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"Food consumption England History."
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Food, energy and the creation of industriousness : work and material culture in agrarian England, 1550-1780
\"Until the widespread harnessing of machine energy, food was the energy which fuelled the economy. In this groundbreaking study of agricultural labourers' diet and material standard of living Craig Muldrew uses new empirical research to present a much fuller account of the interrelationship between consumption, living standards and work in the early modern English economy than has previously existed. The book integrates labourers into a study of the wider economy and engages with the history of food as an energy source and its importance to working life, the social complexity of family earnings and the concept of the 'industrious revolution'. It argues that 'industriousness' was as much the result of ideology and labour markets as labourers' household consumption. Linking this with ideas about the social order of early modern England the author demonstrates that bread, beer and meat were the petrol of this world and a springboard for economic change\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Politics of Provisions
The elemental power of food politics has not been fully appraised. Food marketing and consumption were matters of politics as much as economics as England became a market society. In times of dearth, concatenations of food riots, repression, and relief created a maturing politics of provisions. Over three centuries, some eight hundred riots crackled in waves across England. Crowds seized wagons, attacked mills and granaries, and lowered prices in marketplaces or farmyards. Sometimes rioters parleyed with magistrates. More often both acted out a well-rehearsed political minuet that evolved from Tudor risings and state policies down to a complex culmination during the Napoleonic Wars.
'Provision politics' thus comprised both customary negotiations over scarcity and hunger, and 'negotiations' of the social vessel through the turbulence of dearth. Occasionally troops killed rioters, or judges condemned them to the gallows, but increasingly riots prompted wealthy citizens to procure relief supplies. In short, food riots worked: in a sense they were a first draft of the welfare state.
This pioneering analysis connects a generation of social protest studies spawned by E.P. Thompson's essay on the 'moral economy' with new work on economic history and state formation. The dynamics of provision politics that emerged during England's social, economic and political transformations should furnish fruitful models for analyses of 'total war' and famine as well as broader transitions elsewhere in world history.
eBook
‘Fractures’ in food practices: exploring transitions towards sustainable food
Emissions arising from the production and consumption of food are acknowledged as a major contributor to climate change. From a consumer’s perspective, however, the sustainability of food may have many meanings: it may result from eating less meat, becoming vegetarian, or choosing to buy local or organic food. To explore what food sustainability means to consumers, and what factors lead to changes in food practice, we adopt a sociotechnical approach to compare the food consumption practices in North West England with two differing consumer groups. The first, supermarket shoppers ‘embedded’ in the mainstream food regime; and the second, who self-identify as sustainable food practitioners, and who perform a range of sustainable food consumption practices. We examine how our two groups experience changes in food practices and identify ‘fractures’ stemming from lifecourse and public events that emerge as points where change might occur. We suggest that ‘sharing spaces’ would be one possibility for prompting and nurturing fractures that can lead to greater sustainability in food practices.
Journal Article
Complementary approaches to tooth wear analysis in Tritylodontidae (Synapsida, Mammaliamorpha) reveal a generalist diet
Stereoscopic microwear and 3D surface texture analyses on the cheek teeth of ten Upper Triassic to Lower Cretaceous tritylodontid (Mammaliamorpha) taxa of small/medium to large body size suggest that all were generalist feeders and none was a dietary specialist adapted to herbivory. There was no correspondence between body size and food choice. Stereomicroscopic microwear analysis revealed predominantly fine wear features with numerous small pits and less abundant fine scratches as principal components. Almost all analyzed facets bear some coarser microwear features, such as coarse scratches, large pits, puncture pits and gouges pointing to episodic feeding on harder food items or exogenous effects (contamination of food with soil grit and/or dust), or both. 3D surface texture analysis indicates predominantly fine features with large void volume, low peak densities, and various stages of roundness of the peaks. We interpret these features to indicate consumption of food items with low to moderate intrinsic abrasiveness and can exclude regular rooting, digging or caching behavior. Possible food items include plant vegetative parts, plant reproductive structures (seeds and seed-bearing organs), and invertebrates (i.e., insects). Although the tritylodontid tooth morphology and auto-occlusion suggest plants as the primary food resource, our results imply a wider dietary range including animal matter.
Journal Article
England Eats Out
Why do so many people now eat out in England? Food and the culture surrounding how we
consume it are high on everyone’s agenda. England Eats Out is the
ultimate book for a nation obsessed with food.
Today eating out is more than just getting fed; it is an expression of lifestyle. In the
past it has been crucial to survival for the impoverished but a primary form of
entertainment for the few. In the past, to eat outside the home for pleasure was mainly
restricted to the wealthier classes when travelling or on holiday- there were clubs and
pubs for men, but women did not normally eat in public places. Eating out came to all
classes, to men, women and young people after World War Two as a result of rising
standards of living, the growth of leisure and the emergence of new types of restaurants
having wide popular appeal. England Eats Out explores these trends from
the early nineteenth century to the present.
From chop-houses and railway food to haute cuisine, award winning author John Burnett
takes the reader on a gastronomic tour of 170 years of eating out, covering food for
princes and paupers.
Beautifully illustrated, England Eats Out covers highly topical
subjects such as the history of fast food; the rise of the celebrity chef and the
fascinating history of teashops, coffee houses, feasts and picnics.
eBook
Numerare Est Errare: Agricultural Output and Food Supply in England Before and During the Industrial Revolution
Carefully constructed but fallible historical estimates of GDP and agricultural output inform our understanding of the preindustrial origins of economic growth. Here we review four recent attempts at estimating agricultural output and food availability in England and Wales at different points between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution. We highlight their contrasting implications for trends in well-being and nutritional status over time. Building on these estimates, we propose our own tentative, compromise estimate of food availability. The compromise estimates are more coherent with our understanding of conditions before and during the Industrial Revolution.
Journal Article
Diet and the comparison of living standards across the Great Divergence: Japanese food history in an English mirror
The assessment of relative living standards, dominated by food, has been central to analysis of the timing and causes of the Great Divergence. Comparative quantitative measures of real incomes and food availability have generated the conclusion that living standards on the western side of Eurasia, in particular in England, were already higher than those observable on the eastern side by the seventeenth century, with the divergence widening thereafter. However, in the English case, research based on evidence as to what people actually ate suggests that the path of dietary change was by no means a straightforward matter of rising calorie consumption. When viewed in the light of this, evidence derived from the work of food historians of Japan can similarly be used to reveal a more complex pattern of dietary development than can be encompassed in quantitative estimates, even if along the lines of a very different diet and cuisine. This needs to be taken into account when living standards are compared across the divergence.
Journal Article
Beyond agriculture: the counter-hegemony of community farming
In this paper we seek to understand the interplay between increasingly widely held concerns about the hegemony of industrialized agriculture and the emergence of counter-hegemonic activities, such as membership of community supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives. Informed by Blackshaw’s (Leisure, Abingdon, Routledge, 2010) work on “liquid leisure,” we offer a new leisure-based conceptualization of the tactics of counter-hegemony, arguing in the process that food politics offers a rich site for new, transitional identity formation. Using a case study of a well-established community farm in southeast England, we demonstrate how the community members devote themselves to transient and inconsequential activities as a means of attempting to realize a larger self-related identity project. We also demonstrate how the seemingly close inter-personal bonds typical of CSA may not reflect the permanence accorded to them, with members able willingly to leave these communities once they can no longer progress their identity project. We conclude by arguing that our findings are emblematic of society in transition, with people moving well beyond the work/leisure activity into a world in which they embody the idea and the practice of being an active co-producer—in our case, of food. While recognizing that this does not necessarily mean that there is simple causality between practice and identity formation, we do argue that there is evidence of an increasing relationship between activity, time, and the performance of a new form of civil labor practice.
Journal Article
FUEL PRICES, REGIONAL DIETS AND COOKING HABITS IN THE ENGLISH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION (1750–1830)
Zylberberg examines English living standards during the Industrial Revolution and offers a different perspective on consumption by discussing two staple goods, fuel and carbohydrates, amongst the laboring poor. He focuses on Hampshire in the south of England and the West Riding of Yorkshire in the north, because these geographically diverse English counties included regions reliant upon each major fuel source. He also outlines the regional patterns of fuel use and changing prices between 1750 and 1830. He then briefly discusses the seasonal pattern of cooking and those regions in which residents heated their homes at other times. The main focus, however, is on regional diets, with discussions on the regional patterns of bread baking, beer brewing and potato consumption. The availability and burning properties of all three fuel sources affected whether English people could afford to cook and the types of food they ate between 1750 and 1830.
Journal Article
Food Gifts, the Household and the Politics of Exchange in Early Modern England
This is an essay about food, and the circumstances that constructed it as a gift, rather than as items to be sold and purchased, in early modern England. It utilizes as principal evidence the household accounts of the nobility and gentry between the 1480s and the end of the Civil War. It seeks to understand the role of gifting in the great household, and then to interrogate the ways in which local patterns of exchange were reflected in the public sphere of court. Draws on anthropological insights into food as the most basic form of offering and as a tool for the maintenance of relationships; at the heart of the essay's concerns are the politics of exchange and the ways in which gift repertoires were used to secure political objectives. (Quotes from original text)
Journal Article