Off the 'Cuff

Throughout history, there are countless hardworking individuals in careers who performed important tasks that made lives better and safer but will never get a mention in the history books simply because their job was not alluring enough to gain attention. Such was the state of food inspectors in Vancouver, until now.

This blog takes us, if only briefly, beyond the history of general food inspectors and into the role specifically of the Bakeshop Inspector in the years 1912 and 1913. Bear with me now. It is actually quite a fascinating look into pre-World War One Vancouver and even hints at such issues as race, religion and class. And all wrapped up in an insatiable love for bits of bread, donuts and noodles.

The Vancouver Police Department was, in earlier days, responsible for a range of services beyond the normal scope of policing as we now know it. These services included things as diverse as funding and reporting on the dog pound, housing and providing the city’s ambulance service and, for two brief years, offering support to the Bakeshop Inspector. This support included offering a space in the VPD’s 1912 and 1913 Annual Reports where the Bakeshop Inspector’s own report could be published.

Bread products, a staple of Vancouverites’ diet since the city’s foundation, were taken very seriously by the VPD.Indeed, a man named Eugene Plant was hired specifically to spend his working hours investigating the labyrinthine, even criminal, world of “Bread Manufacturers, Confectioners, Café and Hotel Bakeshops, Cones, Doughnuts and Noodle Factories, Biscuit Factories” and as of 1913, “Macaroni Factories”.

Mr. Plant’s reports, please understand, were two pages of small-typed detailed statistics. These statistics, and their associated categories, offer all kinds of little snapshots of our history. In terms of race, for example, at that time being Canadian was unequivocally equated with being British. Out of the 99 bakeshops in operation in 1912, 81 were classified as being “British or Canadian” while the other 18 were “Foreign”. In 1913, the figure was up to 106 total bakeshops. As in the previous year, 81 of those were “British or Canadian” (and I do love how “British” comes before “Canadian”) and 25 (an increase of seven!) were “Foreign”.

Religion poked its head into the picture, too. Sundays, that traditional Christian day of rest for everyone (except servants and ministers of religion) required a special legal exemption for businesses to be open. In 1912, for instance, 33 permits were issued to bakeshops to open for part of the day for Sunday work. In 1913, this was down slightly to 31. Of those, approximately 116 men “work[ed a] portion of Sundays” in 1912 and 102 men in 1913. (Ah, look! Gender makes an appearance. It seems according to these statistics that women either did not work in bakeshops on Sundays – which is untrue – or they were simply lumped under the category “men” as in “manpower”.)

And, of course, there is always class lurking around, placing its dirty little mitts where they ain’t meant to be. Out of those 99 bakeshops in 1912, there were 64 “verbal cautions to workers in unfit and dirty condition or clothing” and 30 such verbal cautions issued in 1913. Either Mr. Plant was not as diligent in his observations in 1913, or more than half of those dirty workers learnt to wash themselves and their clothes in the interim.

There are often moments in studying historic statistics that give you pause for thought at the stories that went into them. Three verbal cautions were issued for “sleeping in Bakeshop” in 1912, with one prosecution and conviction ultimately attained. These particular statistics speak volumes of possibilities: Was it an owner or an apprentice of a bakeshop who didn’t have a house to go to who slept in the shop? Was it someone from another country where the laws were different and shops and houses were seen as the same space? And did Mr. Plant spend his evenings prowling around bakeshops and bread factories with a flashlight on the off chance of catching a napping worker? Incidentally, no verbal cautions were issued the following year. Without disparaging Mr. Plants’ fine character and obvious enthusiastic work ethic, perhaps by 1913 he found himself another evening hobby.

My favourite statistics are, as ever, the really naughty ones. In 1912, one (one!) “Underground Bakeshop” was “in operation” and subsequently closed. In 1913 the “Number of Bakeshops underground” was also one. This later statistic is a mite confusing. Was that a bake shop built underground, or simply as per the previous year, meant to read “Underground Bakeshop”? And what delicious connotations the notion of an underground bakeshop conjures up. A person furtively finds their way to a door. It is knocked upon using a secret and complicated series of knocks. An eye slit opens and a pair of suspicious eyes looks out to check who is doing the knocking. A password is exchanged. The door opens… And finally, bread nirvana… The opportunity to buy illegal bread products from around the world lays before you: Sourdoughs from San Fran, bagels from New York, macaroni from Sicily, pumpernickel from Germany, decadent cream buns from Britain and, for those with the cash, tortillas from Mexico.

Seriously, though, bread was really taken seriously. Of especial concern was its weight. In 1912, 3785 (!) loaves of bread were tested for weight. Imagine, more than 10 loaves of bread were weighed every day (including Sundays) for an entire year and their data carefully recorded. Presumably not just Mr. Plant did the weighing and recording. Of all these loaves, 4.62 percent (or 185 loaves) were found to be “shortweight”. This resulted in eight convictions that year. In 1913, 4055 loaves were tested for weight, or which 4.19, or 170 loaves, were founding to be wanting. This resulted in four convictions for “shortweight”.

And finally, when talking about snapshots and policing, somewhere science needs a mention in the picture. The City Analyst, poor over-worked man he probably was, analyzed at Mr. Plant’s behest, 15 loaves of bread for “Moisture Content” in 1912. In 1913, that number went up to 35 loaves analyzed. I won’t bore you with the specifics, only to say that in 1913 which has the most detailed statistics, the loaves contained between 41 percent and 48 percent “moisture content in crumb”. I have absolutely no idea in heaven or on earth what this actually means. But Mr. Plant thought the scientific statistics on these 35 analyzed loaves of bread important enough to take up almost a quarter of his 1913 report, so we’ll leave it at that.

In 1914, Canada showed how British it truly was by joining other Commonwealth countries in throwing their young men and women against the bombs and the guns of the young men and women of Germany and their allies. The entire nature of policing and police reporting changed as many officers left the police service to enlist and economic cutbacks meant previously printed and bound reports were replaced with typewritten ones on onion paper. Mr. Plant and his bakeshop statistics were never heard of again in the pages of the VPDs Chief Constable’s annual report. Along with policing, many other things changed irretrievably; food standards increased and the people who reported on them became part of a growing and important profession of health inspectors we all benefit from having today. Don’t mind me. I’m just off now to make a piece of toast.

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