What food did people eat in that time period? Particularly in England and the US. And what did the different classes of people eat? (More/less wealthy = what food?)
By that time period I mean specifically around 1770-1810
Part 1
We do know a great deal about the types of foodstuffs and commodities consumed in Britain around the turn of the century, our sources ranging from cookbooks to the first organised inquiries into population health and diets. The details, ingredients and means of preparation of specific meals is well beyond my area of expertise, so I won’t go into that. Hopefully someone with knowledge on 18th/19th century cooking will come along too. What I can talk about however, are the types of ingredients consumed and the quantities thereof.
British society during the late 18th and early 19th century was changing. The first industrial revolution was taking hold, leading to rapid urbanisation and the establishment of new family patterns (as the male breadwinner, performing wage labour on behalf of his dependent family became increasingly common). Economic liberalisation was likewise reinforcing these patterns, with countryside clearances, specialisation of production, the expansion of the monetary economy and the gradual end of subsistence farming. It’s easy to overestimate the impact and rapidity of these processes – two thirds of the British population still lived in the countryside in 1850. The economic and social transition has nevertheless attracted a wealth of scholarly attention, including setting the stage for one of the longest running debates in western economic history – namely the issue of British industrial revolution real wages.
Real wages is income controlled for inflation, and so tells us how much stuff people could actually get for their wages. That information is crucial for understanding the diets of people, especially when it comes to nutritional intake and differing between everyday food and luxuries. Given that inflation is hard to measure, especially for time periods before the introduction of reliable recording changes in prices over time, the debate over real wages has tended to focus upon the construction of price estimates and weights (i.e. what were people spending their money on, and how much did they have to spend). For food, two of our chief primary sources are independent investigations into rural poverty in England in the late 1700s conducted by David Davies and Frederick Eden. Their descriptions of living conditions and household budgets have been trawled by historians looking to construct budget weights – i.e. how big a part of income goes into paying for different types of food. Davies and Eden did produce household budgets of their own, but these were limited to the limited rural localities they investigated, and were not always consistent in their upper and lower bounds (i.e. who could be considered “poor”, and therefore included in the inquiry). In order to construct reliable national estimates it is therefore necessary to include information about consumption patterns, prices and goods availability from elsewhere in the UK.
One of the more prominent attempts at producing such a weighted national household budget for working class Britain during the industrial revolution is that published by Charles Feinstein in 1998. In order to capture variations in consumption patterns over time (as prices and the availability of goods changed) Feinstein produced three separate budgets (which he the spliced to produce an overall time series deflator). The weights for the later period (where data is much easier to find) is based on an analysis of household budgets by Mackenzie, Horell and others.
Working-class expenditure share (percentage of total expenditure; Feinstein, 1998)
| Items | 1788/1792 | 1828/1832 | 1858/1862 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Food | 69 | 65 | 61 |
| Rent | 10 | 11 | 13 |
| Fuel | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Light | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Drink | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| Clothing | 6 | 8 | 9 |
| Total | 100 | 100 | 100 |
Allocation of expenditure of food as share of the above
From the above we can see that half or more of working class household food budgets goes into bread and flour. This holds through the entire period, with shares of the total budget at 60%, 53% and 48% respectively. Given the low cost of cereals (relative to other commodities on the list) we can thus see that bread, porridge, gruel and other grain based foods were by far and away the most common foodstuffs eaten. This corresponds well with qualitative period sources, describing bread and/or porridge alone as a common meal. These would have been eaten every day, all year round. It is also interesting to note that potatoes' share of the total budget doubles over the course of the period, reflecting increased availability. It is thus safe to assume that potatoes was gradually replacing some grain consumption, but that of the two grain remained the staple.
Going further we can also see that meat products make up 10-12% of the total. Given the need to procure meat for a large number of people (Mokyr has estimated that between 1771 and 1821 the ratio of dependants to breadwinners in Britain rose from 2.61 to 3.06) on a limited budget, we can also assume that we are not talking about quality cuts. Quantity would in most cases have trumped quality. At 12-15% dairy products (milk, butter and cheese) occupies the same or slightly bigger share of household budgets as meat. Thus we can say with a degree of certainty that the average working class family would have consumed animal products on a regular basis, but not in large amounts.
Note also that Feinstein has separated "drink" from the overall food budget. Milk however is part of the food budget. Thus "drink" refers almost exclusively to beer and spirits, both of which were consumed on a regular basis.
Finally, the household budgets all include a degree of what we might charitably describe as "luxuries". In Feinstein's case, tea and sugar are made to stand in for a number of other commodities which would also have to fall under this header. Luxury commodities are notoriously difficult to use in long term statistics, because their consumption commonly fluctuates much more widely, in large part because they are much more subject to fashion and taste than staple "subsistence" commodities. Tea and sugar show relatively stable consumption patterns, and are therefore commonly used as placeholders for all "luxury" consumption. Feinstein made the somewhat controversial decision to also include coffee, but followed common practice by excluding tobacco. At a persistent 10% of total food expenditure through the period, luxuries thus nevertheless played an important role in working class consumption.