful cool storage of fruit, mainly apples to begin with, and shipment under refrigeration to Britain. Cool storage chambers were included in general-purpose refrigerated stores, but later the reverse was true. Cool stores built primarily for fruit included refrigeration chambers used for other commodities, and sold ice to the local community. Thus, Jones and Co. in Hobart built cool stores in the first years of the 20th century and in the early 1920s had two Linde ammonia compressors in operation for ice making; the refrigerated storage of meat, poultry, fish and dairy products; and the cool storage of fruit and hops. With expansion of fruit growing on the mainland in the 1920s, cool stores, often built and owned by the grower co-operatives, proliferated.

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In the mid-1870s Mort and Nicolle developed a domestic ice-making machine, another world first, and in 1884 Hudson Brothers Ltd, also in Sydney, introduced a domestic refrigerator. Both were well before their time. Domestic refrigerators began to appear in numbers in the interwar years and, with home freezers, became commonplace after the Second World War, together with acceptance by the consumer of the products that came with them. Once the principles and practice of refrigeration had been established, the way was open for the many applications in the 20th century.

The Government Cool Stores, Melbourne, were established by the Victorian Government in the 1880s. Clockwise from top left; calico covered mutton, 56 lb boxes of butter, crates each containing two of the traditional 80 lb cylindrical cheddar cheeses, rail transport in from the country and out to the ships for export. (Weekly Times, 8 March 1919, p. 25. Reproduced by courtesy of the La Trobe Library, Melbourne.)

Chapter 6

Sugar: A major ingredient

Sugar is both a valuable flavour additive and a preservative but is normally used in concentrations much higher than one associates with additives and is therefore regarded by cook, food processor and regulator as an ingredient. There are very few formulated foods without any sugar, and some dietitians have decried it as nothing more than a source of ‘empty calories’. True, it is a very pure substance, but it is also a good energy food and, unfortunately, its function in making foods of wider nutritional value more palatable tends to be overlooked. Sugar cane was first grown in Australia in the Sydney Botanical Gardens in 1817, and then experimentally from 1823 at Port Macquarie by TA Scott, who produced 70 tons of refined sugar. But it was a false dawn. In 1839 Francis Kemble and WK Child registered the Australian Sugar Company in London, the prime purpose being the refining of raw sugar from the Philippines. Disagreements delayed action, and the assets were taken over in 1842 by the Australasian Sugar Company, which commenced operations that year with imported technology at Canterbury, now in suburban Sydney. In August 1843 Edward Knox became manager of that company, to which he leased both Bowden’s refinery and Robert Cooper’s distillery, which he and two others had already bought. This company was reorganised in January 1855 as the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR), later CSR Ltd, and bought the refinery and distillery. It prospered on the refining of imported raw sugar and in 1857 initiated the Victoria Sugar Company, 50% owned by CSR, and built a refinery at Sandridge (Port Melbourne). A slump followed and Knox had a hard time seeing the company through a period of financial uncertainty. In the early 1860s the wheat farmers of coastal New South Wales were hit by poor seasons and an outbreak of ‘rust’, and, for that matter, by the increasing volume of wheat from west of the Dividing Range. Alternative crops were explored, and about 1864 some farmers even as far south as Kiama tried sugar cane. In essence, sugar is obtained by crushing the cane to release the juice, heating the juice with lime to reduce acidity and precipitate impurities, concentrating the clear juice until the sugar crystallises, and spinning off the mother liquor. Although sugar milling was well established with British and French machinery in the Caribbean and Mauritius, in Australia’s earliest days milling the cane was a village technology, but not a British village technology. Individual growers crushed their cane one stick at a time between hardwood rollers that were usually horse-driven. Attempts were made to introduce steam milling, but design and operation were poor. On the New South Wales south coast it was soon realised that frost was a limiting factor and by 1870 cane growing in New South Wales had stabilised in the Northern Rivers District, along the Macleay, Clarence and Richmond rivers.

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In 1862 in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens, John Buhot, who had come from Barbados, succeeded in making Queensland’s first granulated sugar. It was a small demonstration of what might be. In the same year CB Whish, a cavalry officer from India, arrived in Queensland and successfully planted cane at Caboolture. He tried to duplicate the plantation system of the United States and the West Indies, and introduced Pacific Islanders (kanakas), the first of many thousands. The story of associated problems is related to the production of cane, not to the subsequent technology. By general consent, the founder of the Queensland industry was Captain the Hon. Louis Hope who grew eight hectares of cane in 1863 and refined commercially at Redlands Bay thus winning a competition sponsored by the (Royal) Society of Arts. By 1867 there were six mills with a combined output of a mere 168 tons, but by 1872–73, 65 mills produced 6266 tons of sugar and 16 000 gallons of rum. In 1868 the nine mills in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales could together produce only 60 tons of raw sugar, but more efficient steam milling was established by 1871. The basic mill technology of the time was described in the Sydney Morning Herald of 6 August 1867. It was an account of Hope’s mill at his Cleveland plantation on Moreton Bay, a mill equipped with plant made in Glasgow and supported by the necessary workshops. The cane was crushed by the standard triangle of rollers in which the single top roller crushes the cane twice in series against the two lower ones. The crushed cane (bagasse) was burnt as fuel, and the juice, which had been partly limed at the rollers, passed to the clarifiers. Here it was further limed, and heated almost to boiling. The scum was removed and the clarified juice decanted from the precipitate to a ‘battery’ of open evaporating pans that were wood-fired from below. The movement of the juice progressively towards the first pan, where concentration was finished off with thermometer and hydrometer, was essentially a countercurrent concentration, on whose completion the mass was removed by a ‘dipper’, a vessel with an open valve lowered slowly into the concentrate. When the dipper was full, the valve was closed and the dipper removed and emptied into coolers where the mass crystallised over a couple of days. The mother liquor was spun off in Weston basket centrifuges and the raw sugar packed into bags. Increasingly, Australian sugar production and refining came to be dominated by CSR. Bindon and Miller identify three distinct phases in its 19th century history: 1855–68, the refining of imported raw sugar; 1868–80, the establishment of centralised milling; and 1880–1900, the establishment of a cadre of chemists. In the late 1860s, Knox’s financial problems had convinced him that reliance on imported raw sugar would not do, and that he had to establish his own supplies. So in 1868 he sent Melmoth Hall to assess the potential of the Northern Rivers of New South Wales as a source of cane. Hall had planted sugar and indigo in India and had come to Victoria in the late 1850s. On Hall’s report, Knox bypassed the traditional plantation system of growing sugar and began to establish central mills to crush cane from farmers. Three mills were ready in time for the 1870 crushing season, the Darkwater mill on the Macleay River, and the Southgate and Chatsworth mills on the Clarence. Thus, cane growing in New South Wales was consolidated in the Northern Rivers District at the same time as efficient steam milling arrived to boost the output of raw sugar. Knox also faced the problem of transport, and in the same year a fleet of ships began to service the river mills and to lift the raw sugar to the Sydney and Melbourne refineries. By 1871 there were five steam mills on the Macleay, eight on the Clarence, and one on the Richmond, as well as 27 horse-driven mills. CSR’s raw material position was transformed. However, even the Macleay was too far south, and in 1874, because of frost, the Darkwater mill was moved to the Clarence and became the Harwood mill, now the


oldest operating mill in Australia. CSR’s decisive move enabled it to retain its near monopoly of refining in the colony, and to avoid in large measure the duty of five shillings per ton on the imported raw sugar. Apart from that, the mills were themselves profitable, and the company was able to improve and ensure the quality of the raw material entering its refineries. During the 1870s weather conditions on the Clarence militated against cane production, and farmers began to move away. Mill capacity in the area was well in excess of requirements, and the Richmond River, still further north, became more attractive to canegrowers and mill owners. EW Knox, Edward’s son, was in charge of the Northern Rivers mills and in 1876 went to the Caribbean to study sugar milling. He saw the latest developments in sugar technology and when he returned to New South Wales he introduced these improvements. The most significant was ‘double crushing’, a second pass of the crushed cane through rollers in series. Further rollers were added later. In 1880 CSR opened the Condong mill on the Tweed River, and in 1881 its Broadwater mill on the Richmond. The latter, with its three sets of double crushing rollers, was the most important mill in the country. It could handle 900 tons of cane per day and in a month produced as much raw sugar as the whole of Australia had produced in 1868. CSR was using the latest technology, but it was buying its cane from individual farmers and there were many small mills still operating. In Queensland, with a much bigger area suitable for it, sugar growing spread northwards from Moreton Bay along the coastal strip. It followed much the same pattern: plantation with matching mill, or small groups of individuals with a small horse-driven mill. In 1878 there were 68 mills in Queensland, but they and their products were very variable. In the 1880s prices on the world sugar market fell from £20 to £12 per ton, and the small mills began to close because they were inefficient. Their technology left half the sugar behind in the crushed cane (bagasse), and their productivity was poor. Southern money began to build big mills in Queensland: in 1883 Swallow and Ariell, the Melbourne biscuit makers, looked to their own supplies by establishing a plantation and mill near Cairns, and CSR installed mills at Mackay and Ingham. Two years later they moved the Southgate mill from the Clarence to Innisfail and embarked on a big investment in machinery and tramways. In 1884 in the Clarence, Richmond, and Tweed district there were 86 mills (102 in New South Wales), and in 1890 there were only 31 (33 in New South Wales). Similarly, in Queensland in the three years from the 1885–86 season, acreage under cane fell from 41 000 to 31 000 and the number of mills from 166 to 106. The small inefficient farm mills continued to close, and in 1898 there were 80 mills in Queensland producing about 100 000 tons of sugar per year. As with milling and brewing, there was centralisation into the hands of the large technologically advanced companies, especially CSR. By 1912 the only three mills in New South Wales were Harwood, Condong and Broadwater, and in the late 1990s that was still the position, while in Queensland the total was only 25. But from more than 30 million tonnes of cane these Queensland mills produced over four million tonnes of high-quality raw sugar. The improvements in Australian sugar production were spelt out in articles in the Australian Town and Country Journal in the 1880s. The triangular arrangement of crushing rollers was the same, but the bagasse was steamed and crushed a second time before being burnt as fuel. In 1873 Robert Tooth and Robert Cran began to refine sugar at Yengarie, near Maryborough, and introduced a system of collecting juice, mildly limed ‘to prevent fermentation’, from plantation mills by pipeline. In 1882 R Cran and Co.’s new mill at Bundaberg and then the Millaquin refinery drew juice from plantation mills up to 15 miles away through six-inch diameter pipelines into which individual farmers or plantations could tap their own five-inch delivery lines. At the refinery the

61

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juice was further limed (8 oz of slaked lime per 100 gallons) and then ‘gassed’ with carbon dioxide, obtained from the limekilns, to precipitate dissolved calcium as the carbonate and thus improve the removal of impurities. If required, there was a second liming, and excess lime could be corrected by the addition of alum. Scum was press-filtered to recover juice, and the precipitate from the clarifiers was used as fertiliser. At one refinery the liquor from the clarifiers was decolourised by passing through animal charcoal made on the spot from bones, before concentration in triple effect evaporators in which, as concentration proceeded, the vacuum was increased and the temperature reduced. This was the reverse of the old open-pan system in which as concentration increased so did the temperature, and with it caramelisation and darkening of colour. From the evaporators the concentrated juice was filtered, decolourised, and concentrated to crystallisation in a Howard vacuum pan controlled by the judgment of the sugar boiler. From the pan the mass went to a mixer and from there to the Weston hanging basket centrifuges in which the crystals were washed with a spray of water, dried and stored. At Millaquin a steam-heated drum drier was used. The liquid phases from the centrifuges were diluted, decolourised, boiled and reconcentrated to yield more sugar, and so on. The final mother liquid was (and is) molasses. As with flour milling, the essential technology of the sugar industry has not changed in 100 years. Cane was hauled from the field by steam locomotives on tramways, essentially narrow gauge railways. Milling was by three to five crushing trains in series, all of them the conventional three-roll mills. Juice was limed and boiled, and clarified by allowing the mud to settle. The bagasse was burnt to raise steam, and the mud from the clarifiers and the ash from the boilers were used as fertilisers. The equipment, much of it made in the colony, for example by Walkers of Maryborough, was quite sophisticated, and 100 years later some of it was still in use. In 1880 only about a quarter of the Queensland mills had vaccuum pans, but almost all of them were using centrifuges to separate the sugar crystals from the mother liquors. By 1900 multiple effect evaporation was the norm, and the sugar was crystallised in vacuum pans. It was a long way from the ‘open batteries’ of the 1860s and 1870s. The product was raw sugar; it still is, but raw sugar contains about 1.6% of impurities that introduce colour, flavour and odour defects to products containing it. Even the dry crystals are ‘wet’, and the film of moisture surrounding them reduces shelf life by supporting the growth of micro-organisms. Raw sugar is refined by successive recrystallisations to yield a very pure sucrose and a range of by-products from the mother liquors. No, the essential technology has not changed. It is in the details that advances have been made, and, driven by Edward Knox, they were being made in the 1880s. The Colonial Sugar Refining Company’s refinery at Port Melbourne burnt down in 1875, and Knox bought the refinery built at Yarraville the previous year by Joshua Brothers. The new Sydney refinery at Pyrmont was opened in 1878. It replaced the earlier ones, and others in Adelaide (1891) and Brisbane (1893) completed such a modernisation of refinery technology that smaller refineries were swamped. EW Knox acquired an extensive knowledge of sugar technology and chemistry, but his father described himself as ‘only a theorist in sugar boiling’. Nevertheless, his most significant contribution in this period was possibly his introduction into and support of science in his company. The polarimeter is a simple instrument for measuring sugars, and as early as 1873 Edward Knox seems to have been aware of its potential application. He was advised to seek the help of Professor John Smith, foundation professor of Chemistry in the University of Sydney. Knox’s first chemist was Andrew Fairgrieve, a mill chemist from Scotland, whose work convinced him of the value of professional chemical support, and in 1880, to set up a science department, Knox recruited Thomas Utrick Walton, a well-qualified Glasgow


University graduate with several years experience in sugar refining. Walton arrived in Sydney in March 1881 and fully justified Knox’s judgment. He trained many young men to use the polarimeter in the field, and, with his central laboratory staff, solved many technical problems. In due course, he became CSR’s chief chemist. Fairgrieve, whose failing seems to have been lack of organisation, was superseded in the mid-1880s by Dr Gustav Kottman, a German beet sugar expert, who joined CSR in 1883. After two years studying the industry in Fiji, Kottman became the company’s inspecting chemist coordinating the work of the mill laboratories. Together, Walton and Kottman tackled the two bugbears of the industry chemist, sampling and inconsistent analytical methods. They followed the sugar from the cane through the various intermediates to the finished product, by-products and wastes; and when sugar prices tumbled in 1884 they introduced into all the mills ‘a system of chemical book-keeping’. This was the now familiar mass balance for the control of any manufacturing operation. It was probably a world first and was copied throughout the Australian industry and internationally. Knox visited the German beet industry in 1886, and what he saw strengthened his views. By this time he had built up a team of chemists and technicians, and when he returned to Sydney he gave them more responsibility in the control of the manufacturing operations. In this he must have been reassured by Kottman’s development of a formula for assessing the pure obtainable cane sugar (POCS) from any load of cane. This was the optimum yield obtainable with the methods then available, and, combining this with a coefficient of work for each mill, he was able to compare mill with mill, a comparison that led to improvements in cane growing and higher yields of sugar. In 1899 CSR began to pay farmers on the sugar content of their cane and by 1916 the whole of the Australian industry was doing so. This development followed inexorably from the ‘chemical bookkeeping’ and was analogous to the dairy industry’s adoption of the rapid Babcock test (1891) for butterfat and subsequent payment to dairy farmers on the fat content of their milk. In 1890, in a paper to the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, EW Knox detailed CSR’s application of chemistry throughout its operations. There were laboratories in all of its mills and refineries, and a central laboratory. The mass balances would include sugar retained in the bagasse used for fuel; the bone char used to decolourise the final syrups; and the molasses, then virtually a waste product. But the ash used for fertiliser, and the condensate used for watering the megass for second stage crushing and steam raising also were checked. There was some ammonium sulphate resulting from the preparation of the bone char, and the spent char could be used in superphosphate manufacture. Knox admitted the initial antipathy of mill managers to the chemists, but listed two other advantages over and above the financial benefits of the close control of the plant. The first was the professional probity of the chemists, and the second was the intellectual stimulation enjoyed in discussion with them. Small wonder that he appointed chemically trained men to manage mills and refineries. As Bindon and Miller put it, CSR had become chemist dependent. This was undoubtedly a factor in weathering the economic storms of the 1890s, and experimentation during the off season led to innovations. Kottman’s development of the diffusion method for extracting cane juice was a case in point. Essentially, this was the extraction of sliced and pulped cane with water at 90°C. It failed in CSR and elsewhere because the high energy cost made it uneconomical. In 1900 the Queensland Government legislated for the establishment of the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations, the BSES. It was modelled on the successful experiment station of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association but, not surprisingly in view of the obvious emphasis of the Hawaiian Association, it concentrated for the first 25 years on cane breeding, soils and agronomy.

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To feed a nation

It was not until 1924 that the first moves were made to form the Division of Mill Technology that was finally established in 1928. Cane shredding had begun in 1914, and new mills, technologically up to date, were built in the 1920s. Advances in mill control and other R&D were made in the 1930s (see Chapter 12), and the Sugar Research Institute, offering a more intensive research programme, was established in 1949 (see Chapter 13).

Beet sugar Given Victoria’s temperate climate, the existence in Melbourne of a sugar refinery, and intercolonial rivalry, it is no surprise that Victoria attempted to base a sugar industry of its own on sugar beet. The Victorian Beetroot Sugar Company was registered in November 1871 and the growing of sugar beet began at Anakie near Geelong. The mill, at nearby Staughton Vale, was described in the Melbourne Argus of 20 November 1873. Once the sugar had been extracted, the process was essentially that used in the cane fields. The beet was weighed, washed (in that order!) and sliced in a machine whose knives could be set to vary the thickness. The slices filled perforated macerating tanks, which were then transferred into a bath of water at 190°F (88°C) to leach the sugar (this was the diffusion process!). The residual pulp became cattle feed; the liquor became the equivalent of cane juice and was treated similarly—limed, boiled and settled, and the clear liquor carbonated. The clear supernatant from this was decolourised with animal charcoal, filtered, and concentrated in ‘evaporating trays’ heated from below in exactly the same way as in the Queensland cane fields. After a final filtration, the syrup was concentrated in a vacuum pan, seeded, crystallised and centrifuged. The sugar went to market and the molasses was fermented to 50–60 overproof spirit. The vacuum pan and the steam raising plant were built in Melbourne, the former by Robison Bros and the latter by McCall and Black. The Argus correspondent said at the outset that the ‘position is found not to be a favourable one’ and that the factory would probably have to be moved, and towards the end were the ominous words, ‘The quantity of ground under cultivation has been far less than promised and the crops neither in quality or quantity have realised anticipations.’ A sugar equivalent of 200 tons was processed in the first year, but in 1874, after only that one year, the mill closed. In 1875, the year after the refinery at Port Melbourne burnt down, a seven-storey factory was built at Ross Town (now the Melbourne suburb of Caulfield). It was never a success and lasted only a few years. In 1894 sugar beet growing began at Maffra in Gippsland, but there was little headway until extensive government support became available in 1910. Victorian Harry Easterby, eventually to be director of the BSES, worked at Maffra before moving to the Bingera mill, Bundaberg, in 1899. The next year he was appointed assistant director of the BSES station at Mackay, but came back to Maffra in the false dawn of 1910. That he returned to Queensland in 1912 as general superintendent of the BSES suggests that he could see no real future in Maffra. He was right: the Victorian initiative had no chance against the Queensland cane sugar industry. After an Indian summer brought about by the exigencies of the war, the Maffra factory finally closed in 1946. In the 1920s Sir Henry Jones, seeking freedom from dependence on CSR, sought to establish a beet sugar industry in Tasmania to support his jam making and fruit canning. Climatic conditions were suitable but his proposal foundered on politics; the federal government declined to extend to him the subsidies available to the Queensland sugar industry. In the mid-20th century a feasibility study for the Tasmanian Government looked at it once more, but, again, cane sugar interests prevailed.

Chapter 7


Vegetables were grown domestically just as soon as the colonists could coax them from the unhelpful Sydney soils, but commercial production with its associated processing was long delayed and was essentially a 20th century development. From the earliest days many fruits were grown in New South Wales and, especially, Van Diemen’s Land. Conserves were being advertised in the latter colony in the late 1840s and, as well as fresh fruit such as apples, were well known in the 1850s when preserves and six tons of dried fruit also were exported. Trade in fresh fruit other than to the nearby sister colonies had to await the introduction of refrigeration and the subsequent development of cool storage, but jam making and the canning of fruit was well under way in the 1870s.

Fruit products Jam The Tasmanian jam industry, which dominated the Australian scene for half a century, began in 1861 when George Peacock began to can jam in Hobart. He had arrived in Hobart in 1850 and set up a grocery and fruit shop. As his customers began to ask more frequently for jams he began to make them in a mini-factory in his own backyard. Here he is believed to have been the first to make jam from Tasmanian berry fruits. Others in Hobart, and then in Launceston, began to do the same, but Peacock saw the opportunity, took the plunge, and in 1859 sold his shop to devote himself full time to jam making in a stone warehouse at the Old Wharf. Here, with deep water in front of him and the railway goods yard behind him, he was ideally situated for the reception of fruit for jam and timber for cases, and for the export of the finished products. By 1863 four Hobart jam makers were exporting their products, almost entirely, one assumes, to the mainland colonies, and other small producers sprang up in Hobart and the Huon valley. By 1870 Peacock was firmly established at the Old Wharf where his factory expanded and for decades dominated the Hobart waterfront. In 1891 his company became H Jones and Co. Pty Ltd, and eventually Henry Jones (IXL) Ltd, the dominant Australian jam maker of the early years of the 20th century. Most of Peacock’s raw material came from the Huon and Channel districts. Because the roads were rudimentary, it was brought to Hobart in kegs by fishing boats—easier and more lucrative than fishing! Raspberries were handled in kegs and the rest in crates. Later, in a sound move to improve quality, he established a factory at Franklin in the fruit growing area and pulped the small fruits before transporting them to Hobart. The sugar came from Mauritius in one or other of Hobart’s clipper ships. For example, each year for years the Harriet McGregor, perhaps the most famous of them all, made one round trip to London and one to Mauritius.

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The Jones and Co. IXL Jam Factory, The Old Wharf, Hunter Street, Hobart. This collection of buildings evolved from the stone warehouse in which George Peacock began to can jam in 1861. (Photograph by the author.)

Peacock’s process was straightforward. The soft fruits were sieved, the others hand picked to remove stalks and damaged fruit, and the fruit boiled with sugar in steam-jacketed copper kettles with a capacity of 156 lb of jam per hour. The finished jam was hand poured into 1 lb cans and left to cool overnight. The cans were closed next morning by soldering on the lids, but if, as for the best quality jams, stoneware jars were used, they were ‘tied down with skins’. This was poor practice, and is in stark contrast with the care taken with the closure of the canned fruit (see p. 71). Contamination of the surfaces with micro-organisms, especially moulds, was inevitable, but spoilage was prevented by the low water activity resulting from the high sugar concentration, and the exclusion of air by the subsequent seal. Peacock’s cans were made on the premises from imported Welsh tinplate. This was cut and prepared for assembly with the auxiliary equipment (guillotine, rollers and dies) then common to all Australian canners. Each can was hand soldered, and, before it was filled, hand washed and tested for leaks. Peacock bought his labels, but for the cases local timber was cut to size by steampowered saws and assembled as required. By 1873 he was exporting to the mainland colonies and to Asia, and was supplying the P&O ships. On the other side of Sullivan’s Cove, Johnson Bros and Co. were making jam in the same way from fruit from the same areas. There were minor differences in boiling the jam, and their cans were made up by ‘Mr Holroyd’s jam tin manufactory’ from British tinplate imported by Johnson Bros themselves. Peacock and the Johnsons were the major jam makers, but there were others, and other jam tin manufacturers, so that the Hobart Mercury of 13 January 1873 said, ‘The manufacture of jam and the preserving of fruit is one of the chief industries carried out in Hobart Town’.


While climate favoured Tasmania, the other colonies tried jam making also, with varied success. In Sydney in the 1840s jam was made for sale, but the first factory was listed in 1868. By 1875 there were 10 of them, but by the end of the decade Peacock had expanded to New South Wales and by the mid-1880s his only competition was Dyasons’ two factories, Alexandria and Ashfield. In South Australia George McEwin began to pack jam in glass in 1862, turned to cans in 1867, and was well established by 1880. Several other South Australian enterprises entered the field in the 1870s and 1880s. At first Victoria was supplied from Tasmania, but in 1868, on their property at Heidelberg near Melbourne, the Perry brothers set up a factory to make jams, jellies, bottled fruits, tomato sauce and chutney. Their raw material came mainly from their own large orchards, and the jam making technology was the same as Peacock’s. Fruit was bottled with Appert’s technology: in a water bath at 180°F rising to 210°F (82°C rising to 99°C) for completion.* As Appert taught, great care was taken with the closure; the corks were sealed with resin. But the Perry brothers’ operation was too small to compete, and in 1871 a protective tariff of 2d per lb on jam shut out the Tasmanian product and encouraged others who swamped the Perrys. In 1871 the Victorian Jam Company was established at Fitzroy, but in 1873 it moved across Melbourne to Chapel Street, South Yarra. In 1876 it bought a brewery opposite, extended it and installed modern equipment. It became known as the Jam Factory, and the name of the company was changed to the Victoria Preserving Company. In 1876 it drew raw material from the country around Melbourne, but not enough, and relied heavily on Tasmanian soft fruits. The technology was as used in Hobart, and the products were offered in consumer sizes but also in 10 and 56 lb units for industrial and food service customers. The factory failed to reach its capacity of 2000 tons of jam per year because of shortfalls in the supply of fruit. Difficulties multiplied and the company went into liquidation in 1885. The Jam Factory became part of the Peacock empire and is still there, but is now a shopping, entertainment and tourist complex. Also in Melbourne in the mid-1870s Stewart was producing 2000 tins per day in North Melbourne and WS Tong of Fitzroy in 1874 packed 100 tins and won a first prize at the Vienna Exhibition. Significantly, he was ‘parboiling’ fruit in season and storing it in barrels for use later in the year. In the 1880s and 1890s Abel Hoadley succeeded where the Jam Factory failed. He had come to Melbourne in 1865 and established a large orchard at Burwood to the east of the city. He began to make jam in a ‘backyard’ operation, but in 1881 set up a factory in Park Street, South Melbourne. It prospered, and late in 1895 Hoadley and Co. moved into larger premises in Wells Street. Here they made a wide range of fruit-based products, the jam making and fruit canning technology following the current methods. But Hoadley was an orchardist and he confined his purchases of fruit to the nearer country areas lest it suffer deterioration during transport. He was, moreover, insistent on fruit without blemish for his canned products, but could not get enough fruit ‘of the right sort’ for his purposes. With an eye to his own supply of raw material, he advised orchardists to seek factory contracts before they began. In the 1890s Hoadley was using sugar from Mauritius, but by the early 1900s he had diversified into confectionery and become CSR’s biggest customer in Victoria. In the 1880s Australia was still a collection of independent colonies using customs tariffs to protect the products of their own citizens. The Victorian tariff on jam has already been referred to. This hit the Tasmanian exports to that colony, but Tasmanian jams were never permitted in * In China in 1980 the author saw the same water-bath technology being used for the canning of fruit. The lids were crimped on the hot cans after processing.

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Western Australia, and the South Australian tariffs were such as to have virtually the same effect. Peacock therefore turned his attention to the mainland, and in the 1879–80 season he began to manufacture in Sydney. This led to two episodes of technological significance that merged into one in the politically motivated events that followed. Peacock was buying local fruit but could not get enough; nor, because of the Sydney climate, could he get small fruits. At that time New South Wales duty on the import of fruit had been waived, so he brought raw material fruit from Tasmania. Small fruits, however, would not survive the voyage, so he began to import fruit pulp. Peacock had visited Britain in 1878–79 and had seen fruit pulp made by boiling with the minimum addition of water and no sugar. Normally, on reaching boiling point, the pulp was run into large tins or casks and closed against the air. Because of the boiling and the partial evaporation, this pulp could be shipped over long distances and, by the addition of the usual amount of sugar, made up into jam close to the markets and out of season. It was a small but sound technological advance. It seems likely that Tong had already been doing this for out-of-season manufacture, and in the 1890s Hoadley certainly was, but Peacock, crossing a ‘national’ boundary, was breaking new ground and was charged the duty for jam. In 1881 this decision was reversed and for about three years Peacock was able to import small fruit pulps into Sydney duty free. In 1884 some fruit in tubs imported as deck cargo was condemned as unfit for human consumption. The problem was probably frothing resulting from the fermentation of fruit sugars by natural yeasts on the fruit. Contamination of the fruit with pathogens was highly unlikely, but it was poor practice to ship pulp in that way, and at this point the whole affair became political. Some of Peacock’s Tasmanian competitors lobbied the New South Wales Customs Department to class the pulp as a preserve and hence dutiable, but Peacock was able to beat this by court action, as he had done in New Zealand and Queensland, by showing that his pulp became jam only after adding sugar and boiling. However, in 1886 the New South Wales Government proposed to impose a duty of 1d per lb on fruit pulp. Peacock published and distributed a pamphlet that showed that 25% of the duty would be on water, which would be boiled off when the jam was made. The pamphlet also showed that this proposal would disadvantage him financially vis-à-vis other Tasmanian jam manufacturers, and that it would therefore lead to loss of employment, not only in New South Wales orchards that supplied him with stone fruits and quinces, but also in tin, case, and jam factories. Unfortunately, shortly after the pamphlet appeared, seven members of one family were reported to have become seriously ill after eating a newly opened Peacock jam. The sample went to the Board of Health and to Assistant Government Analyst WM Hamlet, a Londontrained chemist recently (1883) arrived in New South Wales. He reported the absence of heavy metals from the jam, but the presence in the bottom of the tin of a putrefactive mass of bacteria and mould. This had not been eaten, it was still in the tin; it could never have caused the symptoms described, nor was any attempt made to determine what else the family had eaten. Tainted fish or meat was a far more likely cause of what happened, but the incident was used to discredit the whole of Peacock’s operations in Sydney in spite of the fact that the infection was clearly due to a faulty or damaged soldered seam in just the one can. Parliamentary debate on the proposed duty followed soon after and George Dibbs, then the colonial secretary, used it to mount a virulent, scurrilous and quite unfounded attack on the whole of Peacock’s activities. It was so bad that, if allowed to stand, it would have ruined Peacock’s Sydney business. With his father in Sydney was William Peacock, who handled a strong counterattack, including circulation among MPs of correspondence and statutory declarations,


evidence of Dibbs’s highly questionable attempts to stifle opposition, the testimony of 19 Sydney grocers to the quality of the Peacock products, and the strong support of J Cosmo Newbery, Scientific Superintendent of the Technological Museum in Melbourne, who was in Sydney at the time. At the next election Dibbs lost his seat to Sir Henry Parkes and it emerged that Dibbs had been helped in his fight to retain it by the Sydney representative of another Tasmanian jam maker! But then William Peacock made a mistake. Hamlet’s report had not been published. The Peacocks had not seen it and William besought Hamlet for a copy. The latter referred him to the Board of Health, but there was delay over the publication and William Peacock offered Hamlet five guineas, the normal charge, for a copy of it. Dibbs, back in parliament as the member for Murrumbidgee, seized on this and added the charge of attempted bribery, the implication being that William Peacock offered money for a favourable report. In the event, the duty of 1d per lb went through, but the dire predictions of damage to the company proved to be unfounded. By the end of the 19th century the trade in Tasmanian fruit pulp had greatly increased. The episode was important for four reasons. First, the Peacocks had introduced an improved technology for jam manufacture by making it possible to produce jam at times other than the fruit season and in places other than the fruit areas. Second, the bureaucracy, as is so often the case, lagged behind innovation. Third, the science of food microbiology was in a very early stage, and, in the hands of a man untrained in it, is seen to have been not only in error but positively misleading. Fourth, there was no provision, as there is now, for a portion of any sample taken for analysis to be made available to the manufacturer of the food sampled, or for the report to be given to him. In Victoria the duty of 2d per lb on jam had effectively established jam making in that colony and stimulated fruit growing. Peacock, who already had factories in Sydney and New Zealand, was shut out of the Victorian market, but in the 1883–84 season began to manufacture jam in Melbourne in a partly finished factory. In 1885 the Victoria Preserving Company went into liquidation and Peacock bought it. It was renamed the Australasian Jam Company (AJC) and survived into the 1970s whereupon, as already noted, the Jam Factory was ‘recycled’. Peacock wished to send his nephew, William David Peacock, from Hobart to manage AJC, but WD refused to leave Hobart, left his uncle’s employ and set up his own jam factory, also on the Hobart waterfront, at New Wharf, later Prince’s Pier. George Peacock’s ‘empire’ consisted of factories in three Australian colonies and agencies in Brisbane and in Dunedin, New Zealand, but Brown describes it as ‘really more a loose confederation of factories owned and operated by several branches of the Peacock family of which George Peacock was the patriarch’ (p. 21). In Tasmania by the mid-1880s there was what Brown refers to as ‘a jumbled confusion of large and small jam factories spread over the colony’ (p. 25), the tariff wars between the colonies were hurting the Tasmanian jam industry, and production was willy-nilly concentrated into just seven fiercely competing units. George Peacock’s equipment was deteriorating and his business declining, but his nephew, WD Peacock, installed efficient modern machinery, mechanising wherever possible. Not surprisingly, he got more than his share of the market. Moves were afoot for a change of management at the Old Wharf; although the exact course of events seems uncertain, in November 1891 George Peacock finally moved out and the business became a partnership between Henry Jones, Ernest A Peacock (a son of George) and AW Palfreyman. Of these the first was the driving force that took jam making, fruit canning and the export of fruit to new heights in the first quarter of the 20th century. The partners were lucky to weather the financial storms of the 1890s, but by 1898 they had entered saw milling to guarantee the supply of timber

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for their packing cases, they had begun to export fresh fruit in refrigerated ships—a trade initiated by WD Peacock in the mid-1880s—and they had rebuilt and modernised the jam factory on the Old Wharf. At the turn of the century a visitor to the factory described the cutting and stamping of imported tinplate, machine soldering of the cans, and, after filling, machine sealing. This was with Heine’s automatic body-forming and side-soldering machine (see Chapter 12). In 1907 Henry Jones and Co. bought the newly perfected Model 4G and this machine, with some American fruit-handling and peeling machines, and automatic filling, closing and cooking equipment, made mass production of canned jams, fruits, and so on possible. In this same period Henry Jones began the steady gathering of jam and similar factories in eastern Australia into a loose federation, the Henry Jones Co-operative Limited. He also secretly acquired WD Peacock’s business, and the export of fresh fruit from southern Tasmania became a monopoly. He had achieved the almost total vertical integration of the fruit and jam business. He controlled the supplies of fruit for processing and export and timber for cases, and in another venture he had interests in south-east Asian tin mining though the plate was made in Britain. Through his co-operative, he controlled jam manufacture in eastern Australia. He had a monopoly of the shipment of fruit from Tasmania and established a small fleet for the shipment of his raw materials in southern Tasmania and for the distribution of his products from Tasmania to the mainland. To reduce his dependency on coal from New South Wales, he bought two small coalmines at Catamaran on Recherche Bay. One thing he could not control was his other major raw material, sugar. He was CSR’s best customer and admitted that he got excellent service from them, but he sought independence by importing, by seeking unsuccessfully to buy the Millaquin refinery at Bundaberg, and by proposing a beet sugar industry for Tasmania. CSR and the embargo on sugar imports (lifted only in 1989) beat him on the first; Millaquin asked too much; and the federal government, in a political decision, refused him the subsidy for beet sugar that they provided for the cane fields. So, he became CSR’s agent in Hobart with a warehouse full of cane sugar that he supplied to retailers and other users! Jones had begun in Peacock’s factory as a lad of 12. He knew the business backwards and kept up with the technology. Thus, as noted above, he modernised his production lines before the First World War. Afterwards he scrapped perfectly good equipment in order to install modern American fruit-handling machines, and his production lines began to approach modern practice. Soft fruits for jam were pulped at four plants in the fruit areas. Stone fruit, mainly apricots, were brought to the Old Wharf by water and road, and sorted by teams of girls. The best went to canning, the remainder to jam. Fruit for jam making was mechanically stoned, but the best fruit was hand stoned and packed into tins, syruped automatically, exhausted, sealed and processed, cooled, labelled and packed. ‘Exhausting’ is standard canning practice in which the filled open cans are passed through an ‘exhaust box’ in which the cans and contents are heated so that the headspaces above the contents of each can are filled with steam. The lids are then sealed onto the hot cans so that, when the cans are cooled after processing, the steam condenses thus producing a partial vacuum in the can. Modernisation was not confined to purchased equipment. In Melbourne specialised plant for peeling and stoning fruit and for seeding melons was fabricated by company engineers. In 1923 in England Jones found that Tasmanian currant pulp was downgraded to one-third of the price of the local pulp. Although the fruit was better in Tasmania, the stalks were removed at harvest, the fruit ‘bled’ in the tubs used to transport it, and the skins toughened to the detriment of the subsequent jam. In England the stalks were left on the harvested fruit and removed


by machine immediately before pulping. Jones at once ordered two destalking machines and offered a bounty to growers for fruit delivered in cases instead of tubs. When he died suddenly in 1926, jam making and fruit canning were set in the technology that would be unchanged until after the Second World War. Canned fruits In the first half of the 19th century there are references to bottled fruits. It may be confidently assumed that these were processed by the water-bath technology which countless Australian homes were still using with their Fowler’s bottling outfits in the middle of the 20th century. Reference has already been made to the Perrys’ bottling of fruit commercially. George Peacock added canned fruits to his canned jams, and gooseberries, currants and stone fruits were hand packed into cans, the cans topped up with condensate (from excess steam) and the lids soldered on. Sterile as it condensed, condensate would undoubtedly have been preferable to the water supply of the time. Though he could not know it, Peacock was intuitively following what is now the accepted practice of ensuring that the preprocessing microbial load of any product is as low as possible. The cans were then heated for a period empirically determined, and the air ‘extracted by a scientific process’. This followed the canning practice of the time by which air and steam escaped through a hole in the lid that was later closed by a dab of solder. As we now know, it was quite unnecessary, doubly so because of the low pH (mild acidity) of fruit. Johnson Bros also were canning fruit (gooseberries and plums), and the ‘air was removed by an undisclosed process’. The lids were soldered on before processing so it seems that both factories were doing the same thing, and though both were coy about discussing it, it can be taken as certain that both knew it. Fruit canning fitted naturally with the making of jam, and one reads of fruit canning by jam makers in all the colonies of south-east Australia in the last quarter of the century. Peacock, at least at first, was canning in water. In the 1880s, at Dunolly in Victoria, Oldmeadow and Son were canning in sugar syrup. They worked out their own methods, but in 1883 the Victoria Preserving Company brought George Ward, an experienced California canner, to Melbourne to can fruit and vegetables. It was a desperate attempt to save the company, but it failed. Whereas Australian canning had been based on meat, the Americans had a long history of fruit and vegetable canning, and other Australian companies sought American expertise also, one even going to the trouble of importing labels from America. In 1887 the Woodstock cannery was built specifically as a fruit cannery in the middle of a fruit area at Plumpton, near Rooty Hill, west of Sydney. A Canadian experienced in Californian fruit canning was brought over to manage the plant, and the equipment for tin forming and fruit peeling and stoning was current American practice. The cannery went into production on 29 December 1887 with Tasmanian fruit, and shortly afterwards processed a consignment of Fijian pineapples, but, looking to the control of the supply of its raw materials, it planted its own orchards. In the 1890s Abel Hoadley was canning peeled tomatoes as well as fruit. He was particular about the quality of his raw material, but he was himself an orchardist and he dealt with individual orchardists. He was alive to the desirability of securing crops by prior contract, but this system was open to the abuse of selling to the highest bidder at the time the fruit was ready. Whereas capital city canners brought fruit from the country with the attendant dangers of damage and deterioration during transport, George McEwin in the Adelaide Hills and other South Australian fruit processors, the Perrys at Heidelberg and Oldmeadow and Sons at Dunolly

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in Victoria, Peacock at Franklin and his successors at other locations as well, and the Woodstock cannery in New South Wales all took the factory to the fruit. They began that vertical integration which, so far as fruit processing was concerned, was developed by Henry Jones. These pioneer jam makers and fruit canners, many of whom also made sauces and pickles, all used essentially the same technology. There was a general appreciation of the need for quality raw material and the prior inspection of fruit before processing. All jam boiling was done in steam-jacketed copper pans at atmospheric pressure and all the products therefore had the characteristic ‘cooked’ flavour. The risks to safety and further flavour deterioration of holding the finished jam overnight in open tins or barrels before sealing or filling were not realised for some time. Peacock began canning fruit in water, and the fruit was processed in open cans in a water bath. Both jam and fruit cans were closed after filling by soldering on the lids. By 1884 the cannery at Dunolly in Victoria had for some time been canning in sugar syrup, sealing, and processing the sealed cans. It is fair to assume that by that time others were doing the same. Can making was by the semi-mechanised hand-finished methods developed by the meat canners. Although there was some mechanisation of the handling of raw materials and finished product, the principles and methodology were those in use for the whole of the 19th century. But by the 1890s, the mechanisation of can making and filling and fundamental work on the microbiology of canning were about to change everything. Although Henry Jones and the Tasmanian fruit industry dominated jam making and fruit canning well into the 20th century, others were canning fruit from the 1870s. However, canning did not begin in Victoria’s prolific and important Goulburn Valley until 1917, and Queensland’s Golden Circle cannery, the dominant pineapple canner, dates only from 1947. After the First World War, however, soldier settlement and land irrigation led to the planting in the eastern states of thousands of acres to fruit, including small fruits. Grower co-operatives emerged and with their associated canneries, for example at Ardmona, established in 1921, steadily reduced the Tasmanian dominance; but the technology was the same. Candied fruits Candied fruits had been known in England for centuries. They came from the Mediterranean where they had been made from the time when sugar became available from India. British housewives were themselves candying fruit at least from the end of the 17th century, and it seems highly likely that candying was practised in Australia well before it was taken up commercially by the jam makers. Citrus peel, for example, was softened in water, boiled in sugar syrup, and dried. The Victoria Preserving Company was making candied lemon peel in the late 1870s; Abel Hoadley, also in Melbourne, candied lemon and orange peel in the 1880s; and from 1889 candied fruit was one of the main products of the Woodstock cannery. Without doubt there were other makers of candied fruits, too. The export of fresh fruit On 9 September 1881 the Journal of the Society of Arts commented on the possibility of obtaining fresh fruit from Australia and referred to ‘a recent consignment of apples’ which failed to pay its way because of high freight costs and a temporary glut. It encouraged perseverance recommending that the fruit be packed ripe, free from dew, unheated by the sun and preferably wrapped in tissue paper. It went on: ‘Tasmanian jams are now to be bought in London shops; and, with the fast steamers now running, many of them provided with ice chambers, there is no


reason why a little care and experience should not result in Australian fruit being placed in the English market in sufficiently good condition to ensure a remunerative return to the exporter.’ It was prophetic even if in 1881 there were scarcely any steamers ‘provided with ice chambers’. However, in the mid-1880s, with the help of the then available fast steamer with ice chambers, WD Peacock is credited with beginning the export of fresh fruit, mainly apples, in which for some years Tasmania led the world. It was an application of mechanical refrigeration which, with the rapid development of a trade in frozen meat, opened alert minds to other possibilities. The cool storage of fruit was one. To begin with, the trade was intercolonial, but by 1887 some thousands of cases were being sent to London in refrigerated chambers. There were problems in persuading the cargo liners to call at Hobart, but no problems with the refrigeration facilities. Rather, deterioration in quality was related to those orchardists who were careless in the sorting, grading and packing of the fruit. In the late 1890s, Peacock himself designed a better and cheaper case that also reduced freight costs and was adopted throughout Victoria, Tasmania and New Zealand. In Tasmania orchard pests were controlled by spraying, and a voluntary scheme of fumigation in airtight chambers before shipment was introduced. The fumigant was hydrogen cyanide generated from potassium cyanide and sulphuric acid. In 1908, as a result of representations by local orchardists, the first government cool store in Victoria was built among the orchards at West Doncaster to the east of Melbourne. Three years later, the first of the co-operative cool stores was built by orchardists who had become disenchanted with bureaucracy. It was an example of what became widespread in the fruit areas. Co-operative cool stores went hand in hand with the upsurge of fruit growing in the eastern states referred to above, and many of them acted also as suppliers of growers’ requirements. In addition, they often offered freezing chambers made use of by dairy and other interests looking for refrigeration. The cool storage of fruit and vegetables and the design and construction of cool stores benefited greatly from the researches of EW Hicks, of CSIRO, in the 1950s. Dried fruits Sun-dried fruits were imported into England from Portugal and the Levant as early as the 13th century and by the 16th century were common in the large households. The six tons of dried fruits exported from Tasmania in the 1850s may have been sun dried, but later in the century sliced apple was being spread on floors heated from below, dried to a leathery texture and exported as ‘evaporated fruit’. Since it had been known in the United States for some time, the early Tasmanian export may well have been that product; however, in 1886 AE Spawn in Hobart obtained a patent for Spawn’s Climax fruit evaporator. This was the first essay in mechanical dehydration. Perforated trays were suspended on gimbals and rotated vertically about a central axis in a rising current of hot air. This was a sound method in principle, and far more controllable than the old one. The product was not dry, but leathery. A trade in evaporated fruit developed to the extent that a Tasmanian Apple Evaporators’ Association was formed. Tree fruits At the end of the 19th century dried apricots were successfully exhibited in London, but it was suggested that sulphur dioxide be used to preserve colour. Accordingly, the stoned and halved fruit was ‘sulphured’ by burning sulphur in sulphur chambers and then dried on trays in direct sunlight until ‘bone dry’. A limit of 14 grains per lb (2000 ppm) of sulphur dioxide was put on the final product. However, the trade had difficulty in meeting this limit and in 1929 the Council for Industrial and Scientific Research (CSIR) convened the Dried Fruit Processing Committee to

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look into the sulphuring of dried stone fruits, especially apricots. It was recognised that the current practice was haphazard in the quantity of sulphur burnt, the dimensions of the chambers and the maturity of the fruit. A recommended procedure covering peaches and pears as well was distributed to growers. An experimental programme was initiated, and a rapid packing shed method for measuring sulphur dioxide was developed. It then emerged that a moister product was preferred on the export market, and procedures were developed for higher initial levels of sulphur dioxide to allow for faster losses and for the moistening of the product to 20–25% moisture before packing. The industry was then faced with the reverse of the original problem, how to set the residual sulphur dioxide high enough to retain the desired colour and flavour. Research showed that a maximum of 21 grains per pound (3000 ppm, or 3 g per kg) was required for a satisfactory shelf life. This level was adopted and is the current limit for dried fruits. The committee also advised on the varieties of plums suitable for the production of prunes, and recommended methods for producing both dry boxed and dessert prunes. Today the raw material for prune production is d’Agen plums, which are washed and dried in hot air cabinets to about 23% moisture in unstoned fruit. Vine fruits The Australian dried vine fruits industry awaited the experience and enterprise of the Chaffeys. In 1884 Alfred Deakin, then a Victorian cabinet minister, chaired a royal commission on water supply and irrigation and then led a party to California to look into irrigation and water conservation methods. There he met Canadians George and William Benjamin Chaffey, who were closely involved with successful irrigation settlements. To what extent Deakin persuaded them is uncertain, but George arrived in Melbourne early in 1886 and was later joined by his brother. Together, with the help and encouragement of the Victorian and South Australian governments and in the face of some hostility and controversy, they established irrigation settlements on the Murray at Mildura and Renmark, and vine fruit growing began. The story of the early days of the area is of initial confidence, flood, strikes, and bountiful crops in the first general harvest in 1893, but there were no railways, and the river fell so low that even the shallow draught river steamers could not operate. At first the fruit was simply put in the sun to dry then dipped in caustic soda to split the skins and hasten drying, and stemmers, graders and hand-operated winnowers were introduced. A thousand tons of raisins were produced but were doomed by distance, the contemporary financial turmoil and the apathy of the Melbourne market. The worst year was 1895 when heavy rain destroyed irrigation channels, flooded the vineyards, damaged the fruit in the field and induced mould spoilage. This was the nadir of the industry’s fortunes. Cincturing of the currant vines was introduced, the Mildura Fruitgrowers Association set up packing sheds, and mechanisation began. On the threshold of the 20th century the Australian demand for dried fruit could be met and the infant industry was looking to export. In 1932 the Fruit Processing Committee (the ‘Dried’ was dropped in 1931) organised trials with vine fruits and the test shipment of experimental fruits to Britain. The dipping of sultanas in emulsifiers was first considered by the Committee in 1937 and was, as Jewell writes in his short history of the committee, ‘a matter which was to occupy much of its time in future years’ (p. 31). Today, the grapes are dried in open-sided tiers of up to 10 wire mesh racks as long as 50 metres and covered to prevent excessive drying of the top layer. Instead of being dipped in soda, the


racked fruit is sprayed with an emulsion of a permitted vegetable oil and a solution of potassium carbonate. The oil ‘opens up’ the waxy surface of the fruit to increase the drying rate, and by raising the pH the carbonate inhibits fermentation. Under favourable drying conditions, sultana grapes so treated will dry within two weeks and the normal enzymic (phenol oxidase) browning will be confined to the highly preferred golden yellow. Australian sultanas, side by side in a British supermarket with those from the Middle East, are clearly to be preferred on colour alone. From the racks, the fruit is finished off in direct sunlight to 13% moisture, a value critical for subsequent coning. Then it is graded according to colour, waste, and extraneous matter; and ‘processed’. The berries are separated according to colour, the stems removed by sieving, and the cap-stems by coning, in which the berries fall between a revolving steel cone and a surrounding wire mesh. Below 13% moisture the skin is too hard for separation; above that level it is soft enough to tear. Rubbish is then removed by air blast and vacuum extraction, and the dried fruit washed, shaken dry, spun dry, and passed through a laser scanner and over a metal detector. Finally, it is coated with a thin film of vegetable oil that reduces sticking and improves appearance.

Vegetable products The heat processing of vegetables came late in the 19th century, and then mainly in the guise of pickles, chutneys and sauces. As already noted, most of the major jam makers dabbled in these products, and on the mainland in the canning of tomatoes, but the processing of vegetables did not happen for the simple reason that there was no supporting supply of raw materials. There were no fields of maize as the Americans had, nor anything remotely comparable, until well into the 20th century. Henry Jones experimented with the canning of rabbits and fish but in his day, apart from the potatoes grown prolifically on the north-west coast since the 1840s for export to the mainland, there were no spare vegetables in Tasmania for him to try. Vegetable processing came to Tasmania with the Second World War. In South Australia the Kent Town Preserving Company was formed to preserve jam, fruit and vegetables. It produced dried potatoes semi-commercially and dried green chicory (190 tons per season by 1890), but was in no way comparable with Victorian production of the latter. The drying of vegetables anywhere, and certainly in Australia, became significant only during the Second World War. The Victorian Preserving Company at its last gasp was thinking about canning vegetables, but vegetable growing, much of it by Chinese market gardeners, was hard pressed to keep up with the demands of the expanding cities. Nor, for that matter, were vegetables a significant part of the Australian diet, which was still dominated by folk memories of mutton, damper, jam and tea. In 1906 RG Edgell, an engineer, began to develop a property near Bathurst in New South Wales. In addition to fruit trees he planted three acres of river flats with aparagus and vegetables. The asparagus developed so successfully that by 1924 he had saturated the Sydney market for it and canning was the obvious outlet for the excess. Because of their acidity, the canning of fruits (including tomatoes) is easier than canning vegetables, and attempts to can the excess asparagus in Sydney failed through lack of knowledge and faulty cans. So Edgell sent his eldest son to California to study this vegetable, especially the canning of it, from raw material to finished product. On his return, asparagus canning in a tiny, hand-operated cannery began at Bathurst and in due course became firmly established. In the mid-1930s a modern cannery was built and equipped, and by the outbreak of war a range of vegetables was being canned.

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For most of the 19th century milling and baking were, as has been shown, traditional technologies. Although fundamental changes had been in train elsewhere for many years, the revolution in milling, a revolution in two parts in the last 20 years of the century, changed the face of the Australian industry. The first part, innovative engineering, was imported in the 1880s. The second, nothing less than the ‘invention’ of cereal science, was Australian and followed from the fundamental work of practical geneticist WJ Farrer and chemist FB Guthrie (see Chapter 11). Laboratory instruments and methods were developed empirically overseas to measure specific dough properties, and cereal science progressed steadily to a discipline in its own right. In the last 100 years there have, of course, been improvements to mills and the organisation of milling, but the basic technology of the rollers remained unaffected by dramatic post-war developments in other branches of the food industry.

Milling By the middle of the 19th century traditional stone milling in Europe and America had reached its most efficient. It was either high or low. Low grinding, with minimum clearance between the stones, gave high yields quickly, at the expense of colour because of bran fragments, and keeping quality because of the rancidity of wheatgerm oil. High grinding permitted better separation of bran and germ, but in addition to flour produced middlings (or sharps) which had to be ground further. Multi-stage grinding with gradual reduction of particle size made for a quality product that satisfied the growing demand for the socially desirable white flour. The stones were highly developed and the clearance between them was carefully controllable, silk cloth for bolting (sieving) had long been available, and the purifier that winnowed and sifted simultaneously had been introduced. Milling had become highly skilled, and it is difficult to see what else could have been done to improve the millstone technology. But before long, roller milling had supplanted it. The use of rollers in place of stones to grind wheat was mooted as early as the middle of the 17th century, and by the 1820s ideas were bubbling in Europe. The principle of variable elastic pressure was coupled with grooved surfaces, and in 1830 Müller built a sophisticated roller mill in Switzerland. Others followed throughout Europe, one in Pest in Hungary, and thereafter the Hungarian system developed quickly so that by 1860 steel or chilled iron rollers were in use to produce quality flour. Shortly after, Wegmann introduced porcelain rollers to avoid discolouring the flour and tearing the bran. However, grooved iron and steel rollers, which sheared the wheat grain and introduced great flexibility and control into the production of various product

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streams, were preferred though porcelain rollers were sometimes used to mill middlings. In spite of British contributions to the development of rollers from as early as 1843, British millers were caught napping in the 1870s as a flood of excellent continental flour suddenly overwhelmed them. But the reaction was dramatic. In 1877 the number of roller mills in England increased from one in January to 350 at the end of December. Australia followed at once, and early in 1879 Messrs W Duffield and Company installed the first such mill at Gawler in South Australia. The Hungarians were quick to come to Australia, and within two years roller mills had been introduced into New South Wales and Victoria and the revolution in milling was well under way in Australia, too. ‘The advent of complete roller plants during the 1870s and early 1880s not only changed the whole concept of grinding,’ say Jones and Jones in The flour mills of Victoria 1840–1990, ‘but [also] led to improved mechanization and automation’ (p. 11). By early 1880 Duffields had 27 pairs of stones and 12 sets of smooth porcelain roller mills in their Victoria mill. This was a big, well-equipped mill four storeys high, with extensive maintenance workshops. In the same year, associated with the Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition, rollers appeared in Sydney, but the first roller mill in New South Wales was in Goulburn. David Gibson in Melbourne installed Ganz steel-grooved rollers in his mill in 1881–82, and his was the first complete roller mill in Australia. Others quickly followed but not all switched completely, and for a time there were transition mills using stones to crush and rollers to reduce to flour. Naturally, there was criticism and the inevitable resistance to change, sometimes no doubt despairing because of the major capital expenditure suddenly required to replace perfectly good equipment made obsolete overnight. There was lack of understanding at first of the difference between grooved and smooth rollers, and, of course, of cereal chemistry. There were two big advantages: first, the ability to discard with the first break the dirt in the crease of the wheat grain; and second, a yield of up to about 70% more flour from the same energy input. But it was generally agreed that a good stone mill was better than a poor roller mill. In 1788–89 in Pennsylvania Oliver Evans was operating the first mechanised flour mill. Very slowly, his ideas spread in the United States, but mechanisation of milling in other countries was completed only in the 1870s with the new roller technology, which was accompanied by wheathandling equipment and the ability to select identifiable product streams. The fluted-break rolls yielded bran and coarse particles of endosperm known as semolina. This is the raw material for the manufacture of pasta, but most of it goes to the reduction rolls ultimately to yield flour, germ and pollard. Few Australian country mills were of the highest standard, nor were they mechanised. They could not compete with the rapidly emerging merchant millers of the cities who, with access to capital, quickly adopted the new and better technology and were immeasurably assisted by the expanding railway system. The sudden fall in the number of mills in New South Wales is shown in Fig. 1 (see page 18). In Victoria 100 country mills closed in the period 1880 to 1900, and of the 103 in South Australia in 1879, 23 had closed by the early 1880s; and the trend continued. In Where have all the flour mills gone? Jones says: ‘There were 161 mills in Victoria in 1875 producing about 117 000 tons of flour per year. By 1980 there were only five mills, but they produced almost twice as much as the large number of small mills which had dotted the countryside one hundred years ago.’ (p. xx). The milling revolution from 1880 was so swift that within a quarter of a century it was virtually complete. Fluted-break rolls in stages tore the grain open and separated the endosperm from the bran as semolina. Smooth reduction rolls then ground the semolina to flour. In the


The various milling products available from the roller mills introduced in the 1870s (from F Kick, Flour manufacture, 1888).

same book, Jones ventures that ‘The fully automatic, gradual reduction system, in which banks of rollers linked with well-controlled purifiers and sifters continuously produced high-quality white flour had reached a peak of efficiency which, in many respects, was never to be surpassed’ (p. 38). In The flour mills of Victoria 1840–1990 Jones and Jones note that ‘by the 1890s flour mills (apart from the ‘village’ mills which survived in some areas of most flour producing countries) were universally automated, the first industry of any consequence in which this happened’ (p. 11). There were improvements in mill machinery leading to reductions in maintenance costs and improved working conditions and safety, but the essential technology of milling remained unchanged. What had to change, and did, were wheat handling, storage and blending techniques—and the wheat itself.

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For 100 years the wheats being grown in Australia were the same old British varieties unsuited to the Australian environment, but in 1882, as his correspondence in The Australasian shows, William Farrer conceived the idea of improving the wheat plant. Like every biological product, wheat is variable, and Farrer’s observational and manipulative genius developed new varieties suitable for the harsh new land. He was concerned with the welfare of the farmer (disease resistance), the miller (milling properties), the baker (strength of flour which determines yield of loaves per bag), the exporter (storage properties) and the consumer (quality of loaf). His breeding of new wheats was of inestimable value to the wheat farmer and to those who depended on his crops, and his collaboration with FB Guthrie, the chemist, whose work continued after Farrer’s death, launched cereal chemistry by relating wheat composition to specific varieties on the one hand and to baking and other properties on the other (see Chapter 11). From this derived the ability to blend wheat streams to yield flour with standard and preselected characteristics. The first industrial cereal chemistry laboratory was Kimpton’s in Melbourne, and it was not established until 1935. Well before this, however, in 1910, the same company had installed a 6000-ton silo containing 70 bins from up to 15 of which wheat could be drawn simultaneously by measure to feed the mill. The result was highly consistent flour in advance of their competitors. The critical measure of the efficiency of a flour mill is the extraction rate, the percentage of flour recovered from the wheat entering the mill. It is related both to the milling properties of the wheat and to the finer points of the procedures used in the mill. The crease in the grain of wheat ensures that the limit of white flour is about 80% extraction. Beyond that, poor colour and increasing ash and fibre content militate against top quality bread. The most usual extraction rate in Australia is 76%, but satisfactory bread may be produced at higher rates, and in wartime Britain the yield of bread from a given tonnage of wheat was increased by compulsorily increasing it. Australian exports of flour declined after the Second World War. Europeans and North Americans dumped flour in Australian markets, and importing countries began to buy wheat and mill their own flour. In spite of increasing population the domestic market expanded very slowly as per capita consumption of flour-based products fell, and flour mills closed steadily during the 1960s and 1970s. The demise of some was hastened by inability to afford advances such as pneumatic transport of mill stocks. This advance improved mill layout; it also improved hygiene by reducing insect infestation, and safety by reducing risks of fire and explosion, but its introduction into Australia had been delayed by the war. Bulk transport in tankers from mill to user also reduced costs. A miller’s survival in the post-war world depended on rigid cost control, improved productivity, and vertical integration into baking and specialised stock feeds carefully designed with specialised advice about nutrition. The breeding of wheats with improved milling properties helped, and flake disruptors and bran finishers improved extraction rates. Air classification—the centrifugal concentration of protein from starch—was introduced from the United States in the 1950s. It suited soft Victorian wheats, the primary product being a higherprotein (12–13%) flour for which there was demand. The costs were tight laboratory control and an even lower protein (5–7%) residual flour for which uses had to be found; for example, when chlorinated it yielded very good flour for cakes and sponges.

Bread Bread has been made for thousands of years by mixing water, flour, salt and yeast to produce a dough. Enzymes in the system form sugars from the starch; these sugars are then fermented by the yeast, as the dough stands under given conditions, to yield carbon dioxide. Gluten, a protein


constituent of flour, is very elastic when wet and, as the gas evolves, traps it and expands to produce a spongy texture. Eventually, after the dough has been divided and shaped, it is proofed: that is, it stands in a warm atmosphere for further fermentation and expansion, which continues in the oven until gelation of the starch and denaturation of the protein set the cellular structure characteristic of bread. At the end of the 19th century William Cripps of Hobart introduced Australia’s first doughdividing machine. However, the local bakery, mixing, kneading, shaping, and, so to speak, baking by hand, repeated in Australian villages, towns and suburbs the age-old pattern of the village baker. In the 1930s there was one innovation: the introduction of starch-reduced bread, not by removing starch but by adding protein as wet gluten. As Australian wheats were generally low in protein this addition improved the dough and the resulting bread. But the major change was in the 1950s and resulted from the vertical integration of the milling industry. As flour exports fell, the surviving millers sought to ensure the internal market for their flour by purchasing local bakeries and centralising baking.

Other baked products Biscuits, that is, ‘twice cooked’, were initially made from unfermented dough baked twice to make them keep. They were known to the Romans, and other forms were made domestically in Britain at least from Tudor times. In the 18th century several kinds of biscuits were known, but the variety familiar to the colonists would have been the hard ships’ biscuits. These were being made commercially in Van Diemen’s Land at least by 1829. In 1854 Thomas Swallow was making ships’ biscuits and more consumer-friendly products at Port Melbourne when he was joined by TH Ariell. Their partnership prospered; by 1880 their factory was making a wide range of cakes and biscuits and bore comparison with the large overseas factories. It was electrified in 1911. TB Guest and Co., also in Melbourne, was acclaimed for its products in Victoria and at the London Exhibition of 1873, and its design of a machine to make Currant Luncheons was adopted by British biscuit manufacturers. In Hobart, Charles Haywood began as a baker and pastrycook in the earlier part of the 19th century, but from 1875 his son, CD Haywood, later mayor of Hobart, specialised in biscuits. Other family firms, such as Brockhoff’s in Melbourne, appeared in the other colonies, but the man whose name was destined to dominate Australian biscuit manufacture was William Arnott. Arnott was a Scot who arrived in Sydney in 1848 and settled in the Hunter Valley. He was a baker in Maitland and then tried his hand at gold digging at Turon. He found no gold, but survived by baking bread and pies. Wisely, he returned to ply his trade at Maitland, suffered under subsequent floods, and in 1865 moved his business to Newcastle. Here he began to specialise in biscuits and in 1882 began to supply Sydney. Within three years he had a factory covering two acres and employing 300 people. It matched that of Swallow and Ariell in Melbourne. In 1894 Arnott bought a factory in Sydney and continued to prosper, moving in 1908 to a site of six and a half acres in the Sydney suburb of Homebush. His machinery was powered by steam, and his ovens were fired by solid fuels. Gas ovens followed in the 1920s and band ovens in the 1930s. There is a great variety of biscuits, but essentially two types of biscuit dough: the fully developed gluten network and the underdeveloped dough, usually with more sugar and fat. The first yields crackers and hard sweet biscuits, the second, shortbread and the so-called cookies. The end product desired, then, determines dough constituents, mixing time and procedures, and the subsequent forming of the biscuit. Those biscuits requiring a filling or coating (such as chocolate)

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go through a secondary process to that end. Complex reactions occur during baking, the colour, as in toast, deriving from the Maillard reaction between reducing sugars and protein residues. A particular Australian contribution to consumer cereal products was the patenting, in 1947 by RJ Hastings of Sydney, of a machine for the automatic and continuous production of crumpets. These are leavened products baked from below. The Hastings machine supplanted the existing manual batch process both in Australia and overseas. The De Jersey machine, which produces a different kind of crumpet, also was developed in Australia. Pikelets must be cooked on both sides, and Hastings followed up his crumpet success with a machine for the continuous production of pikelets also.

Breakfast cereals The so-called breakfast foods or breakfast cereals do not normally include the oatmeal or rolled oats used for making porridge, but are taken to mean the products that originated in the United States with Henry Perky’s shredded wheat. Kellogg followed with wheat flakes and cornflakes, and his products came to Australia in 1924, but Sanitarium’s first products had been produced in Northcote, Victoria, in 1898, and its Granose® flake biscuits had been manufactured in New South Wales for a quarter of a century. Puffed cereals have been known since the early 1900s. The technologies for shredding, flaking and puffing were all imported into Australia and all depend on the preliminary cooking of the grain, either as wholegrain or as grits freed from hull and germ. Cooking to gelatinise the starch is followed by tempering under precise conditions to a given moisture content and, if required by the final product, mixing with other ingredients. For shredding, the cooked, tempered wheat is forced between heavy rollers, one grooved at right angles to its length, and the strands cut to length. For flakes the ingredients are cooked together, dried to firmness, rolled into flakes and toasted in heated drums to final flavour and moisture. For puffing, whole grains are cooked, adjusted to a preset moisture content, and sealed in a rotating heated cylinder. The pressure increases and at the appropriate level is suddenly released, whereupon the internal moisture vaporises and puffs the grain. For optimum product, the moisture levels, pressures and release times must be finely controlled. The general principles underlying the manufacture of these products were established quite early, but a greater understanding of the changes that occur during processing improved quality and consistency.

Pasta Pastas are made from doughs of flour or semolina, well kneaded with salt and water and sometimes egg solids. The end product determines the raw material, preferably flour from durum wheats for noodles and semolina for pasta, and the manufacturing procedure. Noodle dough, made with flour, water and a neutral or alkaline salt, is worked through pairs of steel rollers into a sheet of specified thickness, and is then machine cut into strips for drying. Semolina is virtually free from loose starch and is preferred for pasta because less water, and hence less final drying, is required. The dough is kneaded, rolled, and, when sufficiently pliable, extruded through dies to produce the well-known shapes. Drying must strike a balance between too fast, leading to surface cracking, and too slow, exposing the product to spoilage by micro-organisms, especially moulds. Pasta was well known in Australia before the Second World War, but since then there has been considerable expansion in demand, and hence production, and significant improvement in and automation of production equipment, especially the drying rooms.


Stock feeds Strictly speaking, stock feeds are outside the scope of food science and technology, but many of these feeds rely on the by-products of milling and play an increasing part in the science-based feeding of food animals, especially pigs and chickens. Each day products are formulated by sophisticated computer programmes that balance the cost of raw materials with nutrition constants.

Gluten The production of vital (that is, undenatured) dry gluten was an Australian innovation. In 1925 Geo. Fielder and Son of Tamworth, New South Wales, began to experiment with the flash drying of starch and gluten, and slowly developed a method of producing dry vital gluten which could be reconstituted to behave as wet gluten and be used to fortify the protein content in ‘starchreduced’ bread. Manufacture began in 1933 and has flourished. This company logically extended from starch to glucose and dextrose and into other cereal products, but its basic contribution to cereal technology was the pioneering of vital dry gluten.

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Before he turned his attention to human and animal diseases, in his studies on wine and beer Louis Pasteur revealed the mysteries of fermentation. In 1879 Emil Christian Hansen became head of the physiology department of the Carlsberg laboratories in Copenhagen and began to apply Pasteur’s principles to the production of pure strains of brewers’ yeast. His work was closely followed in Victoria by CW Château Müller and Auguste de Bavay, and a lasting contribution to Australian brewing resulted. Also at this time (in 1880), Burston and Company introduced the pneumatic malting of barley. This process with its greater flexibility and control also was a major technological advance. Winemaking in Australia took longer to shed its traditional shackles; it made little progress until after the Second World War. Soft drinks and cordials appeared early in Australia’s history but were not really established until the Victorian gold rush.

Brewing If barley is allowed to sprout, enzymes so produced convert the starch in the grain to maltose that, with valuable nitrogen compounds, enzymes and flavours, may be extracted with hot water. Dried hop cones and sometimes sugar are added to this extract, and the liquor boiled. The resultant wort is fermented with yeast, and the product then separated from the yeast and vegetable detritus is beer. Such are the bare bones of brewing. Malt For centuries floor malting was the norm. Barley was steeped in water and then piled in heaps until it germinated. Acrospires and roots began to form, the α- and β-amylases to convert the starch of the endosperm to maltose, and the proteinases to hydrolyse the protein. When the acrospire reached about three-quarters the length of the grain, and the root about one and a half times the length, the malt, as it had now become, was spread out on the malting floor to aerate and to slow the growth by reducing the temperature. Growth was finally stopped by drying the malt and lightly cooking it in a kiln in which the colour of the final product could (and may) be controlled by limiting or intensifying caramelisation and the Maillard reaction between reducing sugars and protein residues. Little malting was done in New South Wales; in Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia it was confined to the winter months. Floor malting called for skill in spreading the malt but was both labour intensive and laborious, and on 8 September 1880 the Melbourne Argus reported that Melbourne maltsters Burston and Co. had introduced Galland’s patent pneumatic malting

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process to Australia. This dated from 1874 and in one modification malting was carried out in a revolving drum. In the Melbourne application the malting chamber was static. The barley was germinated on wire shelves in airtight compartments through which cool moist air was drawn. The air was recirculated via damp filters, and it was claimed that the malting season was thereby extended by a month. The withered malt was then transferred to the kiln and dried in two stages countercurrently, the hot air from the final drying rising, cooler and moister, to an upper floor to begin the drying of the green malt. This, it was claimed, was Burston’s own idea and had been patented. The machinery was made by Robison Bros of Melbourne. Pneumatic malting gave maltsters greater control of their conditions. It saved space and labour, reduced spoilage, and made malting possible over the whole year. Other maltsters quickly followed Burston’s lead; however, further improvements in kiln drying, malt crushing, and protection against dust explosions came to Australia more slowly. Hops The characteristic flavouring and preservative properties of the hop are in the essential oils and α-acids from the inflorescence (cone) of the female hop plant. For best results the hops should be picked and dried at optimum maturity, but if carefully stored they are then suitable for brewing for up to two years. The consolidation of hop growing in Tasmania has already been referred to. Towards the end of the 19th century there was an upsurge in hop growing in Victoria, but it faded, and Pearce says that ‘the position of Tasmania as the premier Australian hop producing state was never seriously challenged’ (p. 2). Late in the 1890s Henry Jones bought the Shoobridge hop-growing estate in Tasmania’s Derwent Valley. By the 1920s Tasmania was supplying 80–90% of the hops used in the Australian brewing industry, much of it through Henry Jones and Co., and, to the benefit of both grower and brewer, was safeguarding the delicate hop flavours by careful cool storage and refrigerated transport. In the 1920s Jones and Co. imported mechanical hop-pickers, but they were resisted, understandably, by the local labour and by the brewers who claimed that they damaged the hop cones. They were American machines picking English hops for which they were unsuitable. Accordingly, they were stored away until the shortage of labour during the Second World War caused them to be used again. After the war mechanisation came to the hop fields along with new varieties high in the desired α-acids, and in the 1960s British hop-picking machines were generally adopted. Brewing practice Poor hygiene, poorly understood raw materials, the climate and poor transport militated against Australian colonial beer and led to the dispersal of brewing throughout the country, often as very small local units (Chapter 3). In the cities the larger breweries approximated to British practice in their organisation and equipment, but still faced the problems of different raw materials and climate. The addition of sugar to the worts had been forbidden in England until 1847, but in Australia it was a necessity because local worts were high in nitrogen and the added sugar enabled the yeast to ferment the nitrogen out and thus improve the biological stability of the beer. Cane sugar rather than invert was used. It was readily available and cheap, and its use in top fermentations was an advance in brewing technology. Nevertheless, beer brewed in the warmer months deteriorated in the bottle, and some brewers brewed only in the winter and bottled throughout the year. The need for cleanliness was understood and emphasised by the better brewers; but sulphur dioxide, salicylic acid and heavy hopping were often resorted to.


The City Brewery, Melbourne. Victorians developed a taste for locally brewed beer earlier than their New South Wales counterparts. (Victoria of Today, September 1902. Reproduced by courtesy of the La Trobe Library, Melbourne.)

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It has been said that the Victorians developed a taste for colonial beer more widely and earlier (by 1870) than their New South Wales counterparts, who favoured the imported ales and porter. But when the Victorian Castlemaine brewery opened a branch in Sydney in 1870 the quality of their product swamped the local colonial beer and challenged the imported ales. Even so, the Sydney brewers were slower in adapting to Australia’s climate and accepting newer techniques; they did not introduce bottom fermentation, for example, until 12 years after its adoption in Victoria. Top fermentation at 60–90ºF was favoured in Britain and transported to Australia. It should have suited the Australian climate but was hard to control. In 1860 Bendigo brewers Glasgow, Thunder and Co. installed a Harrison machine to control the brewing temperature, but it was some 30 years before their example was followed, and then by very few. Attemporators were used, but Australian brewers were trying to work with the climate rather than take the trouble to control it. Bottom fermentation was favoured in Germany and proceeded at 40–50°F (4°C–10°C) to produce lager of lower alcohol content. In that the hops are added later in the boiling stage, lager differs chemically, and therefore in flavour and in other ways. In Australia bottom fermentation depends on refrigeration, and although others had tried it the ‘lager revolution’ may be said to have begun in 1888 with the arrival of the Fosters from New York. They employed a German brewer, delivered their product in chilled casks in the hot weather, and supplied publicans with ice to keep their beer cold. Improved biological stability and the railways facilitated the distribution of beer and were powerful factors in the centralisation of brewing in capital cities and major provincial centres. To an extent, the latter breweries were still protected by the cost of transport, but many disappeared as the industry became even more centralised and the technology responded to scientific advance. At the end of the 19th century there were still some 190 breweries in Australia, but most were very small and their products very variable. Some, including city ones, failed to survive the 1901 Beer Excise Act of the new federal parliament, and other legislation forced closures or takeovers as the small brewers were unable to meet the capital costs of compliance. The adoption of the crown seal bottle by the larger breweries immediately before the First World War undoubtedly hastened the disappearance of their smaller competitors. In March 1875 Melbourne beer was attacked for a serious lapse in quality. In investigating a death apparently from alcoholic poisoning, the Melbourne coroner criticised Melbourne beer. The press took it up and there was considerable public comment. The brewers sought to counter the adverse publicity by seeking official inspection of their plants but were reminded that they were already subject to inspection. However, 700 samples were taken from public houses and 49 from the breweries themselves. Of these, 40 of the brewery samples were clear, the other nine contained fusel oil in low concentrations but sufficient to produce odours and flavours bad enough to warn drinkers. Most of the 700 samples from public houses were satisfactory. Some publicans were adding salt to promote thirst, but the major faults were the use of sugar instead of malt, poor and/or insufficient hops, and fermentation at higher than desirable temperatures; in August the same year, the government analyst reported that the local beer was muddy, of poor quality, and adulterated with quassia. Charges of adulteration with other quite dangerous substances also were made; but in spite of the recommendations of various enquiries, beer was not regulated under any of the Pure Food Acts that had passed through all state parliaments by 1912. There is no doubt that colonial beer was often contaminated with micro-organisms such as Lactobacilli, but the understanding of such contamination was only just emerging. Pasteur had


begun to study the alcoholic fermentation of beetroot and grain at Lille in 1854. He revealed the true nature of fermentation and with it the explanation and control of spoilage in vinegar, wine and beer. His work on beer was published in 1876 as Études sur la bière. In it he distinguished between aerobic and anaerobic fermentation: the former yielded yeast and little alcohol, and the latter alcohol with little growth of yeast. He had already identified the problems of contaminating organisms, invented pasteurisation to control them, and recognised how easily postpasteurising contamination could occur. Brewing, however, was ‘an art and a tradition’, and Pasteur’s advances were only slowly adopted. Empirical reliance on preservatives has already been noted, but there was at least one local brewer who fermented up to 90°F (32°C) and believed that he would get better results, that is, reduced contamination, from the ventilation and dryness of his plant than from the refrigeration of the worts. The fact that contamination could come from the air and dirty equipment had been realised for some time. Pasteur explained why, and warned against the dangers of infected cultures. In 1879 Emil Christian Hansen, a botanist, became head of the physiology department of the Carlsberg laboratories in Copenhagen and began work that revolutionised the brewing industry. He made a special study of yeasts, developing a system of classification and methods for culturing and isolating many species. Pasteur had enunciated principles and introduced pure culture techniques. Hansen followed the principles, and his most important contribution to the brewing industry may have been his techniques for growing pure strains of yeast from a single cell. Pasteur attributed problems with beer to organisms other than yeast, Hansen blamed wild yeasts, but there is little doubt that, had Pasteur not turned to solving medical problems, he, too, would have recognised the role of these intruders. Hansen’s pure culture methods were quickly applied in Europe, Britain, the United States— and Australia. Auguste de Bavay was a Belgian who in the 1870s worked in breweries and had contacts with Pasteur and others in France and Belgium involved in similar research. He arrived in Melbourne in 1884 to work in the Victoria Parade brewery and applied Hansen’s methods there. CW Château Müller at Terry’s West End brewery was similarly engaged, and both were successful. De Bavay became the recognised Australian authority, and developed the world’s first pure culture for top fermentation. He isolated a wild yeast which was named after him, and was congratulated by Hansen for his work. In 1894 de Bavay joined the Fosters as chief brewer and continued to work with pure cultures. He acted as consultant to breweries in three states and became embroiled in a controversy over the relative superiority of purely malt beers over those brewed with the addition of sugar. Over 40 years his influence on Australian brewing was considerable. By the end of the 19th century the transformation of the old technology was well under way. New scientific principles permitting better control of wanted and unwanted organisms had been enunciated and were gradually being applied. The technologies to go with them, refrigeration and pasteurisation, were available—though wholehearted adoption of them both, particularly the latter, was slow. The European bottom fermentations to produce lager beers at lower temperatures were introduced and transport improved, but Australian brewing was still constrained by the conservatism of the British industry from which it derived and, one might add, by the slow acceptance of brewery engineering. In addition to the tardy adoption of refrigeration and pasteurisation, the introduction of improvements in mashing equipment and of easily sterilised glass enamelled vats was delayed. But one Australian innovation was the use of fireproof and corrosion-proof tea-tree bark for insulating lager cellars.

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Winemaking It was apparent to a number of the early colonists that Australia’s climate should favour winegrowing, and, as already noted, vines were planted in the earliest days of the settlement. Though wine had been made in Britain in the Middle Ages and is produced there today, viticulture was not a recognised British accomplishment: Australian entrepreneurs accepted the need to tap continental expertise. Hence John Macarthur’s 18-month study and collecting tour of France and Switzerland in 1815–16, James Busby’s collecting tour of French and Spanish vineyards in 1831, and James King’s European visit in the 1850s. Hence also the immigration in the early 1840s of Latrobe’s Swiss, established first in the Barrabool Hills near Geelong, and of GF Angas’s Germans, who settled the Barossa Valley of South Australia, as well as William Macarthur and James King’s introduction in the 1840s of German vine dressers and vignerons to New South Wales. The Macarthurs’ property at Penrith was Australia’s first commercial vineyard, but the Hunter Valley was the most productive area. It expanded in the 1840s, the decade in which winegrowing in South Australia and Victoria began, and by 1850 there were over 500 acres under grapes; but it was still tentative. The big expansion came in the 1850s and 1860s, and in the same period vineyards were established in the Murray Valley at Corowa and then in the Albury district. In Victoria, winegrowing in the Yarra Valley began in 1848, and many vineyards followed in what is now the Melbourne suburban area. Those in the Bendigo district showed promise, and other well-known Central Victorian wine-producing areas were developed in the same period. From the 1860s onwards the Rutherglen vineyards flourished, sometimes with more enthusiasm than skill in winemaking, but GF Morris developed the Brown’s Plains and Rutherglen area into Australia’s largest wine area at that time. Morris was a Rutherglen district pioneer grazier who entered winegrowing by stages, but he is chiefly remembered as a publicspirited vigneron who visited Europe several times in the interests of Australian wines and shared his experience. Then, in 1892, a London wine merchant, Peter Burgoyne, established a large winery near Rutherglen to make the ‘Australian Burgundy’ for which the district was by then well known. The Victorian Government was offering bonus payments to encourage winegrowing in the north-east of the colony and in 1896 built the Rutherglen Viticultural College to service and promote winegrowing in the area. It was opened by the governor in March 1897, but the seeds of disaster had already arrived in Victoria in 1877 when cuttings from Europe infected with Phylloxera vastatrix arrived at Geelong for the vineyard at Fyansford. Phylloxera is an aphid native to America. It kills the roots of vines and was carried to Europe when vines resistant to Oidium spp. (powdery mildew) were imported. It quickly spread from Fyansford to Geelong itself, and was slowly wafted north on the prevailing southerly winds to the Bendigo vineyards. Strenous attempts were made to protect Rutherglen, but in doing so the infected Geelong and Bendigo wine areas were totally destroyed—to no avail. Phylloxera reached Rutherglen in 1898, and although destruction was not total the importance of Rutherglen as a wine producer was reduced. The Victorian industry did not begin to recover until it was belatedly realised that uprooting affected vines and attempting to sterilise the soil were useless and that the answer was grafts on resistant American rootstock. Morris visited Europe in 1906 partly to procure disease-free vines. It is possible that the Phylloxera disaster doomed the Viticultural College. Whatever the reason, it was converted shortly afterwards into a general agricultural research facility and continues as such within Victoria’s Institute for Integrated Agricultural Development. Phylloxera devastated the Corowa and Albury vineyards, but Western Australia, where there was a small industry in the Swan River Valley, South Australia and the Hunter Valley all escaped.


The first South Australian vines were planted before 1840. Rapidly, vineyards appeared in the Adelaide area, the southern vales, the Barossa Valley, Clare, and later at Coonawarra in the southeast, and South Australia became established as the major wine producing colony. Bleasdale, who knew what he was talking about, said of South Australia in his Report of the jury on wines for the Intercolonial Exhibition 1866–67, ‘this colony may now be regarded as one of the wine producing countries of the world’ (p. 17). With Federation in 1901 the customs barriers between the colonies were removed and South Australian wines swamped the market. Victorian wines had been knocked out by Phylloxera, and as the South Australian Government subsidised their own winegrowers the Hunter Valley wines could not compete on price. Many vineyards were uprooted and it took the valley two generations to recover. For the most part the early years of the 20th century were good for South Australian wines. Exports fell away during the First World War, but recovered quite quickly afterwards. After the war, soldier settlers took up winegrowing in the Murray and Murrumbidgee areas, and in the Hunter Valley where most of them failed. There was great expansion in South Australia also, but by the end of 1924 it had gone too far, and all areas suffered from overproduction. In the same period the Hunter Valley was badly affected by downy mildew, but the collapse of the market during the economic depression of the early 1930s led to the switch of many vineyards to pasture. The Barossa Valley survived on sweet and fortified wines, and the industry recovered slowly from 1932 especially during the Second World War. As Bishop says: ‘What can we say about wine-making in Australia in the 19th century? We borrowed our wine-grape cultivars from Europe without much idea of their suitability and did the same for our wine-making methods’ (p. 21). Busby, who was just 23 when he arrived in Sydney in 1824, had studied viticulture in France but was too young to have had much experience. His Treatise on the culture of the vine and the art of making wine, published in Sydney in 1825, was largely a translation of French viticultural experts. It was criticised as being impractical and offering theory rather than the simple directions the colony needed. He later wrote accounts of his 1831 tour, but although his heart was in viticulture he never practised it; his career was as British Resident in New Zealand. In the 1840s William Macarthur, speaking from experience, emphasised the importance of knowledge of local conditions for successful viticulture. In the 1860s Dr AC Kelly, an Edinburgh medical graduate who had been winegrowing in South Australia since the early 1840s and thus had 20 years of experience of Australian conditions, published two books, The vine in Australia: its culture and management (1861), and Wine-growing in Australia (1867). Kelly showed himself to be a sound technologist who made use of such science as was then available. He criticised his fellow vignerons for failing to heed scientific principles, saying in his first book, ‘It is a notorious fact that modern science has not found its way into the cellar of the vigneron, who follows exactly the same routine his fathers have pursued for centuries.’ It was a pity, then, that his second book was a description of traditional European practices written for the instruction of Australian winegrowers. James King planted a vineyard in 1832, but by 1854 he had only 15 acres and six of them were experimental. Described by Ilbery as ‘fully aware of the value of experimentation and scientific study’ (p. 18), he corresponded frequently with Liebig whom he later met on a successful visit to Europe where, at the Paris Exhibition in 1855, King’s wine won a medal. To what extent Liebig was helpful one cannot say because he opposed Pasteur’s correct explanation of fermentation and maintained for many years, in the face of the facts, a purely chemical one.

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The man who knew more about the current science and technology of wine than anyone else in Australia at that time planted no vineyard nor wrote a book. He was Rev. Dr JI Bleasdale, an English Roman Catholic priest who had been educated for the priesthood at the English College in Lisbon. This college taught contemporary science, grew its own fruit and vegetables and made its own wine. As part of their training the students worked in the fields. Bleasdale chose the vineyards, becoming expert in viticulture and oenology and absorbing with them the scientific knowledge of the subject, including the chemistry, then available. He came to Victoria in 1851, was sent to Geelong, and immediately visited and assessed the vineyards in the Barrabool Hills. Later, back in Melbourne, he joined the Philosophical Institute, which in 1860 became the Royal Society of Victoria. He held a number of offices in the latter, becoming president in 1865. He was very active in the organisation of the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866–67 and among other roles chaired the jury on wines. This gave him the opportunity to examine wines from all the eastern colonies. His subsequent contributions were mainly through papers to the Royal Society of Victoria and the Medical Society of Victoria, and reports of the various exhibitions held in Melbourne from 1866 to 1875. His years as a student in Portugal had taught Bleasdale winemaking, wine types and wine evaluation, and as soon as he arrived in Victoria he began to gather all the information he could about winegrowing in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia. He had samples from Camden and the Hunter Valley, including ‘Irrewang’, and ‘really good wine from South Australia’. He thought the early Victorian whites were passable, dismissed the reds, but from the early 1860s praised wines from Geelong, Yering, Batesford, Sunbury and Riddell’s Creek. The Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866–67 assembled, in Bleasdale’s opinion, the most varied collection of Australian wines that to that point had been seen. From these he kept 48 samples in his office at 65–92°F (18–33°C) to study shelf life. They had been opened for judging; some had been recorked and others decanted, but his conclusion was that the wines that had been made well, kept well. Later, he received for examination the best wines from the 1872–73 International Exhibition and the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition of 1875. Bleasdale was well enough off to set up his own laboratory, but his published analytical results were confined to alcohol content by distillation returned as percentage proof spirit. On one occasion he published comparative figures for the different methods of Gay-Lussac, of Sykes and of Long for completing this analysis. He also measured specific gravity, sugar, total solids, colour change, and total titratable acidity but published no results for them. He was probably, as he claimed to be, the only wine chemist in Australia at the time. It is somewhat surprising therefore to find him writing, in On colonial wines, that, ‘as a rule scientific chemists are bad makers of wine, partly because the whole chemistry of wine is not yet fully known, and partly because they are habitually too fond of instituting new enquiries’ (p. 63). There was no serious attempt in Australia to study the chemistry of wines until AR Hickinbotham went to Roseworthy in 1936. Bleasdale served Australian winegrowing in three ways: assessment, advice and promotion. In assessment he used his trained palate, chemical analysis and keeping (shelf life) tests. His advice, based largely on his assessments, was given in his exhibition reports and his lecture to the South Australians. He promoted his ideas to the medical profession and the wider public. Bleasdale’s three exhibition reports contain many comments on the suitability of specific districts for specific wine types covering climate, soil types, aspect and grape varieties. His advice began with the sine qua non of all experimenters and production men: keep good records; but then he went on to specifics, such as try this grape there, don’t try to copy Europe, let your own


wines develop their own characters, but Iberian methods could be useful in Australia. In 1867 Bleasdale was invited by a number of South Australian winegrowers to visit Adelaide where he was well received. His lecture to them was later published. He thought well of South Australian wines, but said that if as much effort were put into studying their own musts as was put into trying to copy French and German wines, they would do even better. He cautioned the South Australians against hurrying their wines through racking and fining to the market and trying to get young wines too dry too early. He suggested adding two to three per cent of 20–30% proof spirit to stop the fermentation at a preselected saccharometer reading. He also suggested correlating alcohol content with saccharometer reading and flavour as determined by the vigneron’s palate. And he had a lot to say about blending. Fining was a means of removing roughness and bitterness as well as particulate matter, but he warned against removing too much tannic acid. Casks should be rinsed with spirit and thoroughly sulphured, kept filled, and held at a steady temperature of about 65°F (18°C). A steady temperature was more important than a precise one. It seems that Bleasdale was unaware of Pasteur’s work on fermentation. Études sur le vin was published in 1866, but Pasteur had outlined his germ theory of fermentation to the Société des Sciences at Lille in 1857. Nevertheless, Bleasdale understood the need for the utmost cleanliness of every cellar, utensil, bottle and cork. He also knew the general self-limiting parameters of fermentation and the tendency of sugars to ferment out if sufficient nitrogen was present unless the fermentation was halted by adding alcohol (as brandy) or by heating. Bleasdale warned against bad corks and decayed barrel staves, and advocated the Portuguese practice of building up thick coats of potassium hydrogen tartrate (cream of tartar) in the barrels. He had a remedy for ‘bottle stink’: remove the bungs from the casks and expose the casks to the sun for five to six hours for four to five days. But ‘earthiness’ baffled him. In the 1870s he spent a lot of time on it— a chemist ‘instituting new enquiries’!—but, like Liebig, he was seeking a chemical answer to a microbiological problem, and he was doing so 80 years before the chemical tool he needed, gas chromatography, became available. In the 1860s Pasteur had invented pasteurisation to control the problems of the French wine industry. Contemporary advances in food analysis and chemical control in the sugar industry, to say nothing of engineering innovations, were reaching Australia quite quickly. Bleasdale did well in transferring the technology he knew, but was he able to think beyond it? There is no doubt about Bleasdale’s enthusiastic promotion of colonial wine. He was a microscopist and for some years from the late 1850s had done the histological work for the Melbourne Hospital. For this he was elected an honorary member of the Medical Society of Victoria, and, among other contributions to it, was active in advocating the use by its members of colonial wines where, as was then often the case, wine was prescribed for the sick. He held tasting sessions for members of the society and undertook to see that selected wines could be bought at affordable prices. Several institutions adopted his suggestions, but he cast his net wider and tried hard to turn Victorians into ‘a healthy, sober, jolly wine drinking population’. It was a vain hope. However, in South Australia he gave the winegrowers some useful hints on improving their marketing: a journal to publicise their wine, a central mart in Adelaide, a better distillation law, and a wider network of retail outlets. Ilbery’s is an excellent historical summary of the development of Australia’s wine areas, not of the science and technology of winegrowing. Understandably, then, she dismisses Bleasdale in a sentence: ‘He [Frank Potts] named his property ‘Bleasdale’ after his friend the Rev. Dr JI Bleasdale who was an influential figure in the wine world of the time’ (p. 133).

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Indeed, he was. He left Australia in 1878 after Phylloxera had arrived in Geelong, but before it ravaged the colony. For 25 years he had contributed uniquely to Australian winegrowing. King, in the title of his book in 1857, forecast that ‘Australia may be an extensive wineproducing country’, and 10 years later Bleasdale (in his jury on wines report) said of South Australia, ‘this colony may now be regarded as one of the wine producing countries of the world’. In the same year, Charles Dilke in his book Greater Britain was saying much the same, ‘With time and care, Australia ought to be the vineyard of the world’, and in 1893 Philip Muskett in The art of living in Australia promoted Australian wines with the same vigour and in much the same way as Bleasdale. All could see the potential, and individual winegrowers worked hard to adapt European vines to the new environment, but it seems clear that up to the 1930s and essentially until after the Second World War Australian winemaking was a traditional technology with little understanding of the principles behind it. Evidently, therefore, the establishment in 1936 at the Roseworthy Agricultural College in South Australia of the Diploma in Oenology and Fornachon’s work from 1938 on bacterial spoilage (see Chapter 12) were most significant contributions to the Australian wine industry. From 1892 Roseworthy had offered lectures in viticulture and oenology in its agricultural course, but the latter was an optional third-year subject. From the new diploma scientific methods and a sound technology began to flow into Australian winegrowing and made it what it became in the last decade of the 20th century.

Soft drinks Benjamin Hill manufactured spruce and ginger beer in Sydney in 1814. Cordials, that is, alcoholic extracts, were made in Hobart in the 1820s and fruit salts and other powdered drinks were on sale. Soda water appeared in Sydney in 1830 when James Thornton compressed carbon dioxide generated from sulphuric acid and baking soda into distilled and filtered water. Others were making ginger beer, and in 1832 R Fisher established an aerated waters factory in Adelaide. The most successful of the early manufacturers, however, was Evan Rowlands at Ballarat in the Victorian goldfields. Digging for gold was thirsty work, but demand was not confined to the products of fermentation. By 1854 there were 13 ‘manufacturers’ of soft drinks in Ballarat, but they made by hand so that when Evan Rowlands and Robert Lewis began to produce soft drinks with a Taylors No. 1 machine in a tent beside Lake Wendouree they prospered. They made several flavours and before long were using Warrenheip spring water. The profits were used to buy more equipment including, by 1858, a steam engine. In 1870 Rowlands and Lewis opened a new factory equipped with three double-action soda water machines built under Rowlands’s direction in Ballarat. They had a capacity of 3500 dozen bottles per day. In 1873 Rowlands and Lewis opened a Melbourne factory which reached a similar output by the mid-1880s. It, too, used Warrenheip spring water and, though soda water was made only at Ballarat, both factories manufactured a growing range of products. Lewis retired in 1876 and died in 1894, but Rowlands continued; it expanded to Sydney and Newcastle by the 1890s and was sold to Schweppes after the Second World War. Rowlands filtered the water four times, and rejected local corks as not good enough. His insistence on a high standard of quality was such that his intercolonial customers were prepared to pay the higher prices induced by intercolonial customs regimes of the time. He also invented and patented an improved soda water bottle. In Sydney, Barretts Aerated Waters, a branch of an English company, was well established by the 1870s. It, too, was mechanised, filtered the water several times through activated carbon, and


used flavour extracts. Water quality was controlled analytically, and the factory could produce 70 000 bottles per day. There were many smaller manufacturers, and most country breweries manufactured soft drinks. Occasionally it was the other way round as in Young in the 1880s. Given that there have been improvements in packaging, such as the easy opening can, in automation, especially in the physical distribution of raw materials and finished product, and in energy conservation in the factories, soft drink technology, that is, the aeration of flavoured water with carbon dioxide, remains unchanged.

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Chapter 10

Dairy products

By 1870 the factory system of dairying, that is, the delivery of milk from farms to a central point for the manufacture of butter and cheese, was in operation in the United States, Britain, and Australia; but only for cheese. Buttermaking was hamstrung by the need to allow time for the cream to rise, then hand skimming and churning; and it was bedevilled by the inevitably poor quality of the product obtained. As the cream was heavily contaminated by dust and insects, the butter had to be heavily salted; it also had 0.5% boric acid added as a preservative. It was a not an attractive product. A butter factory was a factory only in the sense that milk from a number of farms could be gathered in one spot, but the area required for the shallow vessels from which cream was ultimately skimmed was a severe handicap. Those factories, if such they were, and individual farmers supplied the towns and cities, but their products were not good enough for export. True, the quality of Australian butter arriving in England was praised by Nature in its 1 June 1871 issue, but some Victorian butter received the same year was fit only for axle grease. Such extremes served only to emphasise the variability of the conditions under which butter was then being made and packed. It was anything but uniform. Though a perishable product, cheese is more durable than butter, and cheese factories began to appear in the Victorian dairy areas during the 1870s.

Cheesemaking In 1861 TS Mort entered dairying at Bodalla. Throughout all his many and varied activities, he maintained his determination to make good butter and cheese. He improved his pastures and the quality of his herds, but throughout the 1860s his share farmers preferred to make butter when Mort really wanted cheese and throughout these years he sought the latest information on cheesemaking from Britain. New equipment was appearing there then, and Joseph Harding, a Somerset cheesemaker of unusual gifts, had systematised Cheddar cheesemaking with particular reference to the minutiae of factory hygiene. Harding was by no means the first to do so: many anonymous farmers’ wives understood its importance in cheesemaking well before the medical profession saw to it in hospitals! But in systematising Cheddar cheesemaking, Harding identified what are now seen to be sources of contamination and took steps to avoid them. So much so that visiting American cheesemakers, who claimed superiority in equipment and organisation, acknowledged Harding’s better factory hygiene. When, in the 1870s, Mort abandoned share farming and ran the Bodalla estate with his employees, he had the advantage not only of up-to-date information but also of employing at Bodalla Henry Harding, one of several of Joseph Harding’s cheesemaker sons. In 1874 manufacture moved from ‘specially adapted rooms’ to a three-storey factory, and

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Bodalla cheesemaking followed in the British tradition in which it was apparently quite common to use sour milk as a cheese starter. Raw milk held at 86°F (30°C) will sour through the growth of naturally occurring Streptococcus lactis and Streptococcus cremoris, which will produce enough acid for cheesemaking. According to Davis, the first recorded use seems to be that of McAdam in Scotland in 1861. He added about a gallon of very sour whey to 140 gallons of milk. Joseph Harding was in touch with Scottish cheesemakers from 1855, and it is highly likely that this method was used in the early Australian cheese factories. Cheese starters per se were introduced in England in 1895, and the first lactic cultures were sold in the United States in 1897. Contemporaneously with Mort, James Manning introduced the factory system to the Bega district on the south coast of New South Wales. Manning was a member, with Mort and others, of the Twofold Bay Pastoral Association with three stations in the Bega area. As managing partner, he lived at Kameruka, and here he introduced the American method of cheesemaking by bringing over a ‘manipulator’ (cheesemaker/manager) to supervise it. He bought Kameruka in 1861, but sold it a year later to the Tooths who went even further, importing from New York all the equipment, even curd rakes, and a manager. The cheesemaking procedures and the rules for handling cows and milk were prophetic. There were others interested in the American system, and Australian cheesemaking in the 1870s was thus derived from two traditions. John Orlebar in the late 1860s had begun a small factory operation for the production of cheese at his property, ‘Tooram’, near Warrnambool in Victoria’s Western District. He was quite successful and an American, George Pierce, and his associates sought to buy him out and introduce American procedures. After some activity and much publicity the proposal fell through, possibly because the milk price offered was too low, and in 1872 Orlebar sold Tooram to Thomas McLeod Palmer. Palmer expanded cheesemaking and in 1882 brought out Swiss cheese makers, from yet another tradition, who increased the quantity and quality of his cheese. He is credited with turning Tooram into one of the best dairy farms in Victoria. Others in Victoria and New South Wales set up small cheese factories; the first in South Australia was at Tantanoola in 1886, and the first of any significance in Queensland at Yangan in 1893. Dairying came late to Western Australia because of the heavy clearing necessary, and the first record of a cheese factory is of a private one near Busselton in 1902. Otherwise Westralian Farmers built one at Denmark in 1928. So, also, cheese factories came to Tasmania only in the 20th century. Much farm cheese was still being made in the last part of the 19th century, but in general the factory product was considered to be more consistent. Cheesemaking developed relatively slowly because of the enormous upsurge of buttermaking in 1890s. For example, the first co-operative factory in the Shire of Korumburra, South Gippsland, a cheese factory, was opened at Woodleigh in 1888, but before long it switched to buttermaking. However, there were still many cheese factories in the dairying districts, and they all made Cheddar cheese. It was familiar, it was easy to make—much easier than many other varieties—and it stored and travelled well. So, Cheddar was the Australian cheese, for both local consumption and export, until the 1950s. It was made in the traditional back-breaking way, with tinned steel equipment in small factories, and was sold in the old familiar cylindrical form, 80 lb, 40 lb, 20 lb, 10 lb, in weight. There was no change until after the Second World War. In an attempt to prolong the life of cheese, potted cheese appeared in the early years of the 20th century. It was made by grinding well-matured Cheddar cheese with a preservative, sodium metabisulphite, and was spreadable. It was packed in ceramic jars with a wax seal, or in hermetically sealed cans. A more satisfactory method of extending the shelf life, though at

Dairy products

a lower flavour intensity, was cheese processing. In 1916 JL Kraft obtained a patent in the United States for a method of processing by heating cheese with emulsifying salts. His process pasteurised the cheese, terminated maturation, prevented spoilage, and effectively stabilised the fat in a protein gel so that it did not separate in hot weather. Cheese had been processed in Germany and Switzerland in the 1890s but Kraft’s method was better, and in 1925 Fred Walker, a Melbourne food processor, secured an agreement with Kraft for the manufacture of Kraft processed cheese in Australia. This began in 1926. Walker provided the premises and management, and Kraft the technical support. However, the search for suitable raw material cheese led Dr CP Callister to undertake a detailed study of the chemical and microbiological characteristics of the Cheddar cheeses available. It was the first such study in Australia and symptomatic of a changing emphasis in food technology.

The liquidity of a hot blend of new, semi-matured and matured cheese newly processed with permitted emulsifier. (Photograph by the author.)

Buttermaking Buttermaking for export, or indeed for storage and transport within Australia, was saved and stimulated by the simultaneous development of shipboard refrigeration and the invention of the continuous cream separator. The real breakthrough came with the separator, simultaneously invented in Sweden and Denmark. This machine intensified the obvious difference in density between the fat and water phases of milk, and, from a continuous feed of milk, delivered continuous streams of cream and skim milk. With many modifications since, the separator has become an essential piece of equipment in many branches of the food industry and in other industries, for example petroleum, as well. Australia rapidly acquired this new technology, and with mechanical churning and working, which quickly followed, the Babcock test for fat, and the eventual adoption of pasteurisation, this giant stride forward in dairy technology was completed. The first separators in this country were put to work in 1881 at Mittagong, New South Wales, where Mort’s New South Wales Fresh Food and Ice Co. had established a creamery as a source of city milk (see p. 102). From the excess spring and summer milk, butter and cheese were made, and three separators were installed together with all the equipment required for buttermaking. By what would now be called extension lectures, separators were quickly introduced to the Illawarra District where several butter factories soon began to produce better and more uniform butter than ever before. Separation eliminated most of the contamination and the incubation of contaminating organisms, and butter production from the combined milk of surrounding farms was of uniform quality. The Pioneer Butter Factory at Kiama was the first of hundreds of co-operative butter factories. It began on 25 May 1884, but the failure of its first manager was an object lesson. He was an engineer and knew nothing of milk. Buttermaking, and the separators, were taken from the Illawarra to the Northern Rivers by men who went to grow sugar but, preferring a monthly cheque from a butter factory to an annual one from the sugar mill, turned to dairying.

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The cream separator made modern buttermaking possible. A Scandinavian invention, it was quickly adopted in all dairy countries. That pictured is a Sharples separator manufactured in the United States. (Illustrated Australian News 1 October 1895, p. 18, reproduced by courtesy of the La Trobe Library, Melbourne.)

Dairy products

The major dairy area of Australia, with due respect to New South Wales and Queensland, is the country on both sides of Bass Strait: the northwest, and to a lesser extent, the northeast, of Tasmania; Gippsland; the Western District; the northeast and northern irrigation areas of Victoria; and the extrapolation of Victoria’s Western District into the far south-east of South Australia. The explosion—not too strong a word—of buttermaking in Victoria began a few years after the opening up of the butter factories in the Illawarra. This explosion was strongly supported if not actually initiated by the financial incentives offered by the Victorian Government. Among other things, in 1886, to facilitate the export of butter, it bought the Newport freezing works of the bankrupt Australian Frozen Meat Export Company. To some extent, to do so was an act of faith because the introduction of the separator had barely begun. The first separators in Victoria appeared in 1882 at the Romsey factory that supplied Melbourne with milk and cream but in the flush made cheese, butter, skim milk and whey from the excess milk. The general introduction of separators into Victoria was delayed, however, until the mid-1880s when David Wilson, later the first Victorian dairy expert, claimed, and was given credit for, the introduction of separators into the colony in the 1885–86 season. The first units were big and were driven by steam or horse power, but when hand-operated separators became available in the late 1880s, farm separation became possible. This meant great savings in transport as only the cream was sent to the factory and the skim milk was used to raise pigs. Butter factories, most of them farmer co-operatives, proliferated, but cheese was an exportable product also and this, too, benefited from shipboard refrigeration. Cheese uses most of the protein fraction of milk that in buttermaking remains in the skim milk. Its by-product is whey, and this, too, went to pig raising. In New South Wales in 1891 10.5 million pounds of butter were still being made under the old farm system, 8 million by the factories. In 1900 the quantities were 4.2 million and 18.8 million respectively. In Victoria two co-operative factories caught the 1888–89 season. The first to be opened, on 22 October 1888, was the Cobden and District Cheese and Butter Factory Company Ltd, and the second was the Warrnambool Butter and Cheese Factory Co. Ltd at Allansford on 14 November. They were Victoria’s first true butter factories, but initially there was an emphasis on creameries rather than factories. Country creameries sent cream by rail to Melbourne where two butter factories in the early 1890s produced just over 40% of the butter made in the colony. Much of this cream came from the north and from east Gippsland, well over 100 miles in each case, and the fallacious view was expressed at the time that it improved on the journey. How could it? If it ‘ripened’ satisfactorily on the journey that was sheer luck, and butter made from ripened cream has a shorter life than that from sweet or neutralised cream. The big expansion came in the mid-1890s. From the handful in 1890, by the end of the 19th century there were 304 butter factories in Victoria. Many of them lacked refrigeration and relied on cellars for coolness or even, during hot weather, manufactured during the night to take advantage of the lower temperatures. From the introduction of shipboard refrigeration the British market emphasised the need to refrigerate and to ship in refrigerated holds, and the Victorian Government introduced a system of bounties provided that the butter went through Newport and was graded by government graders and given a government brand. The control of buttermaking was not possible without some method of measuring fat. Allowing milk to stand in a cylindrical tube and reading the cream line was a rough and ready, but scarcely accurate, test. At Mittagong they were using the lactometer to measure gravity and the lactocrite to determine fat. This was a method of separating fat centrifugally from acidified

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milk in graduated tubes. It was a precurser of the test perfected by an American, Professor SM Babcock, in 1890 in which sulphuric acid dissolves the milk proteins leaving the fat free to be read volumetrically in the graduated neck of specially designed flasks. It is an empirical test whose accuracy depends on calibrated glassware and the observance of carefully designated times and temperatures, but in skilled hands it was the basis of dairy factory control, and the payment of farmers, for nearly a century. It is thought that the first in Australia to use the Babcock test were Cherry and Sons at Gisborne in Victoria, but in November 1892 the factory at Koroit in Victoria began to pay farmers on fat content. It was the first factory to do this, but was followed shortly afterwards by the Fresh Food and Ice Co. in Sydney and by the Berrima District Co-operative Company also. This move was resisted, but it eliminated the watering of milk, which had been bought and sold on volume, and it led to stock improvement. The bacteriology of milk was unknown territory then. The Americans, following the successful work of Prescott and Underwood on canned foods, had begun to study what is now the dominant aspect of dayto-day dairy technology, but pasteurisation arrived in Australia only at the end of the 19th century and for many years was not generally applied. In the late 1880s the old keg as used for farm butter had given way to the square butter box, and the Victorian Minister for Agriculture, the Hon. JW Taverner, reporting in 1899 on a visit to England, said: ‘I believe we can now regard this industry as established’. He went on to make three points about Australian butter: salt, at 3%, was too high; the colour was too deep; and the matter of preservatives (boric acid) was unresolved. It was not then realised that the deep yellow of the Victorian butter was an indication of high vitamin A activity, far higher than the pale Danish product. Pasteurisation and refrigeration overcame the need for preservatives, which were gradually phased out. The new technology had set the pattern of Australian dairying for some 50 years. The organisation of manufacturing was essentially through farmer co-operatives, but, as the 20th century progressed, especially from the 1970s when the dairy industry went through a major reappraisal, amalgamations became frequent and super–co-operatives emerged. Murray Goulburn became dominant in Victoria, but Dairy Farmers Co-operative Milk Co., founded in New South Wales in 1900, in 1989 acquired Kraft’s natural cheese business and expanded into Queensland and Victoria. That there was still a place for the smaller co-operative was evident by the continuation of, for example, Bega Cheese, founded in 1899 as the Bega Co-operative Creamery Co. and now owned by some 135 dairy farmers on the far south coast of New South Wales. Its products include a range of cheeses, butter and whey powders.

City milk In his 1875 paper to the Agricultural Society of New South Wales, Mort deplored the poor supply of milk to children both in Britain and in New South Wales. He knew, he said, that milk might be preserved indefinitely if slowly stirred to stop separation while being held just below the freezing point of water; and he spoke of his long-held ambition to get refrigerated milk from the country to Sydney. Mort knew also that without a railway he could not get milk from Bodalla to Sydney, but he initiated a scheme for getting milk from the Southern Tabelands, for example from Mittagong, as already discussed. Quick cooling of milk to the temperature of the coldest water available, and rail transport in ice-cooled vans of cans filled to the top to reduce churning provided milk of significantly better quality than the contemporary supply. In the 1880s and beyond, Frederic Dunn in Melbourne exposed the cheating of dishonest dairymen who watered the milk they

Dairy products

sold. But milk is not of fixed composition and the influence on it of breed of cow, feed, and even day-to-day weather variations were so little understood that it is highly likely that scrupulously honest dairymen were sometimes unfairly convicted. Nor was it until this period that herd testing and regular chemical and microbiological analyses began. Bottled milk, safer if pasteurised and bottled correctly, appeared in 1923, but loose milk was being delivered into householders’ cans in the early hours of the morning until well after the Second World War.

Extension The colonial governments quickly reacted to the importance of the opportunity presented by the separator. In 1888 Victoria was the first to appoint a dairy expert. He was David Wilson, a Scot, who became a Victorian dairy farmer and conscientiously studied dairying. He was an early importer, and enthusiastic supporter, of separators for farm use and demonstrated their value by the quality of his butter for which Melbourne grocers paid a premium price. In 1871 he was one of those whose butter had been classed in England as axle grease, but by 1881 his property had become one of the great dairy farms and part of the successful shipment of butter per the SS Protos was his. In the early 1890s Wilson was sent to Europe to study ‘pasteurised and fermentised’ butter and came back predicting that the adoption of pasteurisation would do away with the need for boric acid. It did. The industry discontinued use of this chemical long before it was banned in 1927. In 1899 Wilson organised a travelling dairy which, under Alexander Crawford, moved round Victoria demonstrating the use and value of the separator and the improvements to the buttermaking process which could flow from it. Also he initiated the installation of a pasteurisation plant at Tungamah and appointed Henry Potts to lecture to managers and buttermakers, and Robert Crowe to teach the use of the pasteuriser. In 1896 New South Wales appointed as dairy expert MA O’Callaghan, later to be the first Commonwealth dairy expert, and in 1902 also had a travelling demonstration dairy, and wellequipped dairies at Hawkesbury Agricultural College and at several demonstration farms in the country. It was not long before all the colonies had appointed dairy experts and initiated similar programmes of instruction. The dairy industry was leading the way in educating its practitioners for change.

Pasteurisation and hygiene In the 1860s Louis Pasteur showed that the controlled heating of perishable liquids could render them safe by killing pathogens and prolong their shelf life for a day or two, longer under refrigeration, by killing many spoilage organisms also. His method was to hold the liquid at 145–150°F (63–66°C) for 30 minutes followed by immediate cooling. It was a batch process and came to be called pasteurisation. The first to pasteurise milk may have been von Soxhlet, but the process was not applied commercially until the 1880s. By 1890 it was in general use by Danish butter makers, and by 1898 the Danes had made it compulsory for bottled milk. In the 1890s it spread to the United States where it was shown to have saved lives and was adopted for the milk supplies of some cities. David Wilson came back from his visit to Europe convinced of the value of pasteurisation and, as related, actively promoted its use throughout the dairy industry. Some go-ahead factories installed batch pasteurisers, but in spite of the climate they were not in general use until after the Second World War.

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Milking machines were introduced before the end of the nineteenth century. That illustrated above was in use in the early 1890s. (Illustrated Australian News, 1 May 1893, p. 19. Reproduced with acknowledgement to the La Trobe Library, Melbourne.)

It is a cardinal principle of food processing that, regardless of the efficiency of the process in inactivating micro-organisms, the microbial load of the raw material should be as low as possible. Apart from anything else, heavy preprocessing contamination may induce changes, for example in flavour, unaffected by the subsequent process that may deal satisfactorily with the contaminants. Many farmers’ wives intuitively understood this, and knew that scrupulous cleanliness was necessary if they were to produce good butter and cheese. In the 1850s Joseph Harding spelt it out in a detailed set of rules covering the location, construction, and operation of the cheese room. Few of the colonists understood it. Those that did—Mort, Palmer, Manning and the Tooths, and Wilson—succeeded, and the Victorian Health Act of 1890, for example, covered the construction and sanitation of dairies. But the carelessness of dairy farmers and their general ignorance even of the need for visible cleanliness, let alone the provision of boiling water for the sterilisation of equipment, especially milking machines, was still a cause of concern to the Victorian superintendent of dairying in the 1930s. Milking machines had been introduced at the turn of the century, but war, economic depression, and lack of the wide availability of electricity delayed their general use until just before the outbreak of war in 1939. Refrigeration, as has been emphasised, was a key factor in building the export trade in Australian dairy products, but it came late to the farms. That its use there was limited before the First World War may confidently be assumed to have inhibited that trade and other advances. Thus, although Mort in 1875 was emphasising the need to cool milk from the cow, and many farmers in the early years of the 20th century were using water coolers, milk quality in the capital cities was a problem even in the early 1920s, and milk cooling was not required of those supplying Melbourne until 1922.

Dairy products

Other dairy products Gail Borden in the United States was making condensed milk in 1862 by evaporating milk in vacuum pans similar to those used in the sugar industry. Twenty years later, in 1882, the Melbourne Milk Supply Company at Romsey began to produce sweetened condensed milk, but the product failed possibly because of ignorance of microbiology at that time. In 1886 concentrated milk was tried but was defeated by the seasonality of the milk supply. The Bacchus Marsh Concentrated Milk Company, founded in 1890, was more fortunate. It was able to export its product, and production expanded during the war years only to fall away between the wars. The most durable of such factories was the Nestlé condensery at Dennington, near Warrnambool. This was built in 1910 and was said then to have been the biggest in the world. It expanded over the years and in 1946 had a daily intake of more than 100 000 gallons of milk from 700 farms. Other dairy products began to appear. Milk powder was produced at first on steam-heated rollers. After many years spray drying followed and became the norm. Dried whey products for incorporation into bread and into stock feeds were produced in the 1930s by a novel process at the Kraft plant at Allansford, but the revolution in whey utilisation came after the Second World War. The major consumer item to appear before 1940 was ice cream.

Dairy research Australian dairy products suffered from several defects, one of which was a series of taints. By subjecting butter to a vacuum it was possible to remove volatiles responsible for some of them, and to do this empirically the ‘vacreator’ was introduced into the industry in the 1930s; however, there was no scientific study of the origins of taints, and little was known of how to prevent them. Attempts from the mid-1920s to set up dairy research in CSIR met strong resistance from the smugness of state departments of agriculture and an industry organised in co-operatives which would rather make second-best products than face the capital and R&D expenditure necessary to make the best. Early in 1939 CSIR set up a dairy research section and the Victorian Government established a school of dairy technology at Werribee. It took a war to change a lot of attitudes.

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Chapter 11

The emergence of food science

It is evident that, in Australia as elsewhere, technology ran ahead of science. Eventually, however, science improved technology. From a hesitant beginning, food science, though nobody then called it that, developed throughout the 19th century, and at least four strands are recognisable. They are: • growing knowledge of the nature of food • gradual understanding of nutrition • recognition of adulteration, and the drive for regulation and control through analysis and legislation • recognition and understanding of the role of micro-organisms. None of these was self-contained, the first three, especially, being interwoven. Nor is the engineering input to milling, canning, refrigeration, and vacuum concentration included, but the task of engineering in that period was to provide the mechanics of food processing. Its integration with food science and technology came a century later.

The nature of food and first steps in nutrition Lind’s demonstration in the middle of the 18th century that scurvy resulted from a nutritional lack was followed in 1769 by William Stark’s rigorous experiments with his own diet, which resulted in his death within seven months almost certainly from scurvy. Lind, successfully, and Stark, unsuccessfully, were pioneers in nutrition, but neither contributed significantly to the knowledge of the nature of food. In the 1780s, CW Scheele in Sweden prepared a number of new compounds from plant and animal sources, and French savant Antoine Lavoisier made observations that led in the 1820s to the recognition of the varying ‘caloric capacities’ of different liquids and of the ‘combustion’ of food to provide bodily heat. By that time it was known that bone consisted of calcium phosphate with some ‘gelatin’, and that ‘albumin’ was present in flesh and blood and was coagulated by heat, but little was known about the constituents of food. Thus, in the early part of the 19th century, foods were classified more or less according to their organoleptic properties: fibrinous, gelatinous, fatty and oily, farinaceous, acidulous, and so on. This meant very little, but Magendie, by feeding dogs selected diets, recognised the essential place of nitrogen-containing foods, though it was Mulder in 1837 who identified protein and coined the word. Magendie’s observations stimulated further work on dogs, this time in Britain, but the big advance came by chance. From 1825 to 1833 William Beaumont, an American, gained the co-operation of a young French Canadian

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trapper, Alexis St Martin, who had suffered a gunshot wound that had left a fistula into his stomach. Through this Beaumont was able to study the progressive digestion of specific foods. These observations in vivo got rid of many erroneous ideas and laid the foundations of modern nutrition. Then, in the 1840s, Liebig, best known for his major contributions to organic chemistry, published books on animal chemistry, food, and agriculture that shifted the emphasis to chemistry. They were milestones in the history of nutrition and indeed of food science because they showed how important was the analysis of food in the understanding of its function. Liebig recognised the major components of food: protein, fat, and carbohydrate. His book, Researches on the chemistry of food, published in 1847, was possibly the first one on the subject other than Accum’s, published in 1820, that had concentrated on analysis. Liebig understood the importance of chemical transformations in vivo, and that the metabolism of protein, fat, and carbohydrate provided energy. He therefore saw the significance of the energy value of foods. He recognised the need for foods that contained nitrogen and sulphur; he knew that sugar degraded to lactic acid, alcohol, and carbon dioxide and then further to butyric acid, hydrogen and oxygen. But he maintained his opposition to a biological explanation for fermentation. Liebig’s meat extract, Extractum carnis, followed, and, as has been seen, large quantities of it were produced in Australia. But in spite of his great expectations of it as a nitrogenous food, he himself came to see it only as a stimulant and source of meat minerals. He also believed that high muscular activity was attended by muscular wastage and was best sustained by nitrogenous foods. This belief was challenged in the 1860s by Dr Edward Smith, who, by quantitative in vivo studies on himself and four prisoners, differentiated between what was consumed and what was digested, and showed ‘that Liebig was wrong in his assertion that energy for muscular exercise came entirely from protein’. The importance of analysis was emphasised by others also; as the century progressed, knowledge of the energy value of foods increased, and the development and use of respiration chambers emerged. By 1900 the place of minerals was broadly recognised, and evidence for the existence of ‘accessory food factors’ was building up to Hopkins’s seminal paper of 1912. Chevreul, a Frenchman, had earlier described the esterified nature of fats and oils, and over the years many others contributed to their study, but detailed knowledge of their chemistry lagged until the 1920s. In the last decades of the 19th century, German chemist Emil Fischer laid the foundations of carbohydrate chemistry on which the Englishman, Howarth, built in the first quarter of the 20th. Fischer also paved the way for the understanding of protein structure. He synthesised polypeptides and studied purines; and the Americans Osborne and Mendel, among others, contributed to recognition of the specificity of various proteins and amino acids. But there was no Australian contribution to these fundamental studies.

Adulteration, analysis and control When chemists first became interested in physiological chemistry they were concerned largely with metabolism rather than the food being metabolised. Only after discovering something of the movement of nutrients within the body did they begin to seek them in food, but analytical chemistry scarcely existed. Methods were not available for determining even the major components of food. There were glimmers of qualitative food analysis at the end of the 18th century as, for example, the methods proposed for the detection of lead in wines.‘Sugar of lead’, lead acetate, had been used from Roman times to offset the acidity of wine, but by the end of the 18th century


the detection of it by the addition of sulphate or sulphide was advocated. Perhaps this is evidence of tacit recognition that the presence of lead was not altogether acceptable; however, it was many decades before anything was done about it. Such inertia also followed Accum’s assault in 1820 on food adulteration in Britain. His book revealed the widespread, even normal, practice of using all kinds of substances, some outright poisons, to colour, flavour, dilute or simulate various foods. The resulting uproar died down as Accum was hounded back to his native Germany, but in 1848 Mitchell again raised the matter, and this time moves to control adulteration began. In 1851, the Lancet’s Analytical Sanitary Commission headed by Dr AH Hassall began to publish its findings. Hassall’s main tool was the microscope, which was, and still is, useful in food analysis. It is limited, but from the early 1850s it played its part in moves towards the regulation of food that culminated in the Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1875. At last the appointment of public analysts by local government authorities became obligatory. One result of Britain’s legislative activity, which had begun in 1860, was the formation in 1874 of the Society of Public Analysts, which in 1954 became the Society for Analytical Chemistry and is now a division of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Another result was the founding in 1877 of the (later Royal) Institute of Chemistry (now the Royal Society of Chemistry) inter alia as a body able to guarantee the competence of chemists, specifically, public analysts. The Food Journal, possibly the first journal devoted to food science, appeared in 1870. It lasted only until 1874 but was devoted to food analysis and was succeeded almost at once by the Analyst, the journal of the Society of Public Analysts. Hassall, at that time, also published a journal, Food, Water, Air, which he edited and largely wrote, but its life was even shorter than that of the Food Journal. By 1874 food analysis had made great strides, and according to Chirnside and Hamence, ‘… the main classes of organic compounds that collectively made up foodstuffs had been classified as: (1) acids, (2) oils and fats, (3) albuminous matter (protein), (4) sugars, (5) starches, (6) fibrous matter, (7) gums, (8) tannins and (9) colouring matter. The percentage of mineral matter (ash) was a useful criterion of purity for some foodstuffs’ (p. 27). Burettes, pipettes, separating funnels, and platinum and porcelain crucibles were commonplace. Good balances were easy to obtain, and polarimeters for sugar work and refractometers for oils, fats and sugar solutions were in use. A primitive spectroscope was available but of limited application. The Soxhlet fat extractor had been invented, but was not used generally. The Kjeldahl method for nitrogen was not proposed until 1883, and nitrogen was determined by the old soda-lime procedure. About 1890 in America SM Babcock developed his rapid test for milk fat thus introducing a powerful control into the dairy industry. In the last quarter of the 19th century there were great advances in analysis and the consequent knowledge of the composition of various foods. Thus the detection of adulteration and government regulation of food became easier—so much so that the Australian State of Victoria (1905) and the United States (1906) introduced compositional food regulations to protect the health and pocket of the consumer. By 1912 all the other Australian states had followed. So, also, progress in nutrition became easier. Throughout the century there had been essentially two questions: ‘What is the nature of food, and how does the body use it?’ and ‘What is the composition of food, and how is it being modified (that is, adulterated)?’ By the turn of the century, these two major strands of interest had come together.

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Microbiology The pioneering work of Leeuwenhoek, Spallanzani, and others in the 17th and 18th centuries paved the way for advances during the 19th in understanding what are now called micro-organisms. In the early years of the 19th century de Saussure carried out many fermentation experiments, and Gay-Lussac preached the fateful doctrine of oxygen responsibility for putrefaction. Whereas de Saussure’s work held the key to the explanation for the success of Appert’s heat process, Gay-Lussac attributed this to the locking up of oxygen; but Pasteur carried out the crucial experiments. Initially by studies on food systems, specifically, fermentations, he ‘invented’ microbiology. He was a chemist, and his work on tartrate crystals, salts of a food acid, founded stereochemistry; but his concern for solving problems of local industry led him to a detailed study of fermentations and to the inevitable conclusion that living organisms were involved. Others, notably Schwann and Cagniard-Latour, had already reached this conclusion but were overshadowed by Liebig and his insistence on the centrality of chemistry and physics. Liebig was the father of biochemistry, and for that matter of food chemistry, but his enormous prestige delayed the development of microbiology. Nevertheless, Pasteur’s experimental results, and his demonstration of the effectiveness of pasteurisation, were conclusive. As has already been noted, by the end of the 19th century pasteurisation of milk had begun in Europe and the United States, important work on yeasts had been carried out in the Carlsberg brewery in Denmark, the American work on spoilage of canned foods had been published and dairy microbiology was beginning in the United States. Microbiology was taking its place alongside chemistry as an important element of food science, but understandably the heavy emphasis within this new science was on medical aspects; it was many years before it could be said to be firmly established in food science and technology. Food microbiology is of two parts: first, that which deals with products dependent for their being on specific micro-organisms—cheese, yogurt, bread, alcoholic beverages, sauerkraut, and many cured sausages. This is traditional biotechnology. The second part is that which concentrates on the quality of the raw material, sanitation in the factory, and the protection of all food products and of the public from spoilage organisms and pathogens. With the exception of some brewers who early recognised the importance of a better knowledge of their yeasts, the food industry continued with its traditional well-tried methods: that is, if certain procedures were faithfully followed, the product would be safe. Of this philosophy the canners are, perhaps, the most striking example. They relied implicitly upon specific retorting conditions of time and temperature (that is, steam pressures) that had been established throughout the industry largely by trial and error to ensure the biological stability of given products in given can sizes. Until the early years of the 20th century it was more a technique than a technology, and science did not enter into it. Nor for that matter did the Australian canning industry progress much beyond that technique until the 1940s. For a long time hygiene and sanitation were not really understood, though such men as Joseph Harding, the cheesemaker, and Bleasdale, in his advice to Australian winemakers, recognised the need for cleanliness. Successively, good food producers in the new land accepted the importance of clean raw materials and good hygiene in the factory. But few producers employed microbiologists before the latter part of the 20th century, and the study in universities of food microbiology per se, or indeed of any industrial microbiology, was rare if not unknown.


Australian Food Science Australian science began with Sir Joseph Banks, who, first by his own hand on the Endeavour voyage, and then by encouragement, instruction and the employment of collectors, stimulated study of the biology of the strange new environment. The thrust of this early science was to collect, describe, classify and record in the hope and expectation that usefulness, especially to the mother country, would follow. As exciting as the wonders of botany and zoology of this new land were, those of the new heavens were just as enticing, and Governor Brisbane, an accomplished amateur astronomer, initiated the Australian study of the southern skies. Government appointments and observatories followed in due course. In the early part of the 19th century, geology was a new science. It came to Australia in 1839 in the person of the Rev. WB Clarke who became a field geologist of note and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). Embryo scientific societies arose and in due course spawned the various colonial royal societies, which continue to this day, and gave rise to museums in the capital cities. Science in Australia to the middle of the 19th century was devoted to the study and understanding of the natural world of Terra Australis Incognita. To this time there was nothing in Australia that could be said to be food science. Practical engineers erected the mills, breweries, and meat canning factories; installed the mills, centrifugals, and vacuum pans in the sugar industry; ensured the supply of steam where that was required; and, late in the 19th century, installed and operated the refrigeration equipment. Some of the advances derived from shrewd engineering observations, but there is no evidence of any understanding of the scientific basis of the chemical engineering principles which, applied to food, are important in, say, vacuum concentration, mass and momentum transfer, and the texture of the final product. In the absence of other appropriate professionals the medical societies discussed food, and, via the Lancet, Hassall’s work would have been known in Australia. In the 1850s Sidney Gibbons was practising as a public analyst. It is, perhaps, not altogether coincidental that at this time he joined with the Rev. Dr JI Bleasdale to form a Microscopical Society. But Victoria had a government analyst. Analysis In the 1850s, drawn by the gold discoveries, a number of scientific men arrived in Victoria. Dr John Maund, a physician, was one of them. He came for health reasons and for a few years was prominent in the Melbourne medical fraternity, but he was also qualified in chemistry and became Victoria’s first government analyst. His most important work was water analysis for the Yan Yean scheme, but he also published on the analysis of Plenty River water and on grain, flour and Victorian mineral water. Maund died in 1858 and was succeeded as government analyst by Dr John Macadam, a man of many parts and, as a member of the Victorian Parliament, responsible in 1863 for the Act to Prevent the Adulteration of Articles of Food and Drink. This was based on the English Act of 1860 and failed for the same reasons—essentially, lack of analysts and reliable analytical methods. Macadam, however, was apparently too busy to carry on Maund’s work with the Yan Yean water, because in 1858 William Johnson, who also had come to Melbourne earlier in the 1850s, was employed to continue it, and in 1866 following Macadam’s death, he too became government analyst. In 1875 the flood of beer samples in response to the charges of adulteration swamped the government laboratory and Johnson was obliged to enlist the help of consulting chemists of which there were several others besides Sidney Gibbons practising in Melbourne. CR Blackett was one of them, and although his main interest was pharmacy, in whose organisation he was prominent, he became government analyst in 1887. On his death in 1902 he was succeeded

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by his son-in-law, Percy Wilkinson, whose work on preservatives was important in the moves towards a Pure Food Act. Of course, Victoria was not alone. New South Wales also had government laboratories as became evident in the course of George Peacock’s struggle to establish the credentials of fruit pulp as an intermediate in jam making. The Rev. Dr Bleasdale, in addition to his interest in oenology, had studied optics, and owned an excellent microscope. He taught science at Saint Patrick’s College in Melbourne, for eight years did the histological work for the Melbourne Hospital, and did Macadam’s government microscopical work for him. His work with wines has already been described. In it Bleasdale practised such science as was available, but his laboratory also gave him the opportunity to examine preserved meats. Here he conducted a sensory evaluation for the Medical Society of Victoria, and his close association with the several exhibitions held between 1866 and 1873 enabled him to play a big part in the assessment of Harrison’s cold bank for refrigerated storage of meat. But, although Bleasdale observed ‘drip’ as the frozen meat thawed, there is no evidence of food science in this, rather an interest in the utility of the system. The Victorian experience in the last quarter of the 19th century is a good indication of the growing maturity of food analysis in Australia. All four volumes of the Food Journal were received in the Melbourne Public Library in 1874, and they carried many papers on the analysis of food with the evidence of the adulteration that at the time was causing something of a turmoil in Britain. This, perhaps, stimulated J Cosmo Newbery, a Harvard graduate, and his young Australian assistant, Frederic Dunn, to undertake a series of analyses of confectionery, milk, and tea. Their laboratory was at the Industrial and Technological Museum (now the Science Museum), which published their results. These showed clearly that milk was being watered, that 64 out of 69 samples of yellow and orange sweets were coloured with lead chromate, and that tea was being ‘faced’: that is, spent tea leaves were being sent to China, coloured green with a mixture of Prussian Blue and turmeric, and re-exported for resale as green tea. The Argus republished these results, and in the absence of legislative teeth the outcry that followed virtually put a stop to the lead colours. Watering of milk was a little more difficult to deal with because a constant milk composition was assumed; because the ‘standard’ figures were too inflexible, innocent men must have suffered (see Chapter 10). The practice of ‘facing’ spent tea leaves was curbed by the Tea Act of 1881, and the watering of milk also was controlled by legislation. In 1884 Dunn became a public analyst and figured in many prosecutions as the authorities tried to curb adulteration. His laboratories continued as Dunn, Son and Stone for more than a century. From the mid-1870s food adulteration was a live issue and many products including aerated waters, beers, bread, biscuits, chocolate, coffee, preserves, mustard, vinegar, sauces, and margarine were analysed by the public analysts, Gibbons, Blackett, Dunn and RWE MacIvor. Preservatives, boric and salicylic acids, were being detected in a number of products at the end of the 19th century and became a public health issue, but the limitations of chemists were apparent from Hamlet’s inability to recognise the microbiological nature of the problem in Peacock’s jam (Chapter 7). From the middle of the 19th century, on the Victorian evidence alone, food (and water) analysis was well established in Australia; but, apart possibly from the Yan Yean water analysis, it was not concerned with control, but with food adulteration. To a limited extent, perhaps, chemical controls were practised in the wine industry from the mid-19th century, but the wine men lived by sensory assessment though Bleasdale’s strictures throw doubt on this. There is no doubt, however, that for wines and preserved and refrigerated meats, Bleasdale organised independent sensory assessment sessions. In the latter half of the 19th century the polarimeter was introduced into the beet sugar


industry in Germany, and was quickly taken up elsewhere by cane sugar mills, including the Australian ones. The introduction of chemical control into the Australian sugar industry by mill chemists guided from a central laboratory has been described in Chapter 6, but the sugar industry by its very nature is essentially a closed system. Control in the dairy industry became possible when the Babcock test was introduced in 1892, but it took time to become general. Research Walton and Kottman carried out applied research in the sugar industry, but sugar was not so much a food as the first chemically supported manufacture of a pure substance that just happened to be an important sweetener and constituent of formulated food products. Although De Bavay’s research was directed towards a predictable and controlled brewing process, he carried out basic work with yeasts. He also isolated and, for the first time in the world, used a pure culture top-fermenting yeast. He was the acknowledged Australian expert on yeasts, and his work was recognised overseas. In the 1890s William James Farrer* and Frederick Bickell Guthrie collaborated in studies which laid the foundations of a distinct branch of food science and technology, cereal science. Farrer was a Cambridge mathematics graduate who came to Australia for his health and, after a period as a surveyor, became a wheat breeder almost by accident. At that time rust was a scourge of Australian wheat fields, and Farrer wrote to the Australasian making suggestions for finding a rust-proof wheat. He took up the challenge of derogatory comments and succeeded. The rusts are fungi, and Farrer identified stem rust (Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritica) as that most responsible for loss of yield. In spite of press scepticism, he bred wheats resistant to it. There is no evidence until 1905 that he was aware of Mendel’s researches in genetics, but, in fact, he applied Mendelian principles in his work. In the 1890s Farrer joined forces with Guthrie to improve the quality of wheat. Guthrie, another Englishman, had been born in Mauritius and studied in Britain and Germany. In 1890 he came to Australia as a demonstrator in chemistry in the University of Sydney, and in 1892 he was appointed chemist to the New South Wales Department of Agriculture where he soon began his seminal work. By using Hungarian ‘toy-mill’ rolls three inches in diameter and only two and a half inches long, and by consulting with the milling industry, Guthrie developed a laboratory flour mill and techniques which, with the measurement of chemical properties, enabled him to predict from a mere handful of wheat how it would behave commercially. The laboratory milling was tedious and, according to Wrigley, Farrer and Guthrie in Records of the Australian Academy of Science, ‘further tests were devised to examine flour yield and colour, gluten content and gluten strength, ash, water absorption, “total and soluble albuminoids” (protein), and finally, actual baking quality, for which 100 g flour was needed.’ Thus, Guthrie needed only a few ounces from a small experimental plot to establish the milling and baking properties of a new variety of wheat. This saved Farrer the time and tedium of growing enough wheat for full milling trials, and greatly accelerated the rate at which new varieties could be developed. Together, Farrer the wheat breeder and Guthrie the chemist established quality parameters for wheat, and Farrer bred wheats to conform with them; but, without Guthrie, Farrer could never have made the progress he did. It was a fruitful collaboration, and at the time unique. It was the beginning of cereal science. One hundred years after Guthrie’s 1898 flour mill, a quarter-scale reproduction of it was built in Sydney, as described by CH Hopkins, F Bekes and CW Wrigley. * Unrelated to the author, except possibly remotely. The ancestors of both were Westmorland farming stock.

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Farrer did not stop at quality. Influenced by the drought of the mid-1890s, he bred wheats suited to southern Australia’s drier inland ares, and emphasised plant morphology and agricultural practices designed to reduce water losses. He was mindful, too, of the yield of wheat per acre, and his most successful variety, Federation, was a high-yielding wheat grown, not only in Australia, for many years after his death. Guthrie’s methods made it easier to compare wheats from different sources and to study factors known or suspected to influence the quality of wheats and flours. He recognised the importance not only of gluten content but also of the relative proportions of gliadin and glutenin to dough ‘strength’, and he related what he found to milling practice. Guthrie’s work continued after Farrer’s death in 1906, and quite early he was relating quality characterisitics to the requirements of the export market. His experimental methods were copied in other Australian states, and his unique partnership with Farrer gained for both of them the respect and gratitude of wheat breeders and chemists in other parts of the world. The emphasis of Farrer and Guthrie’s work was technological rather than biological, but it was sound science. Many techniques, for instance in the manufacture of continental sausages, were carried over into the 20th century, but already the scientific study of food had begun and technologies based on scientific principles were emerging.

The 1880–1900 watershed For Australian food science and technology the last quarter of the 19th century was a watershed as major changes in the technology of several basic commodities occurred practically simultaneously with significant contributions to food science. The critical technological developments in these years were the: • • • • • • •

roller milling of cereals, specifically, wheat separation of milk pasteurisation of milk and cream refrigeration of meat and dairy products cool storage of fruit introduction of mechanical dehydration introduction of bottom fermentation into the brewing industry.

The critical scientific developments were the: • introduction of science into the sugar industry • research by de Bavay into yeast • development of cereal science by Farrer and Guthrie. Almost all these advances were introduced into the Australian food industry in the 1880s. Knox’s introduction of science into the sugar industry began early in the 1870s but continued into the 1880s. Farrer’s cereal work began in the 1880s and came to fruition in the 1890s. Most of the sugar science, roller milling, separation and pasteurisation of milk, and bottom fermentation were imported and applied by local technologists, but all the other advances were Australian. Roller milling was segment specific and, as already noted, the transition was virtually completed within 25 years. However, separation, pasteurisation and refrigeration, especially the last, were quickly seen to be applicable in many segments of the food industry. Though refrigeration was developed for the meat industry, dairy products and fruit benefited before the end of the 19th century. The salting of meat, a practice already damaged by canning, was doomed by refriger-


ation. Canned meat exports, already suffering from American competition, were further reduced by refrigeration but were rescued by the demands of the Western Australian goldfields and the Boer War. However, the canning industry had a life of its own as was already evident in canned jams and other fruit products. Although it was only slowly adopted and has flourished only in the 20th century, mechanical dehydration was invented in 1886 specifically for Tasmanian apples. Brewing gained from the introduction of bottom fermentation but this, too, was industry specific. However, this same industry contributed de Bavay’s yeast research to the scientific developments of these fruitful years. Knox had already introduced scientific control into the sugar industry, and his staff developed the concepts of yield and mass balance based on the dayto-day measurements of the major constituent of interest. The dairy industry followed the same path with the Babcock test, and the development overseas of the Kjeldahl method for nitrogen offered the meat and dairy industries similar opportunities. At the National Museum of Victoria in the previous decade the work of Newbery and Dunn on confectionery colours, the watering of milk and the facing of tea had demonstrated the value and increasing efficiency of chemical analysis in the control of the adulteration of food. Continuing analyses to the end of the 19th century of samples taken from the market place paved the way for the introduction of food regulations early in the next century. But the major Australian contribution to food science was the laying of the foundations of cereal science by Farrer and Guthrie. Altogether, these years saw critical developments practically simultaneously in several specific segments of the food industry and the introduction of technologies applicable across commodity boundaries. Even more important, there was the glimmer of the realisation that science had much to offer what later came to be called food technology.

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Into the 20th century

Farrer and Guthrie, by their unique collaboration, have been acclaimed as the founders of cereal science, but they must also be put alongside Russell, Prescott and Underwood and the American dairy scientists of the 1890s in the forefront of the founders of food science and technology. It is generally acknowledged that such studies first emerged as a discipline in America, and RL Hall has identified 10 American pioneers of which the oldest, Prescott, was born in 1872. Half of them were born in the 20th century, and the foundations of protein, fat, carbohydrate and vitamin chemistry were laid before they were born or while they were still children. However, the integration of such knowledge, into the study of food systems and the processing of them, was the stuff of food science, and that came years later. Accepting the Pasteurian pronouncement that there is no such thing as applied science, only science and the applications of science, Hall spoke only of food science, and, of the latter half of the 20th century, there is much truth in it. However, we have seen how food technology ran ahead of science, but that by the end of the 19th century the application of science to the older technologies was beginning. Australian reaction to the changing emphasis is the subject of this chapter.

Retrospect The early colonists brought with them, and installed in the new land, the old village technologies with which they were familiar. Subsequent developments were established in Australia in three ways, by the importation of ideas, technology, and people. First, brewing and winemaking, known to be possible, were improvised by amateurs. Then the Sydney Salting Company, denied the importation of a technology, developed for itself the idea on which it was based. Importing the technology was not an option for Sizar Elliott, but he knew meat could be canned; he had seen the products, and he worked out the method for himself. Second, in the early days milling technology was imported from Britain, and from the 1820s so was the brewing technology. The Josephs, the Dangars, Tindal, Ritchie and their associates imported the British meat canning technology in toto. Sugar boiling came from the Caribbean, and roller milling was imported from Hungary via Britain at first and then directly. The milk separator was Swedish, pasteurisation French, the Babcock test American, and the cheesemakers practised English, American and Swiss methods. Irrigation and dried fruits were, so to speak, brought from California by two Canadians. The later winegrowers used European varieties of grapes and European methods and habits. They even imported, unwittingly and unwanted, the vine disease, Phylloxera. Bleasdale, who brought his technology with him from Portugal, did his

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best to convince winegrowers to adapt to Australian conditions, but to little avail; his technology was largely wasted. Though others had taken tentative steps, lager brewing was brought from New York by the Fosters and their German brewer. Third, the Australian advances, acknowledged overseas as such, arose from local needs, and all were made by ‘imported’ people, immigrants: mechanical ice-making by Harrison, a Scot; refrigerated storage and terrestrial transport by Nicolle, French, and Mort, English; mechanical dehydration by Spawn, an American. Knox, an Englishman born in Denmark, brought Walton, a Scot, and Kottman, a German, who pioneered the chemical control of sugar milling and boiling. De Bavay, who, initially by his work on yeasts, bestrode the Australian brewing industry, was Belgian. Farrer and Guthrie, both English, developed cereal science which was technological in thrust and devoted to adapting wheat to the harsh Australian environment. And the innovations of Ritchie, another Englishman, postponed the collapse of the Australian canned meat export trade of the 1870s. One should not be surprised at the absence of the Australian born. From the 1850s there was a stream of able, educated people to the Australian colonies. The mere fact that they came suggests enterprise above the average. Australians, on the other hand, were at a disadvantage. Travel, and therefore exposure to new ideas and developments, was difficult and time-consuming, and educational opportunites were new and few. It was not really until the 20th century that chemists, who were the core of Australian food science and technology for half a century, began to become involved with food production and processing. It is fair to say that the influence of the Australian born and educated on what became food science and technology only became evident from the 1920s.

Prospect As the new century opened, the universities were offering degrees in chemistry, and technical and agricultural colleges were consolidating in south-eastern Australia. Some of the technical colleges were schools of mines, but interest in the chemistry—specifically, the chemical analysis—of food was strong if only because of public concern over adulteration, and there was a consequential increase in the number and activity of public analysts. In 1898 a sub-branch of the London-based Society of Chemical Industry (SCI) was formed in Sydney. This was followed on 12 June 1900 by the formation in Melbourne of the Society of Chemical Industry of Victoria (SCIV). Though modelled on the English society, the SCIV was independent, the first independent chemical society in Australia, and it drew its membership (140 in the first four months) from industry, academe, and public analysts. Legislation providing for the appointment of the last by local government authorities had increased their numbers, and in the absence of any means of assessing such people the SCIV took the initiative. However, in 1906 the University of Melbourne established a Diploma of Analytical Chemistry; and there quickly followed a Diploma of Public Health that called for competence in the analysis of air, water and food. In 1917 the (later Royal) Australian Chemical Institute was founded and assumed responsibility for the competence of all chemists. In the meantime, the influence of the public analysts and the interest in food was reflected in the subjects discussed at SCIV meetings. In 1900 HA Danne presented a paper on the measurement of moisture in butter, and the next year black spot in apples and its prevention was discussed. In succeeding years members lectured on beet and cane sugars, the manufacture of starch, pasteurised milk, and the fermentation industries. In 1915 Professor WA Osborne


lectured on vitamins, at that time a very new concept, and in 1922 he combined with Associate Professor WJ Young to present a paper on the physiology and biochemistry of milk and milk products. Later in the decade Young himself lectured twice on food topics. The SCIV maintained its interest in the science and technology of food until other organisations dedicated to the study of food and food processing were formed after the Second World War. In Brisbane in 1908 SW Rich gave a well-supported series of lectures to the Queensland Master Bakers’ Association. Those who attended, both master bakers and operatives, were keen to know more about the theoretical background to what they did every day. The royal societies in the various colonies, the SCI in Sydney, the SCIV, and the Australian Chemical Institute all catered for a generality of interests each within a broad framework. The establishment in 1900 in Queensland of the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations (BSES) recognised the need for scientific support for an industry of economic importance. The Queensland Government’s role in legislating for the BSES rightly or wrongly set the pattern for Australian industry generally, and for food science and technology in particular. It was half a century before the food companies acted collaboratively, but the stage was being set for Australian participation in the development of food science and technology.

Performance Technology The old village technologies had gone through their transformation in the last two decades of the 19th century, and they entered the new one more or less as they were going to be until the latter half of it. The technology of roller milling had swiftly become established; the subsequent changes in the industry have been in organisation, control and background science. In the first two decades of the 20th century, lager brewing, adopted by the Melbourne brewers led by de Bavay, spread to the other states; although top fermentation did not disappear, by 1939 Australian brewing technology had moved strongly to bottom fermentation. Refrigeration and pasteurisation had been accepted, and closed glass-enamelled vessels introduced. Improvements were made in filtration and stabilisation, the Crown seal bottle appeared in 1914, and control laboratories were being installed and R&D begun. In 1910 the first compressed yeast for the baking industry was made at the Shamrock brewery in Abbotsford. The bare statement hides the benefit this brought to the baking industry in eventually guaranteeing a uniform, reliable and easily handled raw material. From 1927 the Carlton and United Breweries (CUB) brewed with pure yeast cultures and went to great lengths in the plant to protect them from contamination. CUB had been formed in 1907 by an amalgamation of six breweries, and in the inter-war years, driven by the economic depression and improved distribution, there was further rationalisation. Aerated water technology had, in essence, been established in the 19th century. The export of wines, mainly dry or table wines, to Britain from 1895 to the First World War was steady around an average of 740 000 gallons per year. After the war there was an expansion as returned soldiers entered winegrowing and local demand for dessert and fortified wines grew. Exports were promoted by the federal government’s Wine Export Bounty Act of 1924, and the British Government’s preferential duty on all Empire wines the next year. The result was the export in 1927 of 4.2 million gallons, and bonded stocks increased into the mid-1930s. Unfortunately, much wine coming out of bond was found to have spoiled, and this led the Wine

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Oversea Marketing Board (later the Australian Wine Board) to seek help from the University of Adelaide. The problem was referred to JCM Fornachon, a university bacteriologist. He showed it was due to Lactobacilli spp. that could tolerate the high alcohol, proliferate at relatively low pH, and thrive on nutrients derived from the autolysis of residual yeast in the lees if the wine were left too long in contact with them. Fornachon’s success was the beginning of organised industry interest in R&D. In 1936 at Roseworthy Agricultural College, AR Hickinbotham, a competent chemist, had begun a programme of chemical investigations of winemaking under local conditions, and in the late 1930s Fornachon began a course of wine bacteriology at the college. In 1938 he was awarded a travelling scholarship for overseas training and was away until August 1940, but in his absence FH Hooper continued work on spoilage problems. Given that pasteurisation was slow to be generally adopted, the dairy industry after the revolution of the 1880s and 1890s—separation, refrigeration, the Babcock test and pasteurisation— settled down to an almost steady state until the latter part of the 20th century. Almost. In 1925 the Kraft Walker Cheese Co. introduced processed cheese, and some 10 years later developed a novel method for drying whey for use as a stock feed and, in one form, as an ingredient for specialty breads. Unfortunately, Australian dairy products generally were of poor quality. In 50 Years of Food Research, Bastian and her co-authors explain: ‘Factories experienced recurring problems with the failure of cheese starters and outbreaks of serious chemical and bacterial taints in butters. Exported butter and cheese drew heavy criticism and could not fetch prices comparable with the New Zealand products, let alone those of such premier exporters as Denmark and Ireland’ (p. 64). Nor did the co-operatives seem to worry too much about poor quality so long as they were paid, and it was not until the 1930s that a start was made to tackle the problem of taints. Because of ‘drip’, refrigeration had temporarily failed to solve the problem of satisfactory Australian meat exports to Britain. The solution was scientific and lay in the future, but there was a respite during the First World War when the British Government preferred frozen to chilled meat. Refrigeration, however, had proved itself in terrestrial cold storage and in the brewing, dairy and fresh fruit industries. Through the observations of Clarence Birdseye in North America, it was soon to usher in quick-frozen foods; but they were slow in coming because they depend on the frozen-food chain from producer to home, and domestic refrigeration made slow progress through the 1920s and 1930s. Ice cream, yes, in unit serves and the powders of yesteryear for home preparation by those who had refrigerators; but Australia had to wait until 1940 for quick-frozen vegetables, and local production of them was delayed until 1949. Of the remaining technologies, heat processing, that is, canning, was revolutionised in the first decade of the 20th century; and sugar boiling continued to progress, especially in the interwar years. At the turn of the century, John Bartram and Sons in Melbourne were a good example of Australian food export activity. They were agents for the Central Queensland Meat Export Company and exported canned and frozen meat; but they specialised in dairy products, cheese, bacon, hams, and butter packed in cooled rooms into cans made on the premises and fitted with key-opening lids. Their markets were in Asia from Japan to India and across the Indian Ocean to Africa. In 1910 Fred Walker began to pack Cheddar cheese, ground with sodium sulphite to preserve it (Red Feather brand), into cans and pottery jars. It was a makeshift product that had its day and its devotees, but it disappeared in 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World War. In the same period, Edgell in New South Wales began to can vegetables, and Jones in Tasmania expanded fruit canning. Whereas Australian meat canning languished towards the end of the 19th century, it received a fillip with orders for the British army in the Boer War in South Africa.


Canning was already becoming more important for the heat processing of fruit, and in the United States its importance for fruit, corn and vegetables had, as already noted, led to the fundamental microbiological understanding of it. In one sense the technology of canning is concerned only with the product and its biological stability divorced from the can and its making. In another it must be concerned with the can because the tinplate and the rate of making, filling and sealing the cans may all influence the quality of the final product. Throughout the 19th century cans were made by hand with the gradual introduction of mechanical aids to stamp out lids and bottoms, roll the bodies ready for assembling, and, by rotating platforms, move the can round the handheld soldering irons as top and bottom were soldered on. But the fundamental limitation was the speed of the men with the soldering irons. That someone would seek to mechanise canmaking was inevitable. John Heine from Devon arrived in Sydney in 1882 via New Zealand and at once began to manufacture food processing equipment, for example a brine pump for salting beef, and eventually canning and canmaking machinery. In 1892 the Royal Agricultural Society of New South Wales awarded him a silver medal for a complete fruit-canning plant, and by the turn of the century he had perfected his first automatic body-forming and side-soldering machine. It was, of course, resented; but millions of cans of condensed milk, butter, beef, and molasses were shipped to the British forces in South Africa and this demand ensured the employment of all who could solder a can. Heine’s first canmaking machine was relatively crude, but improvements led in 1907 to his Model 4G, which White describes as ‘highly adaptable, simple to operate and so robust they were practically indestructable’ (p. 43). Many continued to perform for 50 or more years—in fact, right up until 1946 for certain classes of pack, the Ross River works at Townsville used a design patented in 1850. White also says that ‘until 1938 Swift used the old type soldered can, substantially the same in design and manufacture as that used in all Australian meat canneries for the previous fifty years. Then Swift switched to the sanitary can’ (p. 88). In 1900 George Gardner of Melbourne patented an automatic canmaking machine capable of delivering 60 to 70 side-seam soldered cans per minute, and Jabez Gadsden and John Bartram were packing butter in open-top cans. Gadsden’s was probably the first big line of open-top cans made in Australia, but butter was not processed after canning. Of these pioneers, Heine deserved greater success than he achieved. But they were all beaten to the ultimate prize, the development of a method of hermetically sealing double-seamed lids crimped onto food cans, by three German migrants in New York: Max Ams, a canner; his son, Charles, a graduate chemist, who developed a sealing compound; and Julius Brenzinger, an engineer. Together they solved the problem of automatically applying the seal to the lids and invented a new and more efficient double-sealing machine. The Sanitary Can Company took it up in the first years of the 20th century and, with failures along the way, the open-top can, with Ams machinery, finally proved itself. For the first time, cans of food could be hermetically sealed without using solder to fasten the tops and bottoms; moreover, the old-style can, with the lid in place and a small hole through which to fill it, became obsolete. At first the new cans were used for fruit and processed at 212°F (100°C), but in 1908 the Sanitary Can Company was sold to the American Can Company, and these cans were soon being used under pressure in retorts. The old cans lingered on in the United States until the 1920s, and, as has been seen, rather longer in Australia. When was the open-top sanitary can introduced into this country? In 1910 Henry Jones imported automatic filling, closing and cooking equipment for his Hobart factory. Was this the

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beginning of open-top canning in Australia? Perhaps, but in 1908 Foggit Jones was canning ham pâté in 4 oz drawn cans which must have been hermetically sealed, and in 1910 Fred Walker’s cans of Red Feather cheese were similarly sealed. One thing seems to be evident, the canned food sent to Britain during the First World War could scarcely have been packed without the opentop can—or steam pressure retorts. The brine bath processing technology endured in Australia for 50 years. It will be recalled that in the 1870s the short-lived meat processing factories at Oakey Creek in Queensland and Ballarat, Victoria, used retorts; but modern retorting can probably be dated from the 1890s when the technology was installed at the rabbit cannery at Compton, near Mount Gambier in South Australia. This factory continued into the 1920s by which time retorting had become well established. Retorts are pressure vessels in which the canned food can be processed at, say, 240–250°F (116–121°C) by steam under pressure. The higher temperature accelerates heat penetration thus shortening the processing time and reducing heat damage of the product. Obviously, time and temperature of retorting will vary with the product being processed and the size of the can, and in the United States the National Canners Association (NCA), founded in 1907, set up a laboratory in 1913 to establish the processing conditions for different products in different-sized cans. This was greatly facilitated by the development of thermocouples, which permitted the observer to track temperature changes in retorts and individual cans, and led to a number of mathematical expressions that enabled canners to select safe conditions of time and temperature for their various products. From this arose the convention of quoting the ‘F value’ for the conditions required to ensure the microbiological stability (commercial sterilisation) of a product. For example, an F value of 6 is the combination of time and temperature required to inactivate bacterial spores that would require 6 minutes at 250°F (121°C) for their inactivation. A low bacterial load in the raw material is obviously desirable in order to avoid overprocessing and consequent loss of quality. A series of NCA bulletins advising canners on these matters became the standard of reference for canners everywhere, including Australia. But canned products in Australia up to 1940 were, with all due respect to Edgell and his emerging vegetable-canning business, essentially meat, jam and fruit, and the systematic study of canning had been neglected. The sugar industry moved into the 20th century with the foundations of modern milling and refining already well laid and the BSES established. In 1924, the Queensland Government sent two men overseas to study sugar technology. One, HW Kerr, was an agricultural specialist who later became director, the other was Norman Bennett, and on his return in 1928 the Division of Mill Technology was established. It concentrated in the first instance on encouraging co-operation between the mills, the standardisation of methods and equipment, and the interchange of data on performance. This last led in 1929 to the Mutual Control Scheme by which mills exchanged factory operating data. But the industry had not waited for the BSES. Cane shredding was in use at least by 1914; and a hammer mill, the Searby shredder, which increased throughput by 20%, was being used at Tully by the mid-1920s. Tully and Babinda were new mills and employed the latest mill technology. From 1930 the BSES offered the industry, through its Division of Mill Technology, testing services and the calibration of laboratory equipment; but it also carried out R&D such as studies in fractional liming in the clarification of juices, sugar boiling and vacuum pan design. In the 1930s the bureau pioneered the design of a mains operated meter for the continous measurement of pH under factory conditions. This broke new ground and the manufacture of the unit began in 1939. However, a pH recorder had been in use elsewhere, and in 1937 the Kalamia mill


at Ayr was the first to install a controller in the factory circuit. The now universal glass electrode was some years away, and it used an antimony electrode which, as any new development, had to be nursed. Such controllers, using glass electrodes, are now commonplace, but the principles are the same. In 1936 the bureau brought a Dutch sugar engineer, Ir Eigenhuis, from Java, and in the 1937 slack season a group of chemists from the mills worked with him at BSES on the chemistry of the cane fibre, its calorific value, and the application of it to bagasse boiler design. In 1929 the Queensland (now Australian) Society of Sugar Cane Technologists was founded. It was the first specifically food-oriented society in the country and, by providing a forum in which the engineers and chemists of the industry can meet and exchange ideas, has been very influential in the technological development of the industry. From the records of its annual conferences it can be seen that Australian mills were quick to adopt technological advances as they became available. Automatic speed control was developed by J Killer, a Queensland mill engineer of some note, who also developed the Killer system of clarification/maceration to do away with the need for a mud filter. The CSR pressure feed of cane and bagasse to the mills was perfected in the 1930s and was universally adopted in Australia and by some overseas countries as well. In the same years the ‘dirty top’ roll, which improved the grip on the cane, was introduced. Discussion of the relative merits of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ maceration was further evidence of vigorous innovation. Science The food analysis that flowered late in the 19th century continued into the 20th. Walton and Kottman and de Bavay had shown what research could do for their companies, and their results flowed into their respective industries, but the aim of Farrer and Guthrie’s government-sponsored research was always the betterment of a whole industry. It was inevitable that, on Federation, sensible people realised that problems with the export of food were not confined within state boundaries. Bastian and her co-authors report that ‘those concerned with the food industry were amongst the strongest voices urging the need for the Commonwealth to sponsor scientific research, either by undertaking research itself through a national institute or by acting as a coordinator of investigations carried out in the State Government Departments and the universities’ (pp. 3–4). In 1911 a combined effort to solve the problem of bitter pit in apples began, but after four years it was discontinued. That was, however, a beginning. In 1916 an Advisory Council of Science and Industry was formed, to be followed in 1920 by the Institute of Science and Industry and finally, in 1926, by the foundation of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), now the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). In the meantime, industry had not been entirely idle. In 1922, FWJ Clendinnen at the Carlton brewery began a line of chemists distinguished in brewing chemistry to which he himself contributed significantly by his work with wort proteins and haze control. From 1923 CP Callister in Fred Walker and Co., later the Kraft Walker Cheese Company, developed Vegemite® from basic studies on the autolysis of brewers’ yeast, and in 1924 CSR set up a central research laboratory. From 1925 Callister carried out pioneering chemical and microbiological studies on cheese as he sought to establish the factors most related to successful cheese processing. His science doctorate from the University of Melbourne was the first such higher degree awarded by an Australian university for studies in food science. In making his submission he was greatly encouraged and supported by Associate Professor of Biochemistry Dr WJ Young (from 1938 the first full Professor). In April 1926, at the first meeting of the new CSIR executive, food was one of the five subjects listed for research. Problems with export and domestic constraints of distance and the uneven

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distribution of population were seen to need urgent attention, and dairy manufacturing and food preservation, especially cold storage, were selected for study. Fundamental long-range research carried out by specialists was envisaged, but Australia lacked the specialists, so two promising young graduates were selected for training. JR Vickery was sent to the Low Temperature Research Station at Cambridge, and WJ Wiley to the National Institute for Research in Dairying, at Reading. In fact, work on ‘drip’, the quality problem of chilled meat from Australia, had begun in 1924 when Associate Professor Young had received a grant to study it. Vickery was among his research assistants. He prepared the slides for Young’s lecture to the SCIV, ‘Some Scientific Aspects of the Refrigeration of Meat’, on 26 March 1926 and was one of the co-authors of the first paper, published that same year, on the results of that work. Small wonder that he was chosen to go to Cambridge. He returned in 1931 to lead the Section of Food Preservation that in May 1940 became the CSIR Division of Food Preservation and Transport. Young continued meat studies until 1931 when they were transferred to the new CSIR section and established in Brisbane under WA Empey, another of Young’s students. Considerable progress was made, but the urgencies of war curtailed this work in 1939 and the full benefit to the Australian meat industry was delayed until after the war. From 1928 Young was closely involved with Professor LS Bagster’s Chemistry Department in the University of Queensland in detailed and successful studies of problems in the transport and ripening of bananas. In this he was assisted by FE Huelin and EW Hicks, who also went on to occupy senior positions in the Division of Food Preservation and Transport. Young’s work also included studies on the handling and preservation of citrus fruits, and contributions to work on fruit storage in Melbourne’s Victoria Dock cool stores. Wiley had returned from Reading and begun work on butter taints, and Young made laboratory space available for him, too. His encouragement and support of CP Callister in industry has already been noted. Vickery, in his article about Young, says, ‘William John Young was, perhaps, the first academic in Australia to take a continuing interest in what is now called food science and technology’. In 1931 when Vickery and Wiley returned, Australia was in the grip of the economic depression. Dairy work was postponed and Wiley was found accommodation in the Forestry Section to work on a butter taint blamed on the wood of the butter boxes. He solved the problem, but there was still no dairy section for him to lead. Vickery was luckier. His Food Preservation Section numbered eight, but its beef and fruit work was done in borrowed and shared laboratories, the first in the Cannon Hill abattoirs in Brisbane, and the second in Melbourne by courtesy of the Department of Agriculture and Professor Young. By July 1933 the meat group had succeeded in prolonging the life of chilled beef by holding it in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide. No one had done this before. With reduction in microbial load on the meat and of surface water activity by drying during chilling, and with low temperatures, it guaranteed the 60 days storage required. In 1936 an experimental shipment had reached Britain in good condition and transformed Australia’s meat trade. Fruit investigations centered on Tasmanian apples and pears going north and tropical fruits going south, and on the protection of citrus fruits from mould and cold injury. The logistical organisation was daunting, but it worked, and much was learnt. Early in 1938 the Food Preservation Section moved to laboratories in the Homebush abattoirs in Sydney. It was a mistake. The site was isolated and the conditions quite unsuitable for scientific work, but there it stayed until 1961, and there it became the core of food science in Australia, making key contributions to the technology as well.


The appointment, at the turn of the century, of dairy experts by the various colonial/state governments had engendered a sense of self-sufficiency that, with the conservatism of the industry, militated against early attempts to form a national institute of dairy research. The frustration of those trying to help the industry was summed up by Dr (later Sir David) Rivett, the Chairman of CSIR, whom Bastian et al. quote as follows: ‘ ...it is no use pretending that the problems of the industry are going to be solved by the establishment of a dairy research institute when we know perfectly well that in most of the States the industry has not yet proved itself willing to make use of the thoroughly established knowledge at its disposal’ (p. 67). It was a damning comment. After his successful solution of the butter box taint, Wiley had no alternative but to return to his former employer, the Queensland Department of Agriculture. But in 1937–39 he was back with CSIR for an 18-month assignment at the New Zealand Dairy Research Institute, Palmerston North, where he studied problems of interest to the Australian dairy industry. While he was there some extraordinary negotiations (detailed by Bastian et al., pp. 73–76) led to the formation, at last, in 1939 of a CSIR Dairy Research Section with Wiley in charge. It was just in time for a war. Late in time, the milling industry enlisted the help of science. Although the Kjeldahl method for the measurement of nitrogen (and thus protein) had been introduced in 1883 and was used by Guthrie, developments in cereal science were slow. Cereal chemistry was not taken seriously until the 1930s. As Moss says: ‘Prior to 1933 or thereabouts, work on cereals in Australia was confined to test milling, test baking and gluten washing in all of which the results were very dependent on equipment and method of procedure. Kjeldahl nitrogen tests were also carried out.’ However, in 1933 William Arnott and Co. appointed WBS Bishop to operate a laboratory to control their raw materials, especially flour, in their Sydney factory; and with the appointment of RA Bottomley in 1935, WS Kimpton and Sons in Melbourne became the first flour millers to set up a cereal laboratory. Both laboratories carried out investigational work as well as control of factory and mill procedures. In the same years, state departments of agriculture appointed their first cereal chemists, and in 1935 the first Brabender Farinograph in Australia came to the Arnotts laboratory. This instrument is a recording dough mixer that, under strictly controlled conditions, provides objective measurements of dough properties. It is a good example of technology running ahead of science even in the laboratory as it is one of several empirical instruments that have been developed especially to cope with the esoteric properties of cereal doughs and their constituents. On the outbreak of war the Australian food industry was export oriented. Milling had been modernised, and brewing improved by refrigeration and the work of de Bavay. The canning industry, especially jam and fruit, after benefiting from the drive of Henry Jones who died in 1926, was jogging along in a conservative way. Butter and cheese, products largely of farmer cooperatives, were simply not good enough. But after years of frustration by ‘drip’, signs that the problem could be solved were encouraging to meat exporters. A few individual food companies were prepared to back the application of science to their products and processes with control and R&D. Most encouraging of all, a federal government scientific organisation had been established with the firm intention of using the best science available for, among other things, solving Australia’s food export problems. Much was about to change.

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PART THREE: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY


Chapter 13

The 1940–60 watershed

In 1939 a gathering of Americans engaged in the scientific study of food and its processing decided to form a professional society which they called the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT). There is evidence that this initiative was stimulated by the success of the pre-existing Food Group of the [British] Society of Chemical Industry. Certainly, to that point the discipline mostly concerned in food studies had been chemistry, but IFT broke new ground in proclaiming the interdisciplinary nature of food science and technology. The institute’s instant success and the inclusion of those practising other disciplines in the study of food testified to the need for it. The period 1940–60 was a watershed, perhaps the watershed, in the development of food science and technology in Australia, and the American initiative contributed to it. The crucial period was the decade 1945–55.

The war years: 1940–45 In the same year as IFT was founded the Second World War began, and virtually overnight the Australian food industry changed from an emphasis on the consumer to the needs of the armed forces and the people of Britain. Some specialised consumer products disappeared as the production of canned foods to (Australian) Commonwealth Food Control specifications was given priority. The CSIR Section of Food Preservation was not at first involved. It was not consulted until something went wrong, and then only tardily as government departments ignored a pool of expertise that, if allowed, could have saved time and effort. The change came with the outbreak of war in the Pacific. Australia became an American base, and the Australian food industry, especially the canners, faced the manufacture of unfamiliar products to yet more unfamiliar specifications not only for Australian and American forces, but for British, Dutch and Free French as well. Unfortunately, a large number of canners whose methods were rooted in the 19th century were found wanting. Fortunately, CSIR staff and officers of the United States Quartermaster Corps (USQMC), many from academe and calling themselves food technologists, were on hand to help them. What the Americans, especially, had to offer was to many Australian manufacturers a new technical approach to food processing and an unexpected emphasis on nutritive value and quality control. The need for the latter was made dramatically obvious by an outbreak of botulism, and some deaths, caused by incorrectly processed beetroot. A few processors, such as the Kraft Walker Cheese Company and HJ Heinz in Victoria, Nestlé in New South Wales and Victoria, and Lever Associated Enterprises in New South Wales, were well-supported technically. In Kraft, especially, all production managers were professionally

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qualified chemists, there was a laboratory staff of about 15 (large for those days), and research in chemistry and microbiology was being carried out. Companies similarly supported did well. Others required help and the CSIR Division of Food Preservation and Transport (DFP), as it had then become, became even more active in its support of industry. To say that, however, is not to denigrate the companies that satisfactorily produced enormous quantities of canned meats; meat and vegetables; fruits; specialised composite ration packs; and unfamiliar American requirements such as canned chicken in aspic, chili con carne (with a spice mix flown in from the United States), bacon wrapped in Cellophane®, corned beef hash and skinless sausages. But Australia’s modern canning industry dates from that time. Although Edwards Patent Preserved Potatoes, a dehydrated product, was adopted by the Royal Navy in 1850 and later by the British army as well, dehydration between the wars was confined mainly to fruit. After 1940, however, the saving of shipping space by removal of most of the water became important and the countercurrent tunnel dehydration of vegetables was quickly established. There was no Australian dehydration industry but the food industry, with guidance, rose to the occasion: large quantities of dehydrated vegetables, mainly potato, cabbage, and carrot, dried to low moisture content and packed under nitrogen in four gallon cans, were produced for the armed forces. Case hardening, especially of the potatoes, made them, in the hands of the army cooks, rather less than satisfactory; and the poor appearance, odour, colour and texture of the reconstituted products emphasised the need for a better way of dehydrating vegetables. Improvements came later, however. In 1942 the government built vegetable dehydration factories, 32 in all, in the major vegetable-growing areas of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, and individual companies ran them. Though the technology was essentially American, at least one company found losses from the abrasive peeling of potatoes and carrots to be unsupportable and turned to lye peeling, which greatly increased yields. In the same company, trimming tables were redesigned and factory layout improved to the extent that the plant broke world records in output per man-hour. These factories served a valuable purpose in the circumstances and broadened the experience of Australian food technologists. Vegetable dehydration was essentially a wartime emergency enterprise, but a few factories did survive the war and became the basis of a broader vegetable-processing industry. Australian canners had no experience in canning fruit juices and low-acid vegetables, nor was the dairy industry able to cope with much other than butter, cheese, sweetened condensed milk and roller-dried milk powders. Fortunately, LJ Lynch of DFP had been studying orange juice and there was a pilot plant in the laboratories at Homebush. That was all, but from this modest beginning Australia began to supply canned and bottled orange juice primarily for the American forces, and in time Australia’s fruit juice industry emerged. In this period DFP staff spent much time and effort in servicing industry. The only research they carried out related to the canning and dehydration not only of vegetables but also of eggs and mutton mince, both of which were produced to fulfil armed service requirements though the mince was hardly successful. In Melbourne, the CSIR Section of Dairy Research (SDR) began work in 1940 with a very small staff. At first it was able to study butter taints and aspects of the relationship between the neutralisation of acid creams and the storage properties of the subsequent butter. Butter taints later became a key project as the Australian Army encountered problems with them, but these problems were overcome. The section rapidly became bogged down in problem solving for an industry confronted with unfamiliar difficulties, but was able to show that some traditional steps in buttermaking were unnecessary and could be eliminated to increase output. However,


the long-term basic research that Wiley had envisaged was postponed. Export of second-grade butter became a problem and the section developed butteroil which could be shipped unrefrigerated. Then, Dr (later Sir) Ian Wark, who was setting up a Division of Industrial Chemistry, appointed G Loftus Hills to look at dairy manufacturing. It had far-reaching consequences, but Loftus Hills, who had chemical engineering skills, joined forces with the SDR, and the butteroil for Britain and a tropical spread for the Army were both perfected. Early in 1946 Wiley resigned to become the Commonwealth dairy expert and the two groups were combined with Loftus Hills as Head of Section. On the periphery of food production, and important to it, were ingredients, by-products and equipment. In all of them Australia was forced to innovate. Thus, Kraft, fearful of an interruption to the import of cheese-emulsifying salts, manufactured sodium phosphate from bones at one of its country factories. This production was never commercial but was an insurance and, in the event, was not needed. Vitamin C was manufactured by CSR in Sydney, and fish liver oils high in vitamins A and D were produced in Melbourne by Nicholas Pty Ltd. BP lactose was in short supply and was successfully produced from whey, but, again, production did not survive the war. New demands were placed on the manufacturers of food processing machinery, and factory engineers responded with many innovations—especially, perhaps, in maintaining beyond their normal lives pieces of equipment available only from overseas. A case in point was the repair of a pitted glass-lined acid digestion vessel using dental techniques of undercutting and filling with specially developed acid-proof cement. The USQMC food technologists were based in Sydney and built up a strong rapport with the CSIR DFP staff at Homebush. From this it became very apparent that Australia, and the Australian food industry generally, had much to learn from American advances in food technology. As already noted, a few Australian companies had strong technical staffs and were active in food research. Bastian et al. judge that ‘the second world war gave to food research in Australia the first important outside stimulus after the initial call to bring scientific help to Australia’s ailing food export industry’ (p. 59). It did much more than that.

Response to challenge That there should be a rapid Australian response to the new professional need and opportunity—challenge is not too strong a word—was first recognised in Sydney. There was in fact not one response but several, some in parallel and some following rapidly in series. Coming as the war was ending or shortly after, they laid the foundations of the modern Australian food industry and established food science and technology in Australia as an integrated discipline in which Australians quickly showed that they could compete with the world’s best. Industry As already noted, the industry response was initiated by demand for quality control of production for American forces. Many were taken by surprise and turned to the Sydney Technical College for an appropriate training course. Drs RK Murpy and FH Reuter, in charge of Science and Organic Chemistry respectively, arranged a series of lectures under the aegis of the (later Royal) Australian Chemical Institute (ACI), and were astonished when about 200 attended the first lecture and a substantial number continued with the series of 15. Contemporaneously, Dr JR Vickery, Chief of DFP, had perceived the need and set up an internal education committee in his division. His staff gave several of the lectures and also contributed to later extension courses.

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To maintain the interest, the ACI agreed to the formation of a Food Group within the New South Wales branch. But it soon became apparent that food technology was an entity in itelf, and that many people who were interested in the technical aspects of food processing were not eligible for professional membership of the Chemical Institute. Moreover, these people, though the technical backbone of their companies, could not answer for the business interests. It was too early by several years to think of a separate professional identity for food technologists in Australia, nor would that have focused the industry. So the committee of the ACI Food Group talked with Sydney leaders of the industry with the result that in November 1945 the Food Technology Association (FTA) was founded as a unit within the New South Wales Chamber of Manufacturers. It was thus an association of companies, an industry organisation, but provision was made for others to be appointed to the management committee. This made it possible for Drs Murphy, Reuter and Vickery to be involved and to contribute their considerable expertise. A year later an enquiry from a Tasmanian company led to the formation within two years of similar associations in the chambers of manufacturers in Victoria and South Australia, and to the formation in 1949 of the Council of Australian Food Technology Associations (CAFTA). By 1953 there were food technology associations in all six states. The first move, though of a different kind, had already been made in the dairy industry. Though largely self-contained in much the same way as sugar technology, dairy technology is part of food technology. Its interests spread back to the farm in as much detail as those of any other segment of food science and technology, and dairy technologists have been active in that wider field. However, in March 1943 the Society of Dairy Technology had been formed in Britain, and, on the initiative of JH Bryant, a dairy machinery manufacturer, a number of technical people in the dairy industry met in Sydney on 22 May 1944 and formed the Australian Society of Dairy Technology (ASDT). Divisions had been formed in all six states within a year and eight local country sections within 10 years. The ASDT was something of a hybrid. It was a society, not a qualifying body nor a professional body in quite the same way as the Queensland Society of Sugar Cane Technologists. Membership was individual, not by company, and members ranged from farmers to managing directors and highly qualified scientists. But it was always heavily industry oriented as is evident from its ultimate metamorphosis into the Dairy Industry Association of Australia (DIAA) by amalgamation in 1986 with the Institute of Dairy Factory Managers and Secretaries. Its publication, the Australian Journal of Dairy Technology, first appeared in 1945 and grew into a respected journal. Educational institutions Training available at the end of the 19th century—the early training in dairy technology at the Hawkesbury Agricultural College in New South Wales and in oenology at Roseworthy Agricultural College in South Australia—was designed to produce buttermakers, cheesemakers and winemakers, and was demonstrably successful in doing so. But it included no tertiary courses, and by the end of the war the Australian need for tertiary-qualified food technologists had become abundantly clear. The Sydney lectures referred to above were the forerunners of food technology education in Australia, and in 1946 the FTA, as representative of employers, pressed for a tertiary course. In February 1947 the first such course in Australia, indeed in the British Commonwealth, began in the Sydney Technical College under the direction of Dr Reuter. It was a six-year part-time course recognised by the ACI for corporate membership and thus strongly chemically oriented. With the rapid evolution of tertiary education in New South Wales


at that time, the course moved to the New South Wales University of Technology, which soon became the University of New South Wales. Conditions were poor but industry supplied some necessary equipment on extended loan and CSIR and industry provided lecturers until the appointment of permanent staff in the late 1950s. In the meantime, however, Dr Reuter had been appointed associate professor in the School of Chemical Engineering, the degree course became available both full- and part-time, and provision was made for graduate work leading to MSc and PhD degrees. In 1951 the Hawkesbury Agricultural College began to teach a two-year Diploma in Food Technology. All this activity stimulated interest in Victoria, and a food technology course at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology was initiated in the early 1950s, approved in 1956 and begun in 1957. At first this too relied for help on technical people from the industry. In time other courses, for example that at the Queensland Agricultural College at Gatton, followed the Sydney initiative. Industry research and development During the war some companies had increased their practice of food research and original work had been published; and in the post-war years they increased their R&D activity still further. Thus, in the late 1930s DI Shew at Kraft, Allansford, had followed up Whitehead’s work on bacteriophage, the destroyer of cheese starters, and had developed in-factory methods for the protection of the starters without which there is no cheese. His work led in 1940 to the first isolated starter room in Australia and phage-free cultures. In 1946 he introduced New Zealand methods for combating phage in the factory, including the very effective programme of starter rotation, later promoted by CSIRO* and now in general use. With AJ Hodge of CSIR, Shew succeeded in 1947 in obtaining the first Australian electron microscope pictures of phage particles lysing starter organisms. In the early 1940s, the Kraft Research Laboratory carried out fundamental studies on processed cheese emulsions and on the kinetics of thiamin (vitamin B1) hydrolysis. The latter led among other things to the inclusion of the yeast extract, Vegemite®, as a vitamin supplement in emergency ration packs for the army and in diets recommended by paediatricians and baby health centres for young children. In the same period Miss Margaret Dick of Kraft introduced the microbiological method for the study of other B vitamins. Also at this time, Dr RA Bottomley at Kimptons in Melbourne used the thiochrome method for the first Australian study of vitamin B1 in wheats and flours, and EC Slater, of the Department of Health Nutrition Section in the Institute of Anatomy in Canberra, adapted the method for human and cows’ milks and a number of cereal products also. Shortly after, WBS Bishop at Arnotts in Sydney pioneered a different method for measuring the same vitamin in flours and biscuits. The Carr–Price method for measuring vitamin A (in fish liver oils) had been used in the University of Melbourne Chemistry Department in 1937, and the potentiometric method for vitamin C was used by Kraft on emergency rations during the war. CSR, Unilever, and Carlton and United Breweries (CUB) also had maintained their R&D activities during the war years. Many companies, most with the guidance of USQMC food technologists and CSIR’s DFP, carried out urgent development work on new and existing products and processes, especially dehydration, and, after the war, work on frozen foods and dairy products. In 1951 CUB began their hop research which culminated eventually in a funda-

* In 1949 the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) became the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

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Armed Forces emergency ration pack. During the Second World War the experienced assembly lines in a number of food factories were used to pack these and similar emergency ration packs. Some of the products were made by those companies, others were delivered in bulk to be incorporated into the final package. (Reproduced by courtesy of the La Trobe Library, Melbourne.)


mental shift in brewery practice, the introduction of hop extracts in place of the traditional addition of hops to the copper. Kraft had initiated the mechanisation of cheesemaking in 1941–42 (see Chapter 14) and in the early 1950s introduced American technology for the manufacture of rindless cheese in rectangular 40 lb blocks wrapped in water-impermeable plastic wrappers. Though an imported technology, this initiative required a considerable input of Australian R&D with local manufacturers of plastic films. Research institutes Certain industry groups, however, decided to carry out R&D on an industry basis. The first were the bakers. Faced at the end of the war with the need to tighten production and reduce costs, they combined in 1947 to found the Bread Research Institute (BRI) to investigate problems related to bread baking and to provide technical advice to the industry. Laboratories were built first at North Sydney and later on CSIRO land at North Ryde, and much basic and applied research from wheat to the nutritive value of bread was carried out. Traditional breadmaking allowed time for bread to proof: that is, for the dough to rise as the yeast produced carbon dioxide. BRI specialised at first in reducing proofing time and thus the length of the breadmaking process. The American Do-maker (1926) had succeeded in doing this, but Australians rejected the product. However, the adoption of some form of mechanical dough development (MDD) was inevitable. Dough development depends on oxidation; speeding it up depends on optimum quantities of improvers, such as ascorbic acid (vitamin C), and adequate oxygen, which can be ensured by mechanical development. In Britain, the Chorleywood process of mechanical dough making was usable by large and small bakeries and yielded an acceptable loaf. The BRI’s Brimec, a no-time process, was similar, produced bread within two hours of the commencement of mixing, and was introduced successfully in 1964. Seeking more intensive research into sugar milling, 26 Queensland sugar millers established the Sugar Research Institute (SRI) in 1949, and the first SRI building was opened at Mackay in 1953. The foundation director was Dr HW Kerr from the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations. All mills were members and funds came from a levy per tonne of cane crushed at each member mill. From 1967, via CSIRO, the federal government also made a progressively increasing annual grant. For many years the whole industry—CSR, BSES, the University of Queensland, mill staffs and SRI—studied sugar boiling and crystallisation, and made progress in the understanding of the physical chemistry of the former and the phase changes in the latter. Control of sugar boiling, once based on the appearance of the crystal content and the feel of the syrup, was achieved by electrical conductivity, pioneered in 1937 at the Kalamia mill. Later, computers took over, as they did in most operations in the industry. The third industry to sponsor its own R&D was the wine industry, but it had anticipated the other two by actions taken in the 1930s. In 1945 JCM Fornachon, whose introductory work on the spoilage of wines has already been described (Chapter 12) and was continued through the war years, transferred to CSIR, through which federal money was added to industry money in support of wine research. To continuing studies on spoilage was added work on sherry production, malolactic fermentation and yeasts. In 1949 a fire destroyed the chemistry laboratory at Roseworthy Agricultural College and led to discussions about the lack of co-ordination of winegrowing research at Roseworthy, in the South Australian Department of Agriculture, and by the Australian Wine Board’s research officers at the Waite Agricultural Research Institute. The result was the founding in 1955 of the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI) to investigate

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all aspects of winemaking. Fornachon was appointed director. Initially, microbiology dominated, and work on yeasts led to the development of pure cultures and the supply of them to the wineries—at last. In 1912 Grove Johnson wrote ‘over and over again he has recommended the use of pure yeasts in the fermentation of wines’. ‘He’ was M. François de Castella, vigneron and the Victorian Government viticultural adviser. Johnson added that a few men, no doubt aware of de Bavay’s introduction of pure cultures into the brewing industry, ‘had proved for themselves the advantages of using pure Australian yeasts for the fermentation of pure Australian wine’. The BRI, SRI and AWRI were all founded in response to needs perceived by industry leaders. All three have made significant scientific and technological contributions to their respective industries. But through the Australian Dairy Research Committee (later Dairy Research and Development Corporation) and the Australian Cattle and Beef Research Committee (later the Meat Research Corporation, later still part of Meat and Livestock Australia Ltd.) the dairy and pastoral industries accepted levies on primary production to make funds available for the support of research in CSIRO, universities and departments of agriculture. Thus stimulated and supported, good science, much of which issued as technology, was made possible. A fourth specialist laboratory, the Army (now Armed Forces) Food Science Establishment (AFFSE), also was founded in this period as part of the Defence Science and Technology Organisation. This laboratory was set up in 1958 at Scottsdale, north-east Tasmania, next door to a vegetable dehydration factory from which, on occasion, it drew raw materials for its work. Its function was to provide laboratory, pilot-scale and small-scale production facilities for the development of ration packs at first for the army but later for all three services. State government laboratories Research in the state departments of agriculture began in the 19th century. Farrer and Guthrie’s work on wheat is still the outstanding example, but investigational work in these departments is ongoing in all states. The involvement of the South Australian department in wine research has already been mentioned, and in 1939 the Victorian department established the School of Dairy Technology and Dairy Research Laboratory at Werribee. In 1966 it became the Gilbert Chandler Institute of Dairy Technology, carrying out laboratory and pilot-plant R&D for the dairy industry in the major dairying state. In 1948 the New South Wales Department of Agriculture combined with CSIRO and Sungold Cooperative Citrus Packing House to set up the Citrus Wastage Research Laboratory at Gosford to combat serious losses of oranges through green mould and stem-end rot. Fruit fly studies were added in 1955, other studies were undertaken over the years, and in 1974 the unit became the Gosford Postharvest Horticultural Laboratory. CSIRO The end of the Second World War was an end also to the feverish industry-service work that had almost exclusively absorbed DFP’s time and talents. It was time to reorganise. Bastian et al. relate that Dr Vickery saw as a primary duty of his division the making of ‘substantial contributions to the fund of scientific knowledge on foods and their reactions to different environments’ (p. 105). To this end he established four discipline-oriented and three commodity-oriented sections. The division was to remain at Homebush until 1961 and, perforce, its staff was scattered. Meat work was in Brisbane, plant physiology at the University of Sydney, and a labora-


tory was opened in Hobart in 1951. Here work begun on fish languished after a few years to be resumed later, but advances were made in the canning and freezing of berry fruits and apple products. Tasmania has a long history of potato growing and a programme of work was begun on this crop also. In Sydney, fundamental studies were initiated on the physical chemistry of proteins and plant physiology, and on the physics of the transport and storage of fruit. In the 1950s Dr WJ Scott carried out his seminal work on the water relations of micro-organisms that led to the concept of water activity and had a profound influence on the theory of food preservation, especially of intermediate-moisture foods. Concurrently, basic studies on the factors influencing resistance of bacterial spores to canning temperatures began, and new information was obtained on the evaluation of heat penetration vis-à-vis the survival of spores. The non-enzymic browning of foods (the Maillard reaction) has in recent years become a major research topic in food science. In the 1950s, CSIRO studies contributed to knowledge of the complex chemistry of these reactions and the role of sulphur dioxide in inhibiting them. At the same time biochemical work related the origin of pink egg whites to the diet of the hens. In 1952 a taste-testing laboratory was installed, the beginning of sensory analysis. Commodity-oriented work in the same period included the continuation of wartime work on dried meats and fruits. Studies on dried fruits led to improved processing techniques and better quality, and to a method for packaging and pasteurising high-moisture prunes in flexible pouches. Biochemical studies on the starch/sugar relationship in ripening peas led to the development of the maturometer for determining in the field the optimum time for the harvest of green peas and, later, sweet corn. Its application for the payment of growers and for quality control followed. In the early 1950s important work on the chemistry of limonin, the bitter principle in navel orange juice, was published by JF Kefford and BV Chandler, and factors affecting the loss of vitamin C were investigated. As Kefford moved to wider responsibilities, Dr Chandler continued to develop methods for the removal of limonin from orange juice, becoming a world authority on the subject. In Melbourne, the Section of Dairy Research (SDR) faced the post-war period with two basic aims, the first to learn more of the fundamentals of dairy chemistry and microbiology, and the second to devise new labour-saving processes for the industry. The first of these led in 1948 to the beginning of an important programme of research on food flavours, and in 1951 to the beginning of work on cheese starters that resulted eventually in the section (later division) becoming the industry reference point for them. The second led to the beginning in the mid-1950s of many years of work on the mechanisation of cheesemaking. SDR supported the several general moves in the dairy industry at this time: ASDT, for which it supplied office bearers and for many years the editor of the journal; the Australian Dairy Produce Standards Organisation; and the proposal for an industry levy for the support of dairy research. It also acted at times as an extension service for the industry, an echo of Rivett’s plaint that the industry was not making full use of existing knowledge. In 1955 SDR moved to new laboratories at Highett and found itself with much more room for the installation of experimental dairy plant. Here work was begun in 1958 to help the industry change from the traditional rinded cheese to the rindless cheese in plastic film, an American technology that Kraft had introduced some years previously. Work was proceeding on a number of other industry projects, especially improvements in butter manufacture, the development of specialised milk powders, and recombined milk products, all of which came to fruition in later years.

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With much else besides, both at Homebush and Highett, CSIRO’s programmes of food research led the way into a new appreciation of what science could offer the Australian food industry. The research institutes were rapidly demonstrating it to the industries which established them, and some companies with well-organised and active R&D departments had already established strong scientific support for their production and marketing departments and were introducing technologies new to Australia. In this period Australian food technology was finally bidding farewell to techniques and turning to science for guidance in modifying old processes, developing new ones, and coping with unfamiliar new packaging materials and unexpected demands of the regulators. Professional organisations The Queensland (now Australian) Society of Sugar Cane Technologists, founded in 1929, was an indication of the need for specialist professionals (as distinct from those practising a discipline such as chemistry) to combine for mutual advantage. It was the first Australian organisation devoted solely to the study of any part of the food processing industry; but it was a specialist group. So, too, was the ASDT (now the DIAA), but on 9 May 1950 nine Australian members of IFT met in Sydney and agreed to petition IFT for a charter for an Australian section. It was granted and the Australian Section of IFT was the first outside the United States. It lasted only two years for in August 1952 a second application, this one from Melbourne, resulted in two Australian sections, Northern and Southern. Annual conventions of the two sections, begun in 1951 by the Australian Section as it then was, continued, though since 1967 under different auspices. The idea of a free-standing Australian institute was floated informally at the 1954 Leura convention of the two Australian IFT sections. It was more a prophecy than a proposal, but it stirred no interest. However, a serious proposal was circulated in 1960, first to the Southern Section committee and then to the Northern Section committee, but it was not until January 1967 that the Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology (AIFST) was born with Dr JR Vickery as the foundation president. It stands in the tradition of British qualifying institutes, able to validate the qualifications of individuals seeking to practice food science and technology, to function as a learned society, and to represent Australian food science and technology internationally. But the decision and action that culminated in the birth of the AIFST date from 1949. In 1946 the Food Technology Association (of New South Wales) began to issue a monthly bulletin. Dr FH Reuter proposed something better, and in August 1949 the first issue of Food Technology in Australia appeared. It was financed by CAFTA and edited by Dr Reuter who built it into a respected journal, the official organ of CAFTA and later of AIFST as well. From the 1950s the journal was the vehicle for publication of papers presented at annual conventions of the IFT sections and, later, of AIFST, and increasingly it came to be used by Australian authors for the publication of research papers also. In September 1988 the name was changed to Food Australia; in 1989 AIFST became a joint partner with CAFTA; and, from mid-1995 when CAFTA was superseded by the Australian Food Council, AIFST continued to publish the journal alone. Two other events of professional importance occurred at this time. First, on 26 June 1950 the Council of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) agreed to a proposal to form a cereal chemistry group. In 1952 WR Jewell, chief chemist at the Victorian Department of Agriculture, said, ‘You will find cereal chemistry to be more art than science’. But the scene was already changing. The group was an immediate success, and the first annual conference was held in September 1951. It has been said that the formation of this group was the most important event in the


development of cereal science in Australia. Jones says in an article in Food Technology in Australia, ‘It brought together people from industry, the universities, CSIRO, and research institutes; it stimulated action to improve wheat quality, helped to upgrade laboratory standards, and built up an interest in effective research programmes which has borne fruit in the publication of many outstanding papers’. A study of the records of the annual conferences of the Cereal Chemistry Group reveals the steady build up of a ‘college’ of cereal scientists in Australia, the increasing depth of the scientific work—physical, biochemical and analytical—being done, and the application of it in the cereal industry. The group is now a division of the RACI. Second, in 1952 an Australian section of the Institute of Brewing (IOB) was formed. The IOB grew out of the small Laboratory Club of brewing chemists started in London in 1886 and became the pre-eminent professional, qualifying and technical body in the brewing industry. A number of brewing chemists, concerned of course with barley, attended the first RACI Cereal Chemistry conference, and a brewing chemistry group was considered. But there is more to brewing than chemistry, and in the event the members of the IOB in Australia decided to form a section of that institute. It was analogous to the move made just a few years earlier by the IFT members in Australia. The IOB Australian Section was very successful and became the Australian and New Zealand Section. Regulation In 1905 Australia, through the State of Victoria, led the way into Pure Food Acts and the compositional regulation of food, but food regulation did not become an issue with the public until late in the 20th century. The tightening of regulations in the 1950s and 1960s was led by both industry and government. At Federation, health matters, including food regulation, were left in the hands of the new states with the result that each state developed its own set of regulations. They served reasonably well until the Second World War. But thereafter, improved interstate transport facilities, enhanced durability of products and new perceptions of marketing into the 1950s opened the whole of Australia to individual manufacturers. Unfortunately, anomalies between various state and export food regulations required food manufacturers to make products to up to as many as four different compositional standards. Harmonisation of regulations was urgent. From 1908 onwards several attempts had been made to resolve this problem, but to no avail. Then the newly formed food technology associations, through their new federal body, CAFTA, importuned government for uniform food regulations throughout Australia. But who would take the initiative? The Commonwealth Health Department, because of the agreement at Federation, had no authority, and no state government wished to accept a task that was obviously fraught with difficulty. So CAFTA offered to draw up a ‘harmonised’ set of regulations. This involved an enormous amount of voluntary work in all states by industry technologists, amateurs in making regulations. Finally, the Commonwealth Department of Health through the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) agreed in 1953 to co-ordinate activities and, on an advisory basis, to prepare new and modified regulations for submission to the states for their consideration. This led to the establishment of the Food Standards Committee (FSC) under NHMRC auspices. FSC was a representational committee with appointees from state and federal departments, CSIRO, university and industry and it met for the first time on 22 March 1955. It was led by Associate Professor FH Reuter, head of the Department of Food Technology, University of New South Wales, whose contribution to this project was enormous. But FSC had no teeth. All it could do was recommend new and modified standards to the various state health departments, which would, or would not,

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incorporate them into their own regulations. In the event, its authority steadily increased and nearly all its recommendations were accepted by the states. Uniformity, however, was long delayed. At the end of 1952, well before FSC was established, the Commonwealth Department of Health had set up the Food Additives Committee (FAC) through the NHMRC and its subsidiary Public Health Advisory Committee (PHAC). This was in response to research overseas casting doubt on the safety of some commonly used food colours and to proposals by nutritionists for the fortification of some foods with nutrients. It held an exploratory meeting on 30 January 1953 and an enlarged committee held three more meetings that year. FAC was an expert committee made up of government, university, CSIRO and industry scientists and it served from 1953 until the establishment of the National Food Authority (NFA). It was not representational: members were invited for their individual expertise and were responsible to no one but themselves. FAC was the first committee of its kind anywhere in the world to justify the use of food additives, adopting a set of guidelines for their use some four years before the FAO/WHO Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) did the same. FAC began its work with food colours but in the course of its history covered the whole range of food additives as well as food irradiation. The safety of food is nobody’s state secret, and FAC had access to research and recommendations on food additives throughout the entire world. Food additives did not become a consumer issue until long after FAC had begun its work (see Chapter 17). Its recommendations almost without exception were adopted by the state governments.

The market place In the 1950s the market place was changing rapidly. First, many of the women who entered the work force in large numbers during the war stayed on and began to look for, and soon expect, speedy shopping and products requiring the minimum of home preparation. The search for convenience had begun. Second, the first cash and carry store was opened in Brisbane in 1950. The idea of self-service spread rapidly and supermarkets followed from the middle of the decade. As they spread so the family grocer and corner shop began to disappear, the distribution system changed dramatically and the power of supermarket buyers grew until supermarkets became the dominant factor in the introduction of new products. Third, migrants were flooding into the country increasing the number of consumers but bringing with them new foods and food habits. Fourth, new packaging materials, especially plastics, both films and rigids, opened up unimagined marketing possibilities; and fifth, new processes offered new products. Products A walk through a modern supermarket creates the illusion of multitudes of food products, but walk down the aisles of breakfast foods or snacks with a critical eye and it is at once apparent that they are all variations on a theme. With a better process, slight variations in formulation, clever and varied packaging, the marketing department has a new product to sell. There have been very few genuinely new products, but two were introduced to Australia in this period and have gone on to become dominant in the Australian diet. In fact, neither is a new product at all. Both result from new processes. They are frozen foods and instant coffee. As already noted, quick-frozen foods appeared in Australia in 1940; but it was not until 1949 that vegetables grown for the purpose were first processed here, most of them at Batlow, New South Wales, and marketed under the Birds Eye brand. The introduction of frozen foods to any market is limited by the capacity of consumers to store them: that is, to the availability and


market penetration of domestic refrigerators and freezers. With the fast disappearance of both wartime constraints and the family grocer, the cold chain was quickly established, and frozenfood technology in Australia dates from the 1950s. The cold chain begins with the processor who chills or freezes the product. The purpose of the chain is to ensure that, in the interests of consumer safety and product quality, the product is then maintained at the desired temperature, never warmer than +4°C for chilled foods and -18°C for frozen foods. Frozen food must certainly not thaw, to be refrozen, until the consumer thaws it to prepare the meal for which it is intended. That means frozen storage, frozen transport to the retailer, frozen storage and display there, rapid transport to the home, and frozen storage until required for use, all at the maximum temperature of -18°C (or +4°C for chilled foods), or lower. This is not easy in Australia with the climate, great distances and scattered centres of population. Much work has been done over the years to educate all the links in the cold chain—including retailers, whose refrigerated cabinets may easily err, and consumers, whose refrigerators often do. Work has also been done to develop smart temperature indicators in packaged food to indicate if that unit has exceeded the stipulated maximum temperature. Frozen peas were an instant success. Their production, assisted by the CSIRO maturometer, soared from the mid-1950s. Other vegetables, fruit, fish, meat and poultry quickly followed. Frozen foods had arrived. Their quality depends on high-quality raw materials, careful preparation to ensure low microbial load, and rapid freezing either in tunnel blast-freezers or, where individual frozen units are required, such as frozen peas, in fluid-bed freezers. In the latter each pea is kept airborne in a rising current of very cold air and frozen individually. Packaging was greatly facilitated by the newly available polythene pouches. These developments of the 1950s initiated the frozen-food industry that dominates the food market today. The appeal of these foods is that they are virtually fresh; the hazard is that as soon as they are thawed they are susceptible to bacterial growth. Instant coffee was brought to Australia in 1949 by the Nestlé company. Apart from milk powders and milk-based products such as Ovaltine®, which was being made in Tasmania in the 1930s, it was the first of the instant foods that with the addition of milk or water yield beverages, soups or various mixes. Instant coffee was a spray-dried percolate but was gradually improved by stripping coffee flavours to add back, extracting the beans under pressure to improve yield by the hydrolysis of complex carbohydrates, and stripping resulting unwanted flavours. These later modifications also came to Australia. In 1951 baby-foods in glass jars and cans also appeared on the Australian market, and soon convenience foods in many forms were becoming available. Processing The changes in Australia’s canning industry (heat processing) could be summed up in one word, mechanisation. Mechanisation of harvesting began during the Second World War with prototype machines brought from the United States and duplicated by Australian manufacturers. In the late 1940s it developed rapidly, especially with peas and sweet corn; and in the fruit canneries pitting, peeling, coring and slicing also were quickly mechanised. In cannery equipment, especially, Australian food engineering firms were to the fore, and, from the tropics to Tasmania, canneries were active in packing fruits, tropical and temperate; fruit juices; vegetables; meats; soups; formulated products; fish; and dairy products. The increase in mechanisation had the same effect as in the milling industry earlier in the 20th century: small canneries could not afford the capital expenditure necessary to keep up and went out of business. Canneries became

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larger and the Golden Circle one in Brisbane, a co-operative established in 1947 initially to can pineapple, in time became the largest of them all. Tinplate for Australia’s cans was hot dipped and came traditionally from Britain. The first electrolytic plate (with a much thinner coating of tin) was imported in 1951, and in 1957 the first Australian tinplate, hot dipped, became available. Australian electrolytic plate dates from 1962. Heat-resistant inks and varnishes permitting the processing of lithographed cans were introduced in 1955 and epoxy resins for internal can lacquers followed in 1957. Aerosol and beer cans were introduced in 1958 and cans for other beverages in 1961. Can filling and sealing lines operated in the 1940s at 60 cans per minute, in the 1950s at 200, in the early 1960s at 400, and by the late 1960s at 600. The Golden Circle cannery was the first to break away from the old time-consuming exhaust box for ensuring a vacuum in the can. It introduced the vacuum syruper and steam flow closing in its place. Conventional tunnel dehydration continued in a small way, spray drying was becoming important, and product quality was steadily improved. Instant mashed potatoes, roller dried flakes at first, but later powder produced by fluid-bed drying, appeared. Packaging Packages for processed foods must protect the contents always from contamination by microorganisms, usually from air and moisture, and sometimes from light. They must, therefore, at all times maintain their integrity. Nor must they taint the product or contaminate it in any other way. The packaging materials of the 19th century were glass, pottery, tinplate, metal foils; and paper for dry goods such as sugar and flour. With the addition of regenerated cellulose (Cellophane®), and some urea formaldehyde resin containers for special purposes, this was effectively the range of food packaging up to the mid-1940s. Artificial polymers such as nylon made their appearance in the 1930s, but the great surge in production of these useful substances came post-war with the growth of the petrochemical industry. At the end of the 20th century the metal can, tinplate or aluminium, was still a major food package, but in the 1950s the great revolution in packaging followed two distinct paths. First, the new plastic films stimulated the introduction of flexible packaging overwraps for retail units— and produced a new breed of professionals, packaging technologists. Second, bulk packaging, which was enthusiastically adopted, posed the same problems of protecting the product as the appropriate retail pack, but bulk tankers added the additional problems for the distribution manager of movement by road, rail or sea. In the 1950s there was a small amount of more or less exploratory pre-packaging of meats in cellulose films, and by the end of the decade most biscuits had moved out of the biscuit tin and into the same overwrap. New grades of paper appeared, and in the mid-1950s machinery for the extrusion coating of polyethylene onto various supporting materials produced coated fibreboard and various laminates. But it was the new flexible packaging materials that from 1953 really opened the way for a fresh approach to traditional products, and an entirely new method of marketing retail units. The cheese industry provides examples of both. The first was the wrapper for the rindless blocks referred to earlier. The second was the marketing of consumer cuts of mild and matured cheese, and from 1959 of packages of sliced processed cheese (individually wrapped slices from 1976). Transparent wrapping materials attractively printed had to be impermeable to water and oxygen, to keep moisture in lest the cheese dry out, and oxygen out so that mould would not grow. As with all food product wrappers, these films have to seal


completely, and resist pinholing during normal transport and handling. In many cases laminates of different materials worked best. When it was necessary to exclude light, packaging technologists resorted to all-over printing or included metal foil in the laminate. These technologists assumed responsibility for company requirements for cans, bottles, jars and their closures as well. As for the eclipse of the wooden case, it began in 1949 with the solid fibreboard carton, superseded in its turn about 1960 by the corrugated fibreboard carton. Stainless steel was not a new material as the plastics were, but in the post-war world it soon began to replace traditional metals, copper and tinned steel, in food factories and to open the way, as road tankers, for the transport of liquids. Collection of milk by road tankers from refrigerated milk-holding vats installed on farms was known in California pre-war and tried in Western Australia in the 1940s. It was introduced into Victoria for market milk in 1957, but its installation as a system connecting farm to factory, especially over a radius of, say, 50 miles, dates from Kraft’s field day at Strathmerton in Victoria on 24 September 1957. Farmers could now hold milk over for one collection per day instead of two in the flush and for two days or even longer in the the slack season, and thus reduce transport costs. The farm tanks and the tankers, all of stainless steel, were essentially large packages albeit intermediate ones. The same held for the bulk transport of beer, wine, glucose syrups and so on, all equally subject to spoilage; and the demise of the jute sack for flour and sugar followed as the bulk transport of these essentially dry products also began. Bulk transport of cartoned products in containers is another variant and began in 1969. This was an exhilarating period for those who lived through it. Much was accomplished in a short time, but few if any of those involved thought that these years were in any way special. There were new opportunities and they took them, there were things to be done and they did them so that Australian food science and technology moved into the 1960s identifiable, organised, expanding and, it may be said, unsuspecting of the anxieties to be aroused by its very success.

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Chapter 14

Consolidating the science base

As the 20th century progressed, several factors combined to consolidate the scientific base and raise standards of practice of food technology in Australia. Scientific understanding of food systems developed exponentially both in Australia and overseas. Advanced instrumentation became available; and food engineering emerged as the skills of the chemical engineer, especially in heat, mass and momentum transfer and the application of rheological principles, were combined with some understanding of food and the uniqueness of food systems. In 1990, Dr JR Vickery, the doyen of Australian food science and technology, attributed Australia’s clearly rising standards in the discipline to three major post-war trends. These were the establishment and expansion of professional and technician courses in food science and technology, the development of professional collegiality, and ‘the introduction of more uniform and better food regulations in each state’ (p. 3). To these could be added the expansion of R&D in government laboratories and in industry, and government financial support.

Education Professional courses were established in the 1950s in New South Wales (University of New South Wales and Hawkesbury Agricultural College), Victoria (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) and Queensland (Queensland Agricultural College). These were followed by technician courses in New South Wales (Sydney Technical College) and Victoria (Moorabbin and Shepparton Technical Colleges). Much earlier, however, Hawkesbury Agricultural College in New South Wales from the 1880s and Roseworthy Agricultural College in South Australia from 1895 taught practical diploma courses in dairying and oenology, respectively. And Victoria’s School of Dairy Technology (later the Gilbert Chandler Institute of Dairy Technology) offered a variety of trade courses in 1939 and a two-year certificate course from 1968. All three of these colleges, following the total reorganisation of tertiary education in Australia in the 1980s, were incorporated into universities and offered degree courses in their special areas of expertise. In the meantime, however, courses in food science and technology became available in every state of Australia, and in some they were available in several universities. They added significantly to the pool of qualified people employed in the Australian food industry, and, through Asian and other overseas graduate students, to the development of food technology in, especially, ASEAN countries. By the end of the century there was a proliferation of degree, diploma, certificate, and short professional development courses, both general and specialised, in universities and colleges of technical and further education in all states. In some states food technology was being taught at the secondary level as well, but the professional

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food technologist requires a broad foundation in chemistry and microbiology at the tertiary level, and the food scientist rather more than that. An important aspect of the development of university teaching was the availability of higher degrees, especially doctorates, by research. While many of these, especially PhDs, have been pursued by overseas students, particularly from south-east Asia, there has been a steady if slow movement of these men and women into the Australian food industry with evident benefit. Even better was the admission to higher degrees, including the PhD, of candidates already working in the industry.

Professional collegiality The formation of specialist groups of sugar, dairy and brewing technologists and of cereal chemists and the beginnings of the Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology (AIFST) have been discussed in earlier chapters. The benefits accruing from the discussion of problems of mutual interest and the sharing of non-confidential experience are well known to professional people and are fostered by annual conventions, monthly meetings of branches and specialist groups concerned with, for example, nutrition, food microbiology, and food engineering, and the publication of journals. AIFST was officially established in January 1967 as a qualifying institute. In May of that year the annual convention, held since 1951 under the auspices of the local IFT sections, was held at Shepparton, Victoria. It was the first AIFST convention and they continued annually thereafter. In 1970 AIFST, on behalf of Australia, became a founder member of the International Union of Food Science and Technology (IUFoST), and in the same year it was agreed with the sister New Zealand institute to hold joint conventions from time to time. The first of these was held at Surfers’ Paradise in Queensland in 1972 and the second at Rotorua, New Zealand, in 1976, then Sydney in 1980 and thereafter at five-year intervals. In 1982 AIFST combined with the Singapore Institute of Food Science and Technology and the Malaysian Institute of Food Technology for a convention in Singapore, and many Australians attended. Branch and group meetings offered members of the institute many opportunities for meeting fellow professionals and broadening their own knowledge of their profession, but possibly the most significant and lasting contribution emerged from the Food Microbiology Group formed in Sydney in November 1971. This group immediately began the education of health inspectors in food hygiene and in the 1970s inaugurated several courses in Food-borne Microorganisms of Public Health Significance. They were very successful and led to the publication of a book of the same title that went through several editions and sold thousands of copies. In 1977 the group began the series of Australian food microbiology conferences which did much to raise the standard of microbiological practice in the Australian food industry. The formation late in the 1990s of the Australian Food Engineering Association was yet more evidence of the need for and value to professionals of shared experience and discussion of topics of mutual interest. However, the high-water mark of AIFST activity in its relatively short history to the end of the 20th century was the successful holding in 1999 in Sydney of the 10th World Congress of Food Science and Technology under the auspices of IUFoST. It drew participants from all over the world and was an international recognition of Australia’s progress in and contributions to the study and practice of food science and technology.


Food regulation It may seem strange to list food regulation as a contributor to raising standards of food science and technology. But the new emphasis on food additives and contaminants made new demands on the food chemist and the toxicologist, and forced manufacturers to face an unfamiliar scientific climate and more sophisticated controls than they had ever envisaged. Faulty handling by consumers of frozen and semi-perishable foods, rapidly changing eating habits, and new and unexpected microbiological hazards also demonstrated the need for strong technical support. In 1988, reviewing food legislation over the previous 20 years, Professor RA Edwards, who succeeded Associate Professor Reuter as Chairman of FSC, put the other side of the coin. ‘Change’, he said, ‘has resulted from our increased understanding of food science, together with a re-awakening and development of knowledge in human nutrition and diet related health and disease’. The first committee to be set up under the initiative taken in the early 1950s by the federal Department of Health had been the Food Additives Committee (FAC), but quite soon FAC ceased to be FAC. At first, FAC’s advice went to FSC via NHMRC but it eventually became the Food Science and Technology (Reference) Sub-committee (abbreviated to FST) of FSC. However, it was always an expert committee making its recommendations on the scientific evidence before it and the demonstrated need for the specific application of the additive proposed. Unfortunately, it did not survive the formation of the National Food Authority, which eschewed expert committees, and its last meeting, the 81st, was in February 1991. This was a pity. In October 1965 NHMRC approved an FSC request for the appointment of an ad hoc food microbiology sub-committee ‘to assist the Food Standards Committee with the preparation of microbiological standards for frozen foods’. The drawing up of microbiological standards for foods could hardly be opposed, but at that time little was known about how to do it except that, in the absence of specified methods, it was very difficult to prepare any standards that really meant anything. There was strong resistance by eminent food microbiologists to arbitrary standards just for the sake of having some. It was a considerable time before the International Commission on Microbiological Specifications for Foods (ICMSF), to which Dr JHB Christian, a CSIRO scientist, made major contributions, finalised reliable standards with their associated methodology. Nevertheless, the Food Microbiology (Reference) Sub-committee (FMC), as it became, first met in 1966 and continued for the next 25 years to offer FSC sound advice. There was progress in other directions, including the general labelling of food products. In 1978 ingredient labelling and date marking were finally accepted, the first in descending order of proportion of ingredients within class names for components, including additives. Consumer representatives wanted the percentage of each ingredient to be shown, but this would have disclosed manufacturers’ formulae and led to dull uniformity. Date marking was required by October 1978, but there was much argument over ‘use by’, ‘packed on’, ‘best before’, and, later, ‘sell by’. The consumers’ preference for ‘packed on’ was useless without knowledge of the product, and would have been misleading in some cases. An example is canned foods, most of which will last for years, and some of which, such as certain canned meat products, actually improve with age. ‘Use by’ became the virtual norm. It was set by the manufacturer, but led to much wastage in spite of the fact that processed foods do not suddenly become stale, useless, or dangerous the day after the ‘use by’ date. Overseas developments and moves by manufacturers to include nutritional claims in their advertising led to the approval in 1986 of a nutritional labelling standard to come into force in 1989. A nutritional claim triggers the need for a formal label statement capable of being

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confirmed. A further development, deriving from perceived nutritional benefits, has been the introduction of foods low in energy, fat, sugar, sodium and alcohol, and others with increased fibre content, or variations in the ratios of saturated and polyunsaturated fats, or containing specific forms of the latter such as omega-3 fatty acids. The need for the definition of ‘low’, ‘light’, ‘reduced’ or ‘increased’ (compared with what?) and other variations from the norm led to requirements for broad compositional statements such as so much per 100 g. FSC’s work from 1955 was directed towards the uniformity of food regulations throughout Australia. Work and lobbying for a Model Food Act for all states had gone on through the 1970s, but an Act was not adopted by the Health Ministers’ Conference until 1980 and the first state to implement it (in 1981) was Queensland. Most of the credit for this ultimate success belongs to the first chairman of FSC, Dr Reuter. However, in 1987 the federal government changed the whole thrust of food regulation-making by transferring it from the Department of Health to the new Federal Bureau of Consumer Affairs (FBCA) within the Attorney General’s Department. FSC disappeared, to be reconstituted at once as the Australian Food Standards Committee (AFSC) under the FBCA but still submitting its proposals to NHMRC for the approval of the National Food Standards Council (NFSC) made up of the federal, state and territory ministers responsible for food standards. Two NHMRC committees, FST and FMC, advised AFSC, then AFSC recommendations went to the NFSC via NHMRC’s Public Health Committee. This arrangement could not last and did not. In August 1991, following agreement between the Commonwealth, states and territories, the federal government set up the National Food Authority (NFA) within the Department of Health and Family Services charged with protecting the health and safety of the public, promoting trade that was fair, and harmonising Australian with international standards. It was a significant advance, but plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. In 1996, in the interests of trans-Tasman trade after the Closer Economic Relations agreement of 1983, and following agreement with the New Zealand Government, the Australian and New Zealand Food Authority (ANZFA) replaced NFA. The new authority was set up with its own budget, staff of professionals in science, law, policy development and so on, and eventually with an office in Wellington also, but failed to attract such experts as had voluntarily served FST and FMC. Nevertheless, it was charged with protecting the health and safety of the public, ensuring informed choice for the consumer, and contributing to an efficient and innovative industry by removing impediments to technological development. From 1991 to 1993 there was an NHMRC Food and Health Standing Committee with a watching brief over toxicology and nutrition, but it was virtually ignored and met only twice. Did it matter? ANZFA was still able only to make recommendations: the decisions were taken by ANZFSC, the council of state, federal and New Zealand health ministers. But the disappearance of experts from the system weakened it.

Research and development: laboratories There were glimpses of government support for food R&D in the 19th century and it flowered in New South Wales with Farrer and Guthrie’s seminal work in the New South Wales Department of Agriculture. So, too, the Queensland Government supported the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations and the new federal government sponsored events leading to the formation of CSIR. CSIR/CSIRO has long since become the largest and most influential government research organisation in Australia. Its massive influence has already been made apparent. The food arm of the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, the Armed Forces Food Science


Establishment, while concentrating on the needs of the services it was set up to serve, also contributed to Australian food science and technology. Among other things, AFFSE investigated one or two specialised technologies, notably freeze-drying and explosion puff drying. The subjects of most interest were meat, eggs, vegetables, the compression of dehydrated products, and the use of retortable pouches. Analyses and nutrition studies were also carried out on a range of bush foods, potentially survival foods for members of the services in remote parts of Australia. Not least, AFFSE maintained links with the Food Study Group of the Commonwealth Defence Science Organisation, with the USQMC laboratories at Natick, and with industry and tertiary institutions in Australia. State departments of agriculture and other state and federal initiatives followed. Laboratories devoted to the study of foods, mainly primary products, appeared in the various states. The Queensland Department of Primary Industries established the Sandy Trout Food Preservation Research Laboratory specialising in tropical fruits, the Otto Madsen Dairy Research Laboratory, and later the Centre for Food Technology. Dairy research work was carried out over many years in the departments of agriculture of New South Wales and South Australia, and in Western Australia the researches of Dr JS Gladstones and his co-workers on sweet lupins won international recognition. In 1939 the Victorian Department of Agriculture set up the School of Dairy Technology and Dairy Research Laboratories at Werribee, near Melbourne. In 1966 it was extended and renamed the Gilbert Chandler Institute of Dairy Technology. In parallel with the practical training of people for the dairy industry a programme of research into problems of the industry was maintained. In 1983 the teaching functions became part of the Victorian College of Agriculture and Horticulture which in 1997 was absorbed into the Institute of Land and Food Resources, University of Melbourne. However, dairy research continued at Werribee and in 1987 became part of a more general Food Research Institute (FRI) set up as one of 13 such institutes within the Victorian Department of Agriculture. In 1994 the Victorian Government wisely recognised that food research knew no state boundaries, and in July 1995 the FRI became the Australian Food Research Institute (AFRI), a statutory authority with new buildings and equipment and a wider remit than Victoria. AFRI brought together research, postgraduate education and industry, but a year later the name was changed to the Australian Food Industry Science Centre (AFISC). AFISC was governed by a board of independent directors, but these changes moved to a logical conclusion in that by the end of 1997 AFISC had entered into a joint venture with CSIRO Food Research Laboratories (as the division had become) to set up Food Science Australia (FSA). Although there was some loss of expertise as the CSIRO Dairy Research Laboratories were relocated at Werribee, FSA was a powerful R&D facility. Overseen by a board of industry, CSIRO and government members, it had a staff of more than 300 in three major centres: in Victoria, at Werribee; in Sydney at CSIRO North Ryde; and in Brisbane at CSIRO Cannon Hill. Each centre had expertise in specific areas and overall, with nutritional advice available in CSIRO Adelaide. FSA operated in comprehensive R&D laboratories, many of them recently built. It was able to offer assistance over the whole range of food science and technology, including industry access to advanced laboratory facilities and/or pilot plant for product trial or development, with or without FSA help, with the guarantee of confidentiality. In addition, valuable technological and international linkages built up over the years mainly by CSIRO became available to individual companies. The Werribee site became an important science park in its own right with university research facilities, the state chemistry laboratories, and other food-related units, especially for dairy-

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oriented work. Thus, the Dairy Research and Development Corporation (DRDC) set up three centres on site and collaborated with FSA on a cheese technology research programme. Also, the Agriculture and Food Initiative of the Victorian Government, set up to improve returns on Victorian farm products, supported many projects. In 1986 the Australian Academy of Grain Technology was opened. It derived from laboratories of the Australian Wheat Board set up in 1981, and its extensive laboratories were designed primarily to provide the Wheat Board with analytical and research facilities, but its expertise and advanced instrumentation enabled it to offer analyses on a fee-for-service basis. In the last decades of the 20th century all state governments increasingly supported food research and it would be a pity if the developments at Werribee were allowed to mask similar initiatives in other states—for example, Queensland’s Centre for Food Technology. These laboratories in Brisbane offer, on a fee-for-service basis, expertise in many aspects of food technology from sophisticated analyses, including sensory analysis, through QA (quality assurance) and HACCP (hazard analysis and critical control points, see p. 195) procedures to information and training and including product development and background research. The centre has special expertise in postharvest studies, particularly those relating to seafood. In the 1990s it had a staff of over 100 and was collaborating with CSIRO, universities, other research institutes and industry. Companies with a tradition of R&D—CSR, Carlton and United Breweries (CUB), Kraft, and Unilever—built up their research facilities in the 1960s. Cereal companies such as Kimptons in Victoria and Arnotts in New South Wales, both active before 1940 and stimulated by the Cereal Chemistry Division of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, did the same. Bunge joined them and Goodman Fielder, formed in 1986 by a series of mergers, quickly built up research centres in several countries. Other companies strengthened their technical support and overall there was a quickening of R&D in the food industry.

Research and development: some examples At CSIRO’s Meat Research Laboratories (MRL) in Brisbane meat scientists worked out the mechanisms of freezer burn, and control of Salmonella infection. Years of work on the biochemistry and biophysics of meat tenderness led to a realisation that the management of animals immediately before slaughter and of their carcasses immediately after was of crucial importance in the biological changes governing the eating qualities, especially tenderness, of the resulting meat. A greater understanding of this background science led in turn to changes in the method of hanging carcasses and the electrical stimulation of both beef and lamb. During the Second World War meat was boned, sometimes butchered, and frozen in cartons to conserve refrigerated shipping space. The technique languished until 1957 when it was revived and studied intensively. Hot boning was introduced but was microbiologically vulnerable, and much was learnt about microbial infection and how to reduce and control it. Ultimately the success of the trade in boned meat was due to vacuum packing in plastic films resistant to the transfer of water, oxygen and carbon dioxide— especially the last, of which sufficient diffused from the meat to reduce the rate of growth of microbiological contaminants within the pack. Also, MRL led the world in developing an automatic slaughter technique and paved the way to an automated and computer-controlled meatworks. Fundamental work in plant physiology led into postharvest studies on a number of fruits in the New South Wales Department of Agriculture, CSIRO and the University of New South Wales. Biochemical work identified the cause of superficial scald in apples, cold injury, and ripening of bananas and tomatoes; it also paved the way for improved storage of fruit in controlled atmos-


pheres, and ethylene ripening. Potato processing increased rapidly and the processors’ demands for higher total solids, freedom from discoloration and better texture led to studies to set criteria for total solids and organoleptic properties and hence to the growing of specific varieties for specific purposes. Studies of the nutrients of the tuber and the seasonal variations in vitamin C, niacin and thiamin were undertaken in the University of New South Wales. The non-enzymic browning of foods (the Maillard reaction), sometimes wanted, sometimes not, had by the 1980s become a subject of intense study giving rise to a series of quadrennial international symposia the first of which was held in Sweden in 1979. CSIRO began work on this very complex series of reactions in the 1950s and continued through the 1960s and into the 1970s. CSIRO Dairy Research Laboratories began flavour/taint studies in the late 1940s. They continued for decades. In Sydney CSIRO undertook similar studies on taints and off-flavours in non-dairy foods, and in Adelaide the Wine Research Institute made contributions to the knowledge of off-flavours in wines. Two higher degrees were obtained by Kraft chemists for similar studies, one on cheese and the other on yeast extract. From the 1950s, CSIRO scientists contributed significantly to advances in food microbiology. Dr WJ Scott’s studies led to the identification of the importance in food science of what came to be called water activity and a cornerstone in food technology. Scott’s work was continued over many years by Dr JHB Christian and his co-workers. So also Dr W Murrell continued his systematic study of bacterial spores and their importance in food processing. This work was hailed as a classic piece of research in food technology, and the division became a world reference point on this topic also. Drs JI Pitt and A Hocking began a long-term study of fungi and mycotoxins and their identification. In the late 1970s, when a sudden upsurge in aflatoxin levels in Queensland peanuts was detected, the industry turned to Pitt, who also became a world authority. From the early 1950s Miss Margaret Dick at Kraft had begun to apply in the company’s factories the principles of microbiological control that 20 years later were systematised in the United States under the general heading of ‘Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points’ (HACCP). The spoilage of chicken meat was studied in the University of Tasmania, but the prime contribution from this group was the development of predictive microbiology which culminated with the publication in 1993 of Predictive microbiology by Professor TA McMeekin and his co-workers. This book did several things: it showed that microbial growth conformed to a first-order chemical reaction equation, it discussed background theory and it explored alternative mathematical models. It led the world of food science into new fields and is considered by experts to be essential reading on the subject. A prominent American food scientist was moved to hope that the mathematics of predictive microbiology would lead the practitioners of the more classical scientific disciplines to look on food science with a little more respect! In the 1990s a New South Wales company began to market a Food Spoilage Predictor based on the Tasmanian work. In the earlier days of the Australian Wine Research Institute in Adelaide, the accent was on microbiological problems, especially spoilage, the provision of selected yeast strains, and an understanding of malolactic fermentation. The chemical work was confined largely to the major components and built up a valuable database. Work on metals in wines led to recognition of their role in wine stability, but from the mid-1960s more detailed work on the organic contituents resulted in greater understanding of wine colour and the pigmentation of red wines. Such background science, coupled with plant breeding programmes and AWRI applied research on problems in the industry, plus the Roseworthy influence through the training of oenologists with a scientific background, underpinned the advances in technology that have caught the attention of interna-

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tional producers. By 1980 very few wineries lacked adequate laboratory facilities and trained staff. In the vineyards the introduction in 1969 of the mechanical harvesting of grapes and research into vine management systems amenable to it followed from CSIRO’s work in viticulture. Also, the benefits of nematode-tolerant rootstocks were studied, and the breeding of new varieties of grapes was continued. Of special importance was the maintenance of the germplasm bank. Scientists of the Bread Research Institute and of the Wheat Research Unit of CSIRO, working side by side in Sydney, have been in the forefront of cereal science from wheat to the final product, and some have won international recognition. Contributions by both the institute and the unit to the cereal chemistry conferences continued at a high level. At BRI basic work was done on oxidising agents in shortening doughmaking. This was followed later in the 20th century by, among other things, more intensive work on wheat proteins and assessments of the usefulness of the rapid visco-analyser and near infra-red reflectance, and in 1986 a pilot mill for research and training was installed. The Sugar Research Institute carried out much fundamental work on its own account and fostered more in universities, other tertiary institutions, and CSIRO. The fundamental studies at SRI included work on the electrochemistry of the mud that settles from the clarification of cane juice with lime. It led to the development of special flocculants and the SRI subsidiser. Increased settling rates led to a dramatic reduction in settling times, an associated 75% reduction in volume of equipment required, and lower costs. In other work, studies of the patterns of circulation during sugar boiling led to improvements in the design and performance of the vacuum pans used. CSIRO’s Dairy Research Laboratories were working on the scientific basis of the major technological advances of the 1960s and later years, and there and in Kraft Research Laboratories, research on cheese starters and their protection from bacteriophage was being carried out. In a number of centres throughout Australia—universities, CSIRO, departments of agriculture and other government laboratories—research into a number of problems relevant to the dairy industry was being supported by the Dairy Research Committee of the Australian Dairy Corporation (ADC), the forerunner of the DRDC. In the 1980s the ADC, with federal funds, sponsored the Cheese Industry Productivity Improvement Project (CIPIP). This involved basic research in the University of New South Wales on starter kinetics and in CSIRO on membrane technology, and factory development work on a short method for cheesemaking first mooted by CSIRO 20 years earlier. The Centre for Food Technology in Brisbane through its Food Bioscience Group developed processes for the recovery of lactoferrin and other valuable proteins from cheese whey, and a fining agent for use in the brewing industry from the swim bladders of fish. It contributed also to cereal science through wheat breeding for better bread and through the development of enzyme assay kits for evaluating the malting quality of barley. Much R&D, especially development, went on in industry, where the background science supporting the company’s own product range was studied. Thus, CSR investigated cane varieties and sugar boiling; CUB, hops, their flavouring compounds, and hop extracts; Kraft, cheese, cheese starters, yeast extract and packaging; Unilever, fats and oils; Mauri Bros, yeast and, later, cheese starters. And the cereal companies researched flour properties appropriate to the expected end uses and applications for by-products. Little was published, but non-confidential information, especially on methodology and perhaps on technical aspects of packaging such as the performance of packaging materials, was exchanged by word of mouth. In the 1970s a thorough understanding of the background science enabled Davis Gelatin to develop a


technology commissioned in 1979 as the world’s first automated gelatin extraction plant, later modified in the light of newer developments. In the 1980s Arnott’s Research Centre developed and company engineers built the equipment for a continuous flour fermentation process for cracker biscuit doughs. It showed considerable savings in time, energy and capital costs and was patented worldwide. The Australian food industry traditionally relied on the packaging companies for packaging technology and this was even more pronounced as films for specialised purposes became available. Some companies, however, had their own packaging laboratories, but they were hardly concerned with cans. Significant changes were made in tin coatings, especially as hot dipped gave way to electrolytic tinplate, and the can companies kept abreast of them. Few food companies did any problem solving, but CSIRO studied problems associated with the introduction of electrolytic tinplate, and new internal lacquers for cans were investigated. Work began on the new flexible packaging films becoming available for food packaging. In the early days of new films and laminates, at least one company did its own research and worked with a converter to get film of the specifications it needed. From its foundation the Department of Food Technology, as it then was, in the University of New South Wales engaged in research. Since many of the postgraduate students came from south-east Asia, topics selected for their study were often chosen to relate to their home environment. Nevertheless, studies there and in the other universities have, over the years, added to the totality of Australian food science and technology. In the latter part of the 20th century scientific instrumentation advanced by leaps and bounds. In food science and technology this was most evident in the increasing availability of instruments based on physical principles to facilitate chemical analysis. In the 1950s dramatic advances in chromatography, both gas and liquid, opened the way for separation of complex mixtures, which was relatively easy as long as samples were prepared in a way amenable to the method. Coupled with the mass spectrometer, which identified the separated compounds, gas/liquid chromatography (GLC) became a powerful tool in, among other things, flavour analysis, the detection and identification of taints and other contaminants, and packaging technology. In the 1980s Dr JD Craske and his co-workers in the Central Research Laboratories of Unilever in Sydney published a series of important papers making major improvements in the GLC analysis of fats and oils. In the 1960s thin layer chromatography revealed aflatoxin and opened the door to the search for other mycotoxins. In Australia, among other things, it became a routine tool for the monitoring of peanuts for aflatoxin. Also in the 1960s Dr (later Sir) Alan Walsh of CSIRO perfected his atomic absorption spectrometer which became of universal application in metal analysis, not least in food science where its value quickly became apparent in the furore following the identification of Minimata disease as mercury poisoning. Other instruments developed overseas were enthusiastically adopted in Australia. They included amino acid analysers, which simplified and speeded up protein research, and instruments for the close and rapid monitoring of nitrogen in cereals, of fat and protein in dairy products, and of moisture generally. Nor was microbiology, with entirely different requirements, far behind. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA), radioimmuno assays (RIA) and DNA ‘fingerprinting’ entered the food science laboratories. Rapid diagnostic kits, including some developed in Australia, were soon being offered. These advances, of which the above are simply examples, increased the productivity of both research scientists and control laboratories, and, by measuring crucial parameters on-line in the factories, increased the

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ability of the production managers to control their processes. There was, of course, a cost: the instruments were expensive, and many required highly specialised operators and maintenance. Also, as more and more substances were revealed in food, so the likelihood of regulation, and its own attendant cost, increased. Such costs steadily pushed the food industry in the direction of those who could afford the instrumentation and the inevitable computerisation that went with it; in other words, it was another factor pushing the food industry towards centralisation.

Introducing food engineering Food engineering is very different from engineering in the food industry. The latter has been, and will always be, concerned with the provision of buildings and services, mechanical reliability, and repairs and maintenance. Throughout the 19th century there was plenty of evidence, in the meat and sugar industries for example, of contemporary engineering practice, but none of theory. Attempts were made in the 1870s and 1880s to introduce technical education for boys, and the first university departments were established in Melbourne (in 1882) and Sydney (in 1884). But the advances at the end of the 19th century were largely new ways of doing old things—wheat milling, milk separation and open-top canning, for example—or the provision of a new service, such as refrigeration. Food engineering, however, calls for an understanding of the properties of food and the changes that occur in them during processing in order that the most productfriendly process and equipment, from crop to consumption, may be designed. It follows, then, that food engineers must know what they are doing to the food products and what the raw materials, intermediates and finished products demand of them; what, for example, happens in the extruder during the production of snack foods. Maintenance engineers and those from other engineering disciplines are frequently at a disadvantage and may even inhibit progress. The men who designed and operated Australia’s sugar industry in the 19th century were well versed in heat, mass and momentum transfer. They were chemical engineers, though they would not have heard the term. But they were not food engineers: they were producing a virtually pure substance. Food engineering provides processes, and handling, processing and packaging equipment which must be designed not to damage sensitive raw materials, not to contaminate the product, not to collect dust, and to be easily cleanable. In short, the food engineer is constrained by the properties and vagaries of food systems. First, food is of biological origin, and all food raw materials are subject to marked variations in composition and thus in, say, specific heat. Knowledge that the elasticity of doughs is notoriously variable is essential in the design of equipment for manufacturing a baked product. As another example, great variation in the composition of milk from the beginning of the season in spring to the dry pastures of February forces changes in the routine of cheesemaking. Second, significant changes in flavour, texture and nutritive value may occur during processing, and every process must be designed to minimise them. The food engineer knows this, and deviations from the product specification to which the food technologist is working may often be corrected by changes to the process rather than the formulation. Third, contamination of the product by chemicals, from pesticides to boiler water additives, must be avoided as far as possible, but microbial contamination and the growth of contaminating organisms are totally unacceptable. Hence the requirement that equipment must be designed to avoid lodgement of dust externally or product internally and, especially, so that it may be cleaned easily and completely. While much food equipment must be easily dismantled for thorough cleaning, cleaning in place (CIP) systems were successfully developed in the 1950s


and were quickly applied in Australia, but they must be efficient and checked regularly by microbiologists. With the installation of the HACCP regime in most factories, the pressure came onto the food engineer, under the eye of the microbiologist, to design equipment as free as possible from microbiological hazards and to collaborate in the development of protocols for the checking of those that are unavoidable. Obviously, the food engineer must have a working knowledge of the chemistry and microbiology of foods, but possibly the ancillary discipline of which he stands in greatest need is rheology. Rheology, a branch of physics, is the science of flow and deformation. It is thus of great importance in food technology: flow in the transport of foods, especially in the pumping and flow of liquids and semi-liquids; deformation in manufacturing processes, as texture of the finished products, both liquid and solid, and as chewability and ‘mouth feel’ as the product is consumed. Mathematical relationships are all important to the rheologist, but, unfortunately, most food systems fail to conform to the classical Newtonian concepts. Obviously, problems were solved or avoided intuitively: pumping mayonnaise and cream without breaking the emulsions, producing and handling doughs for baked products and other starch-based foods, and so on. But equally obviously, a professional appreciation of the shear forces involved and their potential for breaking emulsions, for example, is preferable. Rheology is at the heart of food engineering. Those who know say that food engineering appeared as a discipline in its own right only after about 1970 though some place it considerably later than that. However, food engineering was being practised before the Second World War. Examples include the manufacture of Vegemite® and the later modification of the process to conserve thiamin (vitamin B1), and (also by Kraft) the vacuum drying on steam-heated shelves of a liver extract, a short-lived product for the treatment of anaemia. Further examples are the introduction of spray drying to replace roller drying in the dairy industry, and the virtually aseptic packaging of condensed milk by Life Guard Milk in 1939. The mechanisation of cheesemaking was begun in 1941–42 by the response of JM Sharkey, manager of the Kraft factory at Drouin, Victoria, to the wartime shortage of workers. After the whey was drained off from a vat of Cheddar cheese curd, the latter was

The ‘chicken breast’ texture of newly cheddared cheese curd. (Photograph by the author.)

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‘worked’ by hand to continue the expulsion of whey until the curd was ‘dry’. It was a back-breaking, labour-intensive task, and workers were no longer available. Sharkey devised a perforated trommel, set at an angle and driven to rotate gently. Curds and whey were pumped to this machine, allowed to drain, and then ‘worked’ mechanically. Later, Sharkey devised a tower, starshaped in section, into which the ‘dry’ curd was delivered, in which it coalesced, and from whose points it flowed, glacier-like, as cheddared curd with the desired ‘chicken breast’ texture. At that time, CSIRO was concentrating on mechanising what was done—that is, on engineering in the factory—whereas Sharkey, devising a different method altogether of achieving the results obtained when what was done in the factory was done, was working on food engineering. However, in the 1980s CSIRO, by clever application of membrane technology, made even greater strides by incorporating milk proteins normally lost in the whey into the improved mechanised Siro-Curd cheesemaking process thus increasing the yield of cheese as well. Membrane technology was embraced in Australia from the 1960s. The science made it look simple enough, but it wasn’t. Membrane technology uses a semi-permeable barrier, usually an artificial polymeric film, to bring about a chemical or physical separation of two or more components of a system. The portion passing through the membrane is called the permeate, and that which does not is the retentate (or concentrate). Separation is achieved by pressure (reverse osmosis and micro-, ultra- and nano-filtration), by electricity (electrodialysis), or by concentration (dialysis). In all of these the membrane is selected for the most effective separation of individual constituents of a solution, emulsion or suspension. Reverse osmosis is the reversing, by the application of pressure, of the osmotic pressure of a solution to force the solvent, that is, water, through the membrane thus concentrating the solution (osmosis dilutes it). As a lowtemperature, low-energy method of concentrating milk, whey, fruit juices and so on, it opens the way for saving transport costs by transporting concentrates for reconstitution at a distant site. Microfiltration retains fat globules and bacteria, ultrafiltration concentrates proteins as well, and nanofiltration permeate contains only water and small ions and is thus of value in demineralising dairy or similar fluids. The simplest application is the desalination of water by reverse osmosis, but CSIRO dairy scientists led the application of this technology in the development of new dairy products. The application of membrane technology in Australia, not only in the dairy industry and other branches of the food industry but also including contributions to the technology itself by Australian companies, was discussed in some detail at the Membrane Technology Today seminar held at Werribee in Victoria in February 1990. The science of membrane technology may well have been worked out in the laboratory, but the food engineer was needed to translate it into a commercial operation, and industry took up the challenge. An advance of a different kind was the introduction in the 1960s of fluid-bed freezers and driers. In these the basic engineering was the same. Food was conveyed down a line on an updraft of air that on the one hand was applied to the freezing of peas, and on the other to the drying of instant mashed potatoes (IMP). In the first, the updraft was of very cold air of sufficient velocity to keep each individual pea airborne as it froze thus ensuring that the final mass of frozen peas would flow and not be caked. In the second, the potato powder was dried by warm air as it progressed so that, again, the final product would flow and not cake. IMP was introduced in the 1960s and is an excellent illustration of challenges to the food engineer. It included a number of unit processes: peeling, slicing, blanching, cooking, mixing, sieving and drying. It transported materials by gravity, water, pump, screw conveyor, belt conveyor, bucket elevator and air. Heat was transferred by heating and cooling using liquid or


The Bell-Siro Cheesemaker 3 Mark II was based on CSIRO research and made by James Bell Machinery Co (later Bell Bryant Pty. Ltd.). It was an important step in a series of such machines beginning in the 1960s and continuing in succeeding years as more was learnt and incorporated in later models. (Photograph by courtesy of CSIRO.)

gas; there was heat and mass transfer during drying; heat, mass and momentum transfer in the fluid bed; and mass transfer within the granules to the surfaces as they dried. A physical constraint was that, whether the final product was to be roller-dried flakes or air-dried powder, the cooked potatoes had to be mashed sufficiently to separate the starch cells but not so vigorously as to break them lest the final product reconstitute as starch paste. It was not a difficult problem, but the food engineer had to be aware of it in designing the plant. Finally, since moist potato powder is an excellent medium for the growth of moulds, there was a compelling need to design plant and equipment to minimise lodgement and facilitate cleaning. Possibly Australia’s most spectacular success in food engineering was Dr DJ Casimir’s invention of a spinning cone for the stripping of flavours, good and bad, from liquids. It has been developed commercially and applied to the collection of important fragile volatile components from fruits, beverages and essential oils without damage either to the flavour collected or to the residual product. Early removal of flavours from a processed product conserves them and allows them to be returned in the final stages of processing. The system has also been used for the strip-

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The Spinning Cone consists of a series of cones fixed to a central spindle and spinning within a similar series of fixed cones and appropriately enclosed. Product fed into the top is conveyed counter currently to the bottom through rising low temperature steam. The volatile substances are recovered at the top, flavours for further use and taints to waste. (Illustration by courtesy of Flavourtech Pty Ltd.)

ping of taints from cream. Because it handles feeds containing solids, the technology is well suited to the food industry and has been improved by further research. The same research group has been responsible also for a flame sterilisation process for canned foods. A reverse roll to agitate the contents was built in, but its application languished. Also, an improved countercurrent extraction was developed, primarily for fruit juice, with consequent increases in yield. It depends on the concentration-driven diffusion of cell contents through heat- or pressuredamaged membranes, but, because of the wash water, the product ceased to be fruit juice as defined in the food regulations. In the 1990s, lessons learnt during the work on flame sterilisation were applied by CSIRO, BHP and Pacific Power in a collaborative study of the processing of canned foods by electrical induction. Texture and flavour were said to be better than in the normally retorted products, and in 1999 prototype equipment was built. Other engineering advances in the 1960s included the mechanisation of harvesting, especially of peas and sweet corn, and mechanisation of the pitting, peeling and coring of fruit. Some machines, such as the Australian peach aligner, were made in Australia. Other advances included the use of the desludging centrifuge to improve the polishing of pineapple juice, the


introduction in 1964 of the screening centrifuge for the extraction of apple juice, and the installation of the first conejector for removing seeds and skins from tomato juice. Another product of a process capable of wider application was milk treated at ultra high temperatures (UHT milk). UHT products are heated rapidly to 135–150°C in continuous flow, held at that temperature long enough to ensure ‘commercial sterility’, cooled rapidly, and packed aseptically, usually into paperboard cartons. The potential for this process was known at the end of the 19th century, but was really only developed after the Second World War. Australia’s first plant was installed about 1964 at Nestlé’s Tongala, Victoria, factory. UHT milk was accepted reluctantly, but by the end of the 20th century many products were being manufactured in Australia. They included various milks, cream, custards and milk puddings, fruit, tomato and vegetable juices, soups and even wines. This process challenges the food engineer on two fronts: the selection of the correct temperature for sterility without damaging flavour, and the design and operation of the aseptic filling line to ensure the absence of post-processing contamination. The oil shock of the early 1970s galvanised the services engineers of the food industry, along with others, into taking a very close look at energy conservation. Many food companies entrusted selected staff members with the task of auditing their energy usage and suggesting ways in which it could be improved, and many found that by tightening procedures they could save a lot of money. The obvious usage of energy in food storage and processing—namely, refrigeration, steam raising and electricity—was critically evaluated. As well, simple things such as attention to the wastage of steam and hot water in the nightly cleaning operations, and the installation of heat exchangers to recover heat from wastewater, paid dividends. Some use was also made of solar energy for heating water. In the 1980s three food-related energy studies, for the dairy, baking and meat industries, were published by the National Energy Research Development and Demonstration Council.

Government support Government support for food science and technology by work in its own laboratories has long been apparent. It can be argued that CSIRO’s very success made industry lazy, and the heavy reliance of both the dairy and meat industries on CSIRO research lends point to the argument. That individual farmers are unable to support R&D for themselves was recognised in the rural research and development corporations and their forerunners, but the disinclination of the processors of primary products to help themselves with their own R&D is far less forgivable. From 1967 the federal government sought to stimulate industry generally to undertake R&D, first by tax relief and then more positively by the establishment of co-operative research centres (CRCs). Food technology benefited from both initiatives. Rural research and development corporations In the mid-1980s the Commonwealth Government decided that the gap between research and development, especially in the rural sector, must be closed and legislated for the setting up of rural research and development corporations (RDRCs). Industry-wide participation by means of levies, to be matched by the Commonwealth, was to pay for R&D that would be of value for the whole industry. This was not new: such had been the case for many years. What was new was the organisation of it. RDRCs, 14 of them, were set up as autonomous corporations with wide powers and broad industry objectives, and made accountable to their respective industries. They were governed by non-representative boards selected according to expertise, which alone circumvented industry politics, and they were able to buy their R&D wherever they chose. Three

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examples of special import to Australian food science and technology were the Australian Meat and Livestock Research and Development Corporation (later the Meat Research Corporation, which in 1998 became part of Meat and Livestock Australia Ltd), the Grain Research and Development Corporation (GRDC), and the Dairy Research and Development Corporation (DRDC). The success of the scheme, which unashamedly was aimed at application, was demonstrated by the large increase in funds made available for R&D by the respective industries. Meat and livestock research was centred on CSIRO’s Cannon Hill Laboratories in Brisbane. Grain research, much of it basic, covered 25 crops from cereals to oilseeds and legumes. It spanned on-farm production, including biotechnology; processing; and marketing. DRDC set up five of its own centres. The first, early in 1992 was the Starter Culture Research Centre. Located at the CSIRO Dairy Laboratories at Highett in Victoria, it was formed to carry out confidential research on cheese starters for subscribing companies. In 1995 it moved into refurbished laboratories at Werribee. Also in 1992 the Dairy Industry Quality Centre was located in the laboratories of the New South Wales Dairy Corporation, but it, too, later moved to Werribee. In 1994 the Australian Ingredient Centre was established. It, also, is at Werribee, but the Dairy Process Engineering Centre (opened February 1996) is at Monash University in Victoria, and the Dairy Industry Centre for UHT Processing was opened in the University of Queensland in 1998. All these centres, with the financial support of participating companies, aimed at strengthening the industry with information, advice, and laboratory R&D work. Tax relief Direct government financial support for industrial research dates from the Industrial Research and Development Grants Act of 1967. The scheme as it stood proved to be cumbersome to administer and, in spite of improvements based on experience, was replaced in the 1980s by a 150% tax allowance for industrial research and development as defined by the Act. The tax relief was later reduced to 125% with a concomitant fall in industrial research activity, but, overall, industrial food science and technology benefited. Co-operative research centres In 1990 the federal government initiated the mechanism for setting up financially supported cooperative research centres (CRCs). These were to bring together like-minded research scientists from universities, government laboratories (mainly CSIRO) and industry to translate scientific results into commercially viable technologies of national importance, but also to encourage the users of research to involve themselves in it and to stimulate education and training in the sciences. CRCs covered industry generally, but a number of them were for food technology projects; for example, international food manufacturing and packaging, biopolymers of food application, wheat and meat quality, food industry innovation, and sustainable sugar and rice production. Their formation has been beneficial, but some of the people trained through them have been lost to the food industry. There can be no doubt, however, that government support generally has raised the standard of Australian food science and technology.

Chapter 15

Challenge and change

Changes in the support for food technology were mirrored by changes in products and processes. Some derived from new technologies, some from automation and the power of the computer, and some were driven by perceived opportunities in the market place, most of which were created by offering the consumer new products and, mainly, old products in new ways. Two dissimilar factors dominated the retail market: the demand for convenience foods, and the packaging revolution. Virtually coinciding, they made a powerful impact. The second facilitated the first as food companies both satisfied and, by their success in doing so, promoted the demand for convenience. The ‘old’ technologies were challenged, and to a greater or lesser extent changed, by the increasing understanding of the underlying science. The companies practising them were transformed, first by automation and later by computerisation, into a smaller number of centralised giants. In the market place the challenge was the market pull for convenience, safety and nutrition; the push for change was technology, especially packaging and the new technologies of which those in the dairy industry were, perhaps, the oustanding examples.

Milling and cereal products Packaged flour for domestic use, both plain and self-raising, had been introduced after the Second World War. Self-raising flour was improved by replacing the traditional cream of tartar (potassium hydrogen tartrate) with a series of cheaper and more reliable acid phosphates. Dry mixes for all manner of baked goods followed. Until the 1950s, baking of bread, cakes, pies and so on was small business carried on locally all over the country. But from 1956 to 1960, especially, there was a surge to centralisation as the large city millers, faced with shrinking export markets, sought economies of scale by vertical integration and acquired bakeries wholesale by purchase. The trend was aided by the mechanisation of bread making, the demise of home deliveries through the growth of supermarkets during the 1960s, the introduction of sliced bread, and the development of processes and packaging to reduce staling and increase the shelf life of loaves. In the mills computer technology integrated the reception and blending of wheats, the operation of the mill, and the blending of the resultant flours so that the mills could be programmed to run automatically. An added advantage was that hard and soft wheats could be conditioned and milled separately and the flours blended. Advanced laboratory instrumentation permitted faster and more accurate testing and, with computerisation, continuous monitoring and feedback control of the mills. As automation increased and the associated laboratories

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called for more, and more complex, equipment, the search for economies of scale became more intense. Only large companies could afford the capital cost; centralisation increased, and the resulting vertically integrated giants concentrated on mass-produced products in the greatest demand. The market reaction to this was the emergence of the ‘little men’ offering specialty products from the proliferating hot bread shops, and the ‘home-baked’ biscuit makers. The miller owners of the bakery chains responded by supplying premixes. In the 1980s, supermarkets introduced their own in-store bakeries, and in the 1990s the home breadmaker appliance became popular bringing baking full circle back into the ‘farmhouse’. The local independent cake shop was another casualty of centralisation. Here again the merchant millers spelt the end of the specialist as premixes and franchise cake makers supplanted the pastrycook. The traditional recipes, too, were changed as butter gave way to vegetable shortenings made to precise specifications for specific purposes by controlled hydrogenation, interesterification, and so on. From time to time the nutritive value of bread, especially white bread, is challenged. Both white and wholemeal breads are excellent foods, supplying energy, protein, B vitamins, calcium, phosphorus and iron. The overall nutritive value diminishes slightly as the extraction rate falls, but in the normal varied diet enjoyed by so-called Western societies this is of no significance whatever. On the other hand, advances in nutrition included a new appreciation of the importance of fibre and the public perception of it. There is much more to fibre than cereal bran, but there was an increase in the demand for wholemeal and multigrain breads, and a decrease in that for white loaves. In the 1980s and 1990s a big expansion in the demand for breakfast cereals put Australians among the largest per capita consumers of these products. Supermarket shelves testified to the variety and volume of them, and the manufacturers of these products made the most of the fibre content of their wholegrain products. During the Second World War the expertise of biscuit manufacturers had been used in production of service ration packs, but afterwards, from 1949 to 1963, there was a rationalisation of manufacture and six other family companies from Brisbane to Perth became associated with Arnotts. In 1965 Swallow and Ariell, too, joined what became the Australian Biscuit Company,

In the 1960s refrigerated, ready-to-bake dough products posed special problems for the packaging technologist. The active aerators present required the package to be strong enough to withstand the pressures developed but weak enough to be opened easily. As the products were unprocessed, there were tight microbiological constraints also. (Photograph by the author.)


ultimately to be Arnotts Limited. By the end of the 20th century Arnotts, by then owned by Campbells Soups, was accounting for more than half of Australian biscuit sales. The equipment for baking, cooling and packing has long been automated with band ovens hundreds of feet long. The production of gluten and starch continued and in 1992 Manildra began to produce ethyl alcohol at Nowra, New South Wales, by fermentation of residues from the production of wheat starch. A number of additives may be used with flour, and in flour for baking. Newly milled flour has a yellowish tinge that has long been known to fade on ageing for two to three months. About 1900 it was found that flour from the mill could be bleached with agents such as oxides of nitrogen, ozone and chlorine. Modern practice is to use benzoyl peroxide at levels considerably lower than those permitted. Cake flours, preferably from low-protein wheats, are chlorinated. Other additives include enzymes to ensure consistent fermentation of the dough, simple oxidising and reducing agents to moderate the behaviour of the gluten, mineral salts to ensure maximum yeast activity, and mould inhibitors to extend the shelf life of bread. In addition bread has been used as a simple medium for ensuring that the population gets a crucial nutrient, for instance calcium and phosphorus in wartime Britain, and iodine in certain goitrous parts of Australia. Ingredients such as garlic, onion, tomato, cheese and so on may be added to the dough as special flavours. In the latter half of the 20th century cereal science, stimulated by the formation of what is now the Cereal Chemistry Division of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, flourished in the CSIRO Wheat Research Unit, the Bread Research Institute, and university and industry laboratories. They covered all aspects from the study of wheat varieties and grain hardness through to biochemical and rheological properties of doughs and their development. But breeders of new varieties of wheat found themselves facing a problem not unknown to production managers in various branches of the food industry: the conflict between yield, in this case what the farmer wanted, and quality—that is, what the miller and consumer wanted. This constraint inhibited breeding for yield. The reports in Chemistry in Australia of the annual conferences of the Cereal Chemistry Division, especially in the last two decades of the 20th century, showed just how far science had advanced in the Australian cereals industry.

Fermentation Brewing From 1945 brewing stagnated for a time, but in the 1950s plant replacement and the addition of new plant began. Over the next 20 years there was little change in the types of beer produced, the Australian product, ostensibly designed for a hot climate, being based on European and North American technologies. This period was noted for a drive for greater efficiency, in raw material usage and plant utilisation, thus focusing attention on the quality of the raw materials, methodology and plant design. The application of statistical methods, operations research and tight quality control programmes improved product uniformity and productivity and led to the adoption of programmed and semi-automated equipment that, in common with the food industry generally, was entirely of stainless steel. This, plus welded joints and improved detergents, led to greatly improved hygiene not only in breweries but in other branches of the food and beverage industry also. Expanding production requirements in the 1970s were met by the installation of ‘tank farms of cylindro-conical vessels’ and the replacement of two-stage filtration with a more efficient single-stage procedure, but still using diatomaceous earth. Above all, however, from 1978 procedures became computer controlled.

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Science and technology combined to improve malting, and raw materials expanded to include sugar and dextrose syrups delivered by tanker, wheat starch and low-protein flour. Led by FV Harold, Carlton and United Breweries research at the Hop Research Station at Ringwood, Victoria, bred new varieties of hops with high α-acids. Ringwood Special was the first, but the second, Pride of Ringwood, was a further improvement and dominated hop growing in Australia. CUB chemists then developed a hop extract in which the humulones were preisomerised and, rather than infusing hops in the wort, permitted a soluble extract to be added to the brew. But hops per se continued to be used by some in pelletised form. Critical path analysis markedly improved throughput in the brewhouse, and research reduced fermentation times. The traditional baskets, boxes, crates, and wooden barrels were replaced by non-returnable cardboard cartons, one-way pint bottles and ring-pull cans (1957) and, from the early 1950s, the stainless steel 18-gallon kilderkin. Later, improved equipment for keg washing and filling was developed and came into general use. Oxygen damages beer flavours, and in the 1980s German pre-evacuation fillers to improve oxygen control were combined with high-speed filling lines that doubled the throughput of the 1970s to 2000 cans per minute. In 1988 O’Donnell was able to write, ‘The major emphasis since 1970 in the technological development of beer has been in improving the flavour and physical stability of the product. To this end, newer chillproofing agents have been introduced which means that beer can be made physically stable over very extended periods of time without becoming cloudy’ (p. 518). Techniques were developed for fermenting worts of higher concentration and diluting the result either before or after filtration, and, stimulated by random breath tests, low and very low alcohol beers of acceptable beer flavour were successfully introduced in the 1970s. In 1985 a vacuum distillation process enabled the Swan Brewery in Western Australia in 1985 to get down to 0.9% alcohol, and the next year CUB adopted the same process. In the 1980s, in search of economies of scale and in response to the perceived advantages of computerisation, corporate manoeuvres took centralisation of the industry a stage further with the closure of many breweries that found the demands for capital for computerisation and automation beyond them. Ominously, as O’Donnell points out in the same article, ‘over the years there have been very few successful beer launches in contrast to other food industries’, but Australian brewers have been able to sell their expertise overseas in both old and emerging markets. In the late 1980s, consumer reaction to the uniform products that dominated the market spawned the individualistic ‘boutique breweries’, pioneered in Western Australia in 1984 by the Matilda Bay Brewing Company. These small and mini-breweries responded to a perceived market for products of distinctive flavours different from the bland uniform products of the giants. They concentrated on ‘natural’ ingredients and eschewed sugar. Many were unpasteurised. They used various strains of yeast, and hops from different sources, some European, for different beers. Another was still using wooden fermenters, but did recognise the need for meticulous plant hygiene. The boutique brewer and the logical extension back to the home brewer closed the circle back to the ‘village’ and the ‘farmhouse’—but with a difference. The boutique brewers and home brewers knew, or at least had the opportunity of knowing, what they were doing in terms of yeast, temperature, pH and density (alcohol content). The parallel with the cereal industry was marked. There, also, the drive towards automation via computer technology increased centralisation and uniformity of products, and there the reaction was the hot bread shop, the equivalent of the boutique brewery, and the breadmaker, the equivalent of the home brewer.


But, to sum up, in the closing years of the 20th century both the brewing and cereal industries were applying science, from plant genetics and biochemistry to chemical engineering and computer science, and making full use of the advanced technology of materials and plant design available to them. Winemaking That there was an upsurge in the latter part of the 20th century in the production of wines, especially white wines, for the home and overseas markets was well documented. The Australian wine industry built firmly on the foundations laid by Hickinbotham and Fornachon and, from 1955, the Australian Wine Research Institute, but, as with milling and brewing, there was a strong move from the 1960s accelerating through the 1970s towards centralisation. By the late 1990s there were some 4500 wine grape growers and 1000 winemakers, but 84% of the crushing was in the hands of only 10 large companies. However, the ability of the multitude of small wineries to prosper was evidence in yet another industry of consumer appreciation of the individuality of the products. The increasing popularity of Australian wines in overseas markets derived from improving quality and the industry’s perceived image of being ‘clean and green’, free from chemical residues. This did not come about by accident. The Australian wine industry is technologically advanced and very efficient. Viticulture was improved by planting grape varieties more suited to the wine being made, by drip and microjet irrigation, and by mechanisation of pruning and especially of harvesting, which could then be done in the cool of the night with consequent better control of the vital grape temperature. Vineyards appeared in the cooler areas and produced quality table wines, and outside the phylloxerated areas grapes tended to be grown on their own rootstocks selected for nematode and drought resistance. The provision after 1955 of specific pure yeast cultures and a better understanding of the importance of pH and temperature led to closer control of flavours from the vineyard onwards, and results became more predictable. Major advances in technology included pre-treatment of juice for white wine production, partial or complete clarification with temperature and oxidation control by cooling or by blankets of inert gases, better quality control, and the addition of selected cultures of lactic acid organisms to promote the desirable malolactic fermentation. Converting naturally occurring malic acid to lactic acid for fermentation improved the flavour by reducing perceived acidity. Clarification was greatly improved in three ways: with diatomaceous earth filters, though adsorbents may remove flavour compounds; by the introduction of membrane technology after centrifuging; and by ultrafiltration. But perhaps the biggest advance was greater flexibility resulting from the adoption of the spinning cone column. This technology allowed ostensibly excessive concentrations of sulphur dioxide to be added as an antiseptic, antioxidant, and enzyme inhibitor and then eventually stripped, permitting large volumes of juice to be held for long periods and thus extending the season. Later, the technology was applied to the removal of alcohol to produce low or no alcohol wines, to recover marc volatiles or to remove unwanted flavours and aromas. The trend to develop full grape flavours increased sugar content with resulting high alcohol development in the subsequent fermentation, but the spinning cone column, by stripping excess alcohol, enabled the vigneron to benefit from the increased aroma without excessive alcohol levels. The technique used stripped the flavour from part of the wine, then the alcohol was removed; the very low alcohol product, plus the stripped flavour, was then added back to produce wine of the required alcohol level.

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The introduction in 1971 by Wynns Winegrowers Pty Ltd of the multi-layer collapsible bagin-box retail container was extremely successful and resulted in a dramatic fall in the sales of wines in glass containers. It was copied round the world and was yet further evidence of Australian willingness to experiment and innovate. Australian schools of oenology and viticulture and research institutes welcomed frequent overseas visitors and Australian winemaking technology became sought after. The difference in the seasons enabled Australian winemakers to work in Australia in the earlier part of the year and in Europe, where they were welcomed, in the latter part. Many did so. The secret of success was largely in the education and training available. The splendid courses in oenology and viticulture at the Roseworthy Agricultural College were already well known internationally. In the early 1990s, Roseworthy merged with the University of Adelaide. Fortunately, the practical strengths of Roseworthy were maintained and theoretical aspects strengthened. A second excellent course was developed at Charles Sturt University at Wagga, New South Wales, and both produced well-educated viticulturalists and oenologists with the practical side of their professions balanced by fundamental studies in biological and chemical topics. More to the point, perhaps, was the interest in higher degrees including the PhD, a necessary development as the industry expanded and research needs and opportunities increased. Of particular interest, in view of Bleasdale’s advice to the South Australian vignerons in 1867 that they should improve their marketing, was the offering at Roseworthy from 1975 of a Diploma in Wine Marketing and at the University of Adelaide in the 1990s of a wine marketing major in the course for the Bachelor of Agricultural Business. Industry organisations have evolved since the formation in 1929 of the Australian Wine Board, and in 1980 a new society of professionals, the Australian Association of Viticulture and Oenology, was formed. With the Australian Wine Research Institute it holds triennial national grape and wine conferences. The Australian Wine Foundation was established by the industry in 1988 to fund research into wine and health, and to promote moderation and an educational programme; and in 1990 the Australian Society of Wine Educators was formed. Many advances in the science of winemaking have been made, and wines are now known to contain many hundreds of constituents. The importance of pure yeast cultures, pH and temperature control from grape harvest to fermentation, the understanding of the importance and promotion of the malolactic fermentation, and the rationale of the value of the spinning cone column have been mentioned or implied. All wineries able to afford them have laboratories to measure constituents related to grape and wine composition and stability. Yet, there seems little reason to modify Dr BC Rankine’s caveat of 1984: ‘However, the analyses do not measure quality as such but set parameters of composition and check on the presence or absence of faults. In fact, winery analyses cannot usually distinguish between a sound commercial and a premium wine’. There is still much to learn; but Bleasdale would have been delighted at the enthusiastic adoption of blending.

Sugar In the mid-1960s the harvesting of sugar cane was changing rapidly from manual to mechanical and some Australian innovations were adopted in other countries. The next decade saw a rapid transformation of the industry driven by international competition, labour shortages, growth, and the recognition that the future lay with research and innovation. Major improvements were made in all aspects of raw sugar production from cane growing through harvesting and processing to transport and storage, not least the technological advances, especially in clarification,


deriving from the fundamental work of the Sugar Research Institute at Mackay. Such were the advances that Australian sugar technology was seen by sugar producers overseas to be at the leading edge, and many came to study it. At the mill the cane was shredded, and crushed through a train of, say, four rollers, each unit of which was the traditional triangular arrangement of three rolls. The fibrous residue (bagasse) from the last of the roller train retained little sugar and was burnt for steam raising. The juice from the rolls was combined in a mixer, limed, boiled, and clarified. The clarification of cane juice is most important. It influences the recovery of raw sugar, its behaviour in the refinery, and the quality of the refined sugar obtained from it. It was therefore carefully controlled and was, effectively, extrapolated to the subsequent refining of the raw sugar to yield ultimately a very pure substance. Various grades of sugar were marketed, and the liquors from the centrifuges yielded molasses, treacle and golden syrup. The treacle and golden syrup were retail products; the molasses, especially that from the raw sugar mills, formed the substrate for fermentation to power alcohol. The filter mud from the first clarification was used as an agricultural fertiliser. On 1 July 1989, after a lifetime of close regulation by the Queensland and federal governments, the Australian sugar industry was deregulated. CSR and Millaquin ceased refining and marketing for the Queensland Government, and, with Manildra Harwood, formed in that year to refine all New South Wales raw sugar, refined and marketed on their own accounts. In March 1998 Sugar Australia was formed from the Australian and New Zealand assets of CSR Ltd and Mackay Refined Sugars. These assets were the refineries at Yarraville and Mackay; the bulk carrier, MRS Pioneer; depot and port facilities around the Australian coast at Mackay, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth; and the CSR brand. In the 1990s there were in Australia some 6000 canegrowers who co-operatively owned almost half the sugar mills. The Australian industry, competing on the world market, had become a major supplier of raw sugar. How? By intensive research, close process supervision, and high standards of mill technology leading to a quality product and very efficient bulk handling and shipping.

Fruit and vegetables The vast bulk of fruit and vegetables on the retail market were sold either fresh, canned (mainly fruit) or frozen (mainly vegetables). Fresh fruit stimulated considerable research on postharvest physiology and the avoidance and prevention of defects, especially in apples and pears. This and indeed most of the research in the associated fields was carried out in New South Wales by CSIRO and the State Department of Agriculture and has been catalogued by Dr Vickery. The major exception was work on tropical fruits in Queensland. The control of bitter pit in apples and superficial scald in apples and pears, defects in bananas and the improvement of controlled atmosphere storage were only some of the topics yielding positive results. The physics of the sun-drying of fruits broke new ground in Australia, and detailed studies on the packaging of prunes yielded results of importance to industry. Tomatoes are processed for pulp, juice or whole fruit, but for best results processors sought different properties in the fruit destined for each end product. Nor was the best fruit for retail the best for any of these products. Objective measurements of the relevant properties in the raw material for each product were developed and matched with individual cultivars. So also with potatoes as industry moved into a variety of potato products, especially frozen ‘French fries’. Similarly, measurements of indicators of the optimum maturity of peas and sweet corn for freezing were developed.

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After the Second World War there were great strides in drying including the drying of vegetables. Tunnel drying to a higher moisture content, 10–12%, and finishing off in bins with a gentle upward flow of warm air dried by passing through a lithium chloride solution gave much improved product. Nevertheless, the major consumers of conventional dried vegetables are the dried-soup manufacturers and the food service industry. Instant mashed potatoes, an acceptable consumer product, has already been discussed. Freeze-drying had been tried in France in 1905–06 but was of limited application except for coffee and some specialised armed forces rations. Most processed fruit, including mixed fruit and pie fillings, continued to be canned and the advances were essentially those of canning technology. However, in 1987 Ardmona Foods Limited introduced long-life, shelf stable diced fruit products in plastic tubs. This pack was an alternative to the can and was a world first. By the late 1990s production had reached 50 million tubs per season. Jam was still made in large quantities and in the 1960s vacuum processing was introduced for a high-quality product. Special attention was paid to the quality of the raw material. The optimum storage temperature for frozen berry fruits, the major raw material for this jam, was found to be -18°C. Boiling under vacuum, that is, at a significantly reduced temperature, removed excess water without the concomitant damage to colour and flavour associated with boiling what is, in effect, a concentrated sugar solution at atmospheric pressure. Reference has already been made to the absence before the Second World War of a fruit juice industry and the sudden birth of one in 1942 to meet the needs of the American armed forces. This new industry expanded rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s both in output and in the variety of products. It benefited greatly from new technologies developed overseas, but also from CSIRO’s spinning cone technology.

Dairy products Of all the ‘old’ technologies dairy technology has faced the greatest changes and, deriving from them, technology-driven challenges to find applications for new products. The introduction in the late 1950s of bulk milk collection by refrigerated tankers from refrigerated farm holding tanks has already been mentioned. The factory collection of cans of milk and cream by wagon and later by motor truck was begun in Gippsland in the early 1890s by the Poowong Co-operative Butter Factory. Bulk collection when ultimately possible was a logical extension. The economic benefits were considerable, but the authorities had to be convinced that the measurement of milk volumes was accurate and the rate of cooling of the milk was standardised. An unexpected result was a new microbiological challenge in the rise in the incidence of psychrophilic organisms favoured by the lower temperatures. Harmless, and destroyed by pasteurisation, they nevertheless could adversely affect flavour. Also, they limited holding time at low temperatures and imposed tighter controls. That Cheddar, made in the traditional way, was up to the 1950s the exclusive Australian cheese of choice is well known. That the post-war flood of migrants brought with them a more varied taste in cheese also has been acknowledged. Australian tastes began to broaden. The first break with tradition came in 1951 with Kraft’s introduction of rindless cheese. This took advantage of the new packaging materials to produce Cheddar cheese in plastic-wrapped rectangular 40 lb blocks of a shape ideal for subsequent cutting into consumer sizes. In 1955 Kraft began to make Swiss (Emmenthaler) cheese in the same rectangular rindless form and in 1957 intro-


duced a roll-stock wrapping machine for all retail units. Consumer-size packs of processed cheese slices were similarly wrapped from 1959, and in 1975 individually wrapped slices were introduced. The technologies were American, but, as is usually the case with technology transfer, they could not have been implemented without considerable Australian R&D. Gradually, other cheeses, including Dutch and Italian types and some soft cheeses, began to be made and increased in variety and volume as the 20th century progressed. By the year 2000 the Australian dairy industry was one of the most efficient food industries in the world and with an excellent safety record. In the second half of the 20th century milk production, almost two-thirds of it in Victoria, had increased almost threefold. In the last decade of the century cheese production, most of it for export, had doubled. In the mid-1970s the major products were pasteurised, evaporated and dried milks; butter; cream; Cheddar cheese; ice cream and yoghurt. But by the year 2000, dairy products also included milk and whey proteins; other whey products; dairy desserts; cultured milk; spreads and blends; numerous varieties of cheese; milk drinks; and recombined, UHT and frozen milk products. Advances in technology included homogenisation (introduced in the 1970s) and new methods of separation and fractionation. Of the new technologies and equipment, the major Australian contribution was perhaps the mechanisation of cheesemaking, which has already been discussed in a different context. CSIRO’s original model, though commercialised, was not entirely satisfactory. It and Sharkey’s system were used overseas, but both were overshadowed by CSIRO’s later system incorporating membrane technology. Australia played a leading role in this field of dairy technology. In the whole of the dairy industry, seasonal factors loom large in the behaviour of milk, for example in cheesemaking, and in the properties of dairy products, for instance milk powders. The roller and spray drying of milk were imported technologies, but much work in the CSIRO Dairy Research Laboratory (DRL) was directed to improving the properties of the dried milks obtained, and much progress was made. In the war years Australian research into the quality of butter had been successfully transferred to industry, and in this later period important background scientific research on butterfat was done by DRL in Victoria, and in the laboratories of the Queensland Butter Board. During the Second World War the Americans shipped dried components of milk to their bases overseas and recombined them to permit the manufacture on the spot of conventional dairy products. After the war other dairy countries took up the technology. Australia was one of them, and the DRL played a leading role in the further development of it. CSIRO helped dairy factories to make the necessary anhydrous butterfat and skim milk powder and the Australian Dairy Produce Board, as it then was, to develop and operate in Asia a series of recombining plants in which various dairy products were manufactured from Australian raw materials. An analogous project was the production of co-precipitate. In response to a cri de coeur from the industry producing casein from milk, DRL developed a method for precipitating both casein and whey proteins together. It was copied overseas and further work yielded precipitates with functional properties suitable for specific food applications. In 1960 a new foods section was established in DRL. Apart from a range of new ingredients, especially after the successful introduction of membrane technology, its major success was the development of a high-protein milk biscuit which was incorporated into infant-feeding programmes in some developing countries, most notably Zambia. A clever attempt to produce polyunsaturated dairy products by feeding cattle special supplements designed to bypass the rumen was entirely successful scientifically, but could not compete on cost with formulated

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products using vegetable oils. Later, butter fractions yielding products to match vegetable shortenings, and powders formulated for many different applications, also were developed. As the work on recombined and then membrane and fractionated products progressed, so new opportunities emerged for the development of ingredients, especially protein products from milk and whey, with functional products suited to specific food applications. Some with nutritional properties of special interest in infant feeding were identified. In the 1990s the Co-operative Research Centre for Tissue Growth and Repair isolated cell and tissue growth factors lactoferrin and lactoperoxidase from whey, and commercialised the process. In the 1970s DRL began to apply membrane technology to the problem of the disposal of whey. Workers in other countries were improving membrane design, manufacture and sanitation. But LL Muller succeeded in persuading the CSIRO Division of Chemical Engineering, the Victorian Department of Agriculture and like-minded groups in New Zealand and Ireland to join him in a collaboration which yielded valuable information leading to the successful application of reverse osmosis and ultrafiltration in the recovery of whey proteins and the manufacture of new products. This collaborative work complemented other research and contributed to the solution of some outstanding problems as well as leading to the installation by the Australian industry of membrane plants producing new whey products. It was obvious that membrane technology could also be used to concentrate milk, and the French pioneered its concentration to cheese composition and the making of soft cheeses from the concentrate without any whey production. Higher yields resulted from the incorporation of the proteins normally lost in the whey, and the technique was used commercially for soft cheeses in Australia also. The making of hard cheeses was more difficult, but DRL managed it. Before

Mr LL Muller, the driving force behind Australia’s significant contributions to the application of membrane technology in the dairy industry, with the array of pipes and pumps within which the membranes functioned. (Photograph by courtesy of CSIRO.)


doing so, however, it developed a cheese base for the manufacture of processed cheese. Pasteurised whole milk was concentrated five-fold by ultrafiltration with the contrived passage through the membrane of most of the lactose. The concentrate was then fermented with cheese starter for 12–16 hours and the moisture reduced to a specified level in a swept-surface evaporator. The resulting thick fluid solidified on cooling and could be stored for long periods without loss of processing properties. Its composition could be varied to match any desired variety of cheese and processed cheese produced from it by the addition of commercially available flavours. DRL’s commercial partner was the American company Schreiber Foods Inc. After installing a plant at Tempe, Arizona, in 1984, this company manufactured thousands of tons of the base, which can also be used in sauces, dips, soups and so on, and, because the casein micelles have not been destabilised, may be dispersed in water. The soft cheese/cheesebase technology as it stood was not suitable for the manufacture of lower-moisture hard cheeses such as Cheddar, and a combination of ultrafiltration and syneresis was developed. Ten percent of the retentate was segregated, fermented overnight with cheese starter, added back to fresh retentate and the whole set with rennet. From that point the normal cheesemaking procedure was followed. Over a period of 11 years and at a cost of some $10 million this procedure was fully automated. Plant was built by APV–Bell Bryant and first installed by Murray Goulburn Co-operative Ltd at Cobram in northern Victoria. Based on a great deal of background cheese science, it led the world and has been sought by overseas cheesemakers. The advantages included an increase of some six to eight per cent in yield, continuous automatic operation with better control of variables, reduced manufacturing time, and a highprotein whey of greater by-product potential. The second plant was installed in Wisconsin, USA, in 1989; others followed, and research was extended to varieties other than Cheddar and to the modification of fat and sodium contents. The beginning of this highly successful project was as the third strand of the Cheese Industry Productivity Improvement Project (CIPIP). In 1980 the Australian Dairy Corporation won a public interest grant from the Commonwealth Government for this project. The other two strands were the successful commercialisation of a shorter method of cheesemaking developed by DRL many years before, and research in the University of New South Wales into the feedforward control of cheesemaking by the continuous measurement of temperature and pH. In 1970 the membrane processing of whey was a novelty. In the year 2000 it was commonplace and a lot of ground-breaking research had been carried out in Australia by public research groups and industry, especially on ultrafiltration, diafiltration, thermal precipitation and ion exchange adsorption. Much had been commercialised, often with a combination of techniques. For example, United Milk in Tasmania installed the membrane concentration of whey followed by thermal precipitation and fractionation of the proteins and lipids, and the production, among other things, of a humanised infant formula. Much work, mainly by CSIRO, was done on the newly available whey proteins and their functional properties, and new whey-based food ingredients resulted. The whey protein growth factors have already been mentioned. For some applications, the lactose content of milk and whey is an embarrassment. Accordingly, DRL developed an immobilised-enzyme technology for the hydrolysis of the lactose in milk, whey and ultrafiltrates. A full-scale plant was commissioned at Drouin in Victoria and worldwide interest followed. In contrast, Mauri Foods Dairy Laboratories in Sydney introduced a series of enzymes, to promote flavour development in hard cheeses but with other applications in the dairy industry, also.

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The centralisation of farms and factories, not dissimilar from other segments of the food industry, proceeded apace in the 1970s with the Murray Goulburn expansion and in the 1980s with Dairy Farmers and Bonlac. There was a drastic fall in the number of dairy factories, and the reasons have a familiar ring. The need for a factory every few miles disappeared when bulk tanker collection enlarged greatly the area served by each factory. New, more capital-intensive technologies led to economies of scale. And managerial flair and financial innovation played a major part. But none of this was possible without the scientific input. The heavy concentration of the dairy industry on both sides of Bass Strait inevitably resulted in a similar concentration of research. However, dairy research goes on elsewhere also, in the departments of agriculture in the various states and in the Centre for Food Technology in Brisbane where, as the 20th century was ending, several projects were under study. One of these was the influence of the physico-chemical environment on protein structure and functionality in processing, and another, with the University of Queensland Department of Biochemistry, the role of folate-binding protein in the uptake of dietary folate. One of the most far-reaching projects in its potential benefits was under study in the University of Melbourne: namely, the application of recombinant DNA technology to cheese starter organisms with the aim of promoting and controlling Cheddar cheese flavour and reducing bitterness. But similar work had already been done to produce cheese starters resistant to bacteriophage.

Edible fats and oils Margarine was invented in 1870 by a French pharmacist, Mège-Mouriés. Australian manufacture began in Victoria in 1885. It was based on animal fat and was called Butterine, and although it was sold honestly by the manufacturer, retailers often sold it as butter. Hence the Margarine Act 1893 to control it. Dairy interests bitterly opposed the new product, and state laws and regulations controlled it very strictly so that quotas on production remained until the mid1970s. Thereafter, advances in nutrition (see Chapter 16) led to a swing away from animal fats towards polyunsaturated vegetable oils, a complete change in the perception of margarine made from them, and amendments to the food laws to reflect the new expectations of the community as, in the late 1970s, margarine consumption passed that of butter. The quality and stability of all edible oils improved markedly from the mid-20th century thus facilitating the introduction of new salad products. Developments in hydrogenation, fractionation and esterification permitted the modification of the various vegetable oils to meet any specifications set by food manufacturers for shortenings, frying oils and so on. The first Australian crushing of an oilseed was of imported linseed at Parramatta, New South Wales in 1908. Slow expansion of the industry pre-war into Victoria (1920s) and South Australia followed, and the first Australian crop of oilseed, also linseed, was grown in 1946. Fifty years later Australia was crushing canola (low erucic acid rapeseed), rapeseed, cottonseed, sunflower, soybeans, safflower, linseed, linola, peanuts, macadamia nuts, olives and mustard seed; and oils from palm and palm kernel, canola, sunflower and soybeans were imported.

Canned products In the years after the Second World War the canning industry went through a period of consolidation leading to large mechanised canneries in all states. As the supply of canned goods overtook demand, costs were cut by mechanisation of harvesting and materials handling, and as in other


segments of the food industry the need for greater capitalisation led to centralisation and the disappearance of the smaller canneries. Mechanical harvesting led to breeding programmes for compatible crops, such as tomatoes, and batch processing in conventional retorts was challenged by continuous hydrostatic cookers. Aseptic canning of already-processed foods offered better products but posed new microbiological questions. The flame sterilisation procedure perfected by CSIRO was resisted even though the contents of the cans were more evenly heated. Classical work—and recognised in the United States as such—by EW Hicks of CSIRO in the 1950s shed new light on the significance of the rate of heating and cooling of canned foods. Many studies were carried out in the same laboratories on the solution of problems thrown up by the canning of fruit, vegetables and fruit juices. They began with aspects of canning technology and moved to, among other things, the need to identify the optimum maturity for harvesting peas and corn; studies in Queensland on pineapples intended for canning; and the finer points of heat processing. Problems of can corrosion were tackled, and the can companies introduced new lacquers for specific purposes. Individual food companies introduced new formulated products, some of them posing new problems in ensuring that all the contents of the can were ‘commercially sterile’ while the more heat sensitive of them remained acceptable. Thus, in processing canned spaghetti and meatballs in tomato sauce, it was necessary to get the required heat to the centre of the meatballs without damaging the tomato sauce. Improved flavour and texture were claimed for similar products processed by electrical induction. In the 1990s lessons learnt during the CSIRO work on flame sterilisation were applied by CSIRO, BHP and Pacific Power in a collaborative study of the processing of canned foods by that method, and in 1999 prototype equipment was being built. Canned baby-foods appeared on the Australian market in 1951 and the range of canned products was greatly extended over the next couple of decades. These included: soups; fruit juices straight and blended; canned mixed fruits; pie fillings; and low-calorie canned fruits, with water instead of sugar syrup. In the 1960s the A10 size can was introduced for institutional and food service packs, and the demand increased. Canned meats, on the other hand, moved little. The exception was canned hams, a shelf stable semi-processed product requiring careful handling. Tuna was canned for the local market and abalone for export, mainly to Japan. Beer in cans was first marketed in Australia in 1958; other beverages followed in the 1960s. Pet foods are effectively beyond the boundaries of this study, but nevertheless are an important part of a growing canning industry. The technology is as for the canning of human foods, at least one manufacturer employing the continuous hydrostatic cooker. The formulation of the products is based on current knowledge of animal nutrition, and, as the 20th century drew to a close, the value of the output was approaching $1000 million.

Frozen and refrigerated foods Cool and cold stored perishable products were succeeded by the manufacture of ice cream, an early application of refrigeration as part of a process. Quick-frozen vegetables followed. Blast freezing was followed by fluid-bed freezing (a special case of blast freezing), spray freezing, freeze-drying and so on. The packaging advances and the solution of the problems inherent in these developments belong to the period after the Second World War. They rely on the fundamental principles and practice of mechanical refrigeration, in whose pioneering and application Australia played a prominent part, but the refrigerated and frozen food industry relies entirely on the establishment of the capital-intensive frozen-food chain right into the home.

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The wartime vegetable dehydration industry collapsed as the war ended, but, as many farmers had become used to growing vegetable crops for processing, it may be said that the Australian frozen vegetable industry was founded on it. This was so in north-west Tasmania: the flexible polythene pouch for peas individually frozen in a fluid-bed freezer was introduced at Ulverstone in Tasmania in 1956 and led the world. Since then it has been used for frozen vegetables and vegetable mixes in sizes from 250 g to 5 kg. At first the Australian consumers’ response was reflected in the industry’s demand for peas and corn. Potato products came later and a sudden increase in the mid-1980s in the demand for chipped potatoes, the so-called ‘French fries’, led to imports of the product from Canada, but expanded production in Tasmania and Western Australia rapidly overhauled the shortfall. The rise of the poultry industry and the steady fall in the cost of frozen chicken, together with a perceived but marginal nutritional advantage, led to a fall in the consumption of red meat; but beef, lamb and pork, often prepackaged, were still in demand. The supermarkets were full of frozen dishes and meals ready to thaw, heat and eat; and other refrigerated, but not frozen, products also became available. The introduction in the 1960s of the refrigerated dairy case into supermarkets led to the development of products to fill it. Milk, cream, butter and cheese were obvious, but yoghurts, dairy desserts, new cheese varieties and processed cheese products—and then non-dairy formulated foods—were quickly developed. Cook-chill and sous vide products approach the limits of safety and were accepted only slowly in Australia. The former are, as the name implies, cooked, and chilled to and held at 2–5°C. They have a shelf life of up to five days. By the late 1990s they were being used extensively in hospitals, the armed forces and airlines. Tight procedures and rigid controls, especially between cooking and use, were necessary as the people handling them were often unskilled in handling food. Sous vide are essentially extended-life cook-chill products. They are packed under vacuum in pouches. Some are hot-filled and some are cooked in the pouch, but, with a shelf life of up to 90 days, usually much less, they must be handled with the same care as the cook-chill products.

Packaging It is only the dwindling numbers of people who recall shopping for food before 1950, or perhaps 1960, who can really appreciate the advances in food packaging resulting from improved paperboards and plastics, both rigid and flexible. This is not to denigrate improvements in traditional materials, but one has only to walk through a supermarket to recognise the dominance of the new materials. Australia has a highly developed food packaging and food packaging machinery industry. Glass, especially in its lightweight modern form, and cans continued as important packaging media. Though canned foods may be overcooked, cans are hard to better as food containers. They are robust, sealed, tamper-proof and easily decorated, and the base plate and tin coating have been progressively lightened. Hot-dipped tinplate was first made in Australia only in 1957, electrolytic tinplate in 1972, and in 1974 the drawn and wall-ironed beverage cans were introduced. Thinner plate and thinner tin coatings followed, and by 1978 food cans contained only 20% of the tin and 65% of the steel in the cans of 1948. Aluminium cans came to Australia in 1969, duplex cans with steel bodies and aluminium lids appeared, and in 1983 the welded side-seam cans began to be made. Add to these advances the steady improvement of inks, varnishes and internal lacquers and the easy opening pop-top and ring-pull top, and the can continues to be an important package.


Nevertheless, the revolution in packaging of the last half century would not have been possible without plastics. In the 1960s heat sealable and shrinkable wrappers for meats, fresh and processed, were introduced, and the overwrapping of fresh fruit in trays was just beginning. Most vegetables were still either in the greengrocers or in cans, but by the 1990s they were pouched or overwrapped for the supermarket shelves. Bread and biscuits moved into plastic wraps and cakes into bake-in trays. Pouches with a water barrier became the norm for dry soups and the many other dry mixes. These materials—polymers derived from the petrochemical industry—emerged over a period as films, semi-rigids and rigids for particular purposes. Films, especially, must act as gas and water barriers lest the product dry out; must resist pinholing and consequent contamination; and must be heat sealable or must cling well according to the end use. Some must be oxygen permeable, for example to maintain the colour of fresh beef, or must act as an oxygen barrier, for example to maintain the colour of cured meat or the protection of cheese from mould growth. Some are developed to be heat shrinkable, for instance the wrappers of 20 kg cheese blocks and, from 1967, pallet loads of finished product; others are non-shrink pouches with which everyone is familiar. Some are designed for vacuum packaging, with or without modified atmospheres achieved by the introduction of a selected gas. These various properties are built into films by clever lamination of film with film, film with metal foil, up to five layers, or more recently by coextrusion. They may be printed within the laminate, and coated with, for example, anti-mycotic. Plastic coatings on fibreboard, polymer laminated with tinless steel, and polymer coatings on glass seemed to place no limit on the possiblities. An example of film packaging of particular importance to Australian exports was the vacuum packaging in polymeric film laminates of chilled meat. Serious problems of bacterial growth with accompanying discoloration and gas formation were overcome in the 1970s only by intensive research by CSIRO at MRL in Brisbane. About 1960 Kraft introduced the now ubiquitous blown mini-tubs for portion control (PC), and rigid plastics were soon being used for trays, tubs and bottles. In many cases the marketing opportunities were new, but glass bottles, and even to some extent cans, soon found themselves challenged. For example, the rigid non-metal can for many products made its appearance, but to the end of the 20th century the retortable plastic pouch had made little impact in Australia. However, plastic-coated fibreboard cartons for milk (and fruit juices) and large plastic containers for milk almost entirely supplanted milk bottles. The increasing popularity of the microwave oven stimulated product reformulation, and the development of microwaveable trays, including ovenable board suitable also for conventional ovens. Overseas incidents of blackmail following deliberate in-store contamination of retail packs led to the development of tamper-proof packages that quickly spread to Australia in the 1970s. Extension of modified atmosphere storage to retail units occurred in the late 1980s. This included variants such as gas flushing and the development in the 1990s of active packaging to, for example, prolong shelf life by scavenging oxygen or removing ethylene from fruit packs or releasing sulphur dioxide into packages of grapes or dried fruits. In the 1960s the permitted and naturally occurring anti-mycotic, sorbic acid, had been incorporated into wrappers for unprocessed cheese, but new developments included films with antimicrobial properties, the inclusion in packages of special-purpose sachets of, for example, desiccants and oxygen absorbers, and time and temperature indicators. The challenge of new packaging materials spawned the packaging technologist, a professional versed in the first instance in the properties of the various new films and the translation of

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new packaging specifications into suitable products. The packaging revolution was essentially an overseas phenomenon, but in the 1950s, especially, the packaging technologist worked closely with the Australian converters of plastic into laminated films of the required specifications, and new laboratory equipment and methods, concerned especially with gas and vapour transmission rates, appeared. Everyone learnt very fast and professional, technical and trade associations were formed for the sharing of information and techniques. Science had always been evident in the metallurgy of tinplate and the making of cans, but it now came to the food processor in a new guise as packaging technologists talked of drop tests, crush tests, laminates, gas and water transmission rates, and seal and tensile strengths. And it was not long before the transmission of trace quantities of substances from package to food became an issue (see Chapter 17). In Sydney in the early years of the 20th century John Heine was building innovative packaging machinery to make and fill cans. Eighty years later in the same city Taylor North Australia Pty Ltd developed, for flexible packaging materials that would have astonished Heine, an innovative vertical form, fill and seal machine which was successfully sold to European snack makers.

Food habits Australian food habits in the 1990s would have astonished Philip Muskett, who in 1893 castigated Australians for their very conservative food habits derived from Britain and modified only partly by the colonial experience. By 1950 the pre-war pattern of home delivery by grocer, butcher and greengrocer was rapidly fading, and jam making and fruit bottling were finally disappearing from the kitchen. Twenty years later the refrigerator/freezer and the motor car had reduced shopping for food to visits to the supermarket once a week or less frequently. In the 1990s consumers had become more critical and more discerning than those of 20 years earlier. They were looking for quality, safety, and good nutrition, which some were putting before flavour; they were more weight conscious; and they were more inclined to check the labels to see what they were actually buying and to avoid ingredients with which, for any reason, they disagreed. They looked for convenience, including appropriate packaging, especially that amenable to the microwave and conventional ovens. And a significant number shopped in ‘health food’ stores as though conventional foods were unhealthy. The concept of convenience was not new. Pre-war, self-raising flour, custard powder, coffee essence, gravy mixes and so on were early convenience foods; so were salami and other intermediate-moisture foods, canned fruits and vegetables, and any product in which most of the preparation had already been done. Frozen peas already shelled, frozen corn already off the cob and similar frozen vegetables are such products. For the same reason, canned baby-foods are a boon to young mothers, and instant coffee, soup powders and any product requiring only the addition of water saves time in the kitchen. Various pastries all ready to use are available, and so are ready-to-bake bread rolls. Rather more exotic were canned ready-to-bake dough products such as scones and Danish pastries. Resulting from some quite sophisticated science and technology, they were less well accepted because the housewife thought she could do better. However, it is with the prepared meal or individual main courses and sweets that one usually associates the concept of convenience, and it is this class of product which, as already implied, has been so brilliantly supported by modern packaging. Inevitably, these products cost more than the home-prepared meal, but the extra that those who buy them pay is the price they pay for the extra free time they have. The tastes of the post-war migrants broadened Australian choices most notably at first in sausages and cheese. Food companies attempted and to some extent succeeded in developing


products for the new arrivals, but this was not always as straightforward as may be expected. Thus, a major cheese company was constrained by its sales staff to develop feta cheese for a large Greek community on its doorstep. A very satisfactory feta was produced by its R&D laboratories, but it did not satisfy the potential customers. It transpired that there was not one feta but many variations, and that each group of local Greeks wanted the one that came from their home locality. Australians, however, developing a taste for feta cheese were unlikely to have been as discerning (or as finicky) as that. Before the Second World War such edible oils as were available were of poor quality, but, as with so much else, post-war R&D resulted in such dramatic improvement in quality that food companies were able to formulate oil-containing products with confidence. Such were salad dressings, and the pre-war Australian low-oil mayonnaise (so-called) gave place to good-quality ‘real’ mayonnaise with an oil content of some 75%. But there were more opportunities than that if only Australians would embrace the salad habit. In the 1960s Kraft set out to sell it and succeeded. Even if Kraft was self-interested, in that this accompanied the introduction of their range of attractive salad dressings, the salad habit was sound nutrition, as Philip Muskett, who in 1893 advocated salads, would have agreed. Up to about 1970 Australian takeaway foods were confined to fish and chip shops and local individual ‘takeaways’ of various kinds and standards. The big chains began in America about 1950 and were brought to Australia by Kentucky Fried Chicken (now KFC) in 1968. The expansion since then was visible to all. The primary offer was of convenience, but quality was essential for repeat business and the large chains relied on reputable processors to supply raw materials, such as edible oils and shortenings, of consistently high quality manufactured to their own usually tough specifications. Specialised equipment is required and precautions are taken to minimise microbial contamination. Inevitably the products are standardised, but the consumers want to know that what they buy is the same in any outlet of the same company. The condemnation of these products as ‘junk food’ is unfair. They all provide protein, energy and minor nutrients. Their composition may fail to satisfy the purists, but they have their place as occasional items in a varied diet. Restaurants serving the various immigrant groups appeared and offered Australians new culinary experiences, and a wide variety of European, and later Asian, cuisines began to influence Australian eating habits. These new opportunities were put into a historical perspective by a team of dietitians in Tucker in Australia, edited by Dr Beverley Wood in 1977 to coincide with the 7th International Congress of Dietetics in Sydney that year. They have since been widely documented elsewhere. One could eat good food more cheaply at home, but more and more couples, families and groups of friends enjoyed a total dining experience in the increasing number and variety of restaurants. By 1990 frozen foods had become a major item in the supermarket trolley. Ice cream came first, then frozen vegetables (potatoes 20%, peas and beans, 64%), poultry, frozen desserts, and convenience meals. The last of these included unit serves such as two ready-to-cook pieces of chicken Kiev to which vegetables could be added, through dessert and gateaux to total meals packed in trays designed for the purpose. The variety was endless, and food sealed into microwaveable and ovenable trays became commonplace. In short, changing food habits became most marked in the last 30 years of the 20th century. The consumption of beef and lamb fell from the mid-1970s, but that of poultry, especially chicken, continued the rise that began in 1950. The consumption of pig meat and of seafood, fruit, vegetable and grain products also grew. Increasing affluence led to more eating out,

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takeaways, and the growth of fast-food outlets. Between 1971 and 1987, for example, the market value of food eaten away from the home multiplied by six. By the end of the 20th century Australia had as varied a cuisine as anywhere in the world, not only through restaurants and takeaways, but also in packaged and frozen foods made available in supermarkets by food technologists. The constituents of these new foods were studied by food scientists and the nutritive value of the various ethnic diets assessed by nutritionists.

Sensory testing Sensory testing was largely neglected by Australian processors. Many of them proceeded by a succession of ‘unscientific hunches’ about ‘Will the consumer like it?’ (perhaps with a taste panel of one: the managing director’s spouse) or ‘Does the consumer like it?’ (with panels of individuals from the office or off the street). However, by the latter years of the 20th century they had moved a long way, to the use of expert panels for identifying flavours and taints. Sensory testing had become a serious assessment of what the markets, especially the Asian markets, wanted and/or would accept. It was used not only post hoc to assess the quality but also ante hoc as an aid to the design of a product for a given market or market segment. It had also become very sophisticated, and the larger companies were using carefully trained staff and proven statistical methods for the design of properly organised panels and the analysis of the data from them. The smaller companies, unable to afford their own facilities, were tending to turn to consultants who were increasingly able to offer an expert service.

Chapter 16

Nutrition: a branch of food science

Nutrition is an interdisciplinary science depending on food chemistry, particularly analysis, biochemistry and physiology. It is intimately concerned also with food technology and what happens to the nutritive properties of foods when they are processed, and with the sociology of food, especially food habits and food choices. Nutrition is both positive, describing what is good and promoting it, and negative, recognising what is harmful and warning against it. Dietetics is the practical application of the principles of nutrition to provide a total diet for the maintenance of good health. Dietitians are not only concerned to ensure that normal nutrient requirements are met. They also develop special diets: for those suffering from some physiological abnormality, for example diabetes or coeliac disease; for the prevention of disease, for instance for those at risk of heart disease; and for those whose physical condition at a particular time demands a restricted diet. Examples of the last group might be people with certain postoperative conditions, victims of famine or, in 1945, prisoners returning from Japanese POW camps. In spite of glimmerings of nutrition in early centuries, nutrition and dietetics is essentially a 20th century science, but in the 1880s Dr Philip E Muskett was an Australian trailblazer. In addition to private practice he served as a medical officer of the Government of New South Wales and as a surgeon and senior resident of the Sydney Hospital. In 1893 his book, The art of living in Australia, was published and on the first page of the Preface he said of the Australian diet: ‘the consumption of butcher’s meat and of tea is enormously in excess of any common sense requirements, and is paralleled nowhere else in the world. On the other hand, there has been no real attempt to develop our deep-sea fisheries; market gardening is deplorably neglected, only a few of the more ordinary varieties being cultivated; salads, which are easily within daily reach of every home, are conspicuous by their absence’. A few pages later he was positive. ‘The golden rule as far as the Australian dietary is concerned is a minimum of meat, and a relatively maximum amount of the other classes of food.’ Given the paucity of nutritional knowledge in those days, Muskett was far-seeing. It was 40 years before any attempt was made to measure what Australians actually ate. Probably the first Australian published information on nutrition was, with all due respect to Muskett, the Primer of dietetics published in 1910 by Professor WA Osborne, who occupied the chair of Physiology in the University of Melbourne. Many years later his eldest daughter, Mrs Audrey Cahn, was Senior Lecturer in Nutrition in the same university. Osborne set out the facts then available so that from him and others like him came the basic nutritional guidance given to mothers through the baby health centres and free kindergartens that were established in all states in the period following the establishment of the first baby health centre in Sydney in 1914.

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The first dietitians in Australia were hospital appointments in the 1930s and were either recruited from North America or were Australian nurses who had supplemented their training by studying dietetics in England. The first was an American, Miss Mabel Flanley, appointed to the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne in January 1930. Through the 1930s others followed in several states. Victoria and Western Australia followed the British pattern by training nurses for a Certificate in Dietetics, but New South Wales adopted further training for science graduates. It was an unsatisfactory situation. Nor was the new profession helped by lack of interest in and understanding of food, nutrition and health by the public or even by the main body of the medical profession. Consequently dietitians suffered from poor employment opportunities, conditions and remuneration. However, in Victoria and New South Wales associations of dietitians were formed in 1935 and 1939 respectively. The British Dietetic Association dates from 1936. By the 1930s the broad basis of nutrition was understood, but, apart from companies supplying milk substitutes for babies, nutrition in well-fed Australia was not an issue for the food industry. This was because it was not an issue for government or the medical profession and certainly not for the consumer other than the mothers of very young children. The only research to the mid-1930s was in the universities and it was meagre: a few studies on energy metabolism and the composition of Australian foods, reports on deficiency diseases, and some growth studies on infants and children. The first official move was in 1936 when international interest in the nutritional status of populations stimulated the appointment of an advisory council on nutrition in the Commonwealth Department of Health. One of the appointees was Sir Stanton Hicks, Professor of Physiology and Pharmacology in the University of Adelaide. His light-hearted comments in the third person on his preparation for the first meeting provoke some sobering thoughts on the status of Australian nutrition at that time, thus: ‘Realising that this [his appointment to the Council] called for more than academic knowledge, he did some weeks of homework on the subject ranging from experiments on dogs to experiments on human beings. More particularly, however, he collected information on every study made in other countries up to that date on what people purchased as food for domestic consumption. He compiled quite a volume, some of its contents having the potential of a hand grenade. So prepared he set out for the first meeting in Canberra’. Largely as the result of Hicks’s homework, the Advisory Council then initiated studies on domestic food consumption patterns, the nutritional status of sections of the population, and the composition of Australian foods. The dietary surveys were, by modern standards, open to question, but they were a beginning, yielded useful information, and were the forerunners of other more detailed studies by the Commonwealth, the states and CSIRO. As war broke out in 1939, almost the only professionals concerned with nutritional matters were paediatricians and the sisters in the baby health centres. The commercial syntheses of vitamins C and B1 were in their infancy and chemical methods for their measurement were only just coming into use. When specific figures for vitamins in given foods became available, paediatricians seized on them and made use of the information in their advice to mothers. Kraft’s ability to provide figures for thiamin (vitamin B1) in Vegemite® and the use to which they were put by paediatricians and the baby health centres may well be the basis of Australian liking for this product. But, apart from the paediatricians, Sir Stanton Hicks was commissioned into the Australian Imperial Forces with the exalted rank of lieutenant and quickly diverted to Supply and Transport to lift the standard of army catering. This, to his own and other people’s astonishment, he did. He had the responsible and frustrating task of applying contemporary knowl-


edge of nutrition to the feeding of an army. His determined, practical and pragmatic approach to it led at length to the establishment of a catering corps that improved the status of army cooks and introduced scientific principles into army feeding by ensuring nutritionally balanced rations and their proper utilisation. This last was the key. ‘The terminal of the “pipeline” of food supply’, he said, ‘is in the Army kitchen. At this important point food can be wasted or its nutritive value impaired or destroyed’. So also in the home as dietitians later in the century were emphasising. The war, as the needs of the repatriation hospitals were met, ensured that dietitians continued to serve in hospitals and it was not until the 1950s that they began to seek and accept responsibilities other than the provision of meals for the sick. This coincided with keen debate on the acceptable standards of education for those wishing to enter the profession and was yet another example of the ferment in the whole of food science and technology at that time. Heather Nash has told the story of the development of dietetics in Australia. Dietetics was boosted by the International Union of Dietetics conference in Sydney in 1977 and is now firmly established in its own professional body, the Dietitians Association of Australia (DAA). The dietitian, the practical nutritionist, long since moved into private practice and contributes to research in nutrition. The work of dietitians anywhere depends on knowledge of the composition of foods. The analyses for the dietary surveys of 1936–38 were carried out by Dr Geoffrey Bourne, and it has been suggested that his report, covering 1172 foods, was the first table of composition of Australian foods. However, it included analyses from many Australian sources other than his own, and overseas data as well. At that time the preferred source of information on food composition was the legendary McCance and Widdowson Composition of foods which appeared in 1940, but that, of course, reflected the British scene. The first perceived Australian source was Anita Osmond’s Composition of Australian foods, published in 1946 by the Commonwealth Department of Health as the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Special Report Series No. 2 and revised and updated by others at intervals since, notably in 1991 by R English and L Lewis in Nutritional values of Australian foods. From 1974 market basket surveys of food purchases carried out by the Commonwealth Department of Health gave a general indication of the overall consumption of specific nutrients by the population and provided raw data for the updating of food composition tables. The value of such tables to nutritionists and dietitians in assessing food intakes or advising on diets is obvious, but they are consulted constantly by the food industry also in the formulation and labelling of products and in the preparation of the industry’s own nutritional publicity. There are continuing problems. First, the never-ending improvement in analytical methodology—such as the introduction of gas and high-performance liquid chromatographies and atomic absorptiometry—often leads to the need to revise existing figures. Second, the recognition of new or unsuspected functions of food constituents—for example, the relationship of cholesterol to heart disease and of folic acid to the prevention of spina bifida—has implications in the development of food policies. A third difficulty, administrative rather than scientific, was the proliferation of foods of ethnic origin. But in this, and in other ways, the upwards of 50 papers on the composition of Australian foods emanating in the 1980s and 1990s from the Department of Food Science of the University of New South Wales were of great value. In the two decades immediately after the Second World War, various growth studies on children were carried out in several states, and energy studies led to the conclusion that the thenaccepted recommended daily intakes (RDIs) for energy were too high vis-à-vis a population faced with less heavy labouring work and walking less. In 1958 and 1975, two studies were

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carried out to determine whether or not Australian bread should be fortified with thiamin (vitamin B1). Although certain categories of the population were identified as being at risk, especially chronic alcoholics, in both cases the conclusion was that it was not necessary. Also, evidence was accumulating that malnutrition in Australia was that of overconsumption. To this point the work of the nutritionist had, with one exception, impinged only benignly on that of the food technologist, but in 1970 Clements perceived that ‘the nutrition related diseases in Australia, as in other industrially advanced countries, were coronary heart disease, hypertension, stroke, diabetes and obesity’ (p. 165). Food scientists and technologists had to take notice. The exception was thyrotoxicosis in Tasmania. The island state is iodine deficient, and goitre is endemic. In order to correct this, iodide tablets had been made available in schools from 1950 and bread was iodated from 1966, but in that year thyrotoxicosis was detected and found to be coincident with the introduction of iodophors as sanitisers in the dairy industry. Iodophors are efficient anti-bacterials, but, with the remedial dosage of iodine already being administered, sufficient iodophor residues were contaminating the milk supply to cause thyrotoxicosis. Dairy technologists moved rapidly to alternatives and the problem was soon brought under control, but the study of the control of endemic goitre, which a sound move in food technology had temporarily and unwittingly interfered with, lasted for 35 years. The last five years of the 1970s were crucial years for nutrition in Australia. For some years nutrition had been an optional subject taught in the Biochemistry Department of the University of Melbourne, but it was 1967 before the first full academic course, a Postgraduate Diploma in Nutrition and Dietetics in the University of Sydney, was introduced. Others in tertiary institutions, mainly universities, followed: Queensland (1975), South Australia and Western Australia (1976), and Victoria (1978). Chairs of Nutrition were established at Deakin University, Victoria (in 1977, Professor ML Wahlqvist), and in the University of Sydney (endowed 1976, taken up by Professor AS Truswell in 1978). In 1978 the Sydney University Nutrition Foundation was inaugurated as a partnership with the food industry to fund scholars and, by acting as a forum for research seminars, to keep research relevant to Australia’s needs. Subsequently, postgraduate training and research in food, nutrition and health accelerated and was an important catalyst in stimulating the positive response of food scientists and technologists to new food and nutrition initiatives in the last quarter of the 20th century. It is evident that postgraduate training in nutrition came to Australia later than to many other countries, but as Clements also says: ‘since the early 1950s there has been a steady flow of nutrition and nutrition related studies with a great acceleration in the last decade [1975–1985]. This spurt is related to the training courses for dietitians and nutritionists’ (p. 152). In the same period it was realised by officialdom that Australia knew a lot about animal nutrition but a good deal less about the nutrition of humans. The CSIRO Division of Animal Nutrition began in 1927 and made some distinguished contributions to the subject. In 1965 the name was changed to the Division of Biochemical Nutrition, and in 1975 it became the Division of Human Nutrition. The research programme then included studies on coronary heart disease, hypertension, cancer, and disorders resulting from the abuse of alcohol, and went on to studies of factors leading to optimal growth and development, techniques for assessing community attitudes to nutrition, and the encouragement of the food industry to produce novel and healthful foods. In 1986 an advisory committee was formed to improve communication with the food industry. It included four industry members and offered advice, opinion and information on aspects of products, diet and nutrition. The Chief of the Division, Dr BS Hetzel, was a world


figure in the treatment of iodine deficiency disease and his successor, Dr PJ Nestel, was similarly distinguished in the relationship of diet to heart disease. The ‘spurt’ was maintained, and in 1996 Professor Truswell was able to review an impressive list of Australian contributions to human nutrition over the previous 20 years. Also in 1975 the Australian Association of Dietitians was formed (in 1983 it became the Dietitians Association of Australia (DAA)), and in 1977 the Australian Nutrition Foundation (ANF) was conceived at Cooma Airport! On 19 February 1977 the Science and Industry Forum of the Australian Academy of Science held a seminar at Thredbo on the topic, Food Quality in Australia (published with that title as Australian Academy of Science Report No. 22, 1977). As participants were returning home the following day, four of them—Professor EJ Underwood, formerly director of the Institute of Agriculture, University of Western Australia, Dr BS Hetzel, chief, CSIRO Division of Human Nutrition, Mr MV Tracey, chief, CSIRO Division of Food Research, and Dr KTH Farrer, chief scientist, Kraft Foods Limited—decided that the time was ripe for the formation of an Australian Nutrition Foundation along the lines of the Nutrition Foundation in Washington and the British Nutrition Foundation. It was set up in 1979 to provide balanced and authoritative information on nutritional matters. Dr Hetzel was chairman, with the secretariat in the CSIRO Division of Nutrition in Adelaide. Divisions in the various states and the ACT followed quite quickly as professional nutritionists and dietitians made their services available. The foundation (now Nutrition Australia) also attracted support from industry and commerce through an industry advisory committee and from some hundreds of friends, and its publications found favour with schoolteachers who relished authoritative and seen-to-be-impartial teaching aids. In May 1993 the Victorian branch of the foundation combined with CAFTA (Victoria), the Victorian Food and Nutrition Programme, the Victorian branch of the Dietetic Association of Australia, and the Victorian division of the National Heart Foundation to form Nutrition Victoria to speak with a united voice and develop a single strong link with the media. In 1997 the ANF claimed with some justification that it had contributed to a better understanding by industry of the part it could play in improving community nutrition and the appreciation by consumers of the need to choose a balanced diet and the place of processed foods in it. In 1964 the American Heart Foundation recommended changes to reduce blood serum cholesterol by reducing the amount of cholesterol and saturated fat in the diet. By 1976 half the American population had changed its eating habits. Something similar happened in Australia. With an upsurge in the growing of sunflower seed in the late 1960s there was a dramatic swing from butter to margarine made from oils with a high content of polyunsaturated fatty acids. There was also a trend to leaner meat, and an increase in the sales of skim milk. By the late 1980s it was noted that the total fat intake by Australians had not been lowered (it was still contributing more than 40% of the energy intake), but the kind of fat had changed to include more vegetable oils. Oleic acid–rich diets were more common and the intake of n-3 fatty acids from fish oils had increased. The community was also ingesting more fibre and less sugar. Initially, recommendations that led to these changes were heavily influenced by clinicians responding to the plight of sick people. Only later were they based on epidemiological studies of which Truswell, a distinguished nutritionist, said in 1987, ‘We need convincing evidence from multiple sources before an association starts to look like a causal factor’ (p. 134). Not surprisingly then, the food industry initially resisted the recommendations, especially as there were anomalies in the evidence that purported to show the effects of the recommended dietary changes, and it was conceded that diet was only one, and not the most important, of several

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factors involved in heart disease. However, given the press and community reaction to this factor over which the individual could have some control, the dairy and meat industries, especially, felt threatened, and asked why the whole population should modify their diets even if individuals at risk should be asked to do so. In view of the still unanswered questions, this was not unreasonable. Gradually, more solid evidence in support of reduced-fat diets accrued, but it was then realised that the total fat intake was not as important as the kind of fat. Australians, no doubt from the legacy of the high-meat diet of the colonial days, were prone to eat fatty meat, but it was possible to produce leaner meat and other products of lower fat content. Also, evidence began to accrue of a fall in heart disease with falling total fat consumption in the community, although, as with all epidemiological evidence, this did not necessarily reflect cause and effect. By and large, Australia avoided the bitter controversies that had erupted in some other countries, and the food industry responded with a flood of products claiming low or reduced fat content. The consumers had a choice and individuals decided for themselves; but there was still no certainty as to which fatty acids were the most effective. Salt, or more specifically, the sodium portion of it, also came under attack as research suggested that in a significant minority of susceptible people it could promote hypertension. Accordingly, everyone was advised to reduce their salt intake and the food industry was urged to reduce the ‘hidden’ salt in its products. Salt is very visible in such products as salted peanuts and other salted snacks. These, and the addition of salt in the kitchen and at the table, can easily be avoided, but salt has an important role in food technology. It is an unavoidable constituent of flavour in many foods, and even the most nutritious food will remain uneaten if the taste is unacceptable. In some products, by lowering water activity, salt is an essential preservative— especially if the product is ‘dipped into’ continually after opening. Vegemite® and Marmite®, Bovril® and Bonox® are examples. But there are products, such as several varieties of cheese, which cannot be made without salt. In these, and in panary fermentation and the making of sauerkraut, the omission of salt is impossible and its reduction not easy. Food technologists responded by attempting to replace salt (sodium chloride) with potassium chloride, but this salt has a bitter astringent flavour and the direct substitution of the one with the other is out of the question. Nevertheless, in some products partial substitution was possible. Sugar, particularly in high-sugar products such as confectionery, soft drinks and some breakfast cereals, also has been frowned on, and reduction of sugar consumption has been recommended, too. Sugar is a very pure chemical and, whereas bread, another high-carbohydrate food, supplies protein, minerals and thiamin (Vitamin B1) as well as energy, sugar supplies nothing but energy—with which the normal Australian diet abounds. Dietitians therefore frequently refer to sugar as ‘empty calories’. It has a case to answer in relation to dental caries, and a British professor, somewhat immoderately, sought to blame it for a variety of diseases. But sugar influences flavour and texture and in some products is a valuable preservative. As for sugar replacement by artificial sweeteners, the latter are seen to be chemicals, whereas sugar is seen to be a natural food and the traditional ingredient in domestic recipes. Most nutritionists agreed that there was a place even for confectionery in a normal varied diet and in 1987 Professor Truswell put the matter in perspective. He agreed with the warning to avoid too much sugar, but said that ‘for the majority of healthy people eating an otherwise balanced diet I have not come across a clear reason to reduce sugar intake from around 14% of calories as long as people minimise consumption of confectionery between meals, especially children in areas without fluoridation. Sugar and Health? They are compatible’ (p. 138).


Along with fat, salt and sugar a fourth ‘new idea’ was the matter of dietary fibre. Food fibre was recognised long ago as being of some importance nutritionally, but only since the 1960s has it been studied in any detail. Epidemiological studies in Africa began to link the low incidence of certain cancers with high-fibre diets. Further study supported the basic contention and led to other perceived health benefits, such as the lowering of serum cholesterol by such a diet. It was soon realised, however, that fibre was not quite what it obviously seemed to be. It was not simply piling bran on the breakfast cereal. Wholemeal flour by all means, but fruit and vegetables play an important part, and there is such a seeming paradox as ‘soluble fibre’.* A hopeful application for the addition of a purified wood fibre to bread was promptly disallowed. Fibre in fibreincreased bread must come from ‘edible cereals or other foods’. The big increase in knowledge of human nutrition, especially new insights into the relationship of nutrition and disease, led to the development of dietary guidelines. The first of these were developed in Sweden in 1968 and taken up in the United States, whereupon expert committees in a number of countries began to study the subject, and American Dietary Goals were published in 1977. In 1979 the Australian Commonwealth Department of Health issued Dietary Goals for the community, and, slightly amended, they were reissued in 1982 as Dietary Guidelines for Australia. They were hailed as a major advance in nutrition education, as, indeed, they were; however, it was necessary to warn that they could not be regarded as fixed and immutable but were subject to modification in the light of continuing research. Some were positive and common sense: promote breastfeeding; choose a nutritious diet from a variety of foods; eat more bread and cereals (preferably wholegrain), vegetables and fruit; and control your weight. The other four were negative: avoid too much fat, avoid too much sugar, use less salt, and limit alcohol consumption. Of these, the first three are less obvious and, as already seen, gave rise initially to some concern among food technologists. This concern was easing in the 1980s as health professionals, including the DAA, emphasised whenever possible that the key to a good diet was balance, variety and moderation, and that the guidelines referred to the total diet, not, definitely not, to individual foods. This was a salutary warning because the press, seizing on the analyses of the products of certain takeaway chains, labelled them junk foods. There is no such thing as a junk food, only junk diets. In 1984 the New South Wales Department of Health added four more guidelines of its own: drink more water; improve nutrition information, consumer education, and the nutrition component of professional teaching; maximise the coverage of fluoridated water supplies; and discourage the use in food of unnecessary additives. All were sound except the last. Which, in the light of consumer expectations, were ‘unnecessary’? Which manufacturer would incur the cost of adding an unnecessary ingredient? By the 1990s there was increasing evidence that Australians were heeding the NHMRC Guidelines, and in 1992 they were reissued in amended form. These said much the same as before, but added exhortations to eat foods containing calcium and iron, stressing the need for women and girls to eat both and for vegetarians and athletes to eat the latter. There were several conferences at which scientists, technologists, government, consumers and represesentatives of business met to study the guidelines. The food industry was at pains, through CAFTA, for example, to emphasise that processed foods were controlled, safe and nutritious, and that their place in the overall diet was recognised by nutritionists. But the industry * McCance and Widdowson’s Composition of foods, 4th revised edition, defines ‘dietary fibre’ as ‘the sum of the polysaccharides and lignin which are not digested by the endogenous secretions of the human gastrointestinal tract. This fraction has a variable composition as it is made up of several different types of polysaccharide (pectic substances, hemicelluloses and cellulose)’.

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also realised that, while there were perceived negatives in the guidelines, there were also marketing opportunities: it was not long before products with reduced fat, salt, energy, and alcohol, and with increased fibre, appeared on the market. Some, such as the increased-fibre cereal products, posed no great technical problems; others, such as low-fat and low-salt cheese, were far more challenging; but all immediately posed problems of labelling and advertising claims. ‘Low salt’— how low? ‘Reduced fat’—from what to what? How much on the label, and how detailed? And so on. Regulations requiring statements of so much per 100 grams were objected to: some people would not be able to visualise what the statements meant; others perceived such figures to be misleading. So much per serve was thought to be better. But how much is a serve? It was also pointed out that labelling regulations relating to processed foods would not and could not apply to restaurant meals and the products of the takeaway chains. But nutrition generally was perceived to be a potent marketing tool. It was so used positively: in the advertising of branded products and commodity groups with the understanding that claims must be true, verifiable, and believable; in promotion of a product in association with other nutritionally desirable foods and/or with sound ideas for its use with a product or by a community; and in the promotion of a product’s place in a varied diet. Unfortunately, nutrition was also used negatively: in the promotion of ‘health foods’ with the implication that other foods were not healthy; in the promotion of ‘organic foods’ with the same implication; and by distorting research findings. Nutrition was also used wrongly in a kind of nutritional auction of, especially, vitamin levels in certain products. Fortunately the Vitamins and Minerals Regulation, based on Recommended Dietary Intakes (RDIs), put a stop to that to the relief of many, not least the participants! Dietary Guidelines relate to the overall consumption of groups of foods, and in general a varied diet based on them will satisfy one’s nutrient needs. RDIs are another matter. In Australia, they are ‘the levels of intake of essential nutrients considered by the Nutrition Committee of the NHMRC, on the basis of available scientific knowledge, to be adequate to meet the known nutritional needs of practically all healthy persons’. This means that the RDI for a particular nutrient of any age or sex group is more than most people need. (Truswell, 1989). Up to 1954 the American RDIs were used, but in that year NHMRC released an Australian set. A new set for a number of nutrients was published in 1970 and in 1978 converted to International Standard (SI) units. In 1981 a working party of the Nutrition Committee of NHMRC began work on a revision of these recommendations and by November 1988 had completed the revision of 20 nutrients, vitamins, trace metals and protein, giving Australia at that time the most up-to-date set of RDIs of any country. Revision of these figures in the light of new knowledge of food composition and consumption began in 1998. RDIs are an essential guide to dietitians in working out diets, and to regulators and food processors in stipulating and meeting what may be claimed on labels. Contemporaneously with the revision of the RDIs, the Nutrition Section of the Commonwealth Department of Health was assembling an Australian Nutrient Data Bank. It resulted from the analysis of many samples of a great variety of foods for proteins and amino acids, carbohydrates, sugars and starch, minerals, vitamins and fibre. Industry co-operated by supplying information on formulation, production changes, and food composition data, and all the results were assessed by a representative working party and computerised so that the information could be accessed in different ways and be continually brought up to date. The printed Composition of foods, Australia was prepared directly from the database and may, of course, be


revised in the same way from time to time. The benefits to consumers and to all branches of food science and technology are obvious. The market basket surveys were based on purchases so that the National Nutrition Survey of 1995 sought to find out what people actually ate and drank. It was funded by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and state agencies, and the data were to help in implementing the national food and nutrition policy and in revising RDIs and national Health Goals. Late in the 20th century, functional foods appeared. The term was unfortunate in that all food fulfils the function of maintaining bodily health and vitality, but the connotation, strengthened by the alternative term, nutriceuticals, was that these foods would border on the semimedical in preventing and/or ameliorating some adverse physical condition. They would, it was held, contribute a benefit over and above the normal function of food. Australian industry did not rush to follow the Japanese lead, but was nevertheless warned that many substances occurring in foods are physiologically active. The most obvious examples were vitamins A, B1, C, folate and, more recently, lycopene from tomatoes, and flavonoids and anthocyanins from fruits. As the 20th century was ending, at least one Australian university was alert to the potential nutritional value of yet more phytochemicals (from plants) and zoochemicals (from animals). Nutrition made tremendous strides in the latter half of the 20th century, but senior nutritionists cautioned that the science was still in its infancy as, for example, advice concerning nutrition and heart disease continued to be expanded and refined. Australia was fortunate to avoid the worst of the confrontations that occurred overseas between the food industry and emerging knowledge of the relationship between diet and disease. This country is doubly fortunate in the astonishing growth, in the last quarter of the 20th century, of strong centres of Australian nutrition research and the positive response of food scientists and technologists.

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Chapter 17

Response to anxiety

In the latter half of the 20th century consumers were offered a very wide choice of products, but the choice was limited by technology. Given the urbanisation of society, this was inevitable and was ‘perhaps’ why sections of the community began to demand more: more information on the age of the product, its ingredients and nutritional value; more convenience; better ‘engineered’ packs with less, but not poor, packaging; tighter control of additives; tighter microbial standards, and so on. While environmental aspects such as animal welfare, diversity and sustainability of resources, and the disposal of wastes were important to some people, public concern about food could be summed up in the question, ‘How safe is it?’ The short answer, ‘Very safe’, was lost in the clamour about chemicals in food and the risks of infections, in the very vocal opposition to irradiation and genetically modified foods, and in the tension between the desire for good nutrition and the warnings of excess or the wrong kinds of food. None of these matters was peculiar to Australia. Indeed, they were often more serious in other countries, which led a leading food scientist at the World Congress of Food Science and Technology at Toronto in 1991 to warn that ‘public concerns about non-existent food safety issues’ were inhibiting technological progress.

‘Chemicals’ in food: additives and contaminants Developments in the use of food additives to improve food quality, a connection not often made by the consumer, the increasing use of agricultural chemicals, especially pesticides, in food production, and spectacular advances in packaging raised legitimate questions about ‘chemicals’ in food that were frequently exaggerated in the news media. That food itself is a mixture of chemical substances essential as raw material for the chemical reactions that build bodily tissue and maintain good health is usually overlooked. That many familiar foods, such as potatoes, parsnips and beans, contain natural substances that no regulator anywhere would for a moment permit to be added to food is ignored. By chemicals in food, however, the consumer usually means food additives and contaminants. Additives are used to improve colour, flavour, texture (emulsifiers, modifiers, free running agents, meat tenderisers, etc.), keeping quality (preservatives and antioxidants) and processability (lubricants and anti-foaming agents). Some countries regard substances unavoidably absorbed during processing (for example, boiler water additives) as adventitious additives, but they, and packaging migrants (that is, substances absorbed by the food from the package) are more correctly viewed as contaminants. Additives, especially colours, have been used in foods for hundreds of years, and their abuse has been referred to in Chapter 11. Late in the 1930s

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research in Britain pointed to carcinogenic properties in certain synthetic food colours. The war delayed action, but, as related, the matter was taken up in Australia in 1951 when government initiative led to the formation of the Food Additives Committee (FAC) to consider just such problems. Prompt evaluation of the evidence by FAC was followed by equally prompt revision of the permitted list of food colours to the consternation of some sections of the food industry. Frank discussion and interchange led industry to accept that FAC had acted justifiably, and would continue to act on the scientific evidence before it. With industry co-operation ensured, FAC moved on to consider the other classes of additives and to evaluate the range of chemical contaminants likely to find their way into processed foods. Which additives could be added to which foods was stipulated and maximum concentrations were regulated. Except where it was expressly permitted, the addition of any additive ‘or other substance’ to food was forbidden— that is, the Australian philosophy is exclusive: unless something is permitted, it is excluded. It was inevitable that there should be some tension between the conflicting interests of producers, consumers and regulators. But regulators, with access to the world pool of research on the subject and the collaboration of food scientists and technologists, succeeded in establishing a control of food additives ‘which’, in the words of Professor RA Edwards, in the Foreword to Hanssen and Marsden’s book, Additive Code Breaker, ‘in Australia, are as closely controlled as in any country in the world’. From 1 January 1986 all processed foods made in the European Economic Community (as it then was) were required to include in the list of ingredients either the names of food additives or the ‘E’ number of them. Nearly 1000 substances were given E numbers. Vitamin C is E300; citric acid, the acid of lemon juice, is E330; acetic acid, the acid of vinegar, is E260; and cream of tartar is E336. Of the colours, tartrazine is E102; and the preservative sulphur dioxide is E220. From 1 January 1987 Australia adopted the same system and the same list of numbers, but without the ‘E’ and with a number of gaps where additives permitted in Europe were not permitted in Australia. The purpose of the system originally was to reassure consumers that a substance with an E number had been thoroughly tested and was safe to be used in the foods at the concentrations permitted. Unfortunately, in the hands of writers ignorant or dismissive of the importance of concentration and the concept of safety-in-use, they were distorted to become danger signals for the presence of a dreaded ‘chemical’. Equally unfortunately, some food manufacturers reinforced consumer anxiety by proclaiming the absence of additives from certain products and, by implication, the inferiority, if not danger, of those foods that contained one or more. It was a marketing ploy but was inexplicable if, as was sometimes the case, some other products of the same company were not additive-free. Such folly was not confined to Australia. The initiative for the revision of the permitted colours on the new scientific evidence had come from government. There had been no consumer anxiety, and the industry response, after its first knee-jerk reaction, had been positive. In 1962 Rachel Carson’s book, Silent spring, while immoderate in some of its claims, made the point very clearly that in the United States the use of pesticides had been much overdone, and during the 1960s pesticides became a consumer bête noire. In due course, therefore, maximum concentrations of contaminants, specifically pesticides and heavy metals, also were written into Australian food regulations. To a greater or lesser extent additives and contaminants as well became issues with consumers. The day of the ‘nonexistent food safety issues’ had begun. Possibly, it will never end. While some journalists acted responsibly in accepting the validity of regulatory limits placed on these substances, others with a vested interest in scaremongering did little to promote rational debate.

Response to anxiety

It will be recalled that FAC (FST as it became) had access to worldwide research on food additives and contaminants especially through the Joint WHO/FAO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA). In any research on these substances the ‘no observable effect’ level (NOEL) was established by animal testing (usually done on rats) and the regulatory concentration was set at one-hundredth (1%) of the NOEL. Australia did very little of this work, though some on antioxidants and certain colours was done in universities. The regulatory level is never the safety level: it is a legal limit deliberately set at many times lower than any concentration likely to be of harm even after prolonged exposure. Nevertheless, a legal limit is not an absolute. Nothing is absolutely safe, and it is not unreasonable to assume that, because of biological variation, someone, somewhere, at some time will react adversely to almost anything anyone can think of. It was hardly surprising, then, that an American physician named Feingold claimed in the 1970s to have found that food additives—specifically, food colours—were the cause of hyperactivity in children. His methodology was suspect and Dr Joan Woodhill in Sydney was one of a number worldwide who tried to repeat his results. Her double-blind crossover tests failed to support Feingold’s sweeping hypothesis, which is now largely discredited. However, it seems that one food colour, tartrazine, can cause adverse reactions in a few cases, and work at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital confirmed that sulphur dioxide, a useful and widely used preservative, may cause problems by triggering attacks in a small proportion of asthmatics. It is such susceptible people that the numbering system for food additives can help. Contaminants may come from the natural environment, industry, agriculture, cooking and processing, and the final package. Of the first, an excellent example was the contamination from 1977 of the Queensland peanut crop with the mould, Aspergillus flavus, which produces aflatoxin, a powerful carcinogen. The sudden appearance of aflatoxin was picked up in a food industry laboratory, the FST secretariat was advised at once and swift action was taken that day. Shortly after, an urgent meeting of industry, government and industry scientists and the Peanut Marketing Board was held, and precautionary steps were taken. The problem was brought under control by the urgent collaboration of all the interested parties. About 1970 the environmental disaster at Minimata Bay in Japan was shown to be due to the contamination of food fish with mercury (up to 20 mg/kg) by industrial wastes. A rapid international response revealed that fish, both marine and lacustrine, could contain measurable levels of mercury normally present. Regulatory action quickly followed. Thorough investigation of Australian food fish revealed no significant problem, but it was found that mercury, left over from its use in the recovery of gold in the 19th century, was identifiable in some inland streams of Victoria. Long-gone industrial contamination remained as a potential environmental source and is thought to be part cause of mild mercury contamination in Port Phillip Bay. Lead, especially in view of its perceived potential for damage in growing children, has been investigated in many countries. In Australia it was studied in Port Pirie and monitored in crops grown near highways and subject to lead fallout from the exhausts of motor vehicles. The permitted concentration of lead in food has been progressively reduced to low concentrations as more has been learned, and the soldered side-seam in cans was replaced by the fully welded can. Contamination of food sources by industrial chemicals is closely monitored. Run-off from farmland may contaminate waterways with residues of fertilisers, weedicides and pesticides. Direct contamination of foods by legitimately used agricultural chemicals is inevitable and is controlled by regulation of the chemicals, the way they are used, and by the time permitted between their use and the harvesting of the target crop. Veterinary medicines and hormone

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treatment are potential hazards in foods of animal origin, but the major concern is pesticide residues. The modern cult of so-called ‘organic’ foods is an attempt, open only to the affluent countries where yield is less important to the consumer, to ensure that contamination by agricultural chemicals is absent. Where applied, modern integrated pest management (IPM) techniques have been successful in significantly reducing the use of pesticides, but some will always be needed. Australia’s exclusive philosophy has resulted in the setting of maximum permitted concentrations for each named pesticide. To maintain such a schedule is demanding, but it makes for precise control. The market basket surveys carried out by the Commonwealth Department of Health since 1974 have provided the only national estimates of pesticide residues and heavy metals in the Australian diet. They have consistently shown no cause for alarm. Contamination by substances during processing is small. Cooking, especially barbecuing, may form carcinogens on meat surfaces; nitrosamines are formed when bacon is fried; and many varied substances result from the Maillard reaction wherever food is browned. In the factory, boiler water additives, detergent residues and sanitisers may be absorbed, such as the iodophors mentioned in Chapter 16. Copper was picked up by milk from worn tinned-copper utensils in dairies. It was not harmful to people, but it was to the flavour of milk products. Such absorption was virtually eliminated by the general use of stainless steel, but there has been a trend back to copper for jam making. Potentially, the package is the greatest source of chemical contamination. Canned foods pick up tin. Indeed, tin absorbed by canned asparagus contributes to the characteristic flavour; but canned foods may also pick up iron from the base plate and, before the welded side-seam and depending on the acidity of the food, lead from the solder. The modern polymeric plastics with residual monomers, and colours, plasticisers, printing inks and, perhaps, sealing compounds are, at first sight, a ready source of contaminants. In 1973 a rare angiosarcoma was attributed to the inhalation over a period of vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) by workers in a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) factory. Reaction everywhere was immediate and the Australian FST asked the Standards Association of Australia (SAA) for a standard for plastics for food contact. Government, plastics manufacturers, converters of plastics into food containers and wrappers, food manufacturers and consumers, in other words everyone concerned from manufacture to consumption, was represented on the subsequent committee. The result was a standard for Plastics for Food Contact such that the concentrations of substances migrating into food, packed in containers and wrappers made from the plastics which conformed to the standard, would not exceed the levels of packaging migrants permitted by the relevant new food regulations. This was a collaborative response of which Australians could be proud, and it happened speedily without any public outcry. It was not confined to Australia: other countries also acted, but none more quickly. Journalists make even more of the occasional discovery of chemical contaminants in food than they do of additives. A report of the detection of a real or even suspected carcinogen in a food or drink makes headlines. The concentration at which it is present, and whether that is significant, is totally ignored; it is sufficient that it is present. The problem is that modern instrumentation has improved food analysis dramatically since the 1950s so that it has become possible to measure substances in minute concentrations far below those of any public health significance. Such power—of great value in food science, especially flavour work—unfortunately gives rise to misrepresentation and the misuse of the detection of very low concentrations of contaminants.

Response to anxiety

Microbiological safety Food is subject to contamination by spoilage and pathogenic organisms, and food technology aims to control these by killing them or reducing their numbers (for example with heat or acidity), and/or by preventing them from growing (for example by refrigeration, drying, acidity or the water activity of the system). Protection of the product from post-processing contamination during packaging or by failure of the package or the product storage conditions (such as rise in temperature or even thawing of refrigerated products) is equally important. Processed foods are expected, virtually by definition, to be safe, but some well-publicised breaches of this expectation, and the BSE crisis in Britain, left the consumer both affronted and alarmed. During the Second World War some members of the armed forces in Australia died from botulism. The source was canned beetroot improperly processed through unfamiliarity with the product and the potential dangers. This was a rare occurrence, but over the years there have been sporadic outbreaks of less lethal food poisoning. Some involved caterers, most were in the home, and all were due to the mishandling of food rather than any breakdown in food technology. One exception, however, was the appearance in 1976–77 of Salmonella bredeney in a powdered infant formula. It had penetrated cracks in the cone of a drier, become established in the insulation and contaminated succeeding batches. Although most cases of food poisoning were, and probably still are, unreported, there has been a steady increase in recorded numbers throughout the Western world including Australia. This is attributed to a number of factors. Rising affluence and the increased proportion of women in full-time employment have increased the number of meals eaten away from home. The proliferation of restaurants and takeaway outlets, some falling short of the highest standards of hygiene, has increased the risks. New processes and packages have been introduced for traditional products such as cheese and meat, and especially for the production and presentation of unit meals and dishes. Many of these, acceding to the call for freshness—some even raw—and freedom from additives, approached the limits of safety, but carelessness in handling and storing food in the home continues to be a major fault. There has, too, been a shift in causative organisms. Salmonellae spp. remain, and strains of Listeria and Campylobacter have become important. Even more disturbing, dangerous strains of E. coli have emerged, 0157:H7 becoming especially notorious because of some mass infections overseas. Finally, these outbreaks in other countries, in which the susceptibility of the young, old, pregnant and immunosuppressed became apparent, stimulated improvements in the detection and reporting of food poisoning. It is not surprising that community sensitivity to this aspect of food safety was sharpened. In Australia in the 1990s there were three serious food poisoning incidents which involved death and hospital admissions. They destroyed one company, damaged the reputations and balance sheets of the others, and shook consumers’ confidence in the products involved. The first, in Adelaide, was an outbreak of haemolytic uremic syndrome due to E. coli 0111 consumed with mettwurst, an uncooked salami-type sausage. Such products are fermented and depend on acid development during fermentation and a subsequent drop in water activity as the sausage is slowly dried. The faulty batch was improperly made and, in the absence of microbiological surveillance, entered the market. A child died, and 19 others required hospital treatment. The company involved went out of business and the whole smallgoods industry suffered. The second, in Melbourne, involved Salmonella poisoning of a number of people by peanut butter manufactured by a company with considerable technical support. The problem was of rodent contamination of peanuts pre-roasted in another state prior to delivery to Melbourne, and a lapse in the surveillance

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of suppliers and incoming raw material. It damaged the company’s hitherto excellent reputation and cost it a lot of money. The third, also in South Australia, was the contamination of orange juice with a type of Salmonella from just one small unhygienic supplier of oranges and the failure of the manufacturer to pasteurise and to follow best manufacturing practice. The first exposed inadequacies in the inspections of local environmental health officers and the folly of skimping on scientific support, the second showed that, even when one has that support, the price of freedom from trouble is eternal vigilance, and the third suffered from poor manufacturing practice. The initial response to the first of these incidents was a meeting convened by the federal government and attended by industry, government, and meat scientists from CSIRO. From it emerged a mandatory Code of Hygienic Production for Uncooked Fermented Comminuted Meat Products based on HACCP (see p. 195). The ongoing response was a research programme in the CSIRO Meat Research Laboratories in Brisbane into all aspects of enterohaemorragic E. coli in Australian meat, and in 1997, though not directly related to the Adelaide incident, the meat industry launched a campaign to show the general public how to avoid food-borne sickness. Six million brochures offering advice on food handling were distributed. Response to the second incident by a company with a long history of microbiological control was a tightening of the assessment of suppliers and the control of intermediates supplied, and the company involved in the third incident installed the latest pasteuriser and adopted HACCP procedures. In the 1930s the University of Melbourne introduced milk bacteriology into its Science faculty bacteriology course, but to the middle of the 20th century there was little microbiological control in the Australian food industry. Such as there was was limited largely to the testing of finished products, and although any serious contamination would be detected in the batches tested, the results were really of historical interest only. That is, they recorded only what had happened, not where it happened or what had to be done to prevent it happening again. In a well-run factory they were useful in showing day-to-day trends and the absence of pathogens, but it was quality control (QC)—the detection of failure. In the 1940s Margaret Dick at Kraft in Melbourne began to conduct factory hygiene surveys on plant cleanliness and on the product at the beginning and end of each day. Factory personnel were shocked to see what grew from the imprints of their ‘clean’ hands and willingly co-operated. At the same time, studies on the microbiology of products began and included monitoring of their shelf lives. Most importantly, collaboration began between microbiologists and engineers in the design of new equipment to minimise product accumulation and facilitate cleaning. This was Quality Assurance (QA), the attempt to prevent failure. As the years went by, to Quality Assurance were added procedures and protocols for assessing new sources of raw materials and accepting normal deliveries, and close collaboration on product characteristics and shelf life during product development and the stability of the product before release to the market. Air delivered to production areas was kept under constant review, and collaboration with production managers included investigation of any observed abnormalities. To all this in country cheese factories was added the monitoring for bacteriophage; and all of it was aided by the temperature and pressure recorders maintained by the engineers on all lines and the inspection each morning of samples from every batch produced on the previous day. In 1955, in concluding a symposium on food microbiology and public health in the UK, Sir Graham Wilson said, ‘It is far more important to lay a down strict code for the preparation and processing of food and to see that it is carried out properly than to rely on bacteriological sampling of the finished product’. In Australia, Kraft was doing that, and maybe others, but

Response to anxiety

about 1970 a code in what amounted to a highly structured, line-focused factory survey was published in the United States and called Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP). HACCP is sophisticated Quality Assurance. It consists of the identification in each production line of hazards—that is, potential sources of contamination, essentially microbiological, but applicable also to chemical and quality parameters—and the critical points at which samples for control of the process are best taken. One then establishes the target levels and acceptable tolerances for control at each critical control point, the monitoring system best suited to it and the appropriate remedial procedures to be taken when failure of the system is detected. Verification procedures and mechanisms for regular reviews also are established, but the essential part of the system is the detailed documentation of it and the procedures for ensuring the keeping of meticulous records. This last is especially important as HACCP has been taken up in a number of countries, including Australia through ANZFA, and made mandatory in some, and inspection of these records is part of the regulatory process. HACCP is supported by modern rapid methods of analysis and includes elements of feed-forward control, but any system set up may get out of control very quickly. Nor is HACCP foolproof. The identification of hazards and critical control points is subjective, and the system is thus subject to human error. The efforts of the AIFST Microbiology Group from 1972, referred to earlier, to improve food hygiene and the practice of food microbiology in Australia did sharpen the industry’s perceptions, but, in general, Australian application of HACCP dates only from the mid-1980s. Companies with strong technical support were able to look after themselves, but smaller companies, many relying on commercial laboratories for their microbiological support, turned to them for their HACCP requirements also. The results were not always as successful as they should have been. In 1997 the Victorian Government, via the Food (Amendment) Act, set up a Food Hygiene Strategy that included a food safety programme based on HACCP with emphasis on the keeping of records. It required regular audits and the implementation of recommended corrections: that is, Quality Control. But it was claimed that it lacked preventative ‘teeth’: that is, Quality Assurance. It was an initiative, however, designed to ensure that the best contemporary procedures available were being implemented in Victorian food factories. In the late 1990s, the boundaries of protection were being further extended. Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA) was under study in Food Science Australia (CSIRO) MRL in Brisbane. Properly applied, QMRA provides a numerical estimation of overall risk and permits one to compare the relative risks of various processes. At the same time, the pioneering work in the University of Tasmania on predictive microbiology was being further developed by studies aimed at understanding why processes, perceived to be safe according to the methods used, had been associated with outbreaks of food poisoning.

Irradiation and genetic modification The application of ionising irradiation (gamma rays, X-rays or electrons), as a process for preserving food, began to be taken seriously overseas in the 1950s. In 1963 FST was asked to add it to its remit and from August of that year for 20 years maintained a watching brief, carefully following the ongoing research, especially that relating to the safety and nutritive value of irradiated foods. It was evident that its usefulness, as with every other food process, was limited, but that it was valuable in reducing the notoriously high bacterial counts of spices and some other dry foods, preventing the sprouting of potatoes and onions, reducing insect infestation, and preventing

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mould growth. Even more important was the ability of irradiation to reduce, if not entirely eliminate, several species of pathogenic organisms in, for example, poultry and shellfish. It was also quite clear that, in the doses of irradiation proposed for these and some other applications, there was no evidence of any significant nutritive damage to the foods or danger to the consumer. Accordingly, in 1986 FST recommended that foods irradiated with doses of radiation not exceeding 10 kGray be permitted. At once there was a loud outcry by a group within the Consumers Association, and the federal government of the day made available a large sum of money to enable this group to second-guess the government’s own expert committee. Fortunately for its intellectual probity, it eventually came to the same conclusion as FST: namely, that food irradiated in the way proposed was safe. But politics had been allowed to override science, and public money was wasted. It was not a good omen. The regulators were still cautious, however. While recognising that sometimes there was no satisfactory alternative, they insisted that irradiation would not be permitted instead of safe food-handling procedures. No process should be. Most Australian interest in the irradiation of food was in Queensland where its application to the disinfestation of fruit for the interstate and export markets offered the greatest potential, and some experience of it was obtained by the Atomic Energy Authority at Lucas Heights, near Sydney. Henderson judges that ‘Irradiation is a technology that offers clear benefits that have never been realised because of unfounded consumer fears’ (p. 117). Genetic modification, or, more correctly, recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology, is threatened in the same way, but this technology is not simply another food preservation process: it offers benefits over the whole gamut of food production. Genetically modified foods promise too much in terms of pest resistance, yield, colour, flavour, texture, keeping quality, diversity, and so on, to be gainsaid. The potential to increase the overall food supply by developing strains of crops growable in arid and saline environments cannot be ignored. In the 1990s, however, in spite of vast areas of genetically modified crops in North America and the East, a carefully orchestrated international campaign with strong political overtones was launched in Europe against genetically modified food. Without doubt, genetic modification may be abused. Without doubt, there are legitimate questions to be answered and concerns to be faced; there are aspects of gene technology that must be very closely monitored, indeed. But, equally without doubt, answers are being sought and concerns addressed, not least by those who know most about them. The first rDNA molecules were made in 1971, the first gene was cloned (for insulin production) in 1973, and in 1974 for the first time a gene from a different species was expressed in bacteria. The implications were such that in 1975 international practitioners of the new technology met in California and formulated guidelines for its control. In the same year the Australian Academy of Science set up a committee to monitor rDNA research in Australia and in 1980 recommended that the federal government take it over. This happened, and it continued as the Recombinant DNA Monitoring Committee (RDMC). Guidelines were revised from time to time. As the technology developed and the potentialities increased, the name of this committee became the Genetic Manipulation Advisory Committee (GMAC), and the guidelines became mandatory. In 1992 the committee was renamed the Gene Technology Assessment Authority (GTAA) with responsibilities relating to the planned release of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It is unlikely that there has ever been a technology of relevance to food science, not even irradiation, which has been so critically assessed, not just in Australia, but everywhere. Some have demanded the application of the so-called precautionary principle that would prevent the introduction of anything in the absence of a

Response to anxiety

guarantee of absolute safety. If it had been applied to the introduction of canning, for example, that technology would never have begun. Nor could it begin today, because there is always the risk of leakers, underprocessing, and so on. The commonsense statement of a British agent in occupied Europe during the Second World War seems appropriate: ‘Caution axiomatic, but over caution results in nothing done’. The rDNA technology is simply a tool, and tools may be used for good or ill. In this case the consequences of the latter could be very serious, but the potential for good in food production is unlimited. It has already been used well in, for example, the manufacture of chymosin, ‘vegetable’ rennet, for cheesemaking and in the development of phage-resistant cheese starters. Australian work on the latter began in the early 1980s and continues. Other contributions to research into food applications also are ongoing, but as the 20th century was ending the only genetically modified crop being grown in Australia was cotton. The Australian food industry realised that consumer acceptance of these products had to be won and that it had some reponsibility to consumer education. In 1992 a biotechnology working group was set up by CAFTA with a wide remit, among other things to inform and develop a consensus within its own membership and generally disseminate information on biotechnology. Collaboration ensued with other interested organisations in Australia including relevant CSIRO divisions, and internationally, and contact was maintained with government departments on a continuing basis. Such activities were continued by CAFTA’s successor, the Australian Food and Grocery Council. In 1999 the recommendation to label food products containing genetically modified components was impeded by difficulties associated with establishing a satisfactory analytical method. ANZFA took the same view as other similar authorities in evaluating the end product not the means by which it is obtained, and where appropriate accepted ‘substantial equivalence’ with the non-modified product. But it requires assurance of the non-transfer of toxins, allergens, antibiotic resistance and so on. Such transfers have occurred in rDNA research, at which point those investigations ceased. As one would expect, conferences and meetings were held in various centres to inform food scientists and technologists and other interested professionals, and when the first Australian consensus conference was held in March 1999, the subject was Gene Technology in the Food Chain. Two panels, one expert and the other lay, considered the subject over two days and presented a series of recommendations that, in effect, accepted the technology provided that it was introduced slowly, responsibly, openly and with inbuilt safeguards. This was not at odds with scientific thinking.

Nutrition From the 1970s, two developments in nutrition led to concern and uncertainty. They were research that began to connect diet with specific diseases, and advice on food choice for good health and well-being, sometimes contradictory or deriving from unconfirmed research. Consumers and food technologists alike were unsettled by these developments. Processing itself was challenged though modern processing procedures do little damage to nutritive value, and, convenience foods apart, urban populations cannot now be fed without food processed in one way or another. The upshot was that consumers were seeking reassurance on three points: that their food purchases provided good nutrition, that they avoided ‘bad’ nutrition, and that they were as ‘fresh’ and as ‘natural’ as possible.

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The nutritional advice, good, bad and indifferent from various sources on fats, salt, fibre, various cancer risks real or imagined, so-called junk foods and a host of other things, was clarified for those who would listen by the issue of Dietary Guidelines and other carefully thoughtout statements. That is, sound advice on good and bad nutrition providing the assurances sought became available, and anecdotal evidence suggested that changes in the apparent consumption of foods and nutrients by Australians from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s reflected the influence of the Dietary Guidelines. True or not, by the mid-1980s consumers were more nutritionally aware. Studies showed that they were reading information on the labels of processed foods and that they were interested in the use-by date and ingredient details. They were buying low-fat, low-sugar, low-energy, low-salt, low-cholesterol, low-alcohol, high-fibre and additive-free products, but with little understanding of them and, unfortunately, an inability to discriminate between sound scientific statements and dubious advertising claims. They expected accurate weights in packages, and products to be what they were labelled to be; and they looked for some form of nutritional labelling. Health messages on labels and in advertising were considered to be helpful, but the imparting of perfectly genuine health information was severely limited by the food regulations. Nutritional labelling was a bugbear in many countries. Australia was no exception. Any health claim triggered an obligatory factual supporting statement, but, as has been seen in relation to tartrazine and sulphur dioxide, there are good reasons why some health warnings should be given. These are usually of importance to only a few people who quickly learn to consult the list of ingredients. Those at risk, sometimes greatly at risk, are individuals allergic to specific foods such as eggs, peanuts, and a number of other familiar foods. In the 1990s some unfortunate incidents in other countries involving nuts sharpened consumer perceptions, and warnings on the labels of processed foods and menus in restaurants followed. As the 20th century was ending there were moves internationally to extend such labelling. As consumer concerns about nutrition intensified, processed foods were perceived to be less nutritious than fresh food. That, given the normal diet, this was a fallacy was irrelevant. However, food technologists responded to a trend towards ‘freshness’ and ‘naturalness’. The cook-chill and cook-freeze products mentioned earlier were part of this response, and the long shelf life (essentially pasteurised) refrigerated foods were well accepted by mainly institutional consumers because of their perceived freshness. They are packed in hermetically sealed pouches and refrigerated, but the production of all these products depends heavily on the observance of the principles of good manufacturing practice (GMP) and documented HACCP procedures, and the ultimate safety of the products hangs on the proper observance by the purchaser of the ‘keep refrigerated’ label and the warning, ‘perishable’. As one report on a similar product said, ‘Storage instructions on chilled foods mean exactly what they say’.

Community response Responses to the community anxieties came from within the community itself, from government instrumentalities, the press, professional bodies and industry. The first was regulatory, the second was the formulation of alternative products, and the third was broadly educational. Sufficient has already been said about government activity in promulgating regulations controlling the composition and labelling of food, the hygiene of food production and presentation, and the organisation of the regulatory system. The precautions taken in the authorisation

Response to anxiety

of the addition of new substances to food and the introduction of new processes and modified foods also have been discussed. Food technologists responded to nutritional concerns by formulating the products the consumers were beginning to buy, low in specified nutrients, high in fibre, and so on. Many lowfat and low-salt products became freely available, low-alcohol beers of acceptable flavour captured 10% of the market, and high-fibre products abounded; and a trend towards additives of natural origin, especially colours, developed—with limited success. Government was active in publishing educational material to inform consumers on various aspects of food safety and good nutrition. The brochures on food additives and the Dietary Guidelines are examples, but there were many other voices seeking to educate the public about food. Each year there are hundreds of articles on food in the Australian daily press and magazines, and advertising in women’s magazines has been seen to be an important source of nutritional information. Some of this information was good, but, unfortunately, objective assessments showed many of the latter to be misleading. Health professionals, in the DAA, university staffs, and the relevant CSIRO divisions, have made major contributions, and the activities of the Australian Nutrition Foundation (ANF) have already been discussed. Industry also provided useful guidance. It was perceived to be self-interested—as, of course, it was—but that did not mean that the information offered was false. The major companies developed and publicised sound nutrition policies and were commended by the ANF for doing so. Under the watchful scrutiny of dietitians and nutritionists, the companies stuck to their claims if only because in every company statement made and every product analysis published the professional integrity of their technical staffs was on trial by their fellow professionals. In the 1970s a number of food companies formed the Food Industry Council of Australia (FICA) as a means of co-ordinating industry representations to the federal government on policy issues including Dietary Guidelines and Health Goals. A major achievement was the formation in December 1990 of the Australian Food Foundation (AFF) to promote the food industry specifically as a provider of safe and nutritious food, and to counter misinformation about its products; to promote rational discussion within appropriate professional and consumer groups; and to supply, especially to the media and government health and educational officials, updated information on the food and health sciences. Since 1982 industry had been active in support of the ANF, which sought to educate the public on healthy eating, and in 1996 the ANF issued a position statement that clarified its views on the processed food industry and the place of its products in a balanced diet. Industry continued to support the ANF, but the leading food producers funded the AFF to educate the public on food production and processing, the safety of the processes and the wholesomeness of the products. To this extent AFF overlapped with, but was of broader intent than, the Canned Food Information Service (CFIS) that had been founded in 1987 to counteract misconceptions of the safety and nutritive value of canned foods. AFF was seen by some as a public relations exercise by the food industry, as indeed it was, but it was careful to appoint a university scientist as its scientific director, and its first activity was the revision and distribution (50 000 copies) of the Bureau of Consumer Affairs booklet Food additives: food for thought. Its inaugural conference in November 1991 brought together professionals from industry, government, education, health care and the media to look at the industry’s response to emerging food and health science and consumer concerns. To this extent the AFF was following CFIS, which had already been holding conferences of technical significance and publishing factual material.

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On 11 October 1994 the Australian Food Council (AFC) was formed by the leaders of 17 of Australia’s largest food companies. It proposed to build on the strengths of FICA, CAFTA, AFF, and the Grocery Manufacturers of Australia (GMA) and to put the industry viewpoint on relevant legislation and regulations, on consumer awareness, and on the interface between the industry and the wholesale/retail food trade. This was an all-embracing aim and AFC took over CAFTA’s technical and regulatory functions forthwith. It later absorbed the GMA and changed its name to the Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC). At the outset AFC/AFGC set out to speak with one industry voice on all matters affecting the industry. Food science and technology was only one part but AFC took it very seriously, appointing a well-qualified science and technology director and in 1999 launching its Food Science Bureau backed by a panel of eminent and totally independent CSIRO and university food scientists. The Bureau’s aims, through its scientific expert panel, its partnership programmes with food professionals, and the Internet, were ‘to provide consumers, the news media, industry, and policy makers, with independent, credible, scientific information on nutrition, food safety and biotechnology and subsequently to encourage accurate and balanced discussion of food and food technology issues’. In the midst of consumer expectations of modern food products, one may identify an underlying tension between safety and nutrition, on the one hand, and, on the other, acceptability, which may be taken to mean having such properties that the consumer will eat the product and buy it again. Acceptability encompasses colour, aroma, flavour, texture, perceptions of safety and nutritive value, price, and the overall satisfaction of consumer expectations. In the 1990s such expectations could encompass product design (of, for example, microwaveable meals), ‘freshness’, source of raw materials, ‘organic’ methods of production and even the disposability of packaging materials. The food processor can be reassured on the safety and nutritive value of his product, both of which are demonstrable, but acceptability is largely subjective and there is tension between it and safety as acceptability seeks to limit processing and preservatives and pushes certain products to the edge of safety. There is also tension between acceptability and nutrition inherent in the demands for low salt, sugar and, in some cases, fat. There is a sense, then, in which some consumer anxieties derive from consumer expectations.

Chapter 18

Epilogue

Throughout the 19th century food science and technology everywhere developed slowly in a series of unequal commodity-oriented steps isolated from each other. It has been seen that this happened in Australia, first, in the self-contained village technologies, and, from the middle of the 19th century, with the newer ones. Heat processing began later than it did in Europe and the United States, but expanded rapidly. In refrigeration, however, Australia was a world leader. In spite of the constraints of distance, travel time, and very limited educational opportunites, overseas advances in the sugar, dairy, milling and brewing industries in the latter part of the 19th century were adopted quite quickly. Australia was innovative in canning and dehydration; science was applied in the control of the sugar and brewing industries, and in the introduction of compositional standards for foods; and Australian research contributed to the scientific knowledge of yeasts and, especially, cereals. In general, the advances made, many of them in engineering and equipment, were isolated within their commodity groups. The milling, sugar and dairy industries illustrate this though the use of the vacuum pan became common to the last two. Yeast had, of course, long been essential for producing fermented beverages and bread, and refrigeration was rapidly applied to more than meat. But there was no study of the food systems themselves. In Europe and the United States proteins, carbohydrates, and fats and oils were being studied as individual components, and the findings were perceived to apply across commodity boundaries. Australia played no part in this, and when the federal government took a positive interest in food research it was in response to specific problems, most of them eventually solved, within commodity groups important to the Australian export trade. In the 1920s, industrial research was similarly constrained: CSR, sugar; CUB, yeast and brewing problems; Kraft, yeast extract, and the chemical composition and microbiology of cheese. For the most part, food was still seen as a series of products. It wasn’t seen as an infinite variety of combinations of—flavours apart—a few classes of compounds: fats, proteins, carbohydrates, minerals, water and, later, vitamins, all of which influenced, and were influenced for good or ill by, microbial activity and the chemical and physical properties of the food systems. Nor, with a few notable exceptions, had Australia come to terms with advances already being made overseas in the knowledge of nutrition. The country had abundant food and had been spared the nutritional problems that beset some European countries in the aftermath of the First World War. In Australia nutrition was not a problem. That there was a fundamental change after the Second World War has already been made apparent, and the latter part of this book is an attempt to illustrate by examples the major trends in the development of Australian food science and technology as a coherent discipline crucial to the good health of the Australian food industry. One is too close to, and was perhaps too closely

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involved in, some of what was happening to be wholly objective, but with the effluxion of time, a definitive picture will emerge. In Australia in the 1940s and 1950s, thiamin (vitamin B1) studies confirmed the validity of applying chemical kinetics to all foods, and in CSIRO Scott’s application of solution theory to microbial growth was seen to be a major factor in the understanding of the biological stability of intermediate-moisture and other foods. Much later McMeekin and his co-workers extended chemical kinetics to predictive microbiology applicable to all foods. In food processing the principles of vacuum concentration were early applied to unrelated products, and, later, fluid bed technology was used for both drying and freezing. The membrane technology pioneered in Australia by CSIRO and Casimir’s imaginative spinning cone technology are applicable to many food products, and the science and technology of the packaging revolution knows no commodity boundaries. In the laboratory some specialised instruments, notably for cereals, continued to be used, but new ones facilitated the study of food systems irrespective of the specific foods in which they may be found. The atomic absorptiometer, an Australian invention, and gas/liquid chromatography, to which Australians contributed the flame ionisation detector, are major examples, but other physico-chemical examples abound. Specialised studies appeared. Rheology, for example, knows no commodity boundaries, nor does the emulsion chemist, and, as science pushed further towards the boundaries of matter, the molecular biologist, uninhibited by product constraints, became important in the study of food systems. Microbial infection is no respecter of product. The principles are the same for all foods and, irrespective of commodity, HACCP was applied, and increasingly was required to be applied in food factories, especially as aseptic packaging and minimally processed foods became more important. From the 1970s nutrition became much more closely studied and new discoveries focused attention on specific chemical constituents of foods, all foods. These, and consumer concerns deriving from incomplete knowledge of additives and contaminants and the thoroughness with which they are controlled, and fuelled by the steadily increasing sensitivity of chemical and microbiological analysis, forced industry and the regulators to respond. The more that was learned about food, the greater the consumer expectations. Whether it was tighter control or yet more esoteric products, science and technology became more and more involved in food production, processing and packaging. In short, the food industry became science oriented and its scientists were focusing on principles of general application to all food systems of which, in many cases, the package forms a part. But the greatest advance was in education. Until the middle of the 20th century Australian food science and technology relied almost entirely on chemists and a handful of microbiologists. Then, the introduction and proliferation of tertiary courses in food science and technology, including food engineering and nutrition, ensured the output of a stream of graduates and postgraduates who have contributed significantly to the growth and rising standards of Australian food production. In effect, these men and women continue to apply scientific principles to the feeding of the nation. What can this history teach us? Some of the lessons are implied in the preceding paragraphs, but the most obvious is that there will always be change and scientific and technological advancement, but that they will not necessarily be acceptable. The cult of organic food is a source of bemusement to most food scientists and technologists, and the prospect of food irradiation and the genetic modification of food sources is unacceptable to most people outside the profession. The biggest lesson of all is, therefore, that one must hasten slowly, with care and explanation, in the introduction of anything really new.

Acronyms

ACI ACT ADC AFC AFGC AFF AFFSE AFISC AFRI AFSC AIF AIFST ANF ANZFA ANZFSC ASDT ASEAN AWRI BHP BP BRI BSE BSES CAFTA CFIS CIP CIPIP CRC CSIR CSIRO CSR CUB DAA DIAA DFP DNA DRDC DRL ELISA FAC FAO FBCA FICA FMC FRI

Australian Chemical Institute (see RACI) Australian Capital Territory Australian Dairy Corporation Australian Food Council Australian Food and Grocery Council Australian Food Foundation [Australian] Armed Forces Food Science Establishment Australian Food Industry Science Centre Australian Food Research Institute (see FRI) Australian Food Standards Committee Australian Imperial Force Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology Australian Nutrition Foundation Australian and New Zealand Food Authority Australian and New Zealand Food Standards Council Australian Society of Dairy Technology Association of South East Asian Nations Australian Wine Research Institute Broken Hill Proprietory Co. Ltd British Pharmacopoeia Bread Research Institute bovine spongiform encephalopathy [Queensland] Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations Council of Australian Food Technology Associations Canned Food Information Service cleaning in place Cheese Industry Productivity Improvement Project Co-operative Research Centre Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (later CSIRO) [Australian] Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (Originally) Colonial Sugar Refineries, later CSR Ltd Carlton and United Breweries Ltd Dietitians Association of Australia Dairy Industry Association of Australia [CSIRO] Division of Food Preservation and Transport desoxyribonucleic acid Dairy Research and Development Corporation [CSIRO] Dairy Research Laboratory enzyme linked immunosorbent assay Food Additives Committee [UN] Food and Agriculture Organisation Federal Bureau of Consumer Affairs Food Industry Council (later Conference) of Australia Food Microbiology (Reference) Sub-committee [of FSC] [Victorian] Food Research Institute

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FSA FSC FST FTA GMA GMAC GMOs GMP GRDC GTAA HACCP ICMSF IFT IMP IOB IPM IR&D IUFoST JECFA MDD MRL MSc NCA NFA NFSC NHMRC NOEL PC PHAC PhD PVC QA QC QMRA RACI R&D RDI RDMC rDNA RIA RMIT SAA SCI SCIV SDR SI SRI UHT USQMC VCM WHO

Food Science Australia (= CSIRO + AFISC) Food Standards Committee Food Science and Technology (Reference) Sub-committee [of FSC] Food Technology Association Grocery Manufacturers of Australia Genetic Manipulation Advisory Committee genetically modified organisms good manufacturing practice Grain Research and Development Corporation Gene Technology Assessment Authority hazard analysis and critical control points International Commission for Microbiological Standards for Foods [American] Institute of Food Technologists instant mashed potatoes Institute of Brewing integrated pest management Industrial Research and Development International Union of Food Science and Technology Joint [of FAO and WHO] Expert Committee on Food Additives mechanical dough development [CSIRO] Meat Research Laboratory Master of Science [American] National Canners Association [Australian] National Food Authority [Australian] National Food Standards Council [Australian] National Health and Medical Research Council no observable effect level portion control Public Health Advisory Committee Doctor of Philosophy polyvinyl chloride quality assurance quality control quantitative microbial risk assessment Royal Australian Chemical Institute research and development recommended daily intake [of nutrients] Recombinant DNA Monitoring Committee recombinant DNA radioimmuno assay Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Standards Association of Australia Society of Chemical Industry Society of Chemical Industry of Victoria [CSIRO] Section of Dairy Research [later DRL] International Standard [units] Sugar Research Institute ultra high temperature United States Quartermaster Corps vinyl chloride monomer [UN] World Health Organization

Sources

Preface Farrer, KTH (1980) A settlement amply supplied: food technology in nineteenth century Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Farrer, KTH (1988) Food technology. In Technology in Australia 1788–1988 (Ed. F Eyre), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Melbourne.

Introduction Anderson, EN (1988) The food of China, Yale University Press, New Haven and London. pp. 80, 81, 82.

Chapter 1 Beaton, JM (1982) Fire and water: aspects of Australian Aboriginal management of cycads, Archaeology in Oceania, 17, 51–58. Blainey, G (1975) The triumph of the nomads: a history of ancient Australia, Macmillan, Melbourne. Brand, JC, Rae, C, McDonnell, J, Lee, A, Cherikoff, V and Truswell, AS (1983) The nutritional composition of Australian Aboriginal bushfoods 1. Food Technology in Australia, 35(6), 293–98. Brand, JC, Cherikoff, V and Truswell, AS (1985) The nutritional composition of Australian Aboriginal bushfoods, 3. Seeds and nuts, Food Technology in Australia, 37(6), 275–79. Cherikoff, V, Brand, JC and Truswell, AS (1985) The nutritional composition of Australian Aboriginal bushfoods, 2. Animal foods, Food Technology in Australia, 37(5), 208–11. Cherikoff, V (1999) Indigenous foods. In Australian food (Ed. C McKean), Agrifood Media, Melbourne. pp. 245–248. Flood, J (1983) Archaeology of the Dreamtime, Collins, Sydney and Melbourne. James, KW (1983) Analysis of indigenous Australian foods, Food Technology in Australia, 35(7), 342–43. Lewis, J (1922) Fought and won, WK Thomas and Co., Adelaide, p. 131. Mulvaney, DJ (1975) The prehistory of Australia, Revised edn, Penguin Books, Vic. Smith, M (1982) Late pleistocene zamia exploitation in Southern Australia, Archaeology in Oceania, 17, 117–21. Webster, J, Beck, W and Ternai, B (1984) Toxicity and bitterness in Australian Dioscorea bulbifera L and Dioscorea hispida Dennst. from Thailand, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 32, 1087–90. Woodward, D (1986) Tasmanian Aborigines. A perspective of a thousand generations, Australian Nutrition Foundation Newsletter, No. 8, November, p.4.

Chapter 2 Anon. (1951) Whitbread Brewery, Whitbread & Co. Ltd., London. Appert, N (1810) Le Livre de tous les Ménages ou l’Art de Conserver pendant plusieurs Années toutes les Substances animales et végétales, Patris et Cie, Paris. (See also Farrer, KTH (1980) A settlement amply supplied: food technology in nineteenth century Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, Chapter 3) Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volumes 1–12, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Badger, GM (1970) Cook the scientist. In Captain Cook, navigator and scientist (Ed. GM Badger), ANU Press, Canberra. Beaglehole, JC (1974) The life of Captain James Cook, A & C Black, London. Burnett, J (1968) Plenty and want, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth. Cowell, ND (1995) An investigation of early methods of food preservation by heat, PhD Thesis, University of Reading. Drummond, JC and Wilbraham, A (1975) The Englishman’s food: five centuries of English diet, Revised edn, Jonathan Cape, London.

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Farrer, KTH (1980) A settlement amply supplied: food technology in nineteenth century Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Hodge, AT (1990) A Roman factory, Scientific American, 263(5), 58–64. Hudson, D and Luckhurst, KW (1954) The Royal Society of Arts 1754–1954, John Murray, London. Kuhlmann, CB (1929) The development of the flour industry in the United States, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass. Mathias, P (1959) The brewing industry in England 1700–1830, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Tannahill, R (1973) Food in history, Eyre Methuen, London. Wilson, CA (1973) Food and drink in Britain, Constable, London.

Chapter 3 Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 2, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Bignell, J (1998) Thorpe water mill, Bothwell, 1823, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Papers and Proceedings, 45(2), 100–103. Bowden, KM (1952) George Bass 1771–1803, Oxford University Press, Melbourne & Wellington. Cassidy, J (1998) Flour milling trades: a case study, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Papers and Proceedings, 45(2), 104–107. Collins, D (1798) An account of the English colony in New South Wales, T Cadell Jun. and W Davies, London. Australian edn (1975) (Ed. BH Fletcher), AH & AW Reed in association with the Royal Australian Historical Society, Sydney. Davey, L, MacPherson, M and Clements, FW (1977) The hungry years: 1788–1792, Historical Studies, 3, 187–208, 1947; reprinted in Tucker in Australia (Ed. B Wood), Hill of Content, Melbourne, pp. 24–46. Drummond, JC and Wilbraham, A (1975) The Englishman’s food: five centuries of English diet, Revised edn, Jonathan Cape, London. Farrer, KTH (1980) A settlement amply supplied: food technology in nineteenth century Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Farrer, KTH (1988) Food technology. In Technology in Australia 1788–1988 (Ed. F Eyre), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Melbourne. Jones, WL (1984) Where have all the flour mills gone? The Flour Millers’ Council of Victoria, Melbourne. Jones, WL and Jones, P (1990) The flour mills of Victoria 1840–1990, The Flour Millers’ Council of Victoria, Melbourne. Linge, GJR (1979) Industrial awakening: a geography of Australian manufacturing 1788 to 1890, Australian National University Press, Canberra. McKean, C (Ed.) (1999) Australian food, 2nd edn, Agrifood Media, Melbourne. Reynolds, M (1978) Wine in Tasmania, Food Technology in Australia, 30(3), 103. Ritchie, J (Ed.) (1971) The evidence to the Bigge reports, Vol. 1. The oral evidence, Heinemann, Melbourne, pp. 116–17.

Chapter 4 This Chapter is essentially a synopsis of: Farrer, KTH (1980) A settlement amply supplied: food technology in nineteenth century Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, Chapters 4, 5, 6,7 and 9; and Farrer, KTH (1988) Australian meat exports to Britain in the nineteenth century: technology push and market pull, Working paper No. 38, Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. The following was also consulted: Linge, GJR (1979) Industrial awakening: a geography of Australian manufacturing 1788 to 1890, Australian National University Press, Canberra.

Chapter 5 Barnard, A (1961) Visions and profits: studies in the business career of TS Mort, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Duncan, R (1962) The Australian export trade with the United Kingdom in refrigerated beef, 1880–1940, Business Archives and History, 2(2), 106–21. Farrer, KTH (1980) A settlement amply supplied: food technology in nineteenth century Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, Chapter 10. Farrer, KTH (1988) Food technology. In Technology in Australia 1788–1988 (Ed. F Eyre), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Melbourne.

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Chapter 6 Allen, JR (1986) personal communication, 1986. A Biographical Register: Notes from the name index of the Australian Dictionary of Biography Vol.I Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volumes 3, 5, 6 & 12, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Australian Town and Country Journal, 15 July 1882, p. 123. Australian Town and Country Journal, 24 March 1888, p. 589. Bindon, G and Miller, DP (1988) Sweetness and light: industrial research in the Colonial Sugar Refining Company: 1855–1900. In Australian science in the making (Ed. RW Home). Australian Academy of Science/Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. Farrer, KTH (1988) Food technology. In Technology in Australia 1788–1988 (Ed. F Eyre), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Melbourne. pp. 71–150. Kelly, FHC (1999) personal communication, April 1999. Linge, GJR (1979) Industrial awakening: a geography of Australian manufacturing 1788 to 1890, Australian National University Press, Canberra. Lowndes, AG (Ed.) (1956) South Pacific enterprise: the Colonial Sugar Refining Company Ltd., Angus and Robertson, Sydney. Prattley, C (Ed.) (1995) Australian food, Agri Food Media, Melbourne. Whayman, E (1986) Some aspects of the development of chemistry in sugar production, Chemistry in Australia, 53, 32–5.

Chapter 7 Brown, B (1991) I excel!: the life and times of Sir Henry Jones, Libra Books Pty Ltd, Hobart. Farrer, KTH (1980) A settlement amply supplied: food technology in nineteenth century Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, Chapter 8, and references therein. Jewell, WR (1960) The dried fruits processing committee: a short history, Food Preservation Quarterly, 20(2), 30–33. Linge, GJR (1979) Industrial awakening: a geography of Australian manufacturing 1788 to 1890, Australian National University Press, Canberra. Prattley, C (Ed.) (1995) Australian food, Agri Food Media, Melbourne. Seppings, J (1967) Where have all the orchards gone? Walkabout, 33(7), 28–32. White, O (1956) The saga of the canmaking industry in Australia, Commonwealth Canmakers Association.

Chapter 8 Farrer, KTH (1980) A settlement amply supplied: food technology in nineteenth century Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Farrer, KTH (1988) Food technology. In Technology in Australia 1788–1988 (Ed. F Eyre), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Melbourne. pp. 71–150. Jones, WL (1970) The cereal based industries, 1945–1970, Food Technology in Australia, 22(8), 430–42. Jones, WL (1984) Where have all the flour mills gone? The Flour Millers’ Council of Victoria, Melbourne. Jones, WL and Jones, P (1990) The flour mills of Victoria 1840–1990, The Flour Millers’ Council of Victoria, Melbourne. Pearce, HR (1976) The hop industry in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Prattley, C (Ed.) (1995) Australian food, Agri Food Media, Melbourne. Saxelby, C and Venn-Brown, U (1980) The role of Australian flour and bread in health and nutrition, Bread Research Institute, North Ryde, NSW.

Chapter 9 Brewing: Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 8 (de Bavay) Farrer, KTH (1980) A settlement amply supplied: food technology in nineteenth century Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Farrer, KTH (1988) Food technology. In Technology in Australia 1788–1988 (Ed. F Eyre), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Melbourne. pp. 71–150.

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Frankland, PF (1901) Pasteur memorial lecture, Memorial lectures 1893–1900, Chemical Society, London, vol. I Harvey, J (1986) From British ale to Australian lager—a hundred years of change, Proceedings of the 19th convention of the Australian and New Zealand Section, Institute of Brewing, Hobart. Winemaking: Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volumes 1, 2 & 5, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Bleasdale, JI (1866–67) Report of the jury on wines. In Report of the Intercolonial Exhibition 1866–67. Bleasdale, JI (1867) On colonial wines, Stillwell and Knight Printers, Melbourne. For private circulation only. Reprinted from Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, VIII, 53–72. Bleasdale, JI (1868) Pure native wine considered as an article of food and luxury and the growing of it as an industry admirably suited to South Australia, Andrews, Thomas and Clark, Adelaide. Bleasdale, JI (1872–73) On wines, International Exhibition essays 1872–73, No.6. Bleasdale, JI (1876) An essay on the wines sent to the late Intercolonial Exhibition by the colonies of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia with critical remarks on the present condition and prospects of the wine industry in Australia, FF Bailliere, Melbourne. Bishop, GC (1980) Australian winemaking: the Roseworthy influence, Investigator Press, Hawthornedean, South Australia. Dilke, CW (1867) Greater Britain (Ed. G Blainey), Methuen Haynes, North Ryde, NSW, p. 107. Farrer, KTH (1988) Food technology. In Technology in Australia 1788–1988 (Ed. F Eyre), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Melbourne. pp. 71–150. Farrer, KTH (1993) The Rev. Dr JI Bleasdale and the Medical Society of Victoria, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 86, 166–68. Ilbery, J (1973) History of wine in Australia. In Australia and New Zealand complete book of wine (Ed. L Evans), Paul Hamlyn, Dee Why West, NSW. Muskett, PE (1893) The art of living in Australia, Eyre and Spottiswode, London, Chapter XII. Pope, D (1971) Viticulture and phylloxera in northeast Victoria, Australian Economic History Review, 11, 21–38. Rankine, BC (1999) personal communication, 30 November 1999. I am indebted to Dr Rankine for details of the Rutherglen Viticultural College and directing me to GF Morris.

Chapter 10 Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Cullity, M (1979) A history of dairying in Western Australia, University of Western Australia Press, Perth. Davis, JG (1981) The evolution of cheese varieties in Britain, Institute of Food Science and Technology, Proceedings, 14(3), 131–44. Farrer, KTH (1979) Adulterations of all descriptions, Food Technology in Australia, 31, 340–49. Farrer, KTH (1980) A settlement amply supplied: food technology in nineteenth century Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, Chapter 11. Farrer, KTH (1988) Food technology. In Technology in Australia 1788–1988 (Ed. F Eyre), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Melbourne. pp. 71–150. Farrer, KTH (1992) TS Mort—food technologist? Food Australia, 44(3), 119–23. Linge, GJR (1979) Industrial awakening: a geography of Australian manufacturing 1788 to 1890, Australian National University Press, Canberra. McKean, C (Ed.) (1999) Australian food, 2nd edn, Agrifood Media, Melbourne. Taverner, Hon. JW (1899) Report on the butter trade, Government Printer, Melbourne. Presented to the Victorian Parliament.

Chapter 11 Accum, F (1820) A treatise on the adulteration of foods and culinary poisons and methods of detecting them, Longman & Co., London. Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 5, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. A Biographical Register: Notes from the name index of the Australian Dictionary of Biography Vol.I Barker, TC, Oddy, DJ, and Yudkin, J (1970) The dietary surveys of Dr Edward Smith 1862–3, Occasional Paper No.1, Department of Nutrition, Queen Elizabeth College, University of London, London. Bleasdale, JI (1867) On colonial wines, Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, VIII, 53–72. Bleasdale, JI (1868) On preserved meats, Australian Medical Journal, 13, 342–46. Bleasdale, JI (1872–73) On wines, International Exhibition essays 1872–73, No.6. Bleasdale, JI (1872–73) On preserved meats; especially with reference to Mr James Harrison’s method of freezing meat, International Exhibition essays 1872–73, No. 7.

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Chapter 12 Bastian, JM, McBean, DMcG and Smith, MB (1979) 50 Years of Food Research, CSIRO, Melbourne. Bond, EE (1980) Servicing the needs of Industry—Cereal chemistry’s role, Chemistry in Australia, 47(5), 188–94. Christian, JHB (1989) The impact of microbiological advances and problems on Australian food exports—An historical perspective, CSIRO Food Research Quarterly, 49(1&2), 19–24. Farrer, KTH (1980) A settlement amply supplied: food technology in nineteenth century Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Farrer, KTH (1988) Food technology. In Technology in Australia 1788–1988 (Ed. F Eyre), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Melbourne. pp. 71–150. Hall, RL (1989) Pioneers in food science and technology: ‘giants in the earth’, Food Technology, 43(9), 186–95. Jones, WL (1970) The cereal based industries, 1945–1970, Food Technology in Australia, 22(8), 430–42. Jones, WL (1976) Cereal science in Australian industry—looking back and looking forward, Proceedings, Royal Australian Chemical Institute, 42(12), 396–405. Jones, WL (1984) Where have all the flour mills gone? The Flour Millers’ Council of Victoria, Melbourne. Jones, WL and Jones, P (1990) The flour mills of Victoria 1840–1990, The Flour Millers’ Council of Victoria, Melbourne. May, EC (1937) The canning clan, Macmillan, New York.

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Chapter 13 Much of the substance of this chapter appeared in: Farrer, K.T.H. (1987) Australian food science and technology: the decade of decision, 1945–55, Food Technology in Australia, 38(1), 22–23, and the permission of the Supervising Editor, Food Australia to quote directly from it is gratefully acknowledged. The papers in the 21st Anniversary Issue of Food Technology in Australia, 22(8), 1970 reviewed advances in the post-war years and also were of help in preparing this chapter. Bastian, JM and Vickery, JR (1976) Growth of CSIRO’s interests in food research, Nature, 261, 644–47. Bastian, JM, McBean, DMcG and Smith, MB (1979) 50 Years of Food Research, CSIRO, Melbourne. Bleasdale, JI (1868) Pure native wine considered as an article of food and luxury and the growing of it as an industry admirably suited to South Australia, Andrews, Thomas and Clark, Adelaide. Edwards, D (1840) Preserving potatoes and other vegetables substances, British Patent No. 8597. Farrer, KTH (1988) Background to the Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology, Food Science and Technology Today, 2, 110–112. Farrer, KTH (1988) Food technology. In Technology in Australia 1788–1988 (Ed. F Eyre), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Melbourne. pp. 71–150. Farrer, KTH (1994) Edwards patent preserved potatoes, Food Australia, 46(12), 549–51. Flavourtech Pty Ltd (1997) Australian innovation revolutionises the wine industry, Food Australia, 49(8), 349. Johnson, G (1912) II The fermentation industries, Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry of Victoria, XII, 5–14. McKean, C (Ed.) (1999) Australian food, 2nd edn, Agrifood Media, Melbourne. Prattley, C (Ed.) (1995) Australian food, Agri Food Media, Melbourne. Rankine, BC (1984) The role of chemistry in winemaking, Chemistry in Australia, 51(11), 296–97. Rankine, BC (1988) The Australian wine industry, Food Australia, 40(11), 449–51. Rankine, BC (1989) Making good wine: a manual of winemaking practice for Australia and New Zealand, Sun Books, South Melbourne. Reuter, FH (1986) 40 Years of FTA, Food Technology in Australia, 38(3), 104–15. Richardson, KC (1997) Science training and research underpin Australian wine industry success: University of Adelaide, Food Australia, 49(8), 353. Scollary, GR (1997) Science training and research underpin Australian wine industry success: Charles Sturt University, Food Australia, 49(8), 352. Shew, DI (1946) A simple test for the detection of bacteriophage attacking starter Streptoccoci. Journal of the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science, 12, 48–50. Shew, DI (1949). Effect of calcium on the development of the Streptococcal bacteriophage, Nature, 164, 492–93. Shew, DI and Hodge, AJ (1950) Electron microscope studies on starter cultures and bacteriophages, Australian Journal of Dairy Technology, 5, 99–102. Vickery, JR (1990) Food science and technology in Australia, CSIRO, Melbourne.

Chapter 14 Allen, N (1996) A microbiologist in industry: the career of an Australian woman scientist, Prometheus, 14(2), 233–47. Anon. (1998) Going with the grain—profiling the Grain Research and Development Corporation, Chemistry in Australia, 65(7), 9–10. Casimir, DJ (1987) Innovation and food engineering, Food Technology in Australia, 39(7), 330–34. Casimir, DJ (1988) Food process engineering over the last twenty-one years, Food Australia, 40(12), 521–23. Christian, JHB (1989) The impact of microbiological advances and problems on Australian food exports—An historical perspective, CSIRO Food Research Quarterly, 49(1&2), 19–24. Cleland, AC and Pound, CJ (1988) Smarter process development—engineers who understand, Food Australia, 50(11), 568–71.

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Craig, AJMcA (1987) Flavour recovery by the Flavourtech Recovery System, Food Australia, 39(3), 102–04. Edwards, RA (1988) Food legislation in Australia – the last twenty years, Food Australia, 40(9), 369–75. Farrer, KTH (1976) Chemical engineering and food technology, Food Technology in Australia, 28(5), 163–67. Farrer, KTH (1988) Food technology. In Technology in Australia 1788–1988 (Ed. F Eyre), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Melbourne. pp. 71–150. Farrer, KTH (1995) Food analysis: where is it taking us? Food Australia, 47(4), 159–62. Forbes-Ewan, CH (1988) Feeding Australia’s defence forces, Food Technology in Australia, 40(6), 229–31. Graham, D and Richardson, KC (1993). Research by CSIRO Division of Food Science and Technology for Australian industry, Food Science and Technology Today, 7(4), 24–45. Halmos, AL (1994) Competing with Mother Nature and winning, Chemical Engineering in Australia, 19(4), 22–26. Harders, T and Sykes, SJ (1999) Comparison of a spinning cone column and other distillation columns, Food Australia, 51(10), 469. McCausland, IP (1999) The rural research and development corporations, The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Focus, No. 108, July/August 1999. McMeekin, TA, Olley, JN, Ross, T and Ratkowsky, DA (1993) Predictive microbiology, John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, UK Reuter, FH (1997) The Australian Model Food Act: personal reminiscences on the road to uniform food legislation in Australia, Supplement to Food Australia, 49(3). (This is essential reading for all interested in the development of Australian food regulations.) Rich, B (Ed.) (1990) Membrane technology today, The Proceedings of Membrane Technology Today seminar conducted by Victorian College of Agriculture and Horticulture – Gilbert Chandler, Food Research Institute, Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, CSIRO Division of Food Processing Dairy Research Laboratory, February 20–21. Sykes, SJ, Casimir, DJ and Prince, RGH (1992) Recent advances in spinning cone column technology, Food Australia, 44(10), 462–6. Vickery, JR (1990) Food science and technology in Australia, CSIRO, Melbourne. Zadow, JG (1993) Development of UHT processing in Australia, Food Australia, 45(6), 274–77.

Chapter 15 Anon. (1979) Brewing—a 20th century technology and an ancient art, Process and Chemical Engineering, 31(12), 13–18 and 32(1), 15–19. Anon. (1989) APV – Siro-Curd enters the World Market, Food Australia, 41(2), 641–42. Anon. (1999) Manufacturing recombined dairy products, Food Australia, 51(11), 534–35. Augustin, MA and Jameson, GW (1997) Developments in dairy ingredients, Food Australia, 49(10), 449–51. Ballard, FJ (1996) Intellectual property licensing: a case study of dairy wastes, Food Australia, 48(3), 128–30. Board, PW (1970) The Australian canning industry from 1949–1970, Food Technology in Australia, 22(8), 406–09. Cox, B, Ford, AL, Cooper, HR and Scriven, FM (1991) Contributors to a symposium, Sensory evaluation in the food industry, Food Australia, 43(6), 235–42. Durham, RJ, Hourigan, JA, Sleigh, RW and Johnson, RL (1997) Whey fractionation: wheying up the consequences, Food Australia, 49(10), 460–65. Ernstrom, CA, Sutherland, BJ and Jameson, GW (1980) Cheese base for processing. A high yield product from whole milk by ultrafiltration, Journal of Dairy Science, 63, 228–34. Eustace, IJ (1989) Food packaging—selection of materials and systems, Food Australia, 41(8), 884–85. Fairbrother, JG (1994). Chicken meat—an export or import replacement industry? Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering Focus, No. 82, May/June. Farrer, KTH (1988) Food technology. In Technology in Australia 1788–1988 (Ed. F Eyre), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Melbourne. pp. 71–150. Fox, D et al. (1990) Arnott’s continuous fermentation process, Food Australia, 42(1), 46–48 (from Australian Journal of Biotechnology, 3(2), 139–42, 1989). Govers, H (1970) The Australian brewing industry—a brief look at the past 21 years, Food Technology in Australia, 22(8), 468–71. Graham, D and Richardson, KC (1993). Research by CSIRO Division of Food Science and Technology for Australian industry, Food Science and Technology Today, 7(4), 24–45.

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Gravina, L (1999) Implementing a sensory evaluation system in the manufacturing environment, Food Australia, 51(6), 227–29. Hills, GL and Muller, LL (1970) Advancement in manufacture in Australia of dairy products, Food Technology in Australia, 22(8), 426–29. Husband, PM (1982) The history of vacuum packaged meat, Food Technology in Australia, 34(6), 272–75. Jameson, GW (1983) Some recent advances in cheese technology, CSIRO Food Research Quarterly, 43, 57–66. Jameson, GW (1987) Manufacture of cheddar cheese from milk concentrated by ultrafiltration: the development of a process, Food Technology in Australia, 39(12), 560–64. Jones, WL (1970) The cereal based industries, 1945–1970, Food Technology in Australia, 22(8), 430–42. Kennedy, G (1997) Application of HACCP to cook-chill operations, Food Australia, 49(2), 65–69. Lovell, HR (1995) The packaging technologist, Food Australia, 47(5), 232. McKean, C (Ed.) (1999) Australian food, 2nd edn, Agrifood Media, Melbourne. Nash R (1988) Back to the basics with boutique brewing, Food Australia, 40(12), 510–11. Nicholson, EH and O’Dwyer, P (1988) Developments in steel packaging, Food Technology in Australia, 40(3), 898–91. O’Donnell, DC (1988) Brewing in Australia 1970–1988, Food Australia, 40(12), 513–20. Regester, GO, McKintosh, GH, Lee, VWK and Smithers, GW (1994) Whey proteins as nutritional and functional food ingredients, Food Australia, 48(3), 123–27. Richardson, HR (1970) Edible fats and oils, Food Technology in Australia, 22(8), 420–25. Scriven, FM (1989) The changing scene—food industries revisited, Food Australia, 41(5), 736. Stevens, PV (1993) Membrane technology for food processing—review of IMSTEC ’92, Food Australia, 45(4), 172–73. Sutherland, P (1999) Australian dairy industry—a 50 year review, Food Australia, 51(8), 362–63. Thompson, PC (1970) Frozen foods for the retail trade and catering, Food Technology in Australia, 22(8), 448–57. Thompson, PC (1988) Refrigerated food industry responds to lifestyle change, Food Australia, 40(9), 361–67. Williams, PG and Brand Miller, JC (1992) Time/temperature histories of vegetables in hospital cook-chill food systems, Food Australia, 44(4), 171–77. Vickery, JR (1990) Food science and technology in Australia, CSIRO, Melbourne.

Chapter 16 Clements, FW (1970) A history of human nutrition in Australia, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne. English, R (1983) Developing dietary guidelines, Food Technology in Australia, 35(11), 508–14. Farrer, KTH (1976) Nutrition in the science–technology continuum, Proceedings of the Nutrition Society of Australia, 1, 21–25. Hicks, S (1972) Who called the cook a bastard? Keyline Publishing Pty Ltd, Sydney. (An account of the fight to establish nutritional feeding of the Australian Army in the Second World War. Everyone interested in nutrition should find a copy and read it.) Nash, H (1989) The history of dietetics in Australia, Dietetics Association of Australia, Canberra. Paul, AA and Southgate, DAT (Eds) (1978) McCance and Widdowson’s Composition of foods, 4th edn, HMSO, London. Rogers, J (1995) Processed foods and dietary guidelines, Food Australia, 47(12), 564–66. Truswell, AS (1983) The development of dietary guidelines, Food Technology in Australia, 35(11), 498–502. Truswell, AS (1987) Sugar and health: a review, Food Technology in Australia, 39(4), 134–140. Truswell, AS (1989) Recommended dietary intakes for use in Australia, Food Australia, 41(7), 840–41. Truswell, AS (1996) Achievements in human nutrition in Australia in the last 20 years, Food Australia, 48(4), 185–87. Wahlqvist, ML (1992) Non-nutrients in food: implications for the food industry, Food Australia, 44(12), 558–60.

Chapter 17 Allen, DH (1985) Asthma induced by sulphites, Food Technology in Australia, 37(11), 506–07. Allen, N (1996) A microbiologist in industry: the career of an Australian woman scientist, Prometheus, 14(2), 233–47. (The subject of this paper is Miss Margaret Dick.) Anon. (1997) Fighting food poisoning, CSIRO Rural Research, 1996, No.170, Autumn. (Reprinted in Food Australia, 49(2), 62–64, 1997.)

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Index

Aboriginal foods 3–7 Act to Prevent the Adulteration of Articles of Food and Drink 111 additives, food 140, 147, 163, 189–91 Admiralty 15, 34, 44, 46, 48, 49 Advisory Council of Science and Industry 123 aflatoxin 151, 153, 191 Agriculture and Food Initiative 150 Albion Brewery 21–22 ale 11, 20, 87 Allen, CH 44 aluminium cans 174 American Can Company 121 Ams, Charles 121 Ams, Max 121 Analytical Sanitary Commission 34, 46, 109 Anderson, William 41 annatto 12 Antill, ES 38 Appert, Nicolas xii, 14, 15, 25, 39, 110 apples 57, 72, 73, 123, 150 apricots 73 APV–Bell Bryant 171 Archer, Thomas 39 Ardmona Foods 168 Ariell, TH 81 armed forces, food 180–81 Armed Forces Food Science Establishment 136, 148–49 Arnott, William 81 Arnotts 125, 133, 150, 153, 163 artificial sweeteners 184 asparagus 75 Assize of Bread 10, 20 Austin, James 22 Australasian Jam Company (AJC) 69 Australasian Sugar Company 59 Australian Academy of Grain Technology 150 Australian Academy of Science 183, 196 Australian and New Zealand Food Authority 148 Australian Association of Dietitians 183 Australian Association of Viticulture and Oenology 166 Australian Biscuit Company 162 Australian Brewery 21, 22 Australian Cattle and Beef Research Committee 136 Australian Chemical Institute 118, 119, 131, 132 Australian Dairy Corporation 152, 171 Australian Dairy Produce Board 169

Australian Dairy Produce Standards Organisation 137 Australian Dairy Research Committee 136 Australian Floral and Horticultural Society 26 Australian Food and Grocery Council 197, 200 Australian Food Council 138, 200 Australian Food Engineering Association 146 Australian Food Foundation 199 Australian Food Industry Science Centre 149 Australian Food Research Institute 149 Australian Food Standards Committee 148 Australian Frozen Meat Export Company 54, 57, 101 Australian Imperial Forces 180 Australian Ingredient Centre 160 Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology 138, 146, 195 Australian Meat and Livestock Research and Development Corporation 160 Australian Meat Company 35, 42, 45 Australian Nutrient Data Bank 186 Australian Nutrition Foundation 183, 199 Australian peach aligner 158 Australian Society of Dairy Technology 132, 138 Australian Society of Sugar Cane Technologists 123, 138 Australian Society of Wine Educators Australian Sugar Company 59 Australian Wheat Board 150 Australian Wine Board 120, 135, 166 Australian Wine Export Bounty Act 119 Australian Wine Foundation 166 Australian Wine Research Institute 135, 151, 165, 166 Babcock, SM 102, 109 Babcock test 63, 99, 102, 109, 112 baby foods 140, 173 Bacchus Marsh Concentrated Milk Company 105 Badgery, James 20 Bagster, LS 124 baked products 80–82 bakeries 20, 161, 162 Ballarat Meat Preserving Company 37, 44 bananas 124, 150 Banks, Joseph 6, 21, 111 Barbender Farinograph 125 barley 23, 85, 86, 152 Barretts Aerated Waters 94–95 Bartram, John 121 basket survey, market 181, 187, 192 Bass, George 24

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To feed a nation

Baughan, John 18 Beaumont, William 107–08 beer, 11, 12, 20, 21. 23, 86, 87, 164 adulteration 87, 111 packaging 164, 173 Beer Excise Act 87 beet sugar 63, 64, 70 beetroot, canned 193 Bega Cheese 102 Bega Co-operative Creamery Co. 102 Bell, Joseph William 29 Bell-Siro Cheesemaker 157 Bennett, Norman 122 Berrima District Co-operative Company 102 BHP 158, 173 Bignell, John 20 biotechnology 195–97 Birds Eye 140 Birdseye, Clarence 120 biscuits 81–82, 142, 162, 169 Bishop, WBS 125, 133 Blackett, CR 111, 112 Blaxland, Gregory 23 Bleasdale, JI 52–53, 56, 91, 92–94, 110, 111, 112, 117–18 Bobardt, Otto 37, 38 Bodalla 97–98 Bogong moth 3, 4–5 boiling down meat 31, 35, 39 boning meat 150 Bonlac 172 Bonox® 184 Borden, Gail 105 Boston, John 21 Botany Meat Company 35 Bottomley, RA 125, 133 botulism 129, 193 boutique breweries 164 Bovril® 184 Boyle, Robert 14 Bread Act 10 bread, 10, 20, 80–81, 161, 162 additives 163 fortified 182 research 152 Bread Research Institute 135, 136, 152, 163 breadmaking 9, 24, 135, 161 breakfast cereals 82, 140, 162 Brenzinger, Julius 121 brewers’ yeast 24, 85, 123 breweries 11–12, 21–23, 86, 87, 164 brewing, 9, 11, 13, 20–23, 85–89, 117, 119, 135, 163–65 chemistry 123, 139 home 21, 22, 164 brine bath technology 40, 41, 42 British Dietetic Association 180 Brockhoff 81 Broughton, Bartholomew 23 Brown, MT 54 Bryant, JH 132 BSE 193

Buhot, John 60 bulk transport of foodstuffs 143 Bullot, LF 56 Bunge 150 bunya pine 3, 5 Bureau of Consumer Affairs 199 Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations (BSES) 63–64, 119, 122–23, 135, 148 Burgoyne, Peter 90 Burston and Co. 85–86 Busby, James 23, 90, 91 bush banana 4 bush foods 149 butter fractions 170 butter, 25, 55, 57, 97, 103, 169, 172 taints 105, 120, 124, 125, 130–31 butterfat 169 Butterine 172 buttermaking 12, 25, 98, 99–102, 103 buttermilk 12 butteroil 131 CAFTA 138, 139 Cahn, Audrey 179 Callister, CP 99, 123, 124 Campbell, James 54 Campbells Soups 163 Campylobacter 193 candied fruits 72 Canned Food Information Service 199 canned foods, contamination 192 canned fruit juice 130 canned meat, exports 34, 35 imports 49 canned products 172–73 canning, 14–15, 31–39, 110, 120, 129, 130, 158, 172–73 fruit 71–72, 120 meat 29–44, 117, 118, 120 mechanisation 140–41 technology 40–44, 49, 121–22 vegetables 120, 173 cans 41, 66, 174, 175, 176 carcinogens 191, 192 Carlsberg 89, 110 Carlton and United Breweries 119, 133, 135, 150, 152, 164 Carnot cycle 51 Carnot, Nicolas Sadi 51 Carr–Price method 133 Cascade Brewery 22 casein 169 Casimir, DJ 157 Castlemaine brewery 87 Cellophane® 142 Central Queensland Meat Export Company 120 Central Queensland Meat Preserving Company 39, 44 Centre for Food Technology 150, 152, 172 cereal chemistry 80, 125, 138–39, 152 Cereal Chemistry Division, RACI 150, 163 Cereal Chemistry Group 139 cereal crops 9

Index

cereal products 161–63 cereal science 77, 113–14, 150, 160 cereals, breakfast 82, 140, 162 Chaffey, George 74 Chaffey, William Benjamin 74 chambers of manufacturers 132 Chandler, BV 137 Charles Sturt University 166 cheese, 9, 12, 25, 57, 97, 122, 151 168–69, 170, 171 cheddar 97, 98–99, 120, 168, 171, 172 cheddar curd 155–56 exports 120 feta 177 packaging 120, 142, 169 processed 171 research 123, 152 rindless 135, 137, 168 cheese factories 194 Cheese Industry Productivity Improvement Project 152, 171 cheese slices 169 cheese starters 133, 137, 152, 160 cheesemaking 97–99, 120, 135, 137, 169, 171 chemical analysis 153 chemical societies 118–19 Cherry and Sons 102 chicken meat, spoilage 151 chicory 75 Child, WK 59 cholesterol 183 Christian, JHB 147, 151 citrus fruits 124 citrus peel 72 Citrus Wastage Research Laboratory 136 City Brewery, Melbourne 87 Clarke, WB 111 Clendinnen, FWJ 123 Cobden and District Cheese and Butter Factory Ltd 101 Code of Hygienic Production for Uncooked Fermented Comminuted Meat Products 194 coffee, instant 140 Colac Meat Preserving Company 38 Collins, Lieutenant-Governor 22 Colonial Sugar Refining Company 59, 62 colours, food 112, 140, 189, 190, 191 Common Brewers 12 community anxieties 198–99 Composition of foods, Australia 186–87 condensed milk 105, 155 consumer behaviour 176–78 consumer concerns 198 consumer education 199 contaminants, food 147, 189, 190, 191–93 convenience foods 176 Cook, James 12–13 cook-chill products 174 cool storage, of fruit 57–58, 73 Cooper, Robert 59 Co-operative Research Centre for Tissue Growth and Repair 170

co-operative research centres 160 copper 192 Cordingley, Thomas 35, 36, 39 cordials 94 Council of Australian Food Technology Associations 132 Cran, Robert 61 Craske, JD 153 Crawford, Alexander 103 creameries 101 Cripps, William 81 Crowe, Robert 103 Crown seal bottle 88, 119 crumpets 82 CSIR 105, 123–24, 125, 133, 148 CSIR Dairy Research Section 125 CSIR Division of Food Preservation and Transport 124, 130 CSIR Section of Food Preservation 124, 129, 131 CSIRO 123, 133, 135, 136–38, 148, 150, 151, 153, 156, 158, 159, 171, 173, 175, 197 CSIRO Dairy Research Laboratories 149, 151, 152, 160, 169, 170, 171 CSIRO Division of Animal Nutrition 182 CSIRO Division of Biochemical Nutrition 182 CSIRO Division of Chemical Engineering 170 CSIRO Division of Human Nutrition 182 CSIRO Division of Industrial Chemistry 131 CSIRO Food Research Laboratories 149 CSIRO Meat Research Laboratories 150, 194 CSIRO Section of Dairy Research 130, 137 CSIRO Wheat Research Unit 152, 163 CSR Ltd 59, 60, 61, 63, 67, 70, 123, 131, 133, 150 152, 167 CUB 119, 133, 135, 150, 152, 164 Cullen, William 51, 52 Currant Luncheons 81 cycad nuts 5, 6 dairies, hygiene 104 Dairy Farmers 172 Dairy Farmers Co-operative Milk Co. 102 Dairy Industry Association of Australia 132 Dairy Industry Quality Centre 160 Dairy Institute Centre for UHT Processing 160 Dairy Processing Engineering Centre 160 dairy products, 13, 57, 97–105, 168–72, 174 polyunsaturated 169 quality 120 research 137 taints 105, 120, 124, 125, 130–31, 151 see also butter, cheese, milk, whey, yoghurt dairy research 105, 125, 136, 149, 156 Dairy Research and Development Corporation 136, 150, 160 Dairy Research Committee 152 Dairy Research Laboratory 136, 149 dairy technology 132, 168–72 dairying 12, 25 Danger, Henry 33 Danger, Richard 33, 34, 40, 41, 46 Danne, HA 118

223

224

To feed a nation

date marking 147 Davis Gelatin 152–53 de Bavay, Auguste 85, 89, 119, 123 de Castella, François 136 Deakin, Alfred 74 Deaking University 182 Defence Science and Technology Organisation 136, 148 Degraves, Peter 22 dehydration, food 73, 130, 142, 149, 168, 174 Department of Health (Commonwealth), 139, 140, 180, 181, 186 Nutrition Section, Institute of Anatomy 133 Dibbs, George 68, 69 Dick, Margaret 133, 151, 194 Dickson, John 12, 18 diet 197 dietary fibre 185 dietary guidelines 179, 185–86, 198, 199 Dietary Guidelines for Australia 185 dietary surveys 180 dietetics 179, 180 dietitians 180, 181 Dietitians Association of Australia 181, 183 digestion, of food 108 Dilke, Charles 94 distillation 12, 21, 22, 23 Donkin and Hall 14, 15 Donkin, Hall and Gamble 15 Dried Fruit Processing Committee 73–74 dried fruits 73–75, 137 drip, meat 56, 57, 112, 120, 124 Dunn, Frederic 102, 112 Dunn, Son and Stone 112 Durand, Peter 14 E. coli 193, 194 Easterby, Harry 64 eating habits 177 Ebsworth, Frederick 31 Edgell 120 Edgell, RG 75 edible fats and oils 172, 177 education, consumer 182, 199 extension 118–19, 131–32, 146 professional 118, 145–46, 202 winemaking 166 educational institutions 132–33 Edwards Patent Preserved Potatoes 130 Edwards, RA 147 eels 5 Elliiott, Sizar 29, 31–33, 36, 40, 42, 46, 117 Empey, WA 124 energy conservation 159 ethyl alcohol 163 Evans, Oliver 13, 78 exhibitions, 34, 36, 67, 81, 91, 92, 112 Intercolonial 34, 36, 37, 52, 56, 78, 91, 92 exports, butter 57 dairy products 55 flour 80 food 120

fruit 72–74 jam 65 meat 24–25, 30, 38, 46–49, 52–57, 120 factory hygiene 194 Fairgrieve, Andrew 62 Farrer, KTH 183 Farrer, William James 80, 113–14, 123 Farrington, Charles Moulden 36, 38 fat consumption 183–84 Federal Bureau of Consumer Affairs 148 Felton, Matthew 24 fermentation 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 20, 23, 87, 88, 89, 110, 119, 163–66 feta cheese 177 fibre 185 film packaging 175, 176 filtration 156, 171 First Fleet 9–15, 17 Fischer, Emil 108 fish liver oils 131, 133 fish, preserved 9, 12 Fisher, R 94 FJ Walker group 36 flame sterilisation 158, 173 Flanley, Mabel 180 flavours, stripping 157–58 flour 10, 18, 20, 80, 161, 163 flour milling 13 folate 172 food, composition 107–108, 181 government regulation 109 non-enzymic browning 151 Food (Amendment) Act (Victorian) 195 food additives 140, 147, 163, 189–91 Food Additives Committee 140, 147, 190 food adulteration 20, 108–09, 111, 112 food analysis 108–09, 111–13, 123–25, 149, 150 Food Australia 138 Food Bioscience Group, Centre for Food Technology 152 food colours 112, 140, 189, 190, 191 food consumption 180 food contaminants 147, 189, 190, 191–93 food engineering 154–59 Food Group of the [British] Society of Chemical Industry 129 food habits 176–78, 197 Food Hygiene Strategy 195 Food Industry Council of Australia 199 food irradiation 195–96 Food Journal 109, 112 food labelling 147, 197, 198 food microbiology 110, 151, 193–95 Food Microbiology (Reference) Sub-committee 147 Food Microbiology Group (AIFST) 146 food poisoning 193–94 food preservation 14–15 food processing 140–41, 158–59, 202 food production, Second World War 129–31 food regulation 139–40, 147–48 food research 129–31, 136–38

Index

Food Research Institute 149 food safety 193–95 food science xi–xii, 107–15, 117–18, 123–25, 133, 135, 137, 201–02 Food Science and Technology (Reference) Subcommittee 147 Food Science Australia 149, 195 Food Science Bureau 200 food spoilage 151 Food Spoilage Predictor 151 Food Standards Committee 139, 140 food technology xi, 14, 119–23, 132–33 Food Technology Association 132 Food Technology Association (of New South Wales) 138 Food Technology in Australia 138 Food, Water, Air 109 Fornachon, JCM 94, 120, 135, 136 Fosters 87, 89 Fowler’s bottling outfits 71 Fred Walker and Co. 123 freeze drying 168 freezer burn 56, 150 freezing 39, 156, 173 Fresh Food and Ice Co. 102 frozen foods 140–41, 173–74, 177 fruit, 73–75 bottled 14, 26 candied 72 canned 64, 71–72, 120 cool storage 73 export 72–73 packaging 168 processing 158 products 65–75 pulp 68 research 124, 150, 167–68 fruit fly 136 fruit growing 25–26 fruit juice 130, 158–59, 168 Fruit Processing Committee 74 fruit salts 94 fruit storage 57, 150 functional foods 187 fungi 151 Gadsden, Jabez 121 Gardner, George 121 Gay-Lussac, Joseph 14, 39, 110 Gedye, Charles 33, 36 Gee, Alban 35, 36, 40, 41, 44 Geelong Meat Preserving Company 41 gelatin 153 Gene Technology Assessment Authority 196 Gene Technology in the Food Chain conference 197 Genetic Manipulation Advisory Committee 196 genetically modification foods 196–97 Geo. Fielder and Son 83 Gibbons, Sidney 111, 112 Gibson, David 78 Gilbert Chandler Institute of Dairy Technology 136, 145, 149

ginger beer 94 Gladstones, JS 149 Glasgow, Thunder and Co. 52, 87 gluten 83 Golden Circle 72, 142 Goldner, Stefan (Stephen) 15, 33, 34 Goodman Fielder 150 Gorrie, John 51 Gosford Postharvest Horticultural Laboratory 136 Goulburn Meat Preserving Company 38 Government Cool Stores, Melbourne 58 government support for food science and technology 159–60 Grain Research and Development Corporation 160 Granose® flake biscuit 82 Grant Tindal, Charles 35, 36 grass seeds 4, 5 green (Kakadu) plum 4 Grocery Manufacturers 200 growers co–operatives (fruit) 72 Guthrie, Frederick Bickell 80, 113–14, 123, 125 H Jones and Co. Pty Ltd 65 haemolytic uremic syndrome 193 Hall, Melmoth 60 Hall, RL 117 Hamlet, WM 68, 69, 112 hams, preserving 44–45 Hansen, Emil Christian 85, 89 Harding, Henry 97 Harding, Joseph 25, 97, 98, 104, 110 Harold, FV 164 Harris, John 25 Harrison, James 51–53 harvesting, mechanisation 158 Hassall, AH 46, 109 Hastings, RJ 82 Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association 63 Hawkesbury Agricultural College 103, 132, 133, 145 Hayes, James 38 Haywood, CD 81 Haywood, Charles 81 Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points 151, 195 Health Act (Victorian) 104 Health Goals 187, 199 heat processing xii, 14, 15, 29–44, 49, 120 heavy metals 190 Heine, John 121, 176 Henry Jones (IXL) Ltd 65 Henry Jones and Co. 70, 86 Henry Jones Co-operative Limited 70 Hetzel, BS 182, 183 Hickinbotham, AR 92, 120 Hicks, EW 73, 124, 173 Hicks, Stanton 180 Hill, Benjamin 94 HJ Heinz 129 Hoadley and Co. 67 Hoadley, Abel 67, 68, 71, 72 Hocking, A 151 Hodge, AJ 133

225

226

To feed a nation

Hogarth Australian Meat Preserving Company 39, 44 Hogarth, D 44 Hogarth, W 44 home brewing 21, 22, 164 Hope, Louis 60 Hopper, FH 120 hops 11, 21, 23, 57, 86, 133, 135, 164 Howard vacuum pan 62 Hudson Brothers Ltd. 58 Huelin, FE 124 Hughes, John 36, 37 Hunter, John 18 Hurlstone, Peter 20 hygiene 110, 194 hyperactivity 191 ice cream 120, 169 ice-making 51–52, 57 Inches, John 45 Industrial and Technological Museum 112 Industrial Research and Development Grant Act 1967 160 Inglis, Robert 38 Institute for Integrated Agricultural Development 90 Institute of Brewing 139 Institute of Chemistry 109 Institute of Dairy Factory Managers and Secretaries 132 Institute of Food Technologists 129, 138 Institute of Land and Food Resources 149 Institute of Science and Industry 123 instrumentation 153–54 Intercolonial Exhibitions 34, 36, 37, 52, 56, 78, 91, 92 International Commission on Microbiological Specifications for Foods 147 International Union of Food Science and Technology 146 iodine deficiency 182 irradiation 195–96 Irving, Clark 36 jam, 25–26, 64, 65–71, 168 canning 35 exports 65 tariffs on 67–68, 69 Jam Factory 67, 69 Jewell, WR 138 JJ Winter and Company 38 John Bartram and Sons 120 John McCall and Company 35 Johnson Bros and Co. 65, 71 Johnson, William 111 Joint WHO/FAO Expert Committee on Food Additives 191 Jones, Augustine 37, 38 Jones, Foggit 122 Jones, Henry 64, 69–71, 72, 75, 86, 120, 121 Jones, Richard 43 Jones and Co. 57 Joseph, Israel 33, 36 Joseph, Moses 33 Joshua Brothers 62 junk food 185, 198

Kefford, JF 137 Kellogg 82 Kelly, AC 23, 91 Kemble, Francis 59 Kent Town Preserving Company 75 Kentucky Fried Chicken 177 Kerr, HW 122, 135 KFC 177 Killer, J 123 Kimptons 133, 150 King, Governor 21, 24 King, James 23, 90, 91, 94 King, John 21 Kissing Point brewery 21 Kjeldahl method 109, 125 Knox, Edward 59, 60, 62 Knox, EW 61, 62, 63 Kottman, Gustav 63, 113, 123 Kraft 99, 105, 131, 133, 135, 137, 150, 151, 152, 155, 168, 175, 177, 180, 194 Kraft, JL 99 Kraft Research Laboratories 133, 152 Kraft Walker Cheese Co. 120, 123, 129 labelling, food 147, 197, 198 labelling, regulations 186, 198 Lactobacilli spp. 120 lactose 171 lager 89 Lake Boga Game and Fish Preserving Company 38 Lavoisier, Antoine 107 lead contamination 191 legislation 147 Lever Associated Enterprises 129 Lewis, Robert 94 liaquamen 9 Liebig, Justus von 45, 91, 108, 110 Liebig’s Meat Extract 35 Life Guard Milk 155 Lind, James 12, 107 Linde ammonia compressors 57 Linley process 56 Listeria 193 Little, John 38 liver extract 155 Loftus Hills, G 131 Low Temperature Research Station 124 Lynch, LJ 130 M Joseph Patent Preserved Provision Manufactory 33 Macadam, John 111 Macarthur, John 25, 90 Macarthur, William 90, 91 MacIvor, RWE 112 Mackay Refined Sugars 167 Maillard reaction 85, 151, 192 Malaysian Institute of Food Technology 146 malting 85–86, 152, 164 Manildra 163 Manildra Harwood 167 Manning, James 25, 45, 98, 104 margarine 172, 183 Margarine Act 1893 172

Index

marketing, meat 46–49 foods 186 Marmite® 184 Marui Bros 152 Matilda Bay Brewing Company 164 maturometer 137 Maund, John 111 Mauri Foods Dairy Laboratories 171 mayonnaise 177 McCall, John 36 McCall and Black 64 McCracken, Robert 34, 36, 37, 38 McEacharn, Malcolm 54 McEwin, George 67, 71 McIlwraith, Thomas 54 McIlwraith McEacharn and Company 54 McMeekin, TA 151, 202 meat, canning 29–44, 48, 117, 118, 120 chemical preservatives 44–45 drip 56, 57, 112, 120, 124 exports 45, 46–49, 51, 52–57, 120 freezing 39, 174 imports 49 preserving 9, 10, 12, 24, 44–49, 124 processing 29–49 refrigeration 52–57, 120 research 150, 160 Meat and Livestock Australia Ltd. 136, 160 meat extract 39, 45–46, 108 Meat Research Corporation 136, 160 Medical Society of Victoria 92, 93, 112 Melbourne Aerated Bread Company 20 Melbourne Meat Preserving Company 35, 36–37, 41, 43, 46, 48, 54–55 Melbourne Milk Supply Company 105 membrane technology 156, 169, 170 mercury contamination 191 metal analysis 153 microbiological standards 147 microbiology, food 110, 151, 193–195 Microscopical Society 111 Mildura Fruitgrowers Association 74 milk, 12 25 53, 97, 169, 170 adulteration 112 bacteriology 194 city 102–03 collection 143, 168 condensed 105 hygiene 104 packaging 175 pasteurisation 99, 102, 103, 110, 171 powder 105, 169 refrigeration 104 skim 101 UHT 159 milk biscuit 169 milking machines 104 Millaquin 167 milling, 13, 17–20, 77–80, 161 equipment 77–78 extraction rate 80

flour 13 products 161–63 research 113–14, 125 roller 119 technology 9 mills 13, 17, 18, 78 Milne, John 10 Morgan, John 45 Morris, Augustus 52 Morris, GF 90 Mort, Thomas Sutcliffe 25, 52, 53, 58, 97, 98, 99, 102, 104 Müller CW Château 85, 89 Muller, LL 170 Murpy, RK 131, 132 Murray Goulburn Co-operative Ltd. 102, 171, 172 Murrell, W 151 Muskett, Philip 94, 176, 177, 179 Mutal Control Scheme 122 mycotoxins 151, 153 Nash, Heather 181 Nash, Robert 20 National Canners Association 122 National Food Authority 140, 147, 148 National Health and Medical Research Council 139, 140, 148 National Institute for Research in Dairying 124 National Nutrition Survey 187 Nestel, PJ 183 Nestlé 105, 129, 140, 159 New South Wales Chamber of Manufacturers 132 New South Wales Dairy Corporation 160 New South Wales Department of Agriculture 113, 136, 150 New South Wales Fresh Food and Ice Company 53, 99 New South Wales University of Technology 133 New Zealand Dairy Research Institute 125 Newbery, J Cosmo 69, 112 National Health and Medical Research Council, Food and Health Standing Committee 148 Nutrition Committee 186 Nicholas Pty Ltd 131 Nicolle, Eugene 52, 53, 58 no observable effect level 191 North Queensland Meat Export Company 39, 46 nutrition, 107–08, 179–87, 197–98, 202 associations 183 education 182 Nutrition Australia 183 Nutrition Victoria 183 nutritional claims 147–48 nutritional labelling 198 O’Brien, Henry 31 O’Callaghan, MA 103 off-flavours 151 oilseeds, in wine 172 Oldmeadow and Son 71 orange juice 130, 137, 194 Orlebar, John 25, 98 Osborne, WA 118, 179 Otto Madsen Dairy Research Laboratory 149

227

228

To feed a nation

Ovaltine® 140 Pacific Power 158, 173 packaging, 142–43, 152, 153, 174–76 beer 164, 173 biscuits 142 cheese 120, 142, 169 frozen foods 140 fruit 168 milk 175 plastic 135 wine 166 Paddington Brewery 22 Page, Joseph 35 Palfreyman, AW 69 Palmer, Thomas McLeod 98, 104 Pambula Meat Preserving Company 45 pasta 82 Pasteur, Louis 39, 85, 87–88, 93, 110 pasteurisation 14, 39, 99, 102, 103, 110 Peacock, Ernest A 69 Peacock, George 35, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 112 Peacock, William 68–69 Peacock, William David 57, 69, 70, 73 peanut butter 193 Peanut Marketing Board 191 peanuts 151, 153, 191 peas 140, 156, 158, 174 Perkins, Jacob 51 Perky, Henry 82 Perry brothers 67 Perrys 71 pesticides 190, 191–92 pet foods 173 Phillip, Governor 13, 17, 23, 25 Philosophical Institute 92 Phylloxera 90, 91, 94 pickling 10 Pierce, George 98 pikelets 82 Pioneer Butter Factory 99 Pitt, JI 151 plastic films 142 plastic wrappers 135 Plastics for Food Contact 192 plastics 175, 192 plums 74 polarimeter 112 polyunsaturated dairy products 169 Poowong Co-operative Butter Factory 168 porter 11, 21, 87 Postle, JD 52 potatoes 75, 151, 167, 174 instant mashed 142, 156–57, 168 Potts, Henry 103 preservatives 112 Pride of Ringwood 164 professional organisations 129, 131–32, 138–39, 146, 180 prunes 74 public analysts 118 Public Health Advisory Committee 140

Public Health Committee (NHMRC) 148 Quality Assurance 194, 195 Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment 195 Queensland Department of Primary Industries 149 Queensland Agricultural College 133, 145 Queensland Butter Board 169 Queensland Department of Agriculture 125 Queensland Master Bakers’ Association 119 Queensland Society of Sugar Cane Technologists 123, 132, 138 quick-frozen foods 120 R Cran and Co 61 rabbit canneries 39, 44, 122 rabbits 38 raisins 74 Ramornie 35, 40–41, 45, 46 Rankine, BC 166 ration pack 134 rDNA technology 197 Recombinant DNA Monitoring Committee 196 recommended daily intakes (RDIs) 181, 186 Red Feather cheese 120, 122 refrigerated foods 173–74 refrigeration, 51–58 butter 101, 102 dairy products 104 domestic 58 meat 56–57, 120 shipboard 53–54 regulations, food 139–40, 147–48 research, 150–54, 160 government laboratories 136–38 laboratories 148–50 levies 136 organisations 136–38 also see Food science, Food technology and individual foodstuffs restaurants 177 retorts 44, 122 Reuter, FH 131, 132, 133, 138, 139, 148 Reynell, John 23 rheology 155 Rich, SW 119 Rindal, CG 35 rinderpest 35, 49 rindless cheese 135, 137, 168 Ringwood Special 164 Ritchie, Samuel Sextus 36, 37, 38, 40, 41 Ritchie and McCall 33, 36, 42 Riverine Meat Preserving Company (Echuca) 37 Rivett, David 125 Robison Bros 64, 86 Roseworthy Agricultural College 94, 120, 132, 135, 145, 166 Rowlands, Evan 94 Royal Agricultural Society of New South Wales 121 Royal Australian Chemical Institute 138, 139 Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology 133, 145 Royal Navy 15, 44, 130 Royal Navy meat scandal 36 Royal North Shore Hospital 191

Index

Royal societies 119 Royal Society of Arts 14, 60 Royal Society of Chemistry 109 Royal Society of Victoria 92 rural research and development corporations 159–60 Russell, PN 52 rust (fungi) 113 Rutherglen Viticultural College 90 Sale of Food and Drugs Act 1985 109 Salmonellae spp. 150, 193, 194 salt intake 184 salt, as preservative 184 salted meats, export 30 Salters Company 12 salting 12, 24–25 Sandy Trout Food Preservation Research Laboratory 149 Sanitarium 82 Sanitary Can Company 121 saturated fats 183 sauerkraut 184 sausages 10–11, 114 Schaffer, Philip 23 Scheele, CW 107 School of Dairy Technology 136, 145, 149 Schrieber Foods Inc. 171 Schweppes 94 Science Museum 112 scientific instrumentation 153–54 Scott, TA 59 Scott, WJ 137, 151 Scottish Bell and Coleman refrigeration machine 54 scurvy 12–13, 107 Select Committee of Enquiry on Preserved Meats (Navy) 15, 34, 44 semolina 78, 82 sensory testing 178 separators, cream 99, 100, 101, 103 Shamrock brewery 119 sheese starter 172 Shew, DI 133 ships’ biscuits 24, 81 Shoobridge, William 21 Siebe and Co. 52 Simpson, Alfred 41 Singapore Institute of Food Science and Technology 146 Siro-Curd cheesemaking process 156 skim milk 101 Slater, EC 133 Smith, Edward 48, 108 Smith, John 62 smoking, food 10 Society for Analytical Chemistry 109 Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce 13–14 Society of Chemical Industry of Victoria 118–19, 124 Society of Chemical Industry 118, 119 Society of Dairy Technology 132 Society of Public Analysts 109

soft drinks 94–95 Soldner, Stefan 36 soup 45 South Australian Department of Agriculture 135 Soxhlet fat extractor 109 Spawn, AE 73 Spawn’s Climax fruit evaporator 73 spices 10, 11 spinning cone technology 157–58, 165, 168 spirits 12, 21, 23 spruce beer 94 Squire, James 12, 21 St Martin, Alexis 108 Stark, William 107 Starter Culture Research Centre 160 steam mills 13, 18, 20 stock feeds 83 stone fruits 73–74 Stonyford Pastoral and Preserving Company 38 sugar, xii, 59–64, 65, 166–67, 184 boiling 120 chemical control 112 consumption 184 research 113, 152 Sugar Australia 167 sugar beet 64, 70 sugar cane 59, 60 sugar industry 122 sugar milling 59, 60–64, 122–23, 135, 166–67 Sugar Research Institute 64, 135, 136, 152, 167 sulphur dioxide 74, 191 sultanas 74–75 Sungold Cooperative Citrus Packing House 136 supermarkets 140, 161, 162, 174 Swallow and Ariell 61, 81, 162 Swan Brewery 164 sweet corn 158 Swift (Australia) Ltd 39 Swiss cheese 168 Sydney Cove 17, 24, 25 Sydney Ice Company 52 Sydney Meat Preserving Company 35, 36, 44, 46 Sydney Salting Company 45, 117 Sydney Technical College 131, 132 Sydney University Nutrition Foundation 182 takeaway foods 177, 178 Tallerman, Daniel 38, 46 tallow 31, 37, 38 tartazine 190, 191 Tasmanian Apple Evaporators’ Association 73 Taverner, JW 102 tax relief 160 Taylor North Australia Pty Ltd 176 TB Guest and Co. 81 tea, faced 112 Tea Act 112 Tellier, Charles 53 Terry’s West End Brewery 89 thiamin 133, 180, 182 Thornton, James 94 Thorpe water mill 19, 20

229

230

To feed a nation

thyrotoxicosis 182 Tindal, Charles 39, 40, 45 tinplate 34, 66, 121, 142, 153, 174 tomatoes 75, 150, 167 Tong, WS 67, 68 Tooth, Edwin 22 Tooth, John 22 Tooth, Robert 22, 45, 46, 61 Tooth’s 22, 25, 98, 104 Torres Strait Islanders 4, 5 Tracey, MV 183 treadmills 17–18 tree fruits 73–74 Trollope, Anthony 39, 44, 48 Truswell, AS 182, 183, 184 Tull, Jethro 13 Twofold Bay Pastoral Association 98 UHT milk 159 Underwood, EJ 183 Unilever 133, 150, 152, 153 United Milk 171 United States Quartermaster Corps 129, 131 University of Adelaide 120, 166 University of Melbourne 118, 133, 149, 172, 182, 194 University of Sydney 182 University of New South Wales 133, 145, 150, 151, 152, 153 University of Queensland 124, 135 University of Tasmania 151 Van Diemen’s Land Company 25 Vegemite® 123, 133, 155, 180, 184 vegetables, canning 120, 173 dehydration 130 drying 75, 168 processing 75, 174 products 75 research 167–68 Vickery, JR 124, 131, 132, 136, 138, 145 Victoria, Twofold Bay and London Meat Preserving Company 43 Victorian Beetroot Sugar Company 64 Victorian College of Agriculture and Horticulture 149 Victorian Department of Agriculture 149, 170 Victorian Ice Works 52 Victorian Jam Company 67 Victorian Meat Preserving Company 38, 44, 45, 46, 48 Victorian Preserving Company 67, 69, 71, 72, 75 Victorian Sugar Company 59 village technologies 17–26, 117–18 vine fruits 74–75 vineyards 23 vitamins 131, 133, 180, 182 Vitamins and Minerals Regulations 186 viticulture 165 W Duffield and Company 78 Wahlqvist, ML 182

Waite Agricultural Research Institute 135, 136 Walker, Fred 99, 120, 122 Walkers 62 Walsh, Alan 153 Walton, Thomas Utrick 62–63, 113, 123 Ward, George 71 Wark, Ian 131 Warriner, G 45 Warrnambool Butter and Cheese Factory Co. Ltd 101 water analysis 111 watermills 18, 19, 20 Webb, Robert 23 West, Thomas 18 Western Meat Preserving Company 38 Westralian Farmers 98 wheat, xii, 13, 20 80 breeding 113–14, 163 milling 9–10 whey 12, 101, 105, 120, 131, 152, 155, 156, 169, 170, 171 whey proteins 169, 170, 171 Whish, BC 60 Whitbread, Samuel 11–12 Whitehead, HM 36 wild cucumber 4 Wiley, WJ 124, 125, 131 Wilkinson, James 17 Wilkinson, Percy 112 William Arnott and Co. 125 Wilson, David 101, 103, 104 Wilson, Graham 194 windmills 17, 18, 20 wine, 9, 12 chemical analysis 112–13 export 119–20 metals in 151 off-flavours 151 packaging 166 research 35–36, 120, 151–52, 165–66 Wine Overseas Marketing Board 119–20 Wine Research Institute 151 winegrowing 23, 90 winemaking 85, 90–94, 165–66 witchetty grubs 4 Woodstock cannery 71, 72 World Congress of Food Science and Technology (10th) 146 worts 86 WS Kimpton and Sons 125 Wynns Winegrowers Pty Ltd 166 yams 4, 5, 6–7 yeast, 23–24, 89, 110, 113, 136, 151 brewers’ 85, 123 compressed 119 yeast extract 133, 151 yoghurt 169 Young, WJ 119, 123, 124

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