Chapter 6: Bread consumption and diet

6. 1. Warm, fresh or stale

In the 16th century the physician Andrewe Boord advised his readers that hot bread was unwholesome, lying in the stomach “like a sponge”, and that bread should be kept for a day and a night before being eaten in order to be nutritious, while also cautioning against the consumption of old, musty or mouldy bread (Boord 1576). At the same time he appears to have been aware of the appetising smell of a freshly-baked loaf (Boord 1576). By the 18th century aroma and flavour apparently had won over concerns of digestion and nutrition, with a large proportion of the bread sold in towns and cities being consumed while still warm and in fact often representing a family’s only warm weekday food (Petersen 1995, 67). This predilection for warm bread continued into the 19th century, despite writers such as Elisabeth Beeton echoing Boord’s advice from three centuries earlier (Beeton 1861, 784).

6. 2. The role of bread in the diet

The importance of bread in the everyday diet of British people over the last five centuries has varied according to a number of different factors, including time, geography and social status. In some poor and remote areas such as some of the Scottish islands up to the 19th century the cereal harvest was not sufficient to last all year; on North Ronaldsay, Orkney, for instance the amount of barley harvested was only enough to bake bread during the winter months, and people had to rely on fish and milk to get them through the rest of the year (Fenton 2007, 256). In most areas of Britain, however, as indeed in many other parts of Europe, a diet of ‘bread and relishes’ based on some type of bread as the staple and small amounts of other foods to enhance flavour and nutrition was the norm for many centuries up to the 19th (Prentice 1950, 66). By 1770 wheat bread had become the main food of most British people (Petersen 1995, 4), and the poor in both urban and many rural areas were being accused (by the rich) of indulging in luxury and wastefulness by insisting on white bread over cheaper coarser bread (Petersen 1995, 26).There were, however, a number of potential reasons for this apparent pickiness which would not necessary have been obvious to those on the higher rungs of the social ladder. White wheat bread was more attractive in both appearance and taste to someone who lived on little else (Petersen 1995, 26), and unlike modern roller mills the stone-milling of the time did not break the bran into small particles, making it quite difficult to digest (Petersen 1995, 24). Furthermore fibre is a negative in nutritional terms, meaning that a proportion of the energy provided by wholemeal flour is used up in the digestion of the bran. Unlike modern dieters, people relying on bread as their main source of calories could ill afford such a loss (Petersen 1995, 25-26).

In the period 1770-1870 the majority of the British population spent the greatest part of their income on food, with bread constituting the largest single item in most families’ food budget (Petersen 1995, xiii-xiv). When the price of bread went up, as it periodically did, poorer people would continue to eat the same amount of it, cutting out other items in the budget to compensate (Petersen 1995, 5). Wheat remained the staple of the British up to the 1870s (Petersen 1995, 40), when factors such as the decline of domestic arable agriculture and the parallel growth of horticulture, the beginning of large-scale imports of cheap meat and wheat and a gradual reduction in food taxes increased purchasing power across social classes, resulting in a lower cost of staples and enabling most people to afford a somewhat more diverse diet (Clark 2001, 94). It has been suggested by some earlier authors that the “new 19th century diet” miraculously enhanced people’s physical and mental abilities, eliminated premature old age and doubled their life expectancy (Prentice 1950, 69), and that the increasing urbanisation encouraged social competition, thus leading to “more sophisticated” tastes and eating habits (Burnett 1966, 2), a rather loaded term. Contemporary evidence appears likely to at least slightly dampen such enthusiasm; records of the diet of Lancashire labourers in 1864 indicate that they lived mostly on bread, oatmeal, bacon, treacle, tea, coffee and very small quantities of butter (James 1997, 76), a neither very varied nor vey healthy diet from a modern nutritional perspective. The situation did not improve when cheap jams came on the market in the 1880s; they were immediately popular, especially with low income families, and many poor children began to live mostly on bread and jam. Most of these ‘jams’ unfortunately contained very little of whatever fruit they were supposedly made from, instead consisting of cheap vegetable or fruit pulp mixed with colourings and copious amounts of sugar (James 1997, 76-77).

To whatever degree the British diet diversified in the latter part of the 19th century, average bread consumption still stood at 1 lb per head per day by the early 20th century (David 1977, 4). However, flour and bread consumption fell between 1918 and 1938 as an increase in real wages combined with a growth in more sedentary occupations, resulting in reduced calorie requirements as well as a more varied diet (Burnett 1995, 71). This trend was reversed temporarily during World War 2, when bread was not rationed but many other foods were, prompting a return to a more ‘bread and relishes’ type diet (Prentice 1950; Burnett 1966; Burnett 1995). During this period the wheatmeal content of bread was increased by law in order to provide the population with more iron and vitamin B in their diet (Keane 1997, 173). While bread was rationed between 1946 and 1948, this was largely observed only on paper (Sheppard and Newton 1957, 68) (fig. 6.2.1.).

Fig. 6.2.1. Protesters against
bread rationing
(Rohrer 2010)

The second half of the 20th century saw a marked decline in the consumption of bread and flour, due to a number of reasons including changing meal patterns, a rising standard of living and a movement away from cheap carbohydrate foods to more expensive proteins (Burnett 1966; Holderness 1985; Burnett 1995). During the 1950s and 1960s bread increasingly became a branded product; aided by the spread of supermarkets, self-service stores and television, Mother’s Pride, Sunblest and Wonderloaf became household names (David 1977; Hardyment 1995) (fig. 6.2.2.).

Fig. 6.2.2. Sunblest bread advertisement,
1950s
(Hardyment 1995, 132-133)

First sold in Britain in the early 1950s, sliced wrapped bread was not very popular initially, but soon caught on (Hardyment 1995, 36; 49). Market research carried out in the later 20th century revealed that people bought pre-sliced factory bread due to its availability, convenience and hygiene; interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, there was no mention of taste (David 1977, 38). While there was an increase in the consumption of brown breads, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, due largely to its higher fibre content being promoted as healthier (Burnett 1995, 74), and traditional regional staples such as Scottish oatcakes, pre-packaged and sold in supermarkets and health food shops, have enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years (Fenton 2007, 263), a nationwide survey involving 2000 adults and commissioned by the Federation of Bakers (FoB) and the Flour Advisory Bureau (FAB) in 2007 shows that bread consumption in Britain is currently still dominated by white sliced bread (FoB and FAB, 2-3) (fig. 6.2.3.).

Fig. 6.2.3. Bread consumption
in Britain 2007
(FoB and FAB nd., 3)

6. 3. Bread as a social indicator

As early as the 16th century, and probably much earlier, there appears to have been a strong correlation between social status and the kind of bread baked and eaten in the home. White bread had played a significant role in urban areas of various parts of Europe since the Middle Ages (Petersen 1995, 31), and Andrewe Boord praised wheat bread for ‘making a man fat’ - a desirable outcome in the 16th century - and ‘setting him in temperance’ (Boord 1576). Wheat bread would seem to have been the most highly-regarded and sought-after bread. In 16th century Scotland wheat bread (home-baked or bought) was eaten by the higher classes, but rarely by the poor, wheat being largely a cash crop at the time (Fenton 1976, 163).

Gervais Markham in the 17th century argued that manchet bread – made from the finest white flour available at the time and frequently enriched with butter, eggs or milk – was the best and principal bread for “simple meals” – simple, that is, for his upper-class readership - but also gives instructions on making rye bread, as well as a recipe for a “brown bread” described as the “coarsest bread for man’s use” and the kind of bread to be given to hind servants. Made from a mixture of barley, pease, malt and wheat or rye, it sounds particularly appetising when Markham advises his readers to use water as hot as possible to minimise the smell or rankness of the pease (Markham 1615, 269-270). In 17th century Wales oat- and barley bread were considered indicative of a lower standard of living than wheat bread (Tibbot 2002, xiii), while in Scotland by the same time the exclusive consumption of pease- or bean-bread had become limited to the poorer classes (Fenton 1976, 166). From around the middle of the 18th century more and more Scots began eating wheaten and white bread, including the ‘lower orders’ who consumed it alongside barley and oat cakes, and regular consumption of wheat bread soon became a status symbol (Fenton 2007, 214-216; 256). However, unleavened bread made with a mixture of pease- or bean meal and bere meal remained common in Scotland until the first half of the 19th century (Fenton 2007, 201), while oven-baked leavened wheat bread was one of the perks regularly provided to harvest labourers in the 18th century (Fenton 2007, 214). By the 19th century wheat bread had descended the social scale far enough that bakers’ shops became common in towns (Fenton 1976, 164).

Fig. 6.3.1. Home baking of
Scottish oatcakes, 1960s
(Fenton 2007, 7)

There was considerable regional variation in the types of breads baked and eaten. In areas such as northern England, northern Wales and parts of Scotland where little wheat was grown or available oatcakes were the staple well into the 20th century (Trinder 1993; Tibbot 2002) (fig. 6.3.1.). In other areas of Wales leavened barley bread was commonly baked under an inverted iron pot on a bakestone or griddle (Tibbot 2002, 90). 18th century eyewitnesses and historians commented on the general prevalence of oats and barley in the rural Welsh diet, with wheat bread not regularly consumed by the lower classes until the latter part of the 19th century (Tibbot 2002, 79-80). It was only following a dramatic drop in the price of wheat in the 1880s that the consumption of oat and barley bread in Wales declined significantly (Tibbot 2002, 80). Bread’s significance as a status delineator, however, endured for somewhat longer; in the late 19th and early 20th century it was usual for a Welsh farmer and his family to eat white bread every day, but farm servants were fed mostly on barley- or mixed bread, being given one slice each of white bread as a Sunday treat (Tibbot 2002, 2).

At the same time as white bread was being strongly associated with higher social standing, a simultaneous trend in the opposite direction took place from the 18th century onwards, when the digestive benefits of brown bread began to be appreciated by some members of the middle classes (Petersen 1995, 36). Its health benefits were promoted by 19th century food writers (Beeton 1861, 782), and by the interwar period the wealthiest classes consumed far more brown bread than the working classes, in a complete reversal of the pattern of previous centuries (Burnett 1995, 71). Regional traditions endured in some areas into the second half of the 20th century; Scottish oatcakes, for example, remained the staple, at least in rural areas, until the 1950s or 1960s, being called breid in some parts while (usually white) wheat bread from the baker’s was referred to as loaf (Fenton 2007, 7). Generally speaking, however, by the 1970s genuine wholemeal bread had become as inaccessible to most people, due to availability and/or price, as fine white bread was in the 16th century (David 1977, 35). By the end of the 20th century overall bread consumption was lowest among the wealthiest section of British society and highest among Old Age Pensioners, due, it has been argued, to their relative poverty and tendency to have more meals at home (Burnett 1995, 74). Most brown and wholemeal bread was eaten by the wealthiest, followed, perhaps surprisingly, by Old Age Pensioners- possibly motivated by its health benefits (Burnett 1995, 74). Overall bread accounted for an average 1/18th of household food expenditure and 1/10th of calories consumed, with both figures higher in low-income households (Burnett 1995, 75). It appears that while bread may no longer be as overtly linked to social status as in previous centuries, there is still a strong correlation between how much and what kind of bread one eats and one’s place in modern British society.