Was there a period in British history when the average person consumed more calories than today?
The idea of the calorie as a unit for measuring nutrition was introduced in the late 19th century. In general, we don’t have a lot of information about exactly how much the average person ate, but there may well have been a time when people in the past consumed more than we do today.
At Kew Palace in the late 18th century, George III and his household were served daily dinners of 18 or more dishes, divided into two or three courses. The middle classes in the 19th century liked the idea of a similarly lavish lifestyle, and Mrs Beeton provided menus for huge dinner parties, though we don’t know how often readers actually attempted to produce such elaborate meals. Of course the working classes ate more simply, and more frugally. However, there is still reason to believe that in the mid-19th century they were ingesting large numbers of calories, if we consider the amount of physical labour an urban worker was expected to undertake in a day, and the energy that required. Historians Paul Clayton and Judith Rowbotham have estimated that “mid-Victorian working-class men and women must have consumed between 50 and 100 per cent more calories than we do today to maintain their ability to work and survive”. This does not, though, mean that they were healthier or better nourished than we are today.
In terms of health and diet, the situation in England seems to have deteriorated from the mid to the late 19th century, as processed and sugary foods began to take up a greater part of people’s diets.