ABSTRACT
Nutrition should be in the first rank of research themes on urbanization, firstly because most households had to spend most of their income on eating and drinking. Studies of the radical change in our food supplies in the context of urbanization, for a long time only fragmentary, have become more focused in the last decade in several European countries. This chapter shows the main results of this work, with an emphasis on the German-speaking areas of central Europe in the nineteenth century. The influences of urbanization on our daily fare can be explained by the pre-industrial food situation. The large expansion of the food products on sale in German cities towards the end of the nineteenth century was partly due to the enterprise of the emerging food industry, partly to new processing and manufacturing processes, and partly to the greater range of raw materials due to foreign imports. The chapter discusses the progress of the contemporary research literature.
