ABSTRACT
The social investigations of Booth and Rowntree which exposed the nature and extent of poverty 100 hundred years ago were, in part, about access to food and the way in which poor nutrition appeared to be the norm for large sections of the working class. There was growing concern from the beginning of the twentieth century about the consequences for our armed forces if the underfed babies and children of the time should grow into men who were unfit to serve in the armed forces. There were two main responses to the revelations on the extent of underfeeding and poor diet. Many argued that the income of working people needed to be increased to enable them to purchase enough food of the right quality, while there was another view that working-class families had enough income but they spent it on the wrong things, e.g. money which should have been spent on food was spent at the betting shop or the public house. Philanthropists devoted a considerable amount of time to instructing working-class women on the importance of budgeting and thrift, although this was a part of the working-class culture which had also created friendly societies and thrift clubs. Social reformers who believed in higher wages for working people might also subscribe to the view that more education was needed about the importance of a balanced diet and budgeting. In the interwar years, the nutritionist Sir John Boyd Orr exposed the deficiencies of many people’s diets in poor areas with the publication of Food, Health and Income in which he claimed that ‘a tenth of the population, including a fifth of all children, were chronically ill-nourished, while a half of the population suffered from sort of deficiency’ (Stevenson, 1984: 215). World War II led to increased wages and a reduction in unemployment which produced an improvement in diet. By the 1960s, Royston Lambert observed that the evidence of the National Food Survey demonstrated that ‘Family size and composition are now the principal determinants of nutritional status in our society. Small or childless families have made substantial nutritional gains in the decade but the diet of families with three or four children or with adolescents and children has shown no overall improvement and some notable falls in nutritional adequacy absolutely and relatively since 1950’ (Lambert, 1964: 45).
