Krugman on British Food

Tyler Cowen points to a nice short piece by Paul Krugman on why the British have or had such bad food which I feel compelled to comment on. It has a typical Krugman multiple equilibrium flavour to it. The basic idea is that

'the country's early industrialization and urbanization was the culprit. Millions of
people moved rapidly off the land and away from access to traditional ingredients. Worse, they did so at a time when the technology of  urban food supply was still primitive: Victorian London already had well over a million people, but most of its food came in by horse drawn barge. And so ordinary people, and even the middle classes, were forced into a cuisine based on canned goods (mushy peas!), preserved meats (hence those pies), and root vegetables that didn't need refrigeration (e.g. potatoes, which explain the chips).'

As someone who can just about remember how bad food could be in the 1980s I am quite interested in this topic and I think Krugman takes us part of the way there. It is true while in most countries traditional working class cuisine comprises peasant food, traditional English food like fish and chip is processed and manufactured (and in fact it was copied from the Portuguese).  The Krugman story fits France very well [gradual industrialization so peasant cooking was retained] but there are some big gaps in his analysis.

English industrialization and urbanization was not that rapid. England was comparatively urbanized in the 18th century before the industrial revolution.  The industrial revolution itself was quite a slow process taking place over fifty years 1780 - 1830.  The size and speed of the change won't explain the decline in food.  Nor do I think that transport costs are quite as important as all that. The British could still import tons of tea and sugar in the 18th and 19th centuries because they demanded them.  I don't think transport costs were the binding constraint. What is needed is a mechanism based upon wage costs and time allocation.   

It is straightforward to see how wage costs and the allocation of time within the household affected food production. Work by Hans Joachim Voth documents that working hours increased dramatically in the early 19th century. 

The increase in household hours supplied to the market meant that households did not have time to cook. Peasant cooking takes a lot of time - think how much time traditional households in India spend preparing curries.  Rising wages and the introduction of new technologies for preserving food [such as cans] meant that British households decided to cut back on time spent on food preparation and spend it at work instead. Importantly female participation in the labour market was very high in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as in traditional societies it is normally women who cook and pass on this knowledge to their daughters. This story of the reallocation of inputs within the household is detailed by Jan De Vries in his latest book.

But how do we explain why Britain stayed in this low equilibrium trap?  Or why other countries managed to escape it?  Here Krugman's argument that tastes then changed as people forgot what good food was remains more convincing than anything else I can think of right now. According to Krugman soon Britain was struck in a 'bad food' equilibrium until the 1990s!  Thus

'your typical Englishman, circa, say, 1975, had never had a really good meal, he didn't demand one. And because consumers didn't demand good food, they didn't get it. Even then there were surely some people who would have liked better, just not enough to provide a critical mass.'

Still, I'm sure there must be more to it.

Comments

[Joe]

I've actually heard the same phenomenon explained in a precisely opposite way, by a distinguished economic historian. Britain had a good supply of quality meat (particularly beef), so didn't need the fancy foreign sauces that the French specialised in. I can only supply the argument from authority to back this up, however.

[Current]

I am a Brit.

My theory is that smoking is the root cause. Smoking progressively destroys the ability to taste food.

Between 1900 and ~1980 Britain had one of the highest rates of smoking in the world. I don't think it was lack of access to good food, but rather than people couldn't taste properly so couldn't tell the good from the bad.

[Nick]

Current,

Forgive me, but smoking as a theory is absolute rubbish (and more akin to puritanism than theory). For a start a minority of the population smoke (or smoked during 1900-1980), and also while smoking does impact on taste it doesn't "destroy" it. When I smoked (you will be glad to know I have given up) I still enjoyed a peppered steak over a kebab. Furthermore, Mexico and China have a much larger proportion of smokers and they have great food. France too.

Cheers,

Nick