Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- 1 Plain fare: diet during industrialization
- 2 Food supply, shops and food safety, 1890 to 1914
- 3 Nutrition, environment and health before 1914
- 4 The Great War and its aftermath, 1914 to 1921: discontent on the food front
- 5 Food and food technology in the interwar years
- 6 The question of malnutrition between the wars
- 7 The Second World War: the myth of a planned diet, 1939 to 1950
- 8 The revival of choice: food technology, retailing and eating in postwar Britain
- 9 Food consumption, nutrition and health since the Second World War
- 10 Overview: change in the twentieth century
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - The revival of choice: food technology, retailing and eating in postwar Britain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- 1 Plain fare: diet during industrialization
- 2 Food supply, shops and food safety, 1890 to 1914
- 3 Nutrition, environment and health before 1914
- 4 The Great War and its aftermath, 1914 to 1921: discontent on the food front
- 5 Food and food technology in the interwar years
- 6 The question of malnutrition between the wars
- 7 The Second World War: the myth of a planned diet, 1939 to 1950
- 8 The revival of choice: food technology, retailing and eating in postwar Britain
- 9 Food consumption, nutrition and health since the Second World War
- 10 Overview: change in the twentieth century
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
At the point when rationing began to be eased, Dr Magnus Pyke reviewed the food of the British people – or at least the majority of them – in a book entitled Townsman's Food. After ten years of rationing, the townsman – or, more especially, the urban housewife – was thinking wistfully of times of former plenty. The countryside was an important part of this yearning, for it symbolized the source of good food to the urban population. However, Magnus Pyke was uncompromisingly dismissive of nostalgia and feelings of ‘romantic regret for the simple foods of earlier centuries’. Memories of prewar availability of food had been making the urban housewife with a tin-opener something of a figure of fun for cartoonists in the 1940s. However, from the pragmatic viewpoint as food scientist, Pyke applauded her search for variety in the diet. To do so, she needed a tin-opener, for few in 1950 could live without canned meat, fish or fruit. As a guide to the diet in the year 1950, Townsman's Food concerned itself largely with a description of the sources of food materials, i.e. bread and baked goods, vegetables, meat, dairy produce and so on, rather than processed food products. It was published in an age when confidence in science was much higher than it is today. Pyke, whose popular reputation rested upon his creed of bringing science to the people, saw the food industry as providing a ‘social service’; after all, he wrote: ‘the food industry has to keep the community alive and in tolerable health’. However, Townsman's Food was published at a time when many wartime regulations were still in place, so there is little on food marketing or presentation. Symbolic of the slowness by which controls were being relaxed was wrapped, sliced bread, which had only been permitted since 1949. Some food technology was important: Magnus Pyke referred to gas storage of fruit, and the use of sulphur dioxide as a preservative, but when he claimed that ‘Today, foods “in season” have been abolished. In the modern world, we expect all foods always to be “in season”’, it is clear that the effervescent optimism which endeared Pyke to radio and television audiences had carried him away. In fact, the reality was far less congenial. Restriction of food consumption was central to the ‘age of austerity’ during the late 1940s.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Plain Fare to Fusion FoodBritish Diet from the 1890s to the 1990s, pp. 169 - 200Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003