Barcelona is noted for its food and its markets, especially the huge Bouqueria market and its chain of neighborhood fresh food markets across the city.
But the issue of keeping everyone fed has not always been a simple one, as an exhibit by Barcelona’s History Museum in a huge hall of the former Ducal palace makes clear, tracing the relationships between food and health, between political power and food and health and more over the centuries.
And it asks: hasn’t the community, the government, always played a role in ensuring basic food and health, and what has happened when it hasn’t? The exhibit goes under the name Alimentar Barcelona, or Feeding Barcelona.
The city, within its ancient walls, produced some amount of food within, but as the walled area filled with people, more land was needed, eventually land outside the walls. The sea was also an important source.
The exhibit considers those questions: Who controlled the routes and infrastructure? To whom did the market master, above with scales, owe his job, the ruler or the local councils that have existed in Barcelona for centuries. As the exhibit shows, that varied from time to time, as power shifted, as other powers came to rule.
One big shift came with trade with the Americas; coffee and chocolate became immediate big hits with the wealthy. The two foods we most associate with the ‘New World’ connection, though—potatoes and corn—were considered animal feed until late in the 18th century. That period also brought a consolidation of Spain, and Barcelona lost many of its local powers, including control of trade.
In Barcelona, the local civic authorities, in whatever form they took at the moment, were also largely responsible for public health, and created hospitals as well as markets. While less widely recognized than today, there were links drawn between food and health; these medieval bone samples show the effects of rickets, a Vitamin D deficiency disease.
Most of the struggles over health, however, weren’t about food; they were about epidemics including bubonic plague, cholera and typhus. Each one brought fear and friction and frequently a shifting of responsibility; in several instances, royal and noble rulers were all too happy to tell local councils “You deal with it.”
Health care of another sort: An assortment of 19th-century treatments claimed to cure a wide variety of ailments.
By the 19th century, food supply was generally good enough to support the population, which doesn’t, of course, mean that everyone shared in the bounty. The painting above shows the market in the Born district, part of the old city, in the late 1800s. These markets, both in the old city and in the new areas beyond, were projects of city authorities, who again took a role in ensuring food distribution.
But Barcelona was feeling other pressures by then. Catalonia, and Barcelona in particular, were the only really industrialized region of Spain, and there were protests and strikes against low wages and poor conditions; in the 1850s, the unrest included destroying machines workers felt were taking jobs from them.
A market scene, above, and some of the tools and equipment from them. Below, advice on what to feed your family… some of the names are still familiar.
