The British Nutrition Transition and Its Histories (original) (raw)

A British food puzzle, 1770–1850

Economic History Review, 1995

A 1770 to 1850, as do widely cited measures of real wages for most occupations. With even a modest income elasticity of demand for food, these income and wage measures imply a substantial growth in food demand per person. Yet when we look at the supply of foodstuffs, here meaning the food materials generated by domestic farm production and by net imports, a puzzle appears. Three different methods of estimating foodstuff supplies per caput show that these stagnated or even declined. This is the food puzzle.

The Literature of Food: An Introduction from 1830 to the Present

European Journal of Food, Drink, and Society, 2022

Book review of The Literature of Food: An Introduction from 1830 to the Present, by Nicola Humble, London: Bloomsbury Academic, Hardback 2020, 368pp., ISBN 978-0- 8578-5455-1; Paperback 2020, 288 pp., ISBN 978-0-8578-5456-8.

Health, national character and the English diet in 1700

By 1750, the 'roast beef of Old England' had become a byword. Half a century earlier, however, debate raged about the appropriate diet for the English temperament, a term laden with medical as well as political implications. John Evelyn's Acetaria (1699, 2nd ed. 1706) valorized a rural society that subsisted mostly on vegetables, while the physician Martin Lister's preface to his edition of the Roman cookery book of Apicius (1705) praised the imperial Roman diet and its use of sauces and spices as healthful. The Grub Street writer William King satirized Lister in The Art of Cookery (1708), claiming that a pre-Roman British diet of grilled meats was the most suited to the English character. But the politics of meat-eating was complex: Evelyn's emphasis on vegetables had earlier been endorsed by the radical Thomas Tryon, while the Royal Society stalwart Edward Tyson argued that although the human body seemed best suited for a vegetable diet, human free will trumped nature.

Meat and status. An historical look at meat in the English diet.

Rarely does a subject strike a chord with the general public in the way that the study of food history has. This extremely popular topic has the advantage of including themes and subjects as common to us today as they were to people in the past; food, kitchens, cookery and recipes all resonate through the ages and now more people are looking to the past in order to guide them in their food consumption today. Yet it would also be true to say that few subjects have as many persistently held myths attached to them as food history seems to, whether it is the assumption that our forebears used spices to cover the taste of rotting meat or that Henry VIII’s meals were a veritable food fight, people are happy that they know the ‘facts’ and are often shocked to find out the actual truth of our culinary history. Popular culture, such as poorly researched television programmes and movies, repeat these myths over and over, but just as frequently we find the accepted works on the subject adding their own myths to the popular mix; meat was the preserve of the wealthy whilst vegetables were the foodstuff of the poor and that surviving recipes are representative of the foods served on a regular basis to the higher levels of society, but are they actually true? They are often presented with little or no corroborating evidence and given the current vogue for the presentation of live historic cookery demonstrations across the country, these facts are being passed on to thousands of people all of whom are keen to see if they can learn something about the food that they eat by looking at food from the past. At a time when the consumption of meat is considered in some circles to be unfashionable, this paper aims to present a balanced view of meat on the historical table. Throughout, I shall concentrate on evidence from the late medieval and early post medieval periods as these are the periods most associated both with the origins of ‘English’ food and many of these food myths.

Nutrition in Interwar Britain: A Possible Resolution of the Healthy or Hungry 1930s Debate?

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018

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