Nutritional transitions and the food system: expensive milk, selective lactophiles and diet change in Spain, 1950-65

Abstract

Why were products such as meat or milk relatively unimportant in the diet of European Mediterranean populations up until the 1960s? Conventional wisdom has it that this was a consequence of the environmental and macroeconomic conditions prevailing in the region, which basically involved aridity and economic backwardness. This article examines the case of dairy products in Spain in the 1950s and early 1960s; it then proposes a modified view in which environmental and macroeconomic factors are considered in conjunction with the political economy of the food chain and consumer agency. Even after considering the environmental constraints to production of cow’s milk and the obstacle posed by low household incomes, dairy consumption could have grown faster than it did. While consumer response to increased purchasing power was relatively passive, a rise in the relative price of milk cancelled out some of the income effect derived from rapid economic growth. This suggests that, in line with conventional wisdom, there were both supply-side and demand-side obstacles to increasing consumption of dairy products. Contrary to conventional wisdom, in this case supply-side obstacles were not primarily related to dairy farming but to other links in the chain, particularly commercial intermediation, while demand-side obstacles were not primarily quantitative, but qualitative.