Diet and Health in Modern Britain

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.