Forty Shelves of Trade

The second menu on the World-of-Food home page read Select Product Group, and behind it stood the index's other axis: roughly forty files that divided the food world not by nation but by trade. The list in the archive runs from additives.htm to wine.htm, and it is worth reading slowly, because the choice of shelves is itself a document.

What counted as a trade

Some shelves are commodities: coffee, tea, cocoa's neighbours sugar and chocolate, cereals, rice, potatoes, pasta, meat, fish, dairy, egg, fruits, vegetables, nuts, oils, olives. Some are preparations: biscuits, bread, beer, wine, soups, sauces, sweets, icecream, readyeat for ready meals. Some are the science around the plate: additives, ingredients, flavours, sweeteners, herbs, salt, vinegar, energy for sports and energy foods, water, drinks, and noalcohol for the alcohol-free trades. Two files, companies.htm and multinationals.htm, stepped back to shelve the largest producers by themselves.

The shape of a trade page

A trade page worked like a country page rotated ninety degrees. Instead of national watchdogs and schools, it held the sector's own institutions: the European federations, the commodity alliances, the technical associations, the trade press. The coffee shelf carried the European Coffee Science Information Centre and the roasters' federation; the brewing shelf carried the European Brewery Convention; the chocolate shelf led to CAOBISCO, the association of the chocolate, biscuit and confectionery industries.

Why forty and not four hundred

The granularity is a period piece. A directory kept by hand cannot hold four hundred shelves; forty is about the number a small desk can keep current. The result is a compression of the food world into its broad trades, each shelf deep enough to matter, each narrow enough to maintain. The reader who wanted more depth was handed off to the federation at the top of the shelf, which is exactly what a good index is for.

The shelves that were not products

Two files in the product list deserve a second look because they are not products at all. Energy.htm held the sports and energy foods; multinationals.htm shelved the handful of producers large enough to span several trades at once; other.htm took the residue, the honest miscellany every index needs. And at least one file, allergiealimentaire.html, broke the site's own naming convention: a French-named page on food allergy that looks like a guest page from the Food-Info side of the family, kept in the directory because the subject belonged somewhere.

The shelving also shows what the index excluded. There is no shelf for restaurants, none for recipes, none for retail. The trades here are the industries and their institutions, the world of food as a set of organised sectors. Everything else, the cooking and the eating of it, was somebody else's shelf.

Reading the shelf list as a census

Taken as a list, the forty files are a census of what mattered in the food economy of the 2000s. Additives and sweeteners had grown large enough to rate their own shelves; ready meals had earned a file called readyeat; bottled water stood beside vinegar and salt. Herbs, nuts and olives kept small shelves of their own, the trades that were old but never industrial enough to need a federation-heavy page.

The census is dated in ways that help a reader. The shelf list predates the plant-protein boom, the hard-seltzer trade and the delivery-platform economy; nothing in it anticipates a meal ordered through a phone. What it maps is the settled structure of the late twentieth-century food industry, still standing in the first decade of the web, and still legible now precisely because the directory froze it in forty files.