What Did Those Eggs Really Cost?

If you have been dismayed by the increases in the cost of food in the last year — I certainly am — be grateful that you don’t live in eighteenth-century France. France, in the 1780s, was one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the history of the world up to that point. Its rulers enjoyed the comforts of a ridiculously over-the-top palace at Versailles. The country controlled colonies all over the world; in some of those colonies, the French had enslaved people to do agricultural work for free. France sat at the center of a global trade network that would have seemed impossible in any previous period of world history. But they still ran out of food all the time. The French diet in the late 1700s relied almost entirely on bread, and, due to bad weather, market speculation, and rising population, they sometimes suffered terrible shortages. The price of bread <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-food-changed-history-the-french-revolution-93598442/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">represented</a> over 50% of many workers’ budgets. After subpar harvests in 1788 and 1789, bread made up as much as 88% of workers’ expenditures. People started to riot. The French Revolution was about a lot of things, but <a href="https://worldhistory.medium.com/food-fueled-the-french-revolution-401796002d8e" rel="noopener">one of its causes was the price of food</a>. The food shortages of the 1780s were bad, but they weren’t all that unusual — there had been a similar incident in 1775, known as the “Flour War,” and France had suffered periodic food shortages for centuries, as had pretty much every other place on earth. Your life would seem like a miracle to an 18th-century French artisan in a million ways, but I think one of the things that would blow his mind the most would be a trip to the grocery store — endless aisles stocked to the ceiling with more food than could ever be eaten. And most of it dirt cheap. <a href="https://worldhistory.medium.com/what-did-those-eggs-really-cost-8f4e51cdf55">Visit Now</a>