One of the indirect consequences of the coming of the railways was a transformation in French eating habits, particularly those of the middle classes. Before the railways were built, the availability of food was limited by the amount that horses or oxen could pull, but under the Second Empire the new rail network made it possible to move large quantities of food quickly from one part of France to another. For the first time, thanks to the steam train, serious famine could be averted, and the bad harvests of 1853, 1856 and 1861 passed without mass starvation. Peasants might still prepare the simple, traditional foodstuffs that had remained virtually unchanged for generations, but in towns and cities things were very different. The new urban middle classes craved more variety in their diet, and a growing industrial population needed more provisions, and wanted them more cheaply. As Auguste Luchet noted in 1867, steam transport allowed fashion rather than necessity to dictate eating habits: ‘Everything changed with the advent of the railway. Shortened distances made our heads swim with swiftly-satisfied pleasures.’ In Second Empire Paris, patterns of eating altered radically as new foodstuffs became available. Oysters, to take but one example, were consumed in huge quantities now that the trains de marée could deliver regular, fresh supplies from the coast; to meet growing demand producers began to farm oysters, and in 1866 more than 260 million of them were sold in the capital, mainly to cafés and restaurants, which flourished as never before.