The industrial and urban development of Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was accompanied by major changes in the food of the people. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, the principal determinant of food consumption was the state of domestic agriculture. Before the development of a large-scale international trade in foodstuffs, the population depended on a limited range of food materials available on a markedly seasonal basis. Dietary patterns were determined by the extent to which traditional methods allowed foodstuffs to be preserved. Thus the predominant food material on the eve of the Industrial Revolution was bread made from either wheat, barley or oats, surpluses of which were processed to produce beer and spirits. Animal food – bacon or pickled meat, fish, butter and, to a lesser extent, cheese – was preserved by the liberal use of salt. Green vegetables were seasonal in supply, as were pulses, roots or bulbs such as onions, though the latter were capable of storage for some time. Nevertheless, every year brought the ‘hungry gap’ of the late winter and early spring when supplies of vegetables were exhausted, a pattern which had not been entirely eradicated in country districts before war was declared in 1914.

The consolidation of landholdings and changes in agricultural techniques of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries turned many country-dwellers into a rural proletariat dependent on wage-labour as the principal source of income and with little access to land of their own on which to produce food. Rural society, as a self-sustaining ecosystem, was in a terminal phase. For most of the nineteenth century only the vestiges of a peasant economy remained, largely confined to the more remote upland or marshland regions. Change was at its most extreme where industrial development in textiles, metal production and engineering created an urban society dependent almost entirely upon the marketplace for food supplies. As the nineteenth century progressed, reliance on the marketplace grew, not only with the expansion of industrial towns but also to meet the needs of the semi-rural but commercialized communities of miners, fishermen, and shipbuilders, and the various crafts and trades of market towns.