Routledge Library Editions: Food and Diet – serie

Food aid continues to be a high profile, and perhaps the most controversial form of aid. Food Aid Reconsidered: Assessing the Impact on Third World Countries, originally published in 1991, which concentrates on recent experience, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, provided a stocktaking on the state of the debate and the contribution that economics and other social sciences had made to resolving many of the controversies surrounding food aid at the time. These issues include the gap between the potential and actual contribution of food aid on food security and agricultural production in developing countries, European dairy aid to India and possible alternatives to exporting food from developed countries for providing humanitarian assistance to hungry people. Today it can be read in its historical context.

‘All natural: no artificial colours or flavours’. This was an increasingly familiar claim made for the food we bought in the late 1980s. But what about the other ingredients? Additives are only one form of adulteration. Nitrates, excess water, pesticide residues, too much fat, and the newest of them all food irradiation, are some of the others. The questions they pose for all of us are inescapable, as is the overall issue of poor-quality food dressed up to be what it is not.In this book, originally published in 1988, the London Food Commission, Britain’s independent food watchdog, spells out the dangers, and suggests solutions. It challenges official policy and condemns official secrecy. It says why British food is the sick food of Europe. It believes that what is needed is a major shake-up in Whitehall and the food trades, and calls for a new anti-adulteration alliance – a positive campaign for improved food policy. And it backs all arguments with rigorous and detailed evidence.Food matters to everyone. We deserve the best. We will only get it if we demand it. This book spelt out what our demands should be. Still a big topic of interest today this is an opportunity to look at some early issues surrounding the food we buy and assess how far we’ve come.

Originally published in 1941, a popular discussion on Food Policy was very welcome at a time when it had become a personal problem for every housewife. It was the purpose of this book to bring home to the general public the nature of the problem. The author first exposes capitalism’s failure to feed the people adequately either in peace or war. He traces the failure to its root cause, and points out that this nation had never had a food policy. Finally, he shows how policy could be re-cast on a cooperative basis to meet the conditions resulting from the war. Today it can be read in its historical context.This book is a re-issue originally published in 1941. The language used is a reflection of its era and no offence is meant by the Publishers to any reader by this re-publication.

Originally published in 1966, the extremely urgent task confronting our generation – to produce food in sufficient quantity and of adequate quality for the world’s rapidly increasing population – may have appeared terrifyingly great and very difficult to solve. In fact, some regarded it as impossible, visualising a world in which the population would increase quicker even than scientific man could feed it and seeing a solution only in wholesale birth control.To these Hugo Osvald, a Scandinavian nutrition expert, did not belong. He surveys all the means, scientific and agricultural at our disposal at the time and reveals that, by their rapid development, enough food can be produced for a world population several times larger than at present. There are practically no limits, he said, to the possibilities of producing food. We were utilizing only a small percentage of the earth’s capacity.Even the lands where starvation was prevalent have the same basic necessary conditions for a vast improvement: fertile soil, water and labour. Knowledge and guidance were already available and could be increased. Dams, irrigation systems, transport facilities and power supplies, fertilizer factories, plant breeding and protection, animal husbandry, technical education – all these could be provided and the possibilities of the oceans as a source of supply had scarcely been explored.The author considered all these factors and the problems involved, and brings a convincing answer to the pessimists. With food poverty still an issue today, this book can be read in its historical context.

In Britain, class differences in children’s health remain wide, and it is often assumed that an important contributory factor is class differences in the attitudes and behaviours of mothers. Originally published in 1986, Keeping Children Healthy draws on an empirical study to throw light on mothers’ actual health care of their young children and to consider what differences, if any, there are between groups of mothers.The book is about how women care for their children’s health: what they think matters, what they actually do, and what affects their actions. Throughout, mothers’ perspectives are considered in the light of the social and material context of their family lives: their income, their housing, the neighbourhood, the network of friends and relatives, access to services, and the quality of services available. The author shows that mothers have a highly responsible approach to child health care, and high standards for good health in children, despite the fact that socially disadvantaged mothers have to contend with many constraints in caring for their children as they wish.A central aspect of the book is the question of whom mothers turn to for help, and what they consider to be the role of professionals in helping them in their child care work. Indeed, the book provides essential and illuminating reading for all those who have professional dealings with the parents of young children such as doctors, social workers, health visitors and teachers and the policy makers and administrators who plan and run health and day care services. Parents who work continuously to ensure their children’s health will find much to recognize and much to think about in this book.

Food is the physiological basis of man’s existence but is also an expression of a society’s culture and may play many roles other than physiological in terms of both personal and group relationships. Originally published in 1976, The Making of the Modern British Diet focusses on the role of food during industrialisation and urbanisation in Britain.Part One contains a series of commodity studies covering bread, cereals, biscuits, meat, milk, tea and cocoa which reflect trends in the supply of some of the foods in the British diet during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The emphasis in Part Two is predominantly on consumption, either through the study of living standards or consumer preference or through the presentation of food and the organisation of its outlets to the consumer. Part Three provides a nutritional evaluation which is an entirely new approach in an historical work.

Originally published in 1985, Diet and Health in Modern Britain examines the changes in diet and health in Britain during the rapid social development of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is particularly concerned with the ways in which the problems of urban life were ameliorated. How was infant and child mortality reduced? How did family life go on in conditions where income was low and sometimes intermittent, where protected water supplies and proper sanitation were not available, and where food preservation and food technology were still limited? How did the state devise diets for those in its care? What were the choices available for consumers?The contributors to this book were historians and nutritionists and this gives a strong interdisciplinary flavour to the volume. Many of the problems encountered during British urban development were being experienced in the developing world at the time. The way in which Britain coped with the health hazards of late-nineteenth-century urban squalor had much to tell those concerned with similar problems in contemporary cities in the developing world. The book makes clear that life in Britain in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and life in the developing world at the time represented similar stages of the process of demographic transition.

Originally published in 1979, Development and the Problems of Village Nutrition was concerned with the development of micro-level approaches (and one in particular) to nutrition problem identification. The author believed that malnourishment could only really be examined, analysed and understood at the micro level where the whole range of factors affecting nutrition are displayed, and individual, community and regional problems could be diagnosed to provide the basis for more meaningful action and plans. The village-oriented approach to micro-level nutrition problems was initiated as a new approach to the study of development problems by the Village Studies Programme (VSP) at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in 1969. The research on which this book is based was conducted as part of the programme. Today it can be read in its historical context.