Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T02:22:47.115Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Food and standard of living: hypotheses and controversies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2009

Massimo Livi-Bacci
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy
Get access

Summary

Soundings in a vast sea

Up to this point we have dealt with various controversial aspects of the relationship between nutrition, health and mortality. It is time now to address a question which has thus far remained in the background: What can we say about long-term dietary trends in European societies? Did these historical populations fight a ceaseless battle against the scarcity of resources; or did they on the whole live well above the threshold of malnutrition; or might they have fluctuated over long periods between comfortable plenty and dire hardship? And supposing these trends can be ascertained, how do they fit in with mortality trends?

It is important to state at the outset that a satisfactory account of Europe's nutritional history does not exist. Agricultural history, though abounding in comprehensive studies on cultivation techniques and yield, land management and price trends, is very uninformative when it comes to the estimation of production flows which would enable estimation of consumption levels. Nevertheless, a few soundings have been made which enable the measurement of longterm changes in nutritional patterns and it is to these that we shall refer in this chapter. These soundings take the form of estimates of food budgets in a number of communities and their assumed caloric content; levels of consumption for some staples like bread or meat; the spread and contribution to diets of new crops such as maize and potatoes; comparisons of wage and price trends for the main foodstuffs (mainly cereals) as indicators of the purchasing power and the standard of living of certain classes of the population; and variations in stature as a ‘net’ indicator of the community's level of nutrition.

Type
Chapter
Information
Population and Nutrition
An Essay on European Demographic History
, pp. 79 - 110
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×