Major dietary changes in nineteenth-century Europe.

Abstract

While there is still a great deal of research to be done eating patterns in the past, from the evidence accumulated so far is safe to say that most Europeans entered the nineteenth century as primarily grain eaters. Virtually every other food available, would seem, fell into the category of luxury items. Luxury foods like meat, fish, cheese, eggs, vegetables, and fruits were readily available to the upper reaches of society, but the great majority of Europeans ate them a very, very limited basis [I]. We still do not know for sure to what extent vegetables were consumed before 1800. But one thing is definitely clear—most artisans and peasants in European society up to 1800 had to consume breadstuffs morning, noon, and night. This overdependence a single staple item by the many is becoming a well-documented fact. In his social history of Paris under Louis XIV, Leon Bernard tells us that the city's artisans subsisted black bread and and that the working class largely lived on the edge of starvation [2]. One hundred years later, at the time of the French Revolution, the artisans of Paris were still obviously meatless. According to Jeffrey Kaplow, their diet was now primarily soup and bread, along with water [3]. Rural elements were likewise poorly off, most of them rarely consuming meat or other sources of protein. Speaking of the Irish peasantry in the 1690s, Sir William Petty commented, As for flesh, they seldom eat it [4]. Other observers of the time, including the famous English student of dietetics, Dr. William Stark, knew that the masses were grain eaters and starved for other foods. Writing in 1788, Stark remarked, I learned that many of the poor people near Inverness [Scotland] never took any kind of animal food, not even eggs, cheese, butter or milk [5]. When the grain crop failed, as did in the late 1780s in France, the results, in the words of