The Rise of Obesity in Europe

A Twentieth Century Food History

Derek J. Oddy, Peter J. Atkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317017554
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Twentieth century Europe went through a dramatic transition from low income populations experiencing hunger and nutritionally inadequate diets, to the recent era of over-consumption and growing numbers of overweight and obese people. By examining the trends in food history from case studies across Europe, this book offers a historical context to explain how and why this transition has occurred and what we can learn in order to try and address the vitally important issues arising from obesity in contemporary Europe.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Derek J. Oddy and Peter J. Atkins

Obesity in Europe in the Twentieth Century

This book is a first attempt to write the history of obesity in Europe in the twentieth century. Hitherto, this has not been a topic calling for academic research by historians of food consumption, but the present wide-ranging collection of papers establishes a challenge for obesity to be studied as a key economic, social, cultural and physical phenomenon of the modern era. Until now, obesity has been the subject of a multitude of research papers, primarily written by medical scientists, and in the early years of the twenty-first century its extent has attracted categorization as an epidemic. The causes and treatment of obesity have acquired a level of general interest that has made it a topic included in newspapers on an almost daily basis. In the introduction to this collection of papers the editors seek to recognize the importance of obesity in Europe, to identify the chronology of change in body weight in the twentieth century and to establish the obesogenic factors that have contributed to the secular trend in excess bodyweight. Historians of food have laid great stress on the privation and under-consumption of the first half of the twentieth century. It has now become apparent that the focus of investigation must shift to the excessive consumption that has marked recent decades

A Dynamic Bodyweight Model for the Twentieth Century

The incidence of excess bodyweight in European populations shifted its location in the twentieth century. As living standards rose in the late nineteenth century, men’s eating patterns – emphasizing the importance of animal foods for their ‘strength-giving’ qualities – led to a rise in bodyweight with age as energy expenditure declined. By middle age, upper-class and middle-class men were ‘stout’ if not markedly overweight but were culturally defined as being in ‘good health’. For women, to be fat was to be petit bourgeois – upper-class culture favoured the suppression of appetite, whereas working-class women, putting their husbands’ and sons’ needs before those of their own and their daughters, had insufficient food to eat, which was best evidenced by their stunted growth and the incidence of anaemia. As urbanization became more extensive, anaemia, known as Chlorosis or ‘green sickness’, was widespread among young female servants, shop assistants and clerical workers by the end of the First World War.

From 1918 there was a marked change in the cultural, social and physical landscape of European society, which followed from the increasing mechanization of industrial production. After World War II, a more sedentary lifestyle developed from the 1960s onwards. Eating patterns changed least and slowest amongst the working classes so that once the severe economic fluctuations of the first half of the twentieth century became a thing of the past, working-class families began to exhibit weight gain as incomes rose and major variations in consumption were prevented by welfare provisions. While slimming fashions and the youth culture had their origins mainly in the interwar years, women’s weight increases reflected their rising incomes as greater workforce participation outside the home developed and as their eating patterns increased to match those of men – including, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, a greater consumption of alcohol. In short, men were fatter than women in the nineteenth century and women became fatter than men in the twentieth.

Much of the literature on obesity has addressed the individual behaviour of consumers. Our contention is that the explanation of trends is better sought at the scale of communities, classes, regions and even nations. The factors are cultural, social and economic; they are integral to our changing lifestyles and to structural changes in modern food systems and they are therefore exceptionally difficult for governments to influence. The present book has value in its desire to look at changes in food consumption patterns country by country. Historical publications using this scale of analysis are rare, although the work of Popkin, James and Monda on the recent ‘nutrition transition’ in China is along similar lines.1

Among the factors usually associated with the transition from undernutrition to obesity, four are worth highlighting from the outset. The first is that urbanization had a profound impact upon diets, particularly in countries that had not experienced much city growth or industrialization before 1900. Customary short-distance food supply chains were increasingly stretched, and migrants left behind their traditional fresh food subsistence. On average, less energy was expended in urban jobs than in agricultural labouring, so the nutritional profile was rather different, especially as sedentary employment in the tertiary and quaternary sectors came to dominate advanced economies. A related point about urbanization is that city design in the twentieth century has favoured the growth of obesity. This does not just mean cities designed for the motor car, such as Los Angeles, where walking to work or to the shops would seem to be an odd choice. All modern cities to a certain extent have in-built discouragements to exercise. There is now a growing literature on this phenomenon, which refers to the creation of ‘obesogenic environments’. These are neighbourhoods where one or more of the following features are present: poor perceptions of safety, especially due to street crime; poor walkability of streets (street connectivity, traffic, pavements, dog mess); poor access to upper floors of high-rise residential buildings; high density of fast-food restaurants; lack of public parks and playing fields; few gyms or sports clubs; local retail grocers emphasizing cheap, energy-dense foods in what are sometimes called ‘food deserts’; housing with inadequate facilities for the preparation, cooking and storage of perishable foods such as fruit and vegetables; low levels of social networking and support; and, most common, low disposable incomes.2

Third, there is an argument that combines demand and supply. On the one hand consumers’ standards of living rose steadily in the twentieth century, despite the temporary set backs of wars and economic slumps, to the point where purchasing sufficient food to satisfy hunger was possible for nearly all. On the other hand, the food-supply systems employed to meet this demand were fundamentally transformed. This not only meant a supermarket retail revolution, but also an increasing proportion of processed foods on sale and in the diet and, most significant for obesity, the availability of high-fat foods at affordable prices. The consequence has been a very powerful combination of deeper pockets and a cornucopia of quantity, quality and variety, which together has encouraged over-consumption.3 Given the difficulty in modern lifestyles of judging a balance between energy intake and exercise, it is hardly surprising that obesity has followed and continues to increase in all of the countries of Europe.

The fourth factor is a matter of knowledge exchange. This is complex and contradictory because modern media are replete with messages advertising fatty junk foods to children but, at the same time, selling slimming products and health foods. There is some helpful research on the history of food advertising and on the evolution of government food policies with regard to healthy diets, but there is less on the reception of such information and its impact upon the act of consumption.

Several recent publications have addressed the history of body weight. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska has looked at ‘the culture of the abdomen’ in the context of British concepts of manliness and racial fitness in the period 1900 to 1939 and Avner Offer attempted a cultural analysis of the rise of obesity in Britain and America since the 1950s.4 Their emphasis, and in the related literature, is often on individual bodies.5 Sander Gilman’s recent cultural history of obesity is pitched at the societal level but his book is short on historical detail and a comprehensive and conceptually rich treatment in this area is still awaited. Although the present book is a major step towards a road map of histories of the nutritional transition of Europe, there is tremendous potential for further research in this area.

European Food Consumption in the Twentieth Century

For the first time since its symposia began in Münster in 1989, the International Commission for Research into European Food History (ICREFH) has reduced the time span of its discussions to a single century. Earlier symposia assumed that, given the differing stages of economic development in Europe during the period of industrialization and urbanization, changes in the European diet must have occurred over two to two and a half centuries from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. The Tenth Symposium held in Oslo, in September 2007, faced a more limited time span by the nature of its theme. To focus on the process by which European countries had progressed from a general state of undernutrition to present-day society in which being overweight is quite widespread, and being obese is less uncommon than it was at any previous time, has occurred in a remarkably short period.

It has not been a steady, even progression. Two world wars not only destroyed liberal bourgeois society but also Europe’s economic prosperity. From 1918 to 1922 parts of Europe suffered from famines and deprivation that affected many populations and particularly the children in them. The work of Harriet Chick (1875–1977) in Vienna was most notable.6 Famines also marked the end of the Second World War, from the south-west Netherlands during the winter of 1944–5 in the west to Russia in the east.7 Recovery from undernutrition was signalled, in food terms, by a surge of compensatory eating – the fresswelle – as it was known in German-speaking central Europe. It can also be seen in Western Europe, as in the United Kingdom. Although this recovery became widespread in northern and Western Europe, political control of consumption east of the ‘Iron Curtain’ meant that progress remained uneven well into the last quarter of the twentieth century. When political control ended, the ensuing ‘catch-up’ phase, although compressed in time, had consumption targets in the West which were hurriedly emulated during the 1990s. These consumption patterns depended upon a trend which may be summarized as being one in which the domestic production, storage, preservation, preparation and cooking of food was replaced by an extended food chain, in which industrial production of food, its distribution, processing and retailing to the consumer required an increasingly complex number of steps. This limited the sale of raw food materials and replaced them with industrially prepared dishes and whole meals which required only the application of a brief heating stage – generally of only minutes – before being ready to eat. In the postwar years the development of food technology was initially applauded. Magnus Pyke, the eminent food technologist, who wrote the United Kingdom’s wartime Manual of Nutrition, likened the successes of food science and technology to a ‘social service’ entrusted to ‘keep the community alive and in tolerable health’.8 By the mid-twentieth century modern food technology meant processing food in a clean and frequently sterile environment, so that insanitary conditions, particularly with regard to animal products such as meat or milk, seemed to be a thing of the past. The Second World War placed considerable demands on food technology and its underlying science. The technical leadership of the United States meant that besides refrigeration and food-canning, dehydration could limit the cargo space required for foods to cross the North Atlantic. An essential characteristic of the postwar food production system was the increased use of energy at every stage in the process and the intensification of production methods required by the growing demand for food as world population numbers expanded. Although these technical advances were widely applauded, some aspects raised concern. During the late 1950s and 1960s there were rumours that food was being affected by chemicals such as antibiotics and that food additives, designed to enhance flavour and handling qualities, were causing problems. The German and Dutch margarine scare of the late 1950s and early 1960s led to the withdrawal of one brand and the payment of compensation.9 Other concerns were raised in the 1950s by the possibility that the use of plastic packaging for food might introduce toxins and also that food materials might be contaminated by radioactivity, in particular, the presence of strontium 90. This anxiety was present up to and including the fall out from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. The term ‘food scare’ has been more recently been extended to include nutritional concerns, for instance, general worries about fat content or specific worries such as the presence of trans-fats, and also disease pathogens. Examples of the latter include Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle and salmonella in eggs – discovered in 1986 and 1988 respectively. Some scholars believe that the modern trend of food scares is so significant that it is representative of what Ulrich Beck has called the ‘Risk Society’, a new version of modernity in which citizens are fearful and in which trust in scientists and politicians to solve these matters has evaporated.10

By the 1990s this industrialized food production system was not only widespread but also highly standardized since large food-processing business firms had attained a size and scale of operations that fitted them to be termed ‘multinational’ or ‘transnational’ corporations operating in a global market. This did not mean that by the end of the twentieth century a single cuisine or food culture had become dominant throughout the world or even throughout Europe, but it did mean that some branded products in the food and drinks market had achieved iconic status internationally and that a general cultural influence supporting this type of food market in Europe had developed. The strongest characteristic of this pressure on consumers was the Americanization of European society. Its influence was strongest in Northern and Western Europe and in industrial and urban social environments, but the cultural determinant of change was the English l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Iantroduction
• PART 1: TRENDS IN FOOD CONSUMPTION AND CONSUMER CHOICE
• PART 2: INDUSTRIAL AND COMMERCIAL INFLUENCES ON FOOD CONSUMPTION
• PART 3: SOCIAL AND MEDICAL INFLUENCES
• Index