ABSTRACT
The budgets of this period make it clear that bread formed the most important part of the diet of ordinary people. Indeed the taste for whiter bread had developed so far that it was often adulterated with alum to whiten it for popular consumption. Eden reported that in 1796, a season of very high prices for wheat, attempts had been made to introduce barley bread into Gloucestershire, but that labourers could not be persuaded to abandon their normal practice of purchasing the finest wheaten bread. The quality of the bread that is eaten by those who have meat, and perhaps porter and port, is of very little consequence indeed: but to the hardworking man, who nearly lives on it, the case is abundantly different. The interpretation of these disturbances as manifestations of general 'consumer consciousness' is borne out by considering how many of them were 'grocery' riots, concerned only with the price of grain, flour, bread, but also of foodstuffs.
