14

Want and plenty, 1945–85

 

 

 

When the first edition of Plenty and Want was published in 1966 it was justifiable to write:

Since 1945 the British economy has remained on the whole buoyant and prosperous: although some traditional industries have lost ground to foreign competitors other, newer ones have largely taken their place, and unemployment has in most years been limited to the 2 or 3 per cent which some economists regard as necessary to ensure labour mobility. The nation has accepted from the sociologist the label of ‘the affluent society’ and from the politician the slogan ‘we have never had it so good’.

Twenty years on little of that optimism remains. For much of the last decade economic growth has been sluggish, or stagnant, especially when viewed against the performance of some other industrialized countries. Mass unemployment, which we had thought never to see again, reappeared in the 1970s, the figure climbing slowly from 1.5 per cent in 1957 to 2.5 per cent in 1968, 3.4 per cent in 1971, then, dramatically, to 5.9 per cent in 1976 and 12 per cent in 1983: by then, over 3 million people were out of work, the highest number since the 1930s. Also exceptional and puzzling was the coincidence of high unemployment with high levels of inflation, the effects of which left no one untouched. Some degree of inflation had been with us ever since the end of the war, retail prices increasing on average by 5 per cent a year between 1945 and 1950, and by 2.6 per cent a year between 1954 and 1964. The ‘take-off’ towards double-figure inflation began in 1971 with a retail price increase of 9.4 per cent which, six years later and exacerbated by the oil crisis of 1973–4, had almost doubled to 17.9 per cent. In 1976 it required £1.82 to buy what £1 had bought in 1972, and New Society was reporting ‘a revolution of falling expectations’. Not very long before, in 1962, the Daily Express had written of ‘the rollicking revolution of merrie England’. Professor A.H. Halsey has recently argued that ‘a post-war period can be identified as having come to an end in the mid-1970s, followed by a decade exhibiting a new form of polarization in British society’.¹

In fact, until recent years the failings in the economy were disguised by a continued advance in the standard of living for most English people – almost certainly a greater increase in the years 1945–70 than in any previous quarter-century. Until incomes restraint began to bite hard in 1974, price rises were more than balanced by wage and salary increases, which through the 1950s and earlier 1960s often ran at double the annual rate of inflation: in particular, powerful trade unions were able to take advantage of conditions of nearly full employment to narrow the gaps between semi-skilled and skilled earnings and between manual and professional earnings. Among the chief beneficiaries of rising standards were therefore some formerly low-paid groups of industrial, clerical, and women workers, while many professional and managerial salaries were squeezed by the combined effects of taxation and incomes policies. In the most recent years, with inflation under control and reduced to annual rates of 4 or 5 per cent, and with bargaining power reduced by weakened trade unions, the advance in standards of living has slowed, but over the whole period from 1951 to 1983 the average real weekly earnings (i.e. the purchasing power) of adult male manual workers almost doubled from £60 to £111.²

Until the economy moved into serious depression in 1974, rising real earnings meant that more people than ever before were able to afford a nutritionally adequate diet. The evidence of increasing prosperity has also been seen in the increase of home-ownership to 62 per cent in 1986, a similar growth of car-ownership (also to 62 per cent of households in 1986), and a spectacular increase in the ownership of domestic appliances, many of which would have been regarded as luxuries a few years earlier. In 1986 nine out of ten households had a television and a refrigerator, eight out of ten a washing-machine, seven out of ten central heating, and two out of three a freezer. The latest innovation in cookery technology, the microwave oven, introduced from the United States only in 1959, is already found in 26 per cent of households.³

Major social and demographic changes since the end of the last war have also had important effects on dietary patterns. Although the birth rate has generally been low, more people have married, and married younger, than in the past, while at the other end of the age-scale people have continued to live longer. The proportion of people over sixty was four times greater in 1985 than in 1901, and now represents 20 per cent of the whole population. One result of these changes has been a greatly increased number of separate households in Britain (currently 20.9 million), but of much smaller average size than in the past. In 1985 the average household in Britain consisted of only 2.56 people, compared with 3.1 in 1961: what was once considered the ‘typical’ family of husband, wife, and two children accounted for only 11.9 per cent of all households, while one-person households constituted 24 per cent in 1985, and two-person households a further 30 per cent. Large families having four or more children are now a mere 1.9 per cent of all households. Family eating and purchasing patterns, which were formerly dominated in all social classes by the large number of mouths to be fed, have had to adapt to catering for much smaller groups, often with specialized tastes or needs.

The increasing desire and ability of parents to limit family size, coupled with the growth of domestic technology, has released wives from many of the burdens of household drudgery. One of the most outstanding post-war social changes has been the increasing employment of married women outside the home – from 22 per cent of wives in 1951 to 52 per cent in 1985, either full-time or part-time. It may be speculated whether ‘the kitchen revolution’ of recent years, which has taken the form of better-planned use of space in the home as well as increased use of ‘convenience foods’ and labour-saving devices, is cause or effect of this change. According to a recent survey, two-thirds of all women spend between two and four hours a day in their kitchens, and only 16 per cent six hours or more.⁴ In 41 per cent of married households washing the evening dishes is shared equally between men and women, though only 16 per cent share the preparation of the meal.⁵ The trend towards women’s liberation has apparently not reduced the centrality of the home and family-based activities in the lives of working women, many of whom give as a main reason for working the desire to improve their domestic circumstances.

In 1985 the average weekly household expenditure in the UK, not including taxes, insurance, betting, or savings, was £161.87 (1975, £54.58). Of this, food at 20.2 per cent was the largest item, followed by housing (16.1), transport and vehicles (15.2), clothing and footwear (7.4), durable household goods (7.2), fuel and light (6.1), alcoholic drink (4.9), and tobacco (2.7).⁶ If we compare these statistics with those of 1953–4 Avhen Britain was just emerging from the post-war period of scarcity and rationing, there have been some interesting changes. Then, food took 33 per cent of total expenditure – two-thirds more than in 1985, and tobacco 6.5 per cent, again substantially more. Most other items, however, accounted for less – transport and vehicles only 7 per cent, housing 9 per cent, and alcoholic drink 4 per cent. The long-term trend in Britain, as in the USA and other affluent societies, has been for food to absorb a smaller proportion of total personal income, while other categories, especially transport, have taken increasingly more. This major reduction in the proportion of expenditure on food reflects not only the growth in real incomes, but also the fact that food prices have risen more slowly in recent years than the prices of other items, while the volume of food consumed has increased only in line with population.⁷

In the nineteenth century and in the years before the Second World War, it was a well-observed phenomenon that as income fell the proportion devoted to food increased, that while the poor might have to spend half or two-thirds of their meagre wages merely to satisfy hunger, the richer classes could fare luxuriously on a much smaller fraction of their earnings. Although this characteristic still holds true today, the relative difference is considerably reduced. Thus, in 1985 the poorest 20 per cent of households allotted 29.4 per cent to food while the wealthiest 20 per cent devoted 15.5 per cent:⁸ in money terms, the richest households spent S9.87 a head on food, the poorest £7.49.⁹ Expenditure on alcoholic drink moves in the opposite direction, from 4.0 per cent in the poorest up to 5.1 per cent in the richest. Another variable in food consumption is now the most important – that of household size – although again less than formerly when, as we have seen, large families imposed great hardship on working-class budgets. Today, the one-adult household spends SI 1.38 a week on food while families consisting of two adults and four or more children spend on average only £5.91 a head. In these larger households the proportion of income spent on bread and other cereal products, dairy products, and milk rises with increasing numbers of children, while that on meat, fish, eggs, and beverages falls:¹⁰ household size has now clearly emerged as the single most important determinant of food expenditure and choice.

In reviewing the dietary history of the last few decades it has to be remembered that food was rationed in all for fourteen years (1939–53) and that only after this did adjustment to free market conditions take place. In some respects the post-1945 diet was more frugal than the wartime ration, due principally to world shortages of foodstuffs, poor harvests, and the ending of ‘Lend-Lease’. Supplies of fat fell noticeably, and their scarcity was especially felt during the arctic winter of 1946–7 when public complaints were loudest. In what amounted to a food crisis, the extraction rate of flour was raised to 90 per cent, bread itself was rationed from July 1946 to July 1948 (at two 2-lb loaves per adult a week), the meat ration was cut, and even potatoes were brought under a control system from November 1947 to April 1948, measures which had not been necessary even in the darkest days of war.¹¹ In fact, the nation’s diet, at its worst from 1946–8, was still better than the average pre-war diet in most nutrients: measured as percentages of values before World War Two, energy fell to 97 per cent and fat to 84 per cent, but total protein was higher at 108 per cent and intakes of calcium, iron, and vitamins were all well above pre-war levels.¹² In 1949, as food supplies and the balance of payments improved, it was possible to begin a gradual de-control, apparently without losing the benefit to the lower income groups which wartime policies had brought. Losses had been more than made good by 1954, and the national diet was in every respect better then than in 1939.¹³

For a few years after the end of rationing increased consumers’ expenditure went on foods formerly in short supply – meat, fats, sugar, eggs, canned fruits, and so on. But, clearly, an upper limit to food intake is set by physiological factors, and once these particular appetites had been satisfied by the later 1950s dietary habits settled down to a pattern which has changed only slowly over time. Table 49 compares average domestic food consumption at four dates – 1950, when rationing was still largely in force, 1960, typical of the ‘affluent’ years, 1983, and 1985; the most recent year for which full statistics are available: additionally, the final column gives average weekly expenditure per person in 1985. It should be noted that the data are drawn from the National Food Survey Reports, which record domestic food consumption and expenditure on a sample basis, but do not include food and drink consumed outside the home.

Over the period since 1950 certain trends in food consumption appear to have become clearly established. Overall, we now buy less food for consumption in the home, a trend particularly noticeable in the 1970s. By 1977 the energy value of household food met only 94 per cent of recommended intake compared with 111 per cent in 1970, though most, if not all, of this decline in eating at home was made up by increased use of meals and snacks outside the home and increased consumption of alcohol and sweets.¹⁴ An interesting case in point is that of milk consumption, which has fallen markedly after rising during the Second World War as part of the deliberate national nutritional policy. At less than two-thirds of a pmt a day it is now well short of the advertising slogan of the 1960s – ‘Drinka Pinta Milka Day’. This has been only partly due to the changes in the provision of welfare milk and school meal schemes in 1971, which cut free milk except for children under seven; nor has it been due to cost, since the real price of milk has fallen relative to other foods. Probably more important have been changes in meal patterns, particularly at breakfast and tea, and the less favourable image which milk has recently acquired as a major source of fat. In this connection, it is notable that while household consumption of liquid whole milk fell by 8 per cent between 1983 and 1985, that of low fat milk more than trebled, and now accounts for 11 per cerffof liquid milk purchases.¹⁵ Curiously, however, similar concerns appear not to have influenced the consumption of cheese, which has continued to rise steadily and now stands at around 50 per cent higher than pre-war: as a relatively cheap source of protein and one of the earliest of all ‘convenience foods’, cheese has evidently adapted successfully to modern dietary patterns. The combined consumption of butter and margarine has fallen significantly, however, and in recent years margarine has moved ahead for the first time in peacetime. Butter reached a peak of 6.10 oz per head a week in 1958 and is now less than half as much, but margarine has gained from much improved quality and flavour, and from the growing preference of consumers for a ‘soft-spread’ product

Table 49 Estimates of average household food consumption and expenditure, 1950–85

Sources:

Table 49 based on the following Reports: (a) Domestic Food Consumption and Expenditure, 1950. Annual Report of the National Food Survey Committee (1952), Appendix D1, 103 et seq. (b) Annual Report of the NFS Committee for 1960(1962), Table 11, 19 et seq. (c), (d), (e) Annual Report of the NFS Committee for 1985 (1987), Tables 2.3–2.10, 4–7, and Appendix B, Table 1, 60 et seq.

made from vegetable rather than animal fats. At around 13 lb a head a year, margarine consumption in Britain is still low compared with Norway (55 lb), the Netherlands (44 lb), or West Germany (28 lb).

Egg consumption grew from 104 a year in 1909–13 to 152 in 1934, and 227 in 1960, since when there has been a considerable contraction to 164. Much more spectacular was the long-term increase in the consumption of sugar, which grew five-fold in the hundred years after 1835, and rose extremely rapidly between 1950 and 1960 after rationing restrictions were removed: by then total consumption of raw sugar in the UK was estimated at 126 lb per person per year, and was exceeded only by that of Greenland, Gibraltar, Iceland, and Hawaii.¹⁶ Since then, domestic purchases of sugar have fallen dramatically to 8¼ oz in 1985, though total consumption has declined less due to the heavy use of sugar in brewing, soft drinks, ice-cream, confectionery, and preserves. The doubling in retail sugar prices between 1974 and 1975 clearly sharpened the decline, although it seems that some swing in public taste away from sweets towards savouries, encouraged by growing concern over the physiological effects of excessive sugar, is a more fundamental cause. A decline in home-baking and preserving is an additional factor.

Total meat consumption has not changed greatly since 1960 aod in fact stands lower now than it did before the last war. Even in their years of affluence the British did not become the nation of meat-eaters that some forecast, and the traditional joint of beef or lamb has continued to slide in popularity, particularly the latter, probably because of its high fat content. Were it not for the increase in pork, and the much more spectacular rise in poultry consumption following the mass-production of broiler chickens, total meat consumption would now be less than in the rationed days of 1950. It is significant that ‘convenience’ products such as cooked, canned, and quick-frozen meats, pies and sausages, have increased, while purchases of carcase meat have fallen off. Its relative dearness in recent years, especially against poultry, has clearly been a major factor, but one authority has also suggested a lack of knowledge of meat cuts among younger housewives due to ‘a break in the foodlore link between the generations’, a reduction of face-to-face contact with butchers as a result of increased supermarket sales, and the reluctance of butchers to prepare cheaper cuts in a form more convenient for mid-week meals.¹⁷ It may be that there are also more deep-seated reasons – that a society whose occupations are less laborious feels less need for animal protein, or even that the growing preference for ‘white meats’ (poultry, pork, cheese) rather than ‘red’ involves complex physiological and psychological factors.

In the immediate post-war period when meat supplies were scarce the consumption of fish increased sharply, but since then there has been a continuous decline, exacerbated by ‘cod wars’, herring scarcities, and vastly increased prices (white fish 1909− 13 = 100,1976 = 3396): by 1985 consumption was less than half that of the 1920s. The one exception to this has been the rapid growth of frozen fish and fish products, a successful innovation which began with the introduction of the fish finger in 1955. As everyone knows, the tasty and once cheap meal of fried fish and chips has lately become a luxury. After falling between the wars, potato consumption increased during the Second World War as part of national policy, and in 1947 was probably 50 per cent higher than in 1934–8: since then, it has fallen steadily, but has recently levelled out at around 40 oz a week. Fresh green vegetables have also fallen since 1960, but the great ‘success story’ of recent times has been the boom in quick-frozen vegetables, especially peas and beans: canned and processed vegetables, another form of ‘convenience’, have also continued to increase.

Probably the greatest change in recent years has been that of bread. Once the mainstay of the English diet, it is still the largest single source of energy and the second source of protein, but overall consumption has fallen greatly since 1950, and that of white bread dramatically from 50 oz a week to 20 oz. This has usually been explained as a natural result of rising standards of living and a shift away from cheaper energy foods, as well as of changes in domestic meal patterns – almost 20 per cent of bread is now eaten outside the home, much of it in the form of sandwiches. But recently, nutritional considerations have clearly had a major effect in stimulating a change to brown, wholemeal, and wholewheat breads, which now make up almost one-quarter of total bread consumption. The only other commodity in this range which has increased greatly since before the war is the group of breakfast cereals, which have trebled since 1950. Tea, of which the British are still the second heaviest consumers in the world after Australians, has been declining in popularity since 1960, but the steady rise in coffee consumption has now established it as a major competitor.

Summarizing these changes over the last quarter of a century, it appears that as a nation we now eat less beef, mutton, and bacon, less sugar, bread and potatoes, less butter and jam, less fish and fewer eggs, and drink less milk and tea – that is to say, less of many of the traditional articles of English diet. No simple pattern emerges. Some of these, like bread and potatoes, were basic foods of the past and had been experiencing decline for many years, except when interrupted by war: others, like sugar, butter, and eggs, were relative luxuries to which previous generations had aspired as their standard of living rose. Similarly, the foods which have increased in recent times – pork and poultry, brown breads, margarine, cheese, pasta, breakfast cereals, and frozen foods – do not fit into a single category or explanation.

Nevertheless, some trends seem fairly clear. Our diet is lighter and less bulky than it was: peak consumption was reached in 1970, from when there has been some reduction towards slightly more stringency.¹⁸ Inflationary pressures in the 1970s appear to have had temporary effects on the consumption of some foods like beef, potatoes, and butter which experienced sharp, short-term price rises, but did not radically alter established trends. Similarly, although public awareness of the relationship between diet and health has become more widespread in recent years, since the publicity given to the COMA and NACNE Reports, this has not yet influenced eating habits profoundly or systematically. For example, visible fat consumption has remained at between 300 and 350 g a week throughout the last forty years: consumption of paté and salami, containing up to 40 per cent fat, has increased at the expense of lower-fat sausages; vegetable oil has increased little, while the consumption of sweets, confectionery, alcohol, and snack foods has shown marked growth recently. With the exceptions of wholemeal and wholewheat bread,“ and skimmed milk, it seems that, so far at least, nutritional arguments have not been a

Table 50 Changes in domestic consumption, 1962–76¹⁹

		%	%
Pasta	+ 160	Carcase lamb	− 37
Poultry	+ 150	Sugar	− 34
Breakfast cereals	+ 69	Potatoes (new/old)	− 34
Carcase pork	+ 26	Preserves	− 30
Cheese	+ 221	Bacon	− 21
Rice	+ 3	Fish	− 21
		Bread	− 24
		Butter	− 17
		Carcase beef and veal	− 15
		Sausages	− 14
		Eggs	− 13
		Milk	− 5
		Margarine	− 3
		Flour	− 3

major determinant of food choice unless supported by some other consideration – economy, palatability, or convenience. In 1976 a market survey of the consumption trends of twenty food items since 1962 arranged them into two groups – those which had increased and those which had declined (Table 50): today, ten years later, it would be necessary to shift the category of only one item – margarine.

But what is now an outstanding and apparently irreversible trend in English diet in recent years is the growth in demand for ‘convenience foods’. These are officially defined as ‘processed foods for which the degree of culinary preparation has been carried to an advanced stage by the manufacturer, and which may be used as labour-saving alternatives to less highly processed products’: they include cooked and canned meats and fish, a constantly expanding range of quick-frozen foods, canned veg-etables, canned fruit, canned and dehydrated soups, breakfast cereals, cakes, puddings, pastries and biscuits, ice-cream, yoghurt, and ‘desserts’ of many kinds. Expenditure on the whole group averaged £3.20 per per-son per week in 1974, or more than a third of total food expenditure: while average household food expenditure rose by 27 per cent between 1980 and 1985, that on convenience foods increased by 48 per cent.²⁰ Because the consumer is buying services as well as food these commodities are a relatively expensive source of nutrients: they are bought because they require little time in preparation, give reliable results, and bring out-of-sea-son foods and a wider choice within reach. Frozen peas and beans may not have the identical flavour of fresh, but most people are glad to have them in mid-winter and many eat them throughout the year. But the greatest advantage of convenience foods is that they enable the housewife to put a meal on the table within minutes rather than hours: they are part of women’s liberation, adapted to working wives and small families, and giving greater flexibility in the choice and timing of meals.

The most spectacular aspect of ‘the convenience revolution’ has been the rapid growth during the last three decades of quick-frozen foods. In this, as in some other aspects of food technology, Britain followed US developments, where quick-freezing had begun just before the Second World War: in 1945 Bird’s Eye began tentative operations in East Anglia, and in 1947 total UK output was valued at a quarter of a million pounds. In 1963 frozen food expenditure in the UK reached £80 million, by 1973 £345 million, and by 1986 £1,913 million,²¹ of which one-seventh was bought by catering establishments. In terms of volume, household consumption of frozen foods has doubled since 1975 from 5 oz per person a week to 10 oz: frozen vegetables are the largest volume sector, followed by meat and meat products, fish, and cereals in that order, but the range has been continuously expanded into such things as sea-food, Chinese foods, cheesecake, and cauliflower florets where these ‘luxury’ items are reported to be booming. The expansion of this market has, of course, depended crucially on changes in retailing, which have brought more than 100,000 freezer cabinets into shops, self-service stores, and supermarkets, and on the rapid increase of home-freezers which are now found in 75 per cent of all homes, compared with 50 per cent in 1980.

It is tempting to speculate, though very difficult to know, whether British food tastes have changed radically since the end of the war. The factors which determine food choice are complex and still largely unexplained. Besides economic and physiological considerations, historical, psychological, ethical, religious, and status factors may exert powerful influences on food habits, yet why we select some foods and reject others is still largely unknown. ‘We all recognize’, writes Professor John Yudkin, ‘that what determines our food choice are food preferences; what determines the other man’s choice are food prejudices.’ People eat for reasons which are satisfying to themselves – not to nutritionists. Through food choice, and the various rituals of cooking, serving, and consuming it, people are able to fantasize about a social status or life-style to which they aspire, to express personality, to honour their guests, or to worship their God, and it would be vain to expect too much rationality behind complicated and often unconscious objectives.

In the short term, food tastes are conservative and strongly resistant to change. Over a longer period one effect of increasing real income and increasing urbanization was to raise the consumption of animal protein, sugar, and fats and to lower that of foods of cereal origin: other, more recent effects have been to encourage the use of ‘stress foods’ with high sucrose, and ‘snack’ foods eaten between meals.²² The latter have seen a spectacular growth recently to total sales of £1,000 million in 1986, of which potato crisps alone were valued at £585 million and savoury snacks at £242 million; the biscuit market added a further £930 million.²³ It is reported that snack-eating occasions in Britain have doubled in the last five years. Food choice is also obviously influenced by the number, variety, and accessibility of shops, and it is difficult to know whether the increasing concentration of retail outlets has widened or narrowed the customer’s choice. The number of grocery outlets in Britain has fallen from 105,283 in 1971 to 50,500 in 1985: multiples now have a 70 per cent share of the grocery market, superstores 23 per cent, and in many small towns and suburban areas there may be no alternative to the single supermarket.

Again the diets of different countries still retain strong national characteristics determined by geographical, historical, and cultural factors, price movements, the incidence of wars, and so on, and there is little evidence as yet of a general trend towards a common ‘European’ diet. Thus, the UK has a milk consumption twice or three times higher than that of most European countries (usually explained by our unique doorstep delivery service). Italy consumes twice as much wheat per head as others, Britain has the lowest fruit and vegetable but almost the highest sugar consumption of the EEC, we drink an average of 12 litres of wine a head a year compared with 104 litres in France, and so on. Expressed in terms of total nutrients the differences become less but are still substantial – Belgium and Luxembourg have the highest fat content in their diets and Italians derive almost 40 per cent of their energy requirements from cereals, twice the proportion elsewhere in Europe.

In this respect, the British diet has historically been a ‘richer’ one than the Italian with an emphasis on more expensive animal sources of protein and fat. In 1973 a survey conducted by J. C. McKenzie into what foods housewives would buy more of if not limited by money showed meat at the top (chosen by 51 per cent) followed by chicken (40 per cent), apples, oranges, butter (21 per cent), fish (19 per cent), milk, and eggs.²⁴ It was noticeable that demand for more meat, chicken, and butter was strongest among the lower socio-economic groups and among families with children, and it has been observed that in recent years while overall meat consumption has remained largely static that of lower income groups has risen while that of wealthier groups has fallen. Obesity, until recently regarded as a disease of affluence, is currently increasing in the United States more rapidly among formerly poorer classes. In Britain in 1985 the difference in meat consumption between different income groups was marginal: households with earnings of over £300 a week ate 35.58 oz a head while those with incomes under £85 a week ate 34.08 oz.²⁵

Deliberate restriction of some foods for cosmetic and physiological reasons has been a noticeable trend in British diets during the last decade or two, and is evidenced, among other things, by the substitution of green salads for potatoes, an increasing use of fruit, a preference for lean over fatty meats, and a drift away from butter towards margarine. The frequently observed preference of children at parties for savouries rather than sweets may well have a basis in some change in national taste: in a recent survey four out of ten housewives believed that their tastes had changed in the last ten years – that they and their families now ate more savoury foods and less sweet ones, that they had a wider variety in their diet and a liking for new dishes. This growing willingness to experiment by a people who were notorious for their conservatism and indiscrimination in food habits may be related to the belief of 63 per cent of housewives that food has less flavour now than it had twenty years ago.

A growing taste for foreign dishes has also been influenced by the huge expansion of overseas travel and holidays abroad, and by the proliferation of Chinese, Indian, Cypriot, and other restaurants throughout the towns and suburbs of Britain. The growth of modest eating-out in the 1950s and 1960s brought a knowledge and appreciation of new foods to less wealthy groups who in the past had rarely eaten a meal outside the home, and the time now seems remote (it was only in 1961) when a coach party of Welsh miners touring Spain thoughtfully brought their own chef with them – even then, he was sent home when they came to prefer Spanish cooking to his. By 1983 62 per cent of adults had had a holiday abroad at some time, compared with only 36 per cent in 1971: also, the fact that Britain’s population now contains 3 million people who were born outside the UK, many of whom have opened food shops and restaurants, has had important effects on national food habits. The greatest success has gone to Chinese restaurants of which there are today over 5,000 and it is difficult to imagine that in the Good Food Guide of 1951 there were only nine oriental restaurants in London and four outside.²⁶ In a Gallup survey in 1976 into people’s knowledge of foreign dishes, chow mein and sweet and sour pork were known by seven out of ten, pizza by eight out of ten, and ravioli by nearly as many; chilli con carne was familiar to only four out of ten, while moussaka, sole meunière, and wienerschnitzel had reached only one in three.²⁷ It is clear that canning and quick-freezing, coupled with mass advertising, have become important instruments of food change, and that the British eating public is less wedded to its ‘meat and two veg.’ than is commonly supposed. In recent times new foods have been introduced at an accelerating pace, and even in the recession year of 1975 ‘New Products in Grocers’ reported a record 667 new lines on the market.

Despite the accumulation of food facts in recent years, what people actually eat at the different meals of the day is still a matter of some

Table 51 Meal patterns, 1958

	Men %	Women %
Early morning tea	40	47
Breakfast	93	91
‘Elevenses’	48	50
Midday meal	95	98
Afternoon tea	45	50
Evening meal	92	91
Late supper	72	76

mystery. The National Food Survey, valuable as it is as a record of family food purchases, only takes us as far as the larder: it does not follow the food into meal patterns or into the mouths of individuals. The only extensive study of eating habits in recent times was carried out by the Market Research Division of W.S. Crawford Ltd in 1958 when for most people meal patterns were still ‘traditional’. The results of this nation-wide survey are summarized in Table 51.

For just over half the population the day began with an early morning cup (or cups) of tea, the most popular time for which was between 7.0 and 7.30 a.m.: during the day, we each drank six cups. The first meal of the day, the British breakfast, had not then changed radically since before the war. More cold cereals as distinct from porridge were eaten, and slightly more fruit, but the light, continental breakfast had made little headway. Forty-seven per cent of people had a cooked course in summer and 51 per cent in winter, eggs and bacon heading the list (17 per cent of people had both), followed by tomatoes, sausages, and fish (only 1 per cent). As the breakfast drink, tea was taken by 85 per cent of people, coffee by only 4 per cent.

The midday meal – described as ‘dinner’ by 64 per cent and as ‘lunch’ by 34 per cent – was eaten by the majority between 12.30 and 1.30 p.m., though later at weekends. Surprisingly, in 1958 six out of every ten men went home for their midday meal: 21 per cent of men ate at work and 13 per cent at a cafe or restaurant. The courses eaten were soup (19 per cent in winter, 6 per cent in summer), a main dish (85 per cent), and a sweet (52 per cent): few people had more than two courses, and a quarter had only the main dish. Throughout the week no one dish dominated the menu – roasts, stews, ham, sausages, egg dishes, fish were all below 13 per cent of the total, but for Sunday lunch, the most traditional meal of the week, 32 per cent of all families ate roast beef and two vegetables. Roast lamb (15 per cent) and pork (12 per cent) were the only serious rivals. Two out of three homes had potatoes at midday, summer and winter alike, and 40 per cent had green vegetables, but salads reached only 13 per cent even in summer.

‘Afternoon tea’ was scarcely a meal, only half the consumers taking cake or biscuits with the drink. The only other meal of importance was the principal evening meal, variously described as ‘tea’ or ‘high tea’ (67 per cent), ‘dinner’ (23 per cent, mainly in the south-east), and ‘supper’ (2 per cent). The peak time was between 6.0 and 6.30 p.m., and it was remarkable that very few in any social class ate later than 7.0 p.m. The foods eaten did not fall into traditional courses: 30 per cent ate the ‘high tea’ type, consisting of a main dish (ham, bacon, sausages, cooked meats, eggs, etc.) with bread, butter, jam, and cakes; 24 per cent the ‘dinner’ type with a main dish, soup and/or sweet, but no bread, butter, and cakes; 23 per cent a main dish only; and 15 per cent an ‘afternoon tea’ type with no main dish. Only 3 per cent ate a soup in summer, 8 per cent in winter, but salads rose in popularity to 40 per cent on summer evenings. The most popular meats were ham, corned beef or luncheon meat, bacon, and sausages. Omelettes were so rare as to be unclassified. Only 1 per cent of families had alcohol with the evening meal, and only 4 per cent coffee after it. The day ended for three-quarters of all people with a supper drink – tea (36 per cent), coffee (16 per cent), ‘health beverages’ (15 per cent), or milk (8 per cent).

To what extent these meal patterns have changed during the last thirty years is unknown in the absence of an updated ‘Crawford’ survey, which is now overdue. One recent piece of research by Kellogg’s into ‘Who eats breakfast’ suggests that an important change has taken place in the first meal of the day, however. An investigation in September and October 1976 covering 6,000 homes and 18,000 men, women, and children in all parts of the UK discovered that only 18 per cent of people ate a cooked breakfast: 40 per cent ate a cereal breakfast, twice the proportion of twenty years ago, and 25 per cent had bread, toast, or a roll, but neither cereal nor cooked dish. But perhaps the most surprising, and alarming, statistic in 1976 was that 17 per cent of the population, representing 9,000,000 people, had either nothing at all for breakfast, or only a drink. Not only had the cooked breakfast collapsed, but many people of all ages were going to work or to school ‘on an empty stomach’: they included half a million children under the age of twelve, a million teenagers, and seven-and-a-half million adults. No very convincing explanation of this change was offered. Working wives in a hurry to leave the house and reluctant to return to breakfast washing-up may be part of the answer, and it is known that children’s breakfast is prepared in one-fifth of cases by children themselves. Deliberate slimming may also be a factor, especially by younger adults among whom no breakfast is most common.

The chief cause for concern highlighted by the Breakfast Survey is, no doubt, for schoolchildren, 9 per cent of whom were fasting for up to eighteen hours – from tea one day until school lunch the next – a problem exacerbated by the cuts in the school meals and milk programmes. In the East End of London 20 per cent of 10–11-year-old boys and 30 per cent of girls were found to be regularly fasting for eighteen hours, and there was strong evidence that this was tending to loss of scholastic performance. The opinion of nutritionists is that breakfast should supply one-quarter of the body’s daily needs for energy and protein, and that children in particular cannot adapt successfully to the complete omission of the first meal of the day.²⁹ Anxieties about the health of schoolchildren were confirmed in the Black Report of 1980 on Inequalities in Health, which argued that under-nutrition existed in Britain, and would increase unless school meals and milk were now extended,³⁰ while a survey of the diets of people on low incomes carried out in 1984 found that 11.2 per cent had missed breakfast during the previous day, of which the highest proportion were young people on government schemes.³¹

In the absence of similar studies of the other meals of the day, we know much less about other possible changes. It must be the case, however, that for the midday meal the family is now much more dispersed than it was thirty years ago, and that lunch has lost much of its former primacy as the principal meal of the day. With longer journeys to work and the increased provision of works canteens to 35,000 in 1976, fewer men now return home for their midday meal: at the same time, the increase in the employment of married women has meant that fewer wives would be at home to prepare it anyway. Another principal change was the growth of the school meals service, first expanded during the war when 1,500,000 meals a day were provided and subsequently increased to cater for 6,000,000 pupils in 1973. The principle was established during the Second World War that the school dinner should provide at least 1,000 kilocalories and between 20 and 25 g of first-class protein: subsequently these requirements were redefined as 42 per cent of the child’s recommended protein and 33 per cent of its energy needs.

A major change occurred in 1980, however, when control over the form and content of school meals passed from central government to local education authorities, with each adopting its own charging and catering policies: the great majority have instituted some form of cafeteria service, by which it is not possible to control the nutritional value of the meal. In 1984, 51 per cent of pupils at public sector schools in the UK took school meals, while 18 per cent received free school meals. For ten-and eleven-year-old children there seems to have been some marginal reduction to around 30 per cent of daily energy intakes supplied by school meals,³² but a recent Which survey reports a marked trend towards healthier menus, with wholemeal quiches and pizzas, baked potatoes with fillings, cottage cheese, yoghurt, and fresh fruit replacing the traditional stew, over-cooked vegetables, and jam roly-poly.³³ The principal concern is for those older children eating out of school at cafes and take-aways and choosing meals low in many nutrients, especially iron.

These changes in the midday meal have had sequential effects on meals later in the day. The former pattern of an ‘afternoon tea’ of cakes, bread, and jam when children returned from school, followed by a later evening meal for parents and older children, has usually given way to a cooked family meal somewhere in time between the two. ‘Afternoon tea’ is now increasingly a meal restricted to the vanishing tea-shop, while the former importance of lunch as a family occasion has been transferred to the evening meal (‘tea’ or ‘supper’) where convenience foods come into their own. A new ‘Crawford’ survey would almost certainly reveal more cooking in the evening, more variety of dishes, and more catering for individual tastes particularly between adults and children. Ritual and conformism in family eating survive primarily at the Sunday lunch, but even this has lost some of its former pride of place: in a recent survey only 56 per cent of all housewives (and 66 per cent of those with children) rated it as the most important meal of the week, and many young housewives without children gave more importance to the weekday evening meal, Sunday being regarded as a day when they should be liberated from the kitchen.

One method of testing people’s food tastes is to ask them to describe the contents of their ideal meal. On four occasions now – 1947, 1962, 1967, and 1973 – Gallup Poll has conducted enquiries on behalf of the Daily Telegraph which have asked a representative cross-section of people throughout Britain ‘If expense were no object and you could have absolutely anything you wanted, what would you choose for a perfect meal?’ Surprisingly, perhaps, lobster, quail, venison, caviar, asparagus, and other time-honoured delicacies did not appear significantly in the replies; more surprisingly still, the choices did not change in fundamental respects between the lean times of 1947 and the affluent ones of 1973.

A quarter of a century of revolutionary social change and an unprecedented rise in the standard of living had apparently resulted only in the substitution of shrimps for sole, steak for chicken, and the addition of a brandy to conclude the meal. But below the surface, some more significant changes in taste are demonstrated. Oxtail soup, second choice in 1947, had fallen badly in popularity by 1973: shrimp and prawn cocktail, scarcely mentioned in 1947 and claiming only 2 per cent of adherents in 1962, topped the fish course in 1973 and was especially the choice of middle-aged, middle-class southerners: by 1973 steak had become the ‘luxury’ meat choice and chicken so commonplace as to be chosen by only 9 per cent. Significantly, in the latest survey 20 per cent did not mention potatoes as part of their perfect meal compared with only 5 per cent six years

Table 52 The perfect meal³⁴

1947	1973
Sherry	Sherry
Tomato soup	Tomato soup
Sole	Prawn or shrimp cocktail
Roast chicken	Steak
Roast potatoes,	Roast and/or chipped potatoes,
peas and sprouts	peas, sprouts, mushrooms
Red or white wine	Red or white wine
Trifle and cream	Trifle or apple pie and cream
Cheese and biscuits	Cheese and biscuits
Coffee	Coffee
	Liqueurs or brandy

earlier. Drinking before and with the meal had also changed notably. In 1947 one person in three chose a drink before the meal, now four in every five: at the earlier date only one in ten chose wine with the meal compared with half in 1973, while as the after-dinner drink coffee rose in popularity from 42 to 60 per cent. In these changes there appears to be some evidence of a demand for wider variety in food, possibly influenced by foreign travel, new marketing techniques, the growth of steak houses and ‘take-away’ restaurants, and certainly evidence of an increased taste for sherry, wine, and liqueurs. On the other hand, the fact that only 1 per cent chose turtle soup, 5 per cent roast duckling, 2 per cent crêpe suzette, and 2 per cent champagne suggests that the British eating public has not developed a taste for the more sophisticated delicacies of the past.

Unfortunately it is not recorded whether ‘the perfect meal’ was to be eaten at home or in a restaurant or hotel, but there has been a marked growth since the war in eating out in all forms, from the hamburger bar to the grand banquet in a City Livery Hall. But even at Grosvenor House, which can serve 1,500 guests, or at the Connaught Rooms where 700 fillet steaks can be grilled simultaneously, the three-course luncheon and four-course dinner are now general: only, it seems, at City functions and Jewish wedding receptions have anything approaching Victorian-sized meals survived, and even these have been somewhat curtailed in recent years. The rich, as we have seen, had been regular diners-out since Edwardian times: it is the growth of more modest eating outside the home by less wealthy salary-earners and wage-earners which is the more recent and interesting change.

In 1985 consumers’ expenditure on meals outside the home was £9,393 million or 4.4 per cent of total expenditure, the same fraction as in 1980 but greater than in 1975 when it stood at 4.1 per cent: this huge amount was almost a third as much as the £29,950 million spent on food in the home.³⁵ Some of this, of course, went towards school dinners, meals in works canteens, and so on, and was not ‘pleasure eating’ in the strict sense, but nevertheless the proliferation of snack bars, foreign restaurants, and food counters in public houses is evidence of a large expansion of catering and its extension to groups of people who before the war rarely took a meal outside the home. In a recent survey of leisure activities, going out for a meal or entertaining friends to a meal at home were rated as the most popular occupations after watching television. In 1985 on average each person ate 3.23 meals a week outside the home and not from the household supply (e.g. sandwiches): 1.69 were midday meals in which institutional canteens played a major part, but the remaining 1.54 meals a week more accurately represented ‘pleasure eating’.³⁶ A total of 130,000 catering establishments includes 61,000 public houses, 7,300 hotels, and 44,000 restaurants, cafés, and fish-and-chip shops.

English cooking has often been regarded as inferior to that of many European countries, due supposedly to our deficiency of creative imagination and lack of discernment. Professor John Fuller, Chairman of the National Catering Inquiry, has commented, ‘The British are not very dis-criminating. They’ll eat almost anything … they are often numb to taste through politeness. In many cases, “as good as mother’s cooking” really means “as bad as mother’s cooking”.’ But to turn the pages of The Good Food Guide, which lists memorable menus at several hundred restaurants, cafés, and pubs, all of which have been recommended by members, is to be made aware of the wealth and variety of good cooking to be found all over England at prices which compare favourably with many continental countries. Government control over meals in hotels and restaurants ended in 1950 and, combined with the gradual phasing-out of rationing, produced a revival of interest in cooking both in the home and in public places. Christopher Driver has pointed to two major influences on the regeneration of English gastronomy at this time – the founding of the Good Food Club by Raymond Postgate and the publication by Elizabeth David of A Book of Mediterranean Food, both in 1950.³⁷ ‘Bon Viveur’ could complain in 1953 that the days would never return when London was a gastronome’s paradise, and that comparisons between his own guide to restaurants and that written by Lt.-Col. Newnham-Davies in 1901 were ‘saddening’, but he proceeded to name the Celebrité, Quo Vadis, La Chatelaine, and many more where good table d’hote lunches could be had for around 4s and recherche dinners for well under £1.³⁸ Until recently, at least, the general standard of British catering was undoubtedly improving: in the last few years steeply rising costs of food and labour appear to have halted progress, and many modest and not-so-modest eating places where individual cooking was once found now increasingly rely on packaged portions thrown from the deep-freeze to the grill and the microwave. Bland, stereotyped meals, eatable but unexciting, are too often the result. Fresh vegetables and freshly roasted joints of meat, home-made soups, pies, and puddings are rapidly becoming the luxuries of the rich, while frozen ‘Aylesbury duckling’ and ‘escalope de veau’ are on the menu of every mock-Tudor suburban pull-in.

After a long period during which public houses dispensed only beer, spirits, and packets of crisps, many are now returning to their earlier function of selling solid food with the drink. Cold lunch counters and ‘meals in the basket’ have spread in public houses up and down the country, and the licensed trade is increasingly aware of the fact that people frequently like to eat with their drink. But the sale of alcohol naturally remains the chief function of the English pub, and in recent years both the consumption and the proportion of expenditure on intoxicating drink have been increasing. In 1985 we spent £15,783 million on alcohol, representing 7.3 per cent of consumers’ expenditure – half as much as household expenditure on food. Twenty years earlier, in 1965, alcohol took only 3.9 per cent of family expenditure.³⁹ Unlike food, the proportion of expenditure on alcohol rises with increasing income, but the upward trend in consumption in recent years after a long period of decline may be more a reflection of social factors than merely of an increase in purchasing power. Between 1960 and 1980 consumption of beer increased by 40 per cent to 270 pints a head a year, wine consumption grew by 250 per cent to 15 pints a head, and spirits by 135 per cent to 6 pints a head.⁴⁰ Since 1980 wine consumption has grown by a further 50 per cent and that of cider by almost as much. Teenage drinking and alcoholism have both emerged as serious socio-medical phenomena while the nutritional gain from alcohol consumption – 5.8 per cent of the average person’s energy requirement – is small. Despite these clear upward trends in certain categories of liquor consumption, however, England has remained predominantly a country which takes its alcohol in the diluted form of beer, though here too there have been interesting changes in taste towards ‘real ale’ (initiated in 1971) on the one hand, and lager on the other.

It is a common assertion that present-day food is less natural than it used to be, that it is frequently processed and ‘chemicalized’ out of recognition, sometimes with dangerous substances, that flavour has been sacrificed in order to give foods a longer ‘shelf-life’, and that the widespread use of chemical sprays for pest-control on growing crops and fruits adds dangerous and even poisonous substances to our food.

Dear housewives [wrote an advocate of the ‘natural school’ in the 1950s], do you know that there is hardly an honest food left to buy …? Nearly all the foods that go on to our table are so changed, so processed and chemicalized that all their original goodness is either removed or killed. They are bleached, dyed, dehydrated, frozen, synthetic, tinned, sulphured, pasteurized, iodized, refined, adulterated and too often unclean as well. It seems a wonder that we are alive at all.⁴¹

Earlier chapters of this book have shown that the food of the nineteenth century was often highly impure, and that deliberate adulteration was then a well-organized and dangerous commercial fraud. Occasional examples of gross adulteration may still be found today: it is not long since a Blackpool firm of rock manufacturers was fined £150 for using a bright pink colouring material, Rhodamine B, which, in sufficient quantity, might induce cancer. It was held to be no defence that a person would have to consume a hundred tons of the rock in order for the amount to be critical. But the problem of food quality and composition today is generally much more subtle than this. Few people are aware that the majority of meringues sold by confectioners are made, not of egg white, but of a cellulose material, that ‘orange’ drinks may be manufactured without oranges, that ‘dairy ice-cream’ must contain at least 5 per cent of fat but ‘ice-cream’ need not contain any, and that while ‘salmon spread’ has to contain 70 per cent of salmon, ‘salmon paste’ need only have 25 per cent. With the growth of food technology since the war and the rapid expansion of convenience foods, additives of various kinds have come to play a major part in British diet, as in that of all industrialized, urbanized societies, and it is claimed we would not be able to enjoy the present variety and ease-of-preparation of foods without them. Additives fall into five main groups – preservatives and antioxidants, emulsifiers and stabilizers, colouring agents, flavourings, and solvents and nutritive additives (either required by government or voluntarily added by manufacturers).⁴² All are subject to the general Food and Drugs Act, 1955, and, more particularly, to the recommendations of the Food Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food which specifies lists of permitted ingredients: in theory they must always satisfy the criteria that they are safe-in-use, never used with the intention of misleading the consumer, and not used in any greater quantity than is necessary to be effective.

No reasonable person can object in principle to the addition of some ‘chemicals’ to what is a chemical compound anyway, and housewives do it all the time in their cooking, but what legitimately concerns a number of experts is the ‘safe-in-use’ aspect. It is usually accepted that a substance is safe if it causes no detectable effects at a level of at least one hundred times the maximum amount likely to be added to food: commonly, therefore, the acceptable daily intake (ADI) for man is set at one-hundredth of the maximum no-adverse-effect level determined in the most sensitive mammalian lifespan studies.⁴³ This is no doubt a sensible, pragmatic approach which safeguards the great majority of the population, but leaves unprotected some specially sensitive people who have suffered from allergies such as bleeding into the skin after exposure to certain colouring agents, and others who have experienced headaches, dizziness, and nausea from monosodium glutamate, used to enhance flavour (the ‘Chinese Restaurant Syndrome’). Potentially more alarming is the fact that in the changing state of scientific knowledge opinions as to the possible toxic effects of substances can vary over time and between individual experts. The fact that a number of additives were permitted until recently in Britain, including agene (banned in 1955), cyclamates (banned 1969), brominated vegetable oils, and a range of colouring matters, cannot yet inspire total confidence about the safety of our foods.

Concern over additives has reached new levels in the last few years, partly because of accelerated growth in their use and partly because of disclosures which have had widespread publicity. It becomes difficult to believe that our diet is ‘purer than it has ever been’⁴⁴ when it has been estimated that 3,850 additives are now in use, costing £225 million a year, and adding 4 kg a year to each person’s ‘food’ intake.⁴⁵ The alternative view, expressed most forcibly by Caroline Walker and Geoffrey Cannon in a No. 1 bestseller, is that we are ‘all at risk from the typical British diet’:⁴⁶ to cite one example, the ingredients of ‘Soup in a Cup’ consist of:

Modified starch, dried glucose syrup, salt, flavour enhancers: monosodium glutamate, sodium 5-ribonucleotide: dextrose, vegetable fat, tomato powder, hydrolysed vegetable protein, yeast extract, dried oxtail, onion powder, spices, flavouring, colours: El50, El24, El02; caseinate, acidity regulator: E340; emulsifiers: E471, E472(b); antioxidant: E320.⁴⁷

Similarly, a ‘Raspberry Flavoured Trifle’ consisted of thirty-eight ingredients, including twenty-two additives, but no raspberries. Following the introduction of the Food Act, 1984, 314 additives have been approved for use, and further regulations in 1986 have begun to bring Britain closer to EEC standards by requiring manufacturers to list certain colourings, preservatives, and antioxidants:⁴⁸ at present, these cover around 300, perhaps one-tenth of those in regular use, and in any case there is much doubt as to whether the public understand the meaning of chemical terms or E numbers. Criticizing the inadequacy of the present law, and the composition of the Food Advisory Committee, which gives strong representation to food companies, Dr Erik Millstone has concluded that: ‘Additives are rarely necessary, hardly ever can we be certain that they are safe, and their presence frequently misleads consumers.’⁴⁹ However, the publicity given to the subject is clearly having an effect on some manufacturers. When Marks and Spencer removed colourings from their jams and canned peas in the early 1970s without informing their customers the immediate effect was to reduce sales by 50 per cent: in 1985 Birds Eye made a point of announcing that they would reduce their use of additives and altogether eliminate artificial colourings by 1986, apparently without any adverse sales effect on what is now a better informed and more discriminating public.⁵⁰

How well-fed are we today? On the evidence of the National Food Survey Reports which have been published each year since 1949, the nation as a whole is well-nourished, and the major improvements in the diets of the poorer classes which came with rationing during the Second World War have been maintained. Already in the Report for 1950 it was observed that the pre-war differences in levels of nutrient intake between the richest and the poorest groups had been greatly reduced – that, for example, the range for calories was now only 11 per cent compared with 40 per cent in 1936–7, for vitamin A 34 per cent compared with 81 per cent and for vitamin B₁ 9 per cent compared with 71 per cent.⁵¹ Rationing, and the related policies of subsidies, welfare foods and price controls had considerably narrowed the nutritional gap between the social classes which had so concerned John Boyd Orr and others in the 1930s. On the whole, these gains survived the period of de-rationing in the early 1950s, and in 1962 total protein was 10 per cent above pre-war levels and energy value 4 per cent above, having remained unchanged since 1954. The range between the highest and the lowest social classes, expressed as a percentage of the average intake, had, however, tended to widen in the case of some nutrients, thiamine, nicotinic acid, and vitamin C.⁵² Differences in the levels of consumption of foods continued to exist – there was still a steady decline in meat, milk, and fruit as income fell, and an increase in bread and potatoes – but it was possible for nutritionists to believe in the 1960s that as standards of living continued to rise the national diet would increasingly resemble the pattern set by the wealthiest socio-economic group.

The method commonly used for assessing the adequacy of the national diet is to compare the average intakes of nutrients with the amounts recommended for health by panels of medical experts (in Britain by the Department of Health and Social Security). Again, these comparisons show that through the 1960s the average consumer was generally well above the recommended allowances, especially since the data are derived from household consumption and do not take account of such things as alcoholic drink and sweets which would supplement the energy intakes.

A major change in this position dates from the mid-1970s, when a downturn in a number of nutrients became noticeable, and in 1976 average energy intake for the first time stood at 95 per cent of recommended value. This fall in energy value and, to a lesser extent in protein and iron, has accelerated in the last five years (Table 53), the energy value in 1985 being

Table 53 Energy value and nutrient content of domestic food consumption expressed as a percentage of recommended allowances (DHSS)⁵³

	1964	1969	1980	1985
Energy value	109	109	99	90
Total protein	126	126	129	119
Calcium	188	194	173	53
Iron	126	121	105	100
Thiamin	125	122	126	144
Riboflavin	128	130	139	127
Nicotinic acid equiv.	183	190	188	181
Vitamin C	176	181	200	179
Vitamin A	203	199	193	196

the lowest ever recorded. So far, the annual Reports of the Food Survey Committee have been relaxed about this change, pointing out that a more sedentary (and unemployed?) population needs less energy and that the deficit is compensated by meals and snacks eaten outside the home, and by sweets and alcoholic drinks. This may be so, but the fact that a joint MAFF/DHSS study has recently been initiated to assess the intake of nutrients by individuals and their relationship to indicators of health suggests that official circles are now aware of possible dangers.⁵⁴ Further concern arises from the fact that it has been known for some years that while the average diet may be satisfactory that of certain groups ‘at risk’ may not be. In particular, family size has emerged as one of the chief determinants of nutritional adequacy, and in families with two adults and four or more children (or children and adolescents) there are downward gradients for almost all nutrients. In 1976 such families were below the recommended levels for energy (91 per cent), iron (92 per cent), and vitamin D (70 per cent) and well below the national averages for protein (109 per cent) and vitamin C (138 per cent). By 1985 these levels had worsened considerably. Even in households with two adults and three children the energy value was only 78 per cent of that recommended and iron 83 per cent, while protein reached only 102 per cent compared with 117 in families with one child.⁵⁵

The optimism of the 1950s about general standards of well-being of the population has also been shaken by the re-emergence of a problem of poverty in Britain. The belief of many politicians and social scientists that the Welfare State had all but eradicated this scourge was first seriously questioned in 1965 by Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith who, using as an operational definition of poverty those living on less than 140 per cent of the basic National Assistance scale plus rent and/or other living costs, calculated that those in poverty had increased from 7.8 per cent of the population in 1953–4 to 14.2 per cent in 1960, representing 7 1/2 million people. The main causes of modern poverty, they believed, were low pay, particularly in public sector occupations, irregularity of work, old age, one-parent families, and above-average numbers of children, but since that time unemployment has reappeared as a principal constituent of the problem. The Child Poverty Action Group has recently produced statistics which suggest an alarming increase since that time. In 1983 they claim that 8,910,000 people were living on or below the Supplementary Benefit level (17 per cent of the population), and that 16,380,000 people (31 per cent of the population) were living in or on the margins of poverty, defined as 140 per cent of the Supplementary Benefit level or below: these numbers in 1983 included 3,490,000 unemployed. The effects on family income are illustrated by the fact that in 1987 a married couple with two children under eleven received on Supplementary Benefit £70.15 a week compared with the average expenditure of all households, excluding housing costs, of £166.60.⁵⁶ It should be noted that this is a relative definition of poverty, not the absolute one used by Rowntree and other earlier researchers, and many have questioned the validity of using the Supplementary Benefit scale as a poverty-line since it represents a moving target. Whatever the precise numbers of the poor there can now be little doubt that there are large groups in the population who are either in poverty or on the edge of it for whom marginal changes in income or a sudden crisis such as illness, death, or unemployment, can produce severe consequences. Evidence suggests that in such crises people tend to cut expenditure on food and drink rather than on fixed expenses such as rent, fuel, and hire-purchase payments.⁵⁷

Particular concern has been expressed recently about the nutritional status and general health of children in large families, partly because these families account for a very large proportion of all children in the country, and partly because they tend to be concentrated in lower income groups where the money available for food is least. David Piachaud calculates that the number of children on or below the Supplementary Benefit level doubled between 1973 and 1983, that 1 in 6 children now live in families dependent on SB, and that 1 in every 3 live in families in poverty or on the margin of it.⁵⁸ If the top and bottom income groups in the National Food Survey are compared, there is clear evidence that wealth still affects the dietary pattern importantly – the poor spend 36p per person per week on fruit and fruit products compared with £1.16 by the rich, 26p on cheese compared with 46p, 36p on fish compared with 69p and £1.04p on vegetables compared with £1.35p: on the other hand, they spend more on bread, eggs, sugar, and preserves.⁵⁹ As we have seen, the National Food Survey is a fairly blunt instrument of research which can identify vulnerable groups in the population but cannot follow the food to individuals, and in the present state of knowledge we cannot know whether malnutrition has reappeared in Britain on a serious scale.

Nor is it possible from official sources to know in detail how the recent depression has affected the dietary standards of individuals on low incomes. In an attempt to discover this, a pilot study was carried out in 1984 by the Food Policy Unit of Manchester Polytechnic into the food consumption of a thousand people on low incomes in the north of England: they consisted of young people on government schemes, the unemployed, the old on state pensions, and people living in large families: two-thirds of all were living on personal incomes of less than £50 a week.⁶⁰ The study concluded that the unemployed was the group most hardly hit: they spent only £7.59 a week on food compared with £12.30 by pensioners, and 35 per cent of them said that they did not have a main meal every day compared with 27 per cent of the whole sample. The traditional pattern of three meals a day was enjoyed by only 62.6 per cent of all, and 51.9 per cent of the unemployed. When money was short, spending went on bread (21.8 per cent of all ate wholemeal only), sandwiches, chips, beans, and fried foods, but fresh meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables were cut: as in former times, the best food was reserved for men and children. There is much here which parallels the poverty of the 1930s, modified by the technological changes which now make frozen chips, fish fingers, and hamburgers convenient and relatively cheap substitutes for traditional dishes: similarly, new forms of snack foods and ‘take-aways’ have reappeared as part of youth street culture, as they were in Victorian times. Yet the charges of extravagance and improvidence levelled by some politicians and well-meaning dieticians scarcely seem justified. National Food Survey Reports show that the poor generally buy their food efficiently, get-ting a third more energy and protein per penny and twice as much vitamin A and D than wealthy families.⁶¹

Despite anxieties about the state of the economy and the reappearance of mass unemployment, most people in Britain eat enough to satisfy physiological requirements, and compared with a country like Brazil where the intake of calories by the poorest quartile of the population is only one-third that of the richest, we are still an affluent society. But do we eat the right foods – has free choice during the last thirty years, constrained as it has been for some by financial considerations, improved or deteriorated the national diet and the national health? Optimists would point to the fact that vital statistics have significantly improved. Since 1951 the male expectation of life has risen from 66.2 years to 71.4, the female from 71.2 to 77.2, while infant mortality, often regarded as the most sensitive health indicator, stands at its lowest-ever point of 9.4 per thousand.⁶² Pessimists would argue that inequalities in health have actually widened over the last thirty years, that there is a ‘social class gradient’ in health which gives significantly better life chances to the better-off. A recent report claims, for instance, that manual workers have a 45 per cent higher risk of dying prematurely than non-manual workers, that babies born into social Class V (unskilled manual) are 59 per cent more likely to be stillborn or to die in their first year than those born into Class I (professional).⁶³ Further, the argument runs, such differences are due primarily to differences in diet rather than to environmental factors such as housing or working conditions. It has been suggested that possible reasons for higher mortality among those consuming ‘poor’ diets might include overweight due to the consumption of the wrong sort of calories, high sugar consumption and a lower intake of vitamins, and that heart disease and obesity may well have changed their social distribution since the 1950s. Simple assertions are best avoided in an area as complex as the relationship between diet and disease, yet there is good reason to believe that faulty diet is still a cause of much preventable ill-health – dental caries and diabetes due to heavy sugar consumption, coronary disease stimulated by high fat or sugar intake, and intestinal disease caused by lack of fibre in the diet are all urged by different authorities. Contemporary diet may not be best suited to contemporary living. As we have seen, the diet of many people in the past was predominantly a cereal one: with increasing affluence Britain, like other industrialized, urbanized societies, moved towards a ‘richer’ diet with more protein, fats, and sugar, and more ‘stress foods’ high in sucrose content. Anthropologically, a predominantly meat diet may have been the ‘natural’ food of man, but what was appropriate for a hunter may not suit the digestion of an office worker.

Until recently, the pessimists’ case was often dismissed as that of cranks, faddists, and ‘food Leninists’,⁶⁴ and most people contented themselves with the old adage that ‘a little of what you fancy does you good’. But opinion, both professional and lay, has changed much over the last decade, partly as a result of statistics which show alarming increases in diseases which many experts now accept to be diet-related (among men aged 50–54, 51 per cent of deaths were caused by circulatory diseases in 1984 compared with 29 per cent in 1951, and among women of the same age deaths from cancer increased from 34 to 53 per cent⁶⁵), partly because of the wide publicity which a series of official and semi-official reports have received. The case for change in the national diet began to mount from around 1974 when a pressure group, TACC (Technology Assessment Consumerism Centre), strongly attacked the nutritional value of the white loaf and the removal of fibre and micronutrients during milling. Shortly afterwards, an article in The Times appeared under the title, ‘Should Bread Carry a Government Health Warning?’.⁶⁶ In 1977 a Committee of the United States Senate chaired by George McGovern argued that the American diet had changed radically during the last fifty years ‘with great and very harm-ful effects on our health…. Too much fat, too much sugar or salt can be and are linked directly to heart disease, cancer, obesity and stroke, among other killer diseases.’⁶⁷ In Britain in 1979 the government set up the National Advisory Council on Nutrition Education (NACNE), while in 1981 another advisory body to the DHSS, COMA (Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy), recommended that ‘an increase in the cereal fibre content of the diet would be beneficial, and this could best be achieved by eating some bread baked from high extraction flour’.⁶⁸ By 1983 a draft of NACNE’s long-awaited Report was ready but, it has been alleged, its publication was blocked until Geoffrey Cannon obtained a copy and leaked the contents in a series of articles in the Sunday Times: the full Report was then published in September 1983 as that of ‘an ad hoc working party’.

The Report recommends long-term and short-term dietary goals for the whole population, not merely for groups ‘at risk’. In summary, the longterm goals are to reduce consumption of fats by one-quarter, that of saturated fats by half, of sugars by half, of salt by half, and of alcohol by one-third: the total quantity of protein need not change, but the proportion of vegetable protein should rise at the expense of animal protein, and the consumption of fibre in the form of cereals, fruit, and vegetables should increase by a half. It is recognized that these changes could not be achieved quickly, and interim goals achievable in the 1980s are set at one-third of the ultimate changes.⁶⁹

At present, when many people are confused about the controversy, there is need for more agreement among the experts and clearer guidelines to food manufacturers, doctors, and the general public. The need is now urgent both for reasons of health and economy. The era of cheap food from which Britain benefited in the past is no more, and the economic advantages of Britain’s membership of the European Community are still in doubt when hundreds of millions of pounds are annually paid merely to stock-pile ‘mountains’ and ‘lakes’ of surplus produce. Scarcity of basic foods is not a problem in Britain – indeed, it is now seriously proposed that British agriculture, regarded as one of the most efficient in the world, should reduce its output by 20 per cent while remaining subject to pricing policies which favour less efficient European farmers. The arguments for a sensible food production policy seem irresistible. So too, many would claim, are the arguments for a sensible nutritional policy as part of a new public health programme.

It should be stressed that the NACNE proposals have not been officially adopted, that some eminent doctors and nutritionists accept them only in part and with varying emphases, and that, at a practical level, their implementation as national policy would have enormous implications for agriculture, the food industries, and for government and EEC regulations. The case for change has been weakened by some exaggeration, over-dramatization, and dubious appeals to history, such as the assertion that ‘we are now, amazingly, as badly fed as we were fifty years ago. Indeed, in some important respects, we are actually worse off than before the Second World War.’⁷⁰ A Welsh doctor recently reconstructed the agricultural labourer’s diet of 1863 described by Edward Smith (see pp. 139–41 for examples) and fed it to mice, comparing the effects with those fed on a present-day diet: the former survived longer, whereas the latter developed high blood cholesterol and died younger. The doctor concluded that ‘People might well be advised to go back to the agricultural diet’, and that the 1863 diet had ‘greater life-span potential than that currently consumed in Wales’.⁷¹ In fact, the average expectation of life (of men, not mice) was then forty-one years, food adulteration with poisonous ingredients was widespread and uncontrolled, and it is doubtful whether the inhabitants even of the remoter parts of Wales would now stomach the labourer’s coarse diet of 1863.

History has a legitimate and important part to play in the study of diet. Over the century and a half reviewed in this book fundamental changes occurred in the sources of our food supplies, the manufacture and distribution of products, and the diets of both richer and poorer classes. Trends in consumption which had seemed firmly established in the past, like the massive increase in the use of sugar during the last hundred years and the more gradual rise in fats, have now been halted or reversed. Sometimes changes were compelled by economic constraints or by war, but more often they were due to the consumer’s increasing power to choose the foods he preferred. We did not usually choose foods because we believed they were good for us, but because, for a variety of complex reasons, we enjoyed them. There is perhaps now sufficient consensus among nutritionists as to what constitutes a healthy diet, and perhaps enough public awareness about diet-related diseases, for a new element to have entered into food choice. Food habits have changed much in the twenty years since the first edition of this book, are still changing, and will change further, but how influential the new considerations of health will be on future trends is not a question for history.

Notes

1 Halsey, A.H. (1987) ‘Social trends since World War II’, Social Trends (Central Statistical Office) 17, 11.

2 ibid., 12.

3 Birds Eye Report, Frozen Foods: A Review of the Market in 1986, 7; Social Trends, ibid., 111 (Table 6.15).

4 Birds Eye Annual Review (1976) ‘The kitchen revolution goes on’, 5.

5 Social Trends 17, op. cit., 14 (Table A2).

6 ibid., 108 (Table 6.11).

7 Household Food Consumption and Expenditure (1985), Annual Report of the National Food Survey Committee, 1987, 2.

8 Social Trends 17, op. cit., 108 (Table 6.11).

9 Household Food Consumption and Expenditure (1985), op. cit., 13 (Table 2.20).

10 ibid., 16 (Table 2.22).

11 For a good account of the food situation at this time see Christopher Driver (1985) The British at Table, 1940–1980, chap. 3.

12 Hollingsworth, Dorothy F. (1983) ‘Rationing and economic constraints on food consumption in Britain since the Second World War’, World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics 42, 194 (Table III).

13 Drummond, J. C. and Wilbraham, Anne (1957) The Englishman’s Food. A History of Five Centuries of English Diet, revised edn by Dorothy Hollings-worth, Appendix B, 468.

14 Buss, D.H. (1979) ‘The resilience of British household diets during the 1970s’, Journal of Human Nutrition 33, 49–50.

15 Household Food Consumption and Expenditure (1985), op. cit., 4.

16 Greaves, J. P. and Hollingsworth, Dorothy F. (1966) ‘Trends in food consumption in the United Kingdom’, World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics 6, 53.

17 Rose, Evelyn (1977) ‘Consumer aspect of beef marketing’, Journal of Consumer Studies and Home Economics 1 (2), June, 131 et seq.

18 Hollingsworth, op. cit., 207.

19 Birds Eye Annual Review (1977), 23. Data based on Taylor Nelson and Associates Family Food Panel.

20 Household Food Consumption and Expenditure (1985), op. cit., 40.

21 Birds Eye Report, Frozen Foods, op. cit., 4.

22 Miller, Sanford (1978) ‘The kinetics of nutritional status: diet, culture and economics’, in John Yudkin (ed.) Diet of Man: Needs and Wants, 191 et seq.

23 United Biscuits (1986) The Grocery and Biscuit Market and the 1986 Snack Food Review.

24 McKenzie, J. C. (1973) ‘Factors affecting demand for protein products’, in J. G. W. Jones (ed.) The Biological Efficiency of Protein Production.

25 Household Food Consumption and Expenditure (1985), op. cit., 13 (Table 2.20).

26 Driver, op. cit., 64.

27 Birds Eye Annual Review (1976), 3.

28 Warren, Geoffrey C. (1958) The Foods We Eat. A Survey of Meals, Their Content and Chronology by Season, Day of the Week, Class and Age, Conducted in Great Britain by the Market Division of W. S. Crawford Ltd.

29 Who Eats Breakfast. Breakfast Research Study Findings by John Birmingham, Director, British Market Research Bureau Ltd. Survey undertaken for The Kellogg Company of Great Britain Ltd, 1976.

30 The Commission chaired by Sir Douglas Black is reported in P. Townsend and N. Davidson (1982) Inequalities in Health, 182–3.

31 Lang, Tim, Andrews, Hazel, Bedale, Caroline, and Hannon, Ed (1984) Jam Tomorrow. A Report of the First Findings of a Pilot Study of the Food Circumstances, Attitudes and Consumption of 1, 000 People on Low Incomes in the North of England, Food Policy Unit, Manchester Polytechnic, 30.

32 Social Trends 17, op. cit., 59.

33 Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 3 September 1987, 13.

34 ‘Meals in the mind’, Daily Telegraph Magazine, 14 December 1973. Gallup Poll inquiries conducted on behalf of the Daily Telegraph: quoted by courtesy of Social Surveys (Gallup Poll) Ltd.

35 Household Food Consumption and Expenditure (1985), op. cit., 1.

36 ibid., 8.

37 Driver, op. cit., 49.

38 Daily Telegraph Book of Bon Viveur in London (c. 1953), XI.

39 HMSO (1966) Family Expenditure Survey Report for 1965, 26 (Table 1).

40 Driver, op. cit., 112.

41 Grant, Doris (1955) Dear Housewives, 21.

42 For example, when production of white flour was allowed in 1953 the government required the addition of vitamin B₁ nicotinic acid, iron, and calcium.

43 Why Additives? The Safety of Foods (1977), devised and edited by the British Nutrition Foundation, 53.

44 Johnston, James P. (1977) A Hundred Years of Eating, 67.

45 Millstone, Erik (1986) Food Additives. Taking the Lid Off What We Really Eat, 40.

46 Walker, Caroline and Cannon, Geoffrey (1985) The Food Scandal. What’s Wrong with the British Diet and How to Put it Right, XXXI.

47 ibid., XXVII.

48 Social Trends 17, op. cit., 110.

49 Millstone, op. cit., 12.

50 Birds Eye (1985) Frozen Foods Annual Report, 1.

51 Domestic Food Consumption and Expenditure, 1950, Report of the National Food Survey Committee (1952), 49.

52 Greaves and Hollingsworth, op. cit., 74 (Table XVIII).

53 For the years 1964 and 1969 Annual Report of the National Food Survey Committee for 1969 (1971), 114 (Table 34); for 1980 and 1985 Annual Report for 1985 (1987), 81 (Table 11).

54 Household Food Consumption and Expenditure (1985), op. cit., 47 and footnote (2).

55 ibid., 83 (Table 13).

56 Child Poverty Action Group (1986) Poverty: The Facts, 5–6.

57 McKenzie, J. C. (1974) ‘The impact of economic and social status on food choice’, Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 33, 67.

58 Piachaud, David (1986) Poor Children: A Tale of Two Decades, Child Poverty Action Group, 2–4.

59 Social Trends 17, op. cit., 109 (Table 6.12).

60 Jam Tomorrow, op. cit.

61 Hunt, Sandra (1985) ‘And the poor? They shall eat carrots…’, Poverty, Child Poverty Action Group, 60 (Spring).

62 Social Trends 17, op. cit., 115.

63 Poverty: The Facts, op. cit., 4.

64 Anderson, Digby (1985) ‘The men who march on our stomachs’, Spectator, 17 August.

65 Social Trends 17, op. cit., 116.

66 The Times, 10 January 1976.

67 Quoted in The Food Scandal, op. cit., XVI.

68 Report of Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy, 1981, 53.

69 The Food Scandal, op. cit., 34–7.

70 Cannon, Geoffrey and Walker, Caroline (1985) ‘Just how well do we eat?’, Wheel of Health, Part I, Observer Review, 27 January, 45.

71 Quoted in ibid., 46.