What was the food of the Scottish population in the period between the end of the sixteenth century and the end of the eighteenth – what were the main ingredients, how satisfactory was it in terms of quantity and nutritional content, how did it change? Most explorations of Scottish economic and social history, though willing to mention famines, have steered well clear of any detailed examination of diet. In a study of prices and wages which has as one of its central purposes the exploration of the standard of living, and which concerns a society in which the wage itself was frequently paid partly or entirely in kind, food history must nevertheless be a central theme. Late eighteenth-century budgets suggest that among the labouring population at least two-thirds of family income was devoted to food, (see chapter 9 below). The proportion must have been the same, or greater, earlier. Food, therefore, was what the standard of living was largely about.

In this chapter we have deliberately eschewed discussing the problem of famine and dearth, partly because it has been considered elsewhere, but also because it was very much the exceptional and not the ordinary lot of the population. Even in the seventeenth century fewer than ten years can be identified as ones of widespread grain shortage, and even these were not universal across Scotland; in the eighteenth century the number is about five. We are here concerned about ordinary people in ordinary times.