From the Consell de Cent to Mercabarna and the market network: the food supply to the city of Barcelona has been for centuries one of the priorities of the municipal authorities. This is recalled by an exhibition that can be visited until October 2022 in the Saló del Tinell, in Plaça del Rei.
The exhibition Alimentar Barcelona (Feeding Barcelona), organized by the Museu d'Història de Barcelona, brings together more than 300 objects that illustrate the history of food in the Catalan capital and will coincide, next week, with the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the transfer of the fruit and vegetable market from Born to the Zona Franca, to the Mercabarna complex, which just a few days ago acquired new land for its expansion.
The exhibition is striking, both in its narrative and in the objects on display, which range from guild symbols, old kitchen utensils, advertisements, and other elements. Thus, it explains that the great turning point in the history of Barcelona's food supply took place in the 13th century, when it ceased to be a small city and joined the Mediterranean trade routes. It was then that the Consell de Cent assumed the powers to ensure the provision, both in quantity and quality.
For a long time, social peace depended on the price of bread and other basic foodstuffs, especially in times of scarcity and epidemics. For this reason, the municipal authorities owned the mills and slaughterhouses, in order to implement policies that guaranteed supply chains and controlled prices.
The exhibition also covers a moment of capital importance in the city's food policies, the constitution, in 1967, of the company Mercados de Abastecimientos de Barcelona, SA, better known by its acronym Mercabarna, which today is one of the leading and most important wholesale food estates in Europe and the Mediterranean. Precisely, this same week, Mercabarna and the Consorci de la Zona Franca have signed the purchase and sale of a plot of more than 170,000 square meters that will increase the complex's surface area by 22% and generate up to 3,000 jobs. In this way, the Barcelona food hub will consolidate its leadership.
In addition, Mercabarna will also celebrate next week that five decades ago the fruit and vegetable market, which until then occupied the Born, moved to the Zona Franca facilities. It was the first wholesale market to do so. Years later, the slaughterhouse, previously located in the current Joan Miró park; the fish market ---which was next to the Ciutadella park--- and the flower market, which was located in the current Teatre Lliure de Montjuïc, would join. In 2020, the Biomarket, Spain's first wholesale market for organic food, was launched.
Jordi Valls has been the general director of Mercabarna for a year. Valls has a long career in the public and private sectors. He was mayor of Manresa, minister of the Generalitat, president of the port and, subsequently, has held senior management positions in the Suez Group in Great Britain, Mexico and Chile. He believes that the food sector today faces important global challenges. One is the demographic growth that the planet will register in the coming decades. The other is to reduce the environmental impact of the food industry and how to address it, taking into account that the sector is one of the largest generators of GDP in Catalonia and Spain.
In fact, the Tinell exhibition has a section dedicated to the sustainability of the sector in the neighboring old royal chapel of Santa Àgueda. For Valls, this second challenge will be even more important in the post-COVID world, as the pandemic has brought to the table issues that have gained greater relevance and that public policies can no longer neglect, such as health, energy and food.
Fortunately, Barcelona seems to be prepared thanks to an almost millennial food policy of which today are heirs what the exhibition Alimentar Barcelona calls the "singularity" of the Catalan capital: Mercabarna and the network of municipal markets.