Refashioning Nature: Food, Ecology and Culture

Refashioning Nature - Food, Ecology and Culture (Paperback)

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However, we still have only the vaguest, most impressionistic sense of how these experiences have shaped tastes and patterns of food consumption, and habits of food preparation in the home. However, although we know more about the food people consume, we know very little about changes in the tasks and responsibilities that govern the preparation of food, beyond the fact that they are largely in the hands of women. A central concern, it will be argued, is that of causation. To what extent have changes in the household, and in the role of women, influenced or helped to bring about wider changes in the food system?

By the same token we can ask: Clearly both processes are important and interrelated, but to approach the question through a crude theory of causation would be unhelpful. This would not have been possible without technological changes or, as we shall see in Chapter 3, an economic system based on increasingly intensive accumulation. As the purchasing power of most consumers has risen, so the transformation of food has engendered a transformation in work. Labour and food have long been commodities, but their interrelationship has changed over time, as the locus of consumption has moved further from the locus of production.

In place of simple cause and effect, we suggest a model with component parts each able to influence, and transform, one another. Rather than emphasize causative links between ideology, social roles and technical change, we suggest thinking in terms of a system. In a sense, our point of entry into this system could be through production the farm , consumption the household or processing the food industry.

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By considering the point of consumption first, we are simply placing the emphasis with the universal, biological necessity which food conveys, and which societiesshape: We return to consumption in the concluding chapter. The Industrial Revolution, and the development of a large, urban working class, marked the beginning of the process through which food, and the labour which went into producing it, became fully commoditized. At the same time, food was the single most important wage-good in the newly industrialized society, and food needed to be imported if enough of it could not be produced domestically.

It was essential to the development of manufacturing industry that food was acquired cheaply, just as the raw materials for the textile industry had to be acquired cheaply. At the level of macro political economy this process is discussed more fully in the next chapter. The food consumed by the household has increasingly, in the past half-century, become processed and prepared outside the home, in the food manufacturing sector, service industries and, through a growing sophistication in household food preparation, using new domestic technologies.

As we shall see in Chapter 2, the full elaboration of the food system involves important changes at the farm level, which in some respects parallels changes in food manufacturing and within urban households. By there were 1,, domestic servants, only 80, fewer than before the war, and the demand from the middle class for servants was increasing Dawes After the war, unemployment had risen again, and economic hardship had forced many former domestic servants back into service.

In , one in three girls between the ages of 15 and 20 was a domestic servant, and 28 per cent of the female servant population was less than 20 years old. It was argued at the time that domestic training was not only useful in servants to the middle classes, it was also essential in working-class wives Dawes This echoed the way in which, during the nineteenth century, the professions concerned with diet, as they became the preserve of women, were progressively marginalized from mainstream medicine Belasco The classic description of Marjorie Spring Rice captures the unremitting toil which women were forced to undertake.

It also serves as a benchmark from which to observe many of the changes introduced by the modern food system during the last half century: When once she is up there is no rest at all till after dinner. She is on her legs the whole time. She has to get her husband off to work, the children washed, dressed and fed and sent to school.

If she has a large family, even if she has only the average family…, four or five children, she lives…in a house extremely inadequately fitted for her needs. Her washing up will not only therefore be heavy, but it may have to be done under the worst conditions. She may have to go down or up two or three flights of stairs to get her water, and again to empty it away. She may have to heat it on the open fire, and she may have to be looking after the baby and toddler at the same time.

When this is done, she must clean the house. The schoolchildren will be back for their dinner soon after 12, so she must begin her cooking in good time. Great difficulties confront her here. She has not got more than one or two saucepans and a frying-pan, and so even if she is fortunate in having some proper sort of cooking stove, it is impossible to cook a dinner as it should be cooked, slowly and with the vegetables separately; hence the ubiquitous stew, with or without the remains of the Sunday meat according to the day of the week.

She has nowhere to store food, or if there is cupboard room, it is inevitably in the only living-room and probably next to the fireplace. This has the advantage of giving her and the baby a breath of fresh air during the morning; otherwise, unless there is a garden or yard, the baby, like herself, is penned up in the nine-foot-square kitchen during the whole morning.

Dinner may last from 12 till 3. Her husband or a child at work may have quite different hours from the schoolchildren, and it is quite usual to hear this comment. Very often she does not sit down herself to meals. The serving of five or six other people demands so much jumping up and down that she finds it easier to take her meals standing.

She does this after the children have returned to school. Sometimes the heat and stuffiness of the kitchen in which she has spent most or all of her morning takes her off her food, and she does not feel inclined to eat at all, or only a bite when the others have all finished and gone away. Then comes the same process of washing up, only a little more difficult because dinner is a greasier meal than breakfast.

After that, with luck at 2 or 2. Housework, including food-related work, was not simply tedious and repetitive for working-class women, it was also dirty, cramped and exhausting. Women performed the labour of buying, preparing and serving food, among other tasks. Food storage is better and the reorganization of food retailing and the widespread use of convenience foods have transformed the time allocated by women and men to provisioning for the family.

There can be few women, however, who would, if given the choice, opt for the full-time domestic work endured in a prewar working-class family trapped by poverty. This is the conventional view: The essence of food manufacture is that, by removing the burden of food preparation and cooking from the home to the factory, it allows more time for the pursuit of other more desirable activities. This has been an important factor in the liberation of women during the Twentieth Century, but it has also affected the lives of others, young and old alike, for whom the preparation of food represents an arduous task.

The combination of greater affluence and work commitments implies a desire to spend less time in shopping, preparing and washing-up meals, and enhances the demand for onestop shopping trips, labour saving kitchen appliances and food that is easily managed. There can be little doubt that for most women the advent of new household technologies has taken some of the burden out of housework, although as we shall see, this has not led men to share the burden that remains.

Changes in domestic food preparation, among other things, may have released women for more paid employment but they have not put paid to housework. Given their obligations to their job outside the home, it is obvious that women could not have undertaken the traditional tasks of food preparation and cooking in the home. In short, it was not an accident that the labour market for women, and food consumption habits both inside and outside the home, changed in the way they did.

The two processes are interconnected and interdependent. As manufacturing took over from cottage industry, women left the domestic handloom, and their labour was transferred to the mill: Women had always been involved in the family production of textiles. When textile production was removed to the factories, girls entered the factory workforce. But, even in that setting, they were seen as working for the household. Women still bear the responsibility for most food preparation and cooking in the home.

They also do most of the work involved in these activities. The focus then becomes not the household but the process through which unsocialized labour is transferred into the market: The abolition of household production often reduces disposable family incomes, as additional goods and services have to be purchased. However, it is not clear that there is what McDowell calls a reduction in disposable family incomes in this context. McDowell seems to be referring to the distinction between real and monetary income, where the former includes use values, as well as exchange values. The important corollary, of course which McDowell refers to , is that this process has an inexorable momentum of its own, as part of the drive within capitalism to provide, or invent, more and more goods for the mass market to consume.

Yeandle argues that whether or not these items are labour-saving, women believe them to be. In many cases they are considered essential items.

Whilst washing machines, vacuum cleaners and refrigerators were seen by most women as basic essentials which were required in every home, some of the less commonly held items were seen as aids to working mothers which they wanted, but were only able to afford because they were in paid employment. Yeandle is arguing that standards of household care assume more, rather than less, importance for women who are not fulltime housewives. Another perspective on the division of labour between the household and the formal economy is provided by writers like Pahl , Gershuny and Mingione , who seek to explain the variation that occurs in most societies around the production of use values for the household, and wage employment in the formal economy.

Mingione notes that the way households manage social reproduction is not mechanistically determined by capital, nor is it a function of some blind technological imperative. He cites as an example the fact that some households continue to process or grow food for selfconsumption, even when it is no longer attractive from a strictly economic point of view.

In similar vein, in the same volume of essays, Cornuel and Duriez show how the ownership of allotments in Northern France enabled families to provide vegetables for their own consumption, of superior quality to those available in the market place. Clearly there is considerable variation, and important cultural preferences, in determining how much effort is put into different household activities. Of key importance in the feminist literature has been the question of whether women exert more control over the technology they employ in the home than the technology they use in the factory.

However, Cockburn maintains, women are not in control of the technology in their homes either: Normally, women use utensils and implements—the dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, car. They do not use tools. The utensils and implements are, in their way, tools, of course, and they are used by women with skills making food, sewing clothes certainly equal to the male skills of their husbands. But women cannot fix these utensils and implements when they go wrong. This argument does not address the question which remains central to the development of the food system.

Women preparing the Sunday lunch may well be trapped within the patriarchal family, as Westwood Charles and Kerr are examples of sociologists who, in addressing the place of food within family life, barely consider the way food technologies have affected behaviour or the way family life is structured Charles and Kerr Bose poses the question, what is more liberating: This, manifestly, has not happened, although she also notes that women in the paid labour force spend an average of 3 to 4 hours a day less on housework than full-time housewives.

Bose does not attach much significance to this reduction in housework, placing her emphasis, instead, on the opportunities household appliances provide for women to foresake full-time housework for wage labour outside the home. She distinguishes after Hartmann between three major types of household technology: She quotes evidence from the United States that the time allocated to childcare, shopping and general household management has increased, while meal preparation time has decreased. Bose also reiterates the view that time saved by the use of white goods in the home has led to the purchase of more goods of this sort, rather than an expansion of leisure time.

Once initiated, the conversion to domestic technology seems to provide a momentum of its own, as consumers seek more sophisticated appliances, or increase their wage-earning time in an attempt to acquire more expensive durable consumer goods. It is clear that in recent years the acquisition of domestic technology has played a major role in redefining housework, and making the environment in which mainly women work more pleasant.

Since British homes have acquired washing machines 87 per cent , fridges 56 per cent , fridge-freezers 44 per cent , freezers 37 per cent and, most recently, microwave ovens 36 per cent during a period when homes with central heating rose from 13 per cent to 75 per cent, and home ownership from 45 per cent to 65 per cent see Jenkins and Tables 1. These appliances were major consumption items, absorbing significant amounts of household income and making the home environment more comfortable. The addition of refrigerators, freezers and microwave ovens also enabled food to be stored for longer, and for convenience foods to be used much more easily.

The proportion of fully fitted kitchens has increased to almost onethird of households, and kitchen extensions approach almost , a year Jenkins In , when the AGB home audit was established to measure the market for consumer durables, the extraordinary growth in their ownership was not predicted. Within the space of five years microwave ownership increased Table 1. Jenkins Table 1.

It is also clear that freezer volume and microwave ownership are linked see Table 1. White goods ownership can be seen as fulfilling essentially complementary functions, linked to saving time and increasing convenience. It is possible—even probable—that given the relatively wide dissemination of VCRs some households turned their attention to the time they could save to watch the video by investing in a microwave.

From a marketing standpoint, at least, it is worth emphasising that microwaves do not standardize food itself, they standardize food variety, opening up a market for microwave foods as varied as the market for microwaves. The very real sociological significance of white goods, especially in food consumption, although largely ignored by sociologists is well described in this passage, written by a market researcher: We have a device for de-stringing runner beans, which is perfectly designed for the job and worth its weight in gold.

First, it is clear that housework, especially food preparation, is lighter work than it was for most working-class women. Indeed, although food preparation in the home is still essentially boring work, it may be no more boring than the work undertaken by the working-class mothers and grandmothers of young women today. Second, it is difficult to maintain as Bose does that domestic food technology helps to confine women to a role in the home, when to acquire this technology women especially need to earn an outside income.

The development of white goods makes housework less onerous, although the boredom often induced fails to gain the understanding of men, and does not force them to share more household tasks. These are certainly strong points in the feminist case on housework. In our view the present situation is put succinctly by Meissner et al.

Paid work offers to married women the potential of at least some financial independence from their husbands but, at the same time, confirms their domestic dependency in the menial and subordinate character of their paid work. The larger contradiction, according to which employment demand and domestic requirements accumulate in their dependent labour, leaves no exit for wives.

The industrialization of food was already well advanced. Writing during wartime, George Darling recognized that the food trades have expanded from a business partnership between farmer, merchant and shopkeeper, which aimed at providing the simple means of sustaining life, into a large collection of related industries some of which are still concerned with satisfying our primary wants, but most of which are organized to produce and sell luxuries.

The coalition government had drafted the mandarins of the private food industry into government service, as Commodity Food Controllers, and from the onset of hostilities Lord Woolton was advised by, among others, thirteen managing directors and chairmen of public companies involved in food manufacturing, processing and retailing. The wartime objective, to produce more food at home and to ration food more fairly, was to have considerable importance for future relations between the food industry and the state.

It was to produce the conditions under which more women could work outside the home, in food preparation as well as war-related industries, and government gradually came to take some responsibility although grudgingly for improved standards of nutrition for the masses.

Wartime reorganization was also the key factor in encouraging more people to eat outside the home: There were over of them in London alone. At most of these restaurants a nutritionally adequate if not always appetizing meal could be bought very cheaply. Some of the restaurants also served meals on a self-service basis, something quite new to the British consumer.

In post-war Britain, workers increasingly ate their midday meals in the works canteen, an institution which was given impetus by wartime conditions. The expansion of outside catering answered the call of economic independence and consumer preference.

In many respects wartime conditions continued after the War, but the development of the restaurant, catering and food manufacturing industries really gained further impetus from the early years of enforced shortages. The post-war story built on wartime experience: Subsequently the need for ready-cooked meals was kept alive. Founded upon labour-intensive production techniques, the new service jobs necessitated the employment of a flexible reserve army of workers whose labour power could be utilized and shed according to the rate of labour-saving technological development in order to secure the fastest rate of capital accumulation.

Baxter and Raw For example, during this period the United Kingdom drew into the vortex of its developing service industries not just women from the domestic sphere—many of whom had worked outside the home for the first time during the war—but also men and women from the colonies. An example is that of Chinese catering. Chinese take-aways were the outcome of social and demographic changes during the s and s: The expansion of the food industry helped to make household names of many foreignowned companies, and these took advantage of a transfusion of labour from overseas. This labour came to be supplied by people displaced from the agricultural labour process in the colonies: This led to the swift demise of previous forms of rice production as a viable source of income throughout the New Territories and the hastened disintegration of the local economy, as pressure for industrial, commercial and housing land encroached into rural areas.

Chinese men began to leave the colony in larger numbers for the United Kingdom. Their forefathers had come to Britain as seamen; they came as personal contacts allowed, to work in the restaurant and catering industries. The falling profitability of family-run restaurants led Chinese immigrants towards smaller capital units operating on lower running costs. Today, employment in the food industries accounts for many more people than employment in agriculture, forestry and fishing combined see Table 1.

Another quarter of a million people worked in food distribution, half a million more in food retailing, and finally over a million additional workers in hotel and catering. A total of 2. The technological transformations behind these changes are examined in Chapter 3.

Employment Gazette, and the Department of Employment, see Covey Among parttime workers, not surprisingly, women predominated; women outnumber men by three to one in the food industry as a whole, while in some sectors, like food retailing and the hotel and catering industry, the vast majority of workers are female see Table 1. A recent survey by the largest trade union in the industry, the General, Municipal and Boilerworkers GMB , revealed that there is considerable bias against women in labour agreements throughout the food industry. The research showed that pay differentials between men and women within the industry were explained by two factors: First, there has been an increase in parttime employment.

In 64 per cent of workers in the industry were full-time, but by this figure had fallen to 59 per cent. Second, employment in farming and food manufacturing had fallen, by , from 37 to 31 per cent, but catering and retail employment had actually increased. Technological innovations have enabled food retailers to gear their employment practices to the peaks and troughs in customer buying, through mechanisms like Electronic Point of Sale EPOS which has computerized stock accounting for major retail chains.

Similar technological changes in fastfood retailing have also led to more part-time workers on very short shifts and work contracts. In a survey by the National Economic Development Office NEDO found that 94 per cent of food and drink manufacturers were seeking to increase the flexibility of their workforce; the trend towards using women on a short-term basis, to supplement full-time male workers, and to facilitate the introduction of new technology, is clearly set to continue. The data in Table 1.

Since the s it is retailing, rather than food manufacture, that has been the dominant influence in the food system. As we have seen, women have been drawn into the wage-labour force through a process of restructuring which is linked with changes in food consumption. These changes in consumption are linked, in turn, to a shift from the production of use values in the home to the production of exchange values outside the home. As the importance of the consumer has increased, so the food industry has concentrated its efforts to maximize profits in the sectors of the industry which show most growth potential.

Food products have become part of wider marketing and advertising strategies, pursued in the face of a declining share of family consumption of food.

These trends have occurred at a time of growing capital concentration in the food industry. These food products are also, as Lang and Wiggins show, composed of a narrower range of primary agricultural products, notably wheat, rice and soya. In countries like Brazil and Thailand increased monocultivation of land is linked, albeit indirectly, to changes in food consumption practices in the United Kingdom and other industrialized countries. Monocultivation is an element in the ecological crisis afflicting developed and developing countries alike.

We find evidence from changes in food manufacturing, then, of fundamental shifts in the labour process of developed countries, of important changes in food consumption and diet in these countries, and, finally, of major changes in land use and trade on the part of developing countries, whose patterns of food consumption and ecological systems are also subject to transformation. Agricultural labourers in Kent spent nearly 70 per cent of their wages on food and drink in the early nineteenth century Richardson During the decade to the percentage most households spent on food was probably slightly more than 60 per cent.

By it was only It is interesting to note, however, that where women control the intra-household economy, a higher proportion of household income is spent on food Pahl As food came to make up a smaller part of household expenditure, processed food became more important. According to Frank and Wheelock , processed food represented over 70 per cent of household food expenditure by Before the Second World War most of the food consumed had been imported into the United Kingdom; by most of it was home-produced.

Even at the outbreak of the Second World War, Britain was still importing 87 per cent of its cereals, 73 per cent of sugar, 69 per cent of cheese, 51 per cent of meat and bacon, 39 per cent of eggs, 25 per cent of vegetables and 92 per cent of all fats. In the s and s many forms of processed food— especially canned foods—were largely imported. Domestic canning increased in importance during the s, but even in , before the outbreak of war, 70 per cent of the canned food consumed in the United Kingdom was imported. The food people consume has not only changed as a proportion of their total expenditure as the standard of living has improved, it has also changed in content.

The farm labourer with whom Howard Newby lived in Suffolk in the early s consumed an insignificant amount of the food his labour had been used to produce, but he possessed a deep freeze. A deep freeze was a necessity, forced on such workers by changes in retailing and, more indirectly, by the specialization of most farm production itself. Before , food consumption surveys show that not only was a very high proportion of disposable income spent on food, much of it was spent on meat, which was much more expensive than it is today, in real terms. Among the poorest families, over one-third of food expenditure was on meat, although quantities of meat consumed were usually pitifully small.

Meat was used to flavour an extraordinarily boring diet, which consisted of a few components, mainly carbohydrates and fats. Bread and potatoes were the staples, supplemented by some animal fat and sugar or treacle. Women and children ate much less meat than men; urban workingclass families ate fresh vegetables and fruit on the rarest of occasions Oddy According to Margaret Reeves, the weekly menu of a workingclass family, with the man in employment, was seriously inadequate in nutritional terms: The intermediate dinners will ring the changes on cold neck, suet pudding, perhaps fried fish or cheap sausages, and rice or potatoes.

Children passed the day tugging on a piece of bread, spread with dripping or a scraping of jam. The advantage of bread for feeding children was that it could be eaten without a plate or fork. Much sentimental reflection surrounds family mealtimes in popular mythology, but for most urban working-class families mealtimes were not the popular feasts they are sometimes depicted as being Rowntree What we do not see is that in order to give him enough food, mother and children habitually go short, for the mother knows that all depends on the wages of the husband.

As more women have entered the paid labour force so women and children have tended to become better nourished also a trend observed in the Third World today. In , when most British food was still imported, and food made up a sizeable proportion of total household expenditure, over a quarter of the British population was offically judged malnourished. Sir John Orr estimated at the time that almost half the population spent less than ten shillings per week on food, and only 13 million of a total population of 46 million spent enough money on food to obtain an adequate diet.

In another survey, conducted in , over half the families with four children or more lived below the poverty line Darling One way of measuring the effect of changes in the real price of food is to consider how long it takes for a household to work to gain specific food items. Comparable figures for other items show the same trend: In addition, this trend held for single-income households too, although not to as marked an extent Halsey Many other important items of household expenditure, such as electricity, petrol, coal, car licence and cinema admission, needed increased work-time by The same report shows that, as expected, low-income families allocate more of their income to food: Food also lost its importance within family budgets in other European countries, such as West Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy, during the s Gershuny This increased dependence on food that could be stored, in an earlier period canned rather than frozen, was the summation of longer-term trends, through which processed food had entered the popular diet.

As we have seen, the diet of most urban, working-class families was an impoverished one in the first decades of this century. What effect did changes in the food industry, and employment in the economy as a whole, have on this pattern? Two examples of food commodities of this type are biscuits and breakfast cereals. Biscuits had originally been consumed largely by sailors: Biscuits were a rather dull but necessary part of the diet of servicemen including soldiers after the Boer War at the end of the century.

But by the s, Huntley and Palmer possessed twenty factories, and with the development of multiple grocers in the s and s—such as Lipton, Home and Colonial and the Co-operatives—biscuits soon became part of middle-class eating habits Corley The growth of demand for biscuits paralleled that for tea and sugar, which increased fivefold between and Products like biscuits and cakes were almost unknown to the working-class diet until after the Second World War, but they had entered mass consumption much earlier, and even influenced the time of day when the middle classes took their meals.

Changes in cereal consumption, similarly, spread down the social pyramid after they had first been tested, and approved, by the middle class. Packeted breakfast cereals were very much a marketing innovation of the early part of the century, but they did not reach the mass market in the United Kingdom until after the Second World War. In fact, cereal consumption in was almost twice that of today, at lbs per capita, but whereas most cereal was consumed as porridge at the turn of the century, the advent of packaged breakfast cereals changed the form in which they were consumed Collins Surveys of eating habits show that readycooked cereals, rather than cooked breakfasts, became progressively more important in the late s, s and s.

This was also a period in which the ownership of the breakfast cereal part of the industry was concentrated in fewer hands Belasco In fact, bread consumption continued to be buoyant throughout this century, but most families continued to buy the white wheaten loaf, rather than wholemeal or brown bread. The white loaf, which had accounted for 95 per cent of bread consumption in , still accounted for over 80 per cent of bread consumed, by weight, in The major innovation, at the time of breakfast cereal expansion, was the introduction of presliced bread.

Another food item which has played a major part in the processing industry this century, as well as in the popular diet, is refined sugar. The consumption of refined sugar increased from 50 Ibs per capita in to over Ibs in , most of this increased consumption occurring before the First World War. An important factor in the increased consumption of sugar was the decline in its price; after sugar beet became widely available early this century, the real price of sugar declined dramatically, compared with other food items, like cheese, butter, eggs and honey.

According to Johnstone , by over half the sugar consumed in the United Kingdom was used by the food manufacturing and processing industries, mainly in the form of soft drinks, cakes and confectionery. Perhaps one of the most indicative items in the working-class diet, and an interesting barometer of wider social mores, is tea. The per capita consumption of tea doubled between and , leaving other drinks like chocolate and coffee far behind. It has sometimes been suggested that this phenomenal increase in tea consumption was linked to the activities of the temperance movement in Britain in the late nineteenth century.

Whether or not more tea was consumed because of temperance activity remains obscure, but it is clear that, at least for a couple of decades, increased tea consumption closely paralleled the decline in alcohol consumption per head of population. The pattern of the new mass retailing was integral with tea-selling, but had been set slightly earlier with other commodities, particularly ham and bacon. The characteristics were the same: It has been argued, and quite convincingly, that before the First World War the rate of growth of food technology probably restricted the introduction of new forms of food.

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As Oddy makes clear, the technological application of the new science of bacteriology together with changes in refrigeration, began to affect baking, meat, fish preservation and dairy produce during the decade up to Recent, and emerging, trends are important in this respect. At that time, processed food was estimated to account for 68 per cent of household food expenditure.

Today, processed food accounts for an even larger share of food expenditure: The potential offered by sophisticated food processing has still not been achieved. A product like sugar, which might be expected to be adversely affected by rising incomes, has been transformed into so many products, that its presence is barely recognizable Heasman Although per capita demand for sugar has risen most quickly in the developing world, in the industrialized countries, too, sugar has retained an important position in the diet.

Increasing product differentiation has been allied to continuing concentration among food companies. This oligopolistic control of the food market is most pronounced in food products with the least nutritional value, such as chewing gum, sweets, biscuits, cereals, cake mixes and carbonated soft drinks, all of which, of course, require sugar as a major component.

Food products can be developed, then, to counteract, at least in part, changes in modern diets, or to develop new tastes for foods which call on traditional ingredients like sugar. International comparisons of current food consumption also suggest a growing similarity in dietary patterns Frank and Wheelock In most developed countries the consumption of dairy products, meat, eggs and sugar has increased, at least initially.

There is also an increase in the proportion of fat and simple sugars in the diet. At the same time the consumption of potatoes and cereals has decreased; a marked decline in the proportion of dietary fibre has been observed in all developed countries. In the United States changes in food consumption have followed changes in the labour market. In most of Europe, too, married women now constitute a significant proportion of the total labour force. As we have seen, families with two adults working outside the home have less time to dedicate to preparing meals, but they also possess the means to acquiring relatively expensive animal products, high-value processed foods and they tend to eat out more frequently.

If we look at changes in food consumption in the United States it gives us some indication of the way diets in Europe are likely to change in the next decade or so, and many of the changes are already pronounced. In the period from —3 to —3 high-value products showed significantly increased consumption in the United States: Some fresh products avocados, pineapples, nectarines were also major beneficiaries of changes in diet.

Most interestingly, meat consumption dropped dramatically, especially lamb and veal, although chicken consumption increased by 76 per cent in the twenty-year period Frank and Wheelock This trend has implications for marketing strategies within the modern food system, but also for other behavioural changes, at the individual and household levels, such as patterns of work, recreation and public attitudes to what are perceived by some as Green issues.

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These are discussed more fully in the final chapter. In Britain the changes in food consumption have been no less pronounced, and broadly reflect those for the industrialized countries as a whole. For the period from to the average real weekly earnings, the purchasing power, of adult male manual workers almost doubled Burnett Among other things, this brought an increase in home ownership, and expenditure on the home increased dramatically.

In , nine out of ten households had a television and a refrigerator, eight out of ten a washing-machine, and seven out of ten had central heating. Not surprisingly, major shifts in food consumption reflect changes in household composition, and British social structure exhibits some interesting features in the late s.

At the same time, one-person households now account for 24 per cent, and two-person households for 30 per cent of total households. Large families that is with four or more children have almost disappeared 1. With changes in family composition eating habits have changed, and food consumption now reflects specialized tastes and needs, or the catering needs of small groups. The microwave is particularly important for shift workers: In terms of food expenditure, household size is now a more important factor even than social class.

The differences in food consumption are much more marked if we look at the size of the household. In addition, it is clear that popular diet has been transformed by more exposure to foreign foods: The increase in the consumption of pasta was per cent between and British people have also been exposed to the foods made and prepared by immigrants, such as Indian curries, which have so enriched what many see as the traditionally bland British diet.

Between and increased expenditure on convenience foods was almost double that for food as a whole Burnett Changes in food consumption are, in turn, connected with changes in food retailing, an area like food consumption, in which convenience has played a major part in shaping current practices. The earlier description of a s housewife shopping on a daily basis for food supplies, with which this chapter began, bears little resemblance to food shopping habits today.

Changing attitudes towards the use of time have led to an emphasis on convenient shopping, as much as convenience foods. People today make fewer shopping trips and visit fewer locations to shop. Higher income consumers, who are geographically mobile, are prepared to travel some distance to their preferred retail outlets, while less mobile, poorer consumers are confined to shopping locally, where food prices are relatively high.

The market share of large supermarkets and hypermarkets has, not surprisingly, grown in recent years: The degree of concentration that exists in food retailing see Table 1. These trends are explored in the concluding chapter, as evidence of changes in consumer consciousness, linked, among Table 1. This section has examined the long-term trends in food consumption in Britain against the background of other industrialized countries. We have indicated that food products, and with them eating habits, reflect rapidly changing social patterns: These trends, and others, have assisted the full development of the food system, by enabling women to find work especially in the food processing industries and by allowing families to increase, and diversify, their pattern of consumer expenditure, providing a rapidly enlarged market for white goods, and other expensive durable goods.

As we shall see in Chapter 3, the move from extensive to intensive accumulation within modern capitalist society has depended on two factors above all else: This integration does not necessarily imply wider ownership of capital, but it does imply a series of production incentives, and consumer promotion strategies geared to increasing or defending profitability.

Some of the difficulties that have accompanied these structural, market-based transformations, notably their impact on the natural environment, are discussed in Chapter 5. More and more household tasks—the tasks of servants in nineteenth-century middle-class households—have been handed over to outside specialists. This process, which reached deep into the social fabric of British and other industrialized societies, mirrors the wider process through which industry has appropriated the domestic labour process.

In being commoditized, domestic labour was converted into an arena for accumulation. The development of new patterns of leisure and work, together with new patterns of food consumption, have proved crucial for the full development of the food system. These social patterns have brought with them important ideological dimensions, a point to which we shall return in Chapter 7.

They should also lead us to reflect on the fact that the developing food system cannot be defined simply in terms of technological and economic restructuring. Ideology is a potent force within the food system today, as we have seen, but the ideological component of changes in diet and the domestic division of labour has received little attention from sociologists. As labour has been transferred from the home and become a commodity, food has been commoditized with it, and the transformation of use values into exchange values has come about through major shifts at the ideological level, as well as in economic terms.

The majority of women routinely use food that has been processed and prepared outside the home, in conjunction with an everincreasing number of devices from refrigerators to dishwashers to microwaves which have transformed the nature of housework. In the next chapter we shall examine the contribution of farming to the development of the modern food system.

For the moment it is important to register that the food system developed around structurally compatible processes, changes in technology and changes in the labour market, and that these processes were neither confined to the home nor the factory, but spanned both. The redeployment of labour—and technology— as the food system developed, was not the result of technological imperatives alone, nor was it entirely socially determined. The next chapter takes up the argument from the point of original production, the farm household rather than the urban consumer.

We have seen that many of the tasks traditionally performed by women within the urban household have become more specialized and differentiated within the modern food industry. The picture that emerges in the following chapter is a rather different process; the farm family has survived by using the domestic unit, the household, to accommodate to external specialization in crops, technology and capital. The only serious threat to this legitimacy is currently being posed by the damage modern farming practices do to the environment and, as we shall see in Chapter 6, the rising consciousness of environmental issues is attributable, among other things, to the loss of sustainability on the farm.

Again, the components of the system need to be viewed as a whole if their wider significance is to be appreciated. To appreciate the full impact of mass consumption we need to consider the roles of women within the family and the wider economy. This requires an appreciation of the changing role of women in the light of new food technology, especially in the food processing, marketing and retailing sectors. For the moment our attention is directed to the point of production: This chapter examines the effects of greater integration in the food system at the point of food production: In this chapter we examine these changes, initially in terms of their demography, but also in terms of the ideological convictions and issues to which urbanization gave rise.

Following the move from the land, British agriculture entered a prolonged crisis, when land was neglected and no easy solutions to the farm crisis were evident. At the same time, and partly because of depressed prices and earnings, freehold ownership of farms increased. Since the last war the agricultural sector has experienced a decline in numbers, but also a revival of confidence; as a result it has come to be associated with continuity in post-Second World War society.

An examination of the labour process on family farms takes us into a discussion of the capacity of family holdings to accomodate to technological change, enabling farmers as a group to acquire greater political weight, but at the same time leading to important changes in agricultural husbandry. At the same time, through the increased dependence of farmers on external suppliers, economic linkages have been developed with product and input markets which serve to weaken the entrepreneurial control of the farmer.

The transformation of family farming and the acquisition of freehold ownership have also been the means through which capital has entered the agricultural sector, without leaving most producers landless. This process of capitalization is, in turn, linked to the role of the state in regulating the terms under which agricultural production takes place, particularly the markets for farm products an issue taken up in more depth in Chapters 3 and 6.

This chapter is primarily concerned with the farm household and the social milieux that have accompanied these changes in agriculture. For most of them it is essentially an arena of consumption rather than production. At the same time, behind the resonance of the English countryside lies a reality of rural social deprivation, a picture which has been obscured, just as the vision of the countryside has been distorted, to reflect the ascendancy of new class interests. Environmental concerns have also become one of the ingredients of the new countryside, but, as we shall see in Chapter 6, farming as an activity is seldom practised in an environmentally sustainable way.

The implications of these changes are taken up later. Here the focus is family farming and rural society, both of which have claimed greater ideological importance at precisely the historical moment which marks their transformation. One approach, that taken by Saville, is to follow official designation, as incorporated in local and national government legislation.

The difficulty, even at the end of the nineteenth century, was that urban overspill had transformed rural areas into urban ones, without necessarily changing their designation. As we shall see later in this chapter, they also account for the difficulty in defining and assessing social deprivation in rural areas today.

It is important to establish at the outset that urbanization is not synonymous with factory production. It was not until the late nineteenth century that factory production really became dominant in Britain, but urbanization had already changed the face of the country. Most production in urban areas was small scale, and often based on simple commodities, using the family, in an extended form, as the model for the enterprise. It is worth indicating at this point that industry, no less than agriculture, is a historical form, with contours and characterisitcs not easily reduced to nineteenthcentury factory production.

Rural-urban migration began to assume importance in England after about , when the population in urban areas began to rise, in some cases dramatically. However, not until the s and s did these migratory trends begin to affect the absolute population of rural communities. After a sizeable number of rural parishes began to experience an almost continuous decline in their total population, but it was not until the last two decades of the nineteenth century that urban population growth was unequivocally linked to declining population in most rural areas. Rural depopulation rose after the s because of a combination of factors.

Employment opportunities in the countryside were more difficult to find as the nineteenth century progressed. This process of structural relocation and development was reinforced by administrative and government arrangements. By the late nineteenth century, the greatly enhanced powers of national and local Government had been located in towns. What this implied for the countryside was that agriculture, which had always been the principal economic activity, now became almost the only activity, at least in many rural areas. Already, by , enclosure had transformed the rural map of most of England, having received its final stimulus from the Napoleonic Wars and the quest for increased food.

Women into Factories 2. The Passing of Rural Society 3. Internationalisation and the Third World Food System 5. Agri-Biotechnologies and the Food System 6. The Food System and the Environment 7. Theories and Practices of Development. Beyond the Lens of Conservation.

Refashioning Nature: Food, Ecology and Culture

Development and Social Change. Non-governmental Organizations and Development. Rethinking the Political Economy of Transformation. Other titles from Routledge. The Ecology of Hedgerows and Field Margins. International Business and Global Climate Change. An Environmental History of the Middle Ages.

The Future of Natural History Museums. Companion to Environmental Studies. Citizen Science for Coastal and Marine Conservation.

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