Urban working‐class food consumption and nutrition in Britain in 1904

Abstract

This article re-examines the food consumption of working class households in 1904 and compares the nutritional content of these diets with modern measures of adequacy. We find a fairly steep gradient of nutritional attainment relative to economic class, with high levels of vitamin and mineral deficiency among the very poorest working households. We conclude that the average unskilled-headed working household was better fed and nourished than previously thought. When proper allowance is made for the likely consumption of alcohol, household energy intakes were significantly higher still. We investigate the likely impact of contemporary cultural food distribution norms and conclude on the basis of the very limited evidence available that women may have received, on average, about 80% of a man's share of the available food. We adjust energy requirements for likely higher physical activity rates and smaller stature and find that except among the poorest households, early twentieth century diets were sufficient to provide energy for reasonably physically demanding work. These results are consistent with recent attempts to relate the available anthropometric evidence to long-run trends in food consumption. We also find that the lower tail of the household nutrition distribution drops away very rapidly, so that few households are estimated to have suffered severe food shortages.JEL Classification: I14, I32, N34

How Many Calories? Food Availability in England and Wales in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

“…After taking account of the nutritional needs of an adult male engaged in 'heavy work', they argued that the amount of food available was insufficient to meet the needs of the whole population before circa 1850. The revised versions of both Estimates suggest that the amount of food may have started to exceed this threshold at a somewhat earlier date even though a substantial proportion of the population was likely to have remained at risk of nutritional inadequacy for much of the nineteenth century (see also Gazeley and Newell, 2014).…”

Nutrition, Crowding, and Disease Among Low‐income Households in Tokyo in 1930

“…On average, NSPD subsample households spent about 38% of their monthly income of food. This food expenditure share of income might be considered low compared to other historical working‐class populations (Gazeley and Newell, , ) and compared to Japanese estimates by Nakagawa (, pp. 393, 398).…”

“…These nutrients are divided into several categories such as principal foods, animal food products, and vegetable food products. We take the reported macronutrient figures to be reliable and do not make any adjustments for spoilage or wastage as in other studies of historical nutrition (Gazeley and Newell, , ) for several reasons. First, as described in the previous section, the quantities of foods were measured before calculating household food expenditure (Tokyo City Office, , p. 229).…”

“…The weights of Japanese men and women would also likely have been very low compared to other countries. For instance, if we compare the Japanese men in our sample to British men in 1905-09, around the time of the 1904 household budget survey studied by Gazeley and Newell (2015), British men joining the army aged over 25 were on average 168.9 cm tall and weighed 63.5 kg (Floud et al, 2011, p. 144). Using Ganpule et al's (2007) equation to compute a BMR for this group, the BMR of British men was 1,474 kcal per day, 7.8% higher than the Japanese BMR.…”

Review of periodical literature published in 2015

“…This is particularly true in the case of discussions of food consumption by poor and working‐class households. Papers by Gazeley and Newell, Logan, and Gazely et al. examine food consumption in working‐class households in the early twentieth century.…”