The pace of change in British eating seems to have increased at such a rate that you do not have to be very old to have experienced it. So think how much more dramatic is the contrast that older generations can remember from wartime rationing that did not finally end until 1954. Rationing was designed to ensure fair shares of the most wholesome diet possible for all, resulting in a period when it is claimed that the nutritional status of the British population was never better. Those who liked sugar in their tea had to go without, no bananas, 2 oz cheese per adult per week – but those enjoying brown bread remember ‘national flour... sort of grainy’.
Haven’t we lately become a country of fast food and takeaways? Aren’t there unprecedented numbers of women going out to work, relieved they can rely on microwave ovens and convenience foods? Aren’t we benefiting from being a newly multi-cultural society with people from elsewhere bringing their cooking styles and recipes with them?
This is the kind of question addressed by various ‘knowledge producers’. Business consultants and market researchers working for industry clients interested in their markets, aim to provide them with details of commercial trends. Based in universities, social anthropologists and sociologists aim to understand the social and cultural contexts of food, and are beginning to show how questions such as these tie together.
Tying these together goes back to the long social and economic transformation that is industrialisation. Progressively more food processing, preparation and cooking takes place in factories rather than the home – going the way of spinning and weaving, making candles and lighting fires – all depending on continuing developments in, and sophisticated new applications of, several sciences and engineering. Socially, the invention of the factory meant the separation of the home from the place of manufacturing, which, in turn, gave a meaning to the expression for women ‘going out to work’ and the idea of a housewife who did not.
A period of full employment in the 1960s entailed a steady increase in married women employed outside the home, and, later, an increase in mothers of young children doing likewise. Household incomes have risen, yet women continue to be responsible for organising the shopping and doing the cooking. The double burden of work inside and outside the home made a readily defined mass market for the sale of electrically powered kitchen technologies, sold in the name of labour saving to ‘busy wives and mothers’ and for frozen dinners, ready-prepared vegetables, cook-in sauces and more. It also created a market in which manufactured foods could aptly be re-named ‘convenience’ foods.
Industrialisation has brought its own versions of social inequalities. Despite the increased prosperity associated with these changing patterns, poverty persists, constraining the freedom to choose, and bringing disparities in diet between social groups. Long established debates continue to surface: are those on lowest incomes really too hard up to be able to afford a nutritionally well balanced diet, or are they simply bad at household budgeting and cooking? Fish’n'chips – a mainstay of nineteenth century working class diet – is a case in point, at the time attracting criticism on the grounds of questionable nutrition, dubious social acceptability and representing monotony in the diet. More enlightened medical and social appraisal of the period, however, led to approval of its economy in time and money, and its source of nutrients absent in, and providing relief from, the monotony of bread and dripping.
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