Diet and Health in Modern Britain

Derek J. Oddy, Derek S. Miller

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040380277
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1985, Diet and Health in Modern Britain examines the changes in diet and health in Britain during the rapid social development of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is particularly concerned with the ways in which the problems of urban life were ameliorated. How was infant and child mortality reduced? How did family life go on in conditions where income was low and sometimes intermittent, where protected water supplies and proper sanitation were not available, and where food preservation and food technology were still limited? How did the state devise diets for those in its care? What were the choices available for consumers?

The contributors to this book were historians and nutritionists and this gives a strong interdisciplinary flavour to the volume. Many of the problems encountered during British urban development were being experienced in the developing world at the time. The way in which Britain coped with the health hazards of late-nineteenth-century urban squalor had much to tell those concerned with similar problems in contemporary cities in the developing world. The book makes clear that life in Britain in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and life in the developing world at the time represented similar stages of the process of demographic transition.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Introduction
• 1. Science and practice in arable farming 1910–1950
• 2. The impact of modern food technology on nutrition in the twentieth century
• 3. The retail and wholesale meat trade 1880–1939
• 4. The demand for meat in England and Wales between the two World Wars
• 5. Changes in the brewing industry in the twentieth century
• 6. The production and marketing of fruit and vegetables 1850–1950
• 7. The nutritional importance of fruit and vegetables
• 8. Infant feeding, sanitation and diarrhoea in colliery communities 1880–1911
• 9. Feeding the hungry schoolchild in the first half of the twentieth century
• 10. Local prison diets 1835–1878
• 11. The public house reform movement
• 12. Rationing and economic constraints on food consumption since the Second World War
• 13. Man’s demand for energy
• 14. The cost of nutrients in the first half of the twentieth century
• 15. The founding fathers of the Nutrition Society
• Contributors