Peasant food? It wasn’t so bad for you

Readers of The Times on August 26, 1864, awoke to disturbing reports. A five-year study of Britain’s eating habits had found ‘‘a large proportion of our population are existing upon less food than was thought sufficient to avert starvation diseases’’.

The worst was yet to come for our Victorian readers because the data implied these hungry Britons were not even the feckless sorts who brought it upon themselves. This was not a result of the ‘‘deserving poverty of idleness’’ we wrote, ‘‘but the hard and bitter poverty of industrial populations’’.

Now a scientific study has taken this same dataset and correlated it with mortality rates to argue that at least initially the industrial revolution significantly harmed our health. Whatever the bleak image of rural life painted by Hardy, the research argues, its urban Dickensian counterpart was worse. ‘‘The humble poor in the west of Ireland and the ploughman in Ayrshire were better fed than their urban counterparts,’’ Peter Greaves, from the University of Leicester, said. In a paper for the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, he likened peasant food to the much praised ‘‘Mediterranean diet’’.

‘‘In the north and Scotland, because they were so distant, they always got paid in kind, not money. They kept a cow in a field near by, grew potatoes,’’ he said. It wasn’t exciting fare – much of Ireland subsisted on stirabout, a slop of milk and grain – but it worked. In towns people were paid in money and had a dreadful diet, he added. ‘‘Milk was expensive and not easily available so they ended up drinking tea with sugar as a substitute, even children.’’

The contrast is reflected in the diseases that people died from. Tuberculosis, which is associated with better nutrition, was twice as prevalent in cities. Between 1850 and 1860 the annual death rate in England and Wales was 22 people per 1,000. It was almost double that in Liverpool, at 38.

In Whitechapel, in the heart of London’s impoverished East End, it was 30. In the pre-industrial communities on Scotland’s remote islands or the west coast of Ireland, it was 14.

It prompted The Times to ask: ‘‘In the face of such facts it is natural to ask with some anxiety whether there is anything to show that this state of things is bettering itself.’’

We suggested a solution to concerned readers. Perhaps ‘‘by instructing the poor how to help themselves, their condition might be very much relieved’’.

Our worries were short-lived. After the 1860s, while rural economies stood still, ‘‘in urban communities things slowly improved’’, Dr Greaves said. ‘‘People got a bit wealthier and there was more availability of food.’’ In the end the poor did not need to solicit the instruction of Times readers on how to relieve their condition after all.