ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the relationship between feeding practices, infant health and mortality rates in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It provides insights into both twentieth-century developments within industrial production of infant foods and the relationship between industry and life-stage-specific nutritional perceptions and knowledge. The book investigates early-nineteenth-century Belgian medical perceptions of children’s diet before the breakthrough of nutritional science. It shows how boys entered children’s cookbooks in the 1970s, and it investigates how the books connected cooking to boys’ masculinity. The book examines the development of workplace canteens in Finland and as such deals with the more diffuse group of ‘working adults’. It also investigates changes in medical perceptions of old age within the fields of gerontology and geriatrics in twentieth-century Germany.
