Teaching & Learning Guide for: The British Nutrition Transition and its Histories
Authors: Otter Chris 
Published: January 2013

This guide accompanies the following article: Chris Otter, ‘The British Nutrition Transition and its Histories‘, History Compass 10/11 (2012): pp. 812–825, [DOI]: 10.1111/hic3.12001

Author’s Introduction

In recent years, food has become an increasingly important object of study for British historians. This essay provides an overview of this literature. Britain, it shows, underwent a “nutrition transition” between around 1750 and 1950. This transition was multifaceted, but its key aspects were the increasing consumption of wheat, sugar, animal proteins, dairy products, potatoes, and tea. These foodstuffs were also, with the exception of milk and potatoes, drawn to an unprecedented extent from a world market. Britain’s food thus became inseparable from the development of neo‐European agrarian economies in Australasia, Argentina and North America. The history of British food, then, is an exemplary case study of the interconnection of British and world history. This essay explores several dimensions of the nutrition transition: the question of the standard of living; the political economy of food; war; and globalization.

Author Recommends

Several useful overviews of British food history exist. A good place to begin would be John Burnett’s classic work, Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day (London: Nelson, 1966). As its title indicates, Burnett’s focus is very much on the intertwined histories of diet and class. Despite being nearly 50 years old, Burnett’s work remains essential reading. His essentially socio‐economic approach, heavily reliant upon statistics, is furthered in the many works by Derek Oddy, for example From Plain Fare to Fusion Food: British Diet from the 1890s to the 1990s (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003).

The historiography of British food has also been highly sensitive to methodological shifts over the past two or three decades. For example, the cultural and imperial turns have been particularly evident. The landmark studies here are Stephen Mennell’s rich comparative study All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, 2nd edn. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996) and James Vernon’s sweeping Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). Mennell’s work is heavily indebted to Norbert Elias: he suggests deep sociological reasons for the divergence of English and French food culture. Vernon, meanwhile, demonstrates that the lived experience of hunger in Britain and its empire remained an integral dimension of inequality well into the 20th century. The gendered and bodily dimensions of the nutrition transition are developed in Ina Zweiniger‐Bargielowska’s recent Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Finally, methodologies from science studies, notably actor‐network theory, have been put to imaginative use in Peter Atkins’s Liquid Materialities: A History of Milk, Science and the Law (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

The connections between British history and world history have been explored by various writers. Sidney Mintz’s celebrated Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (London: Penguin, 1985) explores the co‐production of the West Indian plantation complex and the almost entirely modern taste for sugar in Britain. This exemplary work also demonstrates the advantages to be gained from the focus on a particular commodity. The dependence on imperial and global trading networks for food was a particularly British phenomenon, with palpable security risks. As Avner Offer has argued in his thought‐provoking The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), British strategy in World War One can be interpreted as a conscious attempt to maintain trading links with North America. Such a nutritional approach to warfare has recently been furthered by Lizzie Collingham in The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (New York: Penguin, 2012).

Online Materials

Blogs are a particularly good source for food history. These are generally less concerned with British food history than with food history and culture more generally. My favourites include Rachel Laudan’s food blog (http://www.rachellaudan.com/) which is endlessly fascinating and offers “A historian’s take on food and food politics,” and Ken Albala’s “food rant” (http://www.kenalbala.blogspot.com/), which is more oriented towards cooking. The Food Museum is another great site (http://www.foodmuseum.com/). Meanwhile, Lee Jackson’s Victorian London website (http://www.victorianlondon.org/) has a nice section on food and drink.

Sample Syllabus

This article could be used in numerous syllabi: British History and British Food History, for example, or the History of Globalization or History of Consumption. Here, I will show how it could be incorporated into a class on Food in World History. Food is a terrific way to teach world history, since it offers a cogent theme through which to link diverse times and places. It allows the simultaneous discussion of economic and cultural history.

This particular class emphasizes the development of world food systems since the early modern period, and the importance of transnational links and global markets. In this narrative, Britain’s role is extremely important: food is an excellent subject for linking British to world history. The article is used to demonstrate the salience of Britain in world food history, and many of the books and articles it discusses form the basis of weekly reading.

Week 1: Introduction and Contexts. The first week of this course establishes key themes and concepts, and sketches the narrative that the rest of the course will develop. Students will be expected to discuss their own diet: how is their food produced? Who makes it? How far has it travelled? Is it healthy or unhealthy (and what do these terms mean)? How much do they know about the contemporary food system? Do they make conscious choices about the foods they buy? They will be encouraged to think about how their diet has a history, one inseparable from globalization.

Weeks 2 and 3: Early Modern Food: a World Perspective (c 1450–1700). The second and third weeks will look at diets across the world during the early modern period. Particular focus will be given to European, East Asian and South American food systems, with “systems” being understood both materially and culturally. Readings for this part of the course will include excerpts from Ken Albala’s Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and E. N. Anderson’s The Food of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

Week 4: the Colombian Exchange. This week examines the period of the Colombian exchange, and concentrates on two key foodstuffs introduced into the European food supply: sugar and potatoes. In particular, it examines the formation of the plantation complex in Brazil and the West Indies and its connections to slavery and European empires (Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, British). It allows students to comprehend the hidden costs of foods that appear normal and natural, and to question the “naturalness” of something like sugar. Readings this week include extracts from Kenneth Kiple’s A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (London: Penguin, 1985).

Weeks 5 and 6: The Nutrition Transition: These 2 weeks explore the nutrition transition, i.e. the shift to a higher‐calorie diet consisting of large amounts of animal proteins, sugar, processed grains (especially wheat) and dairy products. It also invites discussion of the technology and economics of lengthening food chains. The transition is first explored in Europe, and then followed through the non‐western world in the 20th century. My article is used as a starting point, along with readings from other texts on the global nutrition transition and the history of the body, such as Benjamin Caballero and Barry Popkin (eds.), The Nutrition Transition: Diet and Disease in the Developing World, (London: Academic Press, 2002) and Roderick Floud et al. The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). These texts help to situate the nutrition transition in the global histories of health and development.

Week 7: The Formation of National Cuisines: The “national cuisines” which are familiar to us today were in many ways a product of globalization and the nutrition transition. They were sometimes developed by migrants, for example, while the globalization of food itself provided the opportunity for cultural attachment to a particular territory. This week addresses this phenomenon, by looking at four national cuisines: Chinese, French, Italian, and Mexican. Readings include Carol Helstosky, Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Italy (New York: Berg, 2004) and Jeffrey Pilcher, Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Week 8: Food Security and War. The extended food chains and complex food systems associated with the nutrition transition generated important issues of security. With an increasing amount of food entering the global marketplace, the issue of feeding populations during times of war became seriously problematic. Here, the focus is on the two world wars. Students read sections of Avner Offer’s The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) and Lizzie Collingham’s The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (New York: Penguin, 2012).

Week 9: Food Security and Famine. Dearth and famine were practically endemic in many parts of the pre‐modern world, but famine persists into the modern period. This week explores the changing history of famine by exploring three modern famines: the Irish famine, the el niño famines of the later 19th century, and the great Chinese famine (1958–1962). The key interpretation is provided by Amartya Sen’s Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), while historical context is provided by Cormac Ó Gráda’s Famine: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

Week 10: Agriculture, Development, Green Revolution. This week examines the history of 20th‐century agriculture, first through an exploration of changing farming techniques (irrigation, technology, synthetic fertilizers) and second through a study of selective breeding and GM crops. Particular attention is paid to the green revolution: the project to develop non‐western agriculture through the exportation of crops and techniques. This embeds the history of food and development within the broader history of global geopolitics. A series of extracts and articles are given to students, including chapters from Peter Atkins and Ian Bowler’s Food in Society: Economy, Culture, Geography (London: Arnold, 2001) and John Perkins’s Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat, Genes, and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Week 11: The Nutrition Transition and Health in the Twentieth and Early Twenty‐First Centuries. The transformation of the global diet has had multiple and contradictory effects on human health. One the one hand, the nutrition transition formed a central dimension of the improvements in life expectancy, morbidity and child mortality from the later 18th century onwards. At the same time, the persistence of inequality and the “pathologies of plenty” (obesity, cardiovascular disease and so on) suggest that the nutrition transition has produced complex and contradictory public health effects. These effects also have race and gender dimensions, with women, for example, often bearing the burden of food shortages in the developing world. This week explores both dimensions of the relation between the nutrition transition and the health transition. Readings will be drawn from Caballero and Popkin (op. cit.), along with Popkin’s The World is Fat: The Fads, Trends, Policies, and Products that are Fattening the Human Race (New York: Penguin, 2009) and Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman’s Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty (New York: Public Affairs, 2010).

Week 12: Food Crises in Modern World History. The world food system discussed throughout this course has had inherent tendencies towards crisis. This week examines three crises: the crisis of world overproduction in the 1930s, the energy crisis of the 1970s, and the food crisis of the early 21st century. It draws together the materials covered in the final weeks of the course and invites students to think of the causes and consequences of, and the possible solutions to, the crises which seem to be endemic to our food system. The bulk of the reading here will be contemporary articles from newspapers and journals.