This study of food and nutrition in the twentieth century begins in the 1890s, even though it can be argued that the ethos of the nineteenth century persisted beyond 1900 and at least until 1914. The history of diet, however, is better explained by the concept of a ‘long’ twentieth century, the start of which was marked by new technology and increasing commercialization of the food market during the 1880s and 1890s. By then the urban environment of late Victorian society was largely complete. Its major aspects remained unchanged from the 1890s to the 1920s, or even the early 1930s in some parts of Britain. The 1890s have attracted much interest in view of the social investigations in London and York by Charles Booth and B. S. Rowntree which revealed the social problems accumulated by more than a century of rapid population growth and urbanization. Although their work and that of other social investigators who followed them drew attention to the housing, employment and nutrition of the very poor, the view of Britain presented by these inquiries ignored the improvements in living conditions during the late nineteenth century. Undoubtedly the majority of the population had benefited to some extent from an advance in the standard of living. Nevertheless, as far as nutritionists and physiologists in the first half of the twentieth century were concerned, the image created by the social investigators of a society in which there was widespread malnutrition – or, strictly speaking, under-nutrition – was valid and still a matter of concern when further improvements in both housing and employment had taken place.

When The Englishman's Food was first published on the eve of the Second World War, ‘the gravely deficient “poverty diet” of England which persisted throughout the ‘thirties’ was still a contemporary problem. Its origins ‘dated from about 1890 and was responsible in the last decade of the nineteenth century for a marked deficiency in the physique and physical efficiency of much of the community’. Any history of diet must examine that assessment and incorporate it into the account of what people in Britain were eating and the nutritional value of their food. Between the 1890s and the Second World War this requires the examination of family budget surveys.