Philobiblon

I often muse on British food is still generally so bad, and French so fine. This seems like a pretty coherent account….

All the evidence points to the triad of the Industrial Revolution, empire and free trade. The first drove people from the fields to the factories; the colonies of the second grew what Sidney Mintz has called the tropical “drug foods” (including sugar and tea); the cheap imports encouraged by the third drove out the homegrown. None of these phenomena were peculiar to Britain, but no other European country had them in combination so early or to the same extent. Britain’s industrial working classes, unmoored from the domestic habits of their rural ancestors and crazed by their factory hours, simply forgot how to cook. As early as 1800, according to Colquhoun, “the poor in Britain were now subsisting not on the diet that had remained broadly unchanged for centuries, of ale, grain, vegetables and a modicum of fatty meat, but on a vastly less nutritious mix of often adulterated white bread, cheese, tea and sugar.
….In the course of the next century, the British population grew fourfold. Canning factories were part of the solution to feeding it. … By 1914, Britain was the world’s largest consumer of tinned goods — a fact that echoes today in the figures for its consumption of “ready meals,” which are three times more than the European average.