DIET REFORM
A disparity between income and expenditure may be corrected by increasing income or by reducing expenditure. Many of the upper classes thought that the second method might be tried in this emergency, and that a judicious change of diet would enable the labourer to face the fall of wages with equanimity. The solution seemed to lie in the simple life. Enthusiasts soon began to feel about this proposal the sort of excitement that Robinson Crusoe enjoyed when discovering new resources on his island: an infinite vista of kitchen reform beckoned to their ingenious imaginations: and many of them began to persuade themselves that the miseries of the poor arose less from the scantiness of their incomes than from their own improvidence and unthriftiness.[184] The rich set an example in the worst days by cutting off pastry and restricting their servants to a quartern loaf a week each.[185] It was surely not too much in these circumstances to ask the poor to adapt their appetites to the changed conditions of their lives, and to shake off what Pitt called ‘groundless prejudices’ to mixed bread of barley, rye, and wheat.[186] Again oatmeal was a common food in the north, why should it not be taken in the south? If no horses except post horses and perhaps cavalry horses were allowed oats, there would be plenty for the poor.[187] A Cumberland labourer with a wife and family of five was shown by Eden[188] to have spent £7, 9s. 2d. a year on oatmeal and barley, whereas a Berkshire labourer with a wife and four children at home spent £36, 8s. a year on wheaten bread alone.[189] Clearly the starving south was to be saved by the introduction of cheap cereals.
Other proposals of this time were to break against the opposition of the rich. This broke against the opposition of the poor. All attempts to popularise substitutes failed, and the poorer the labourer grew the more stubbornly did he insist on wheaten bread. ‘Even household bread is scarcely ever used: they buy the finest wheaten bread, and declare (what I much doubt), that brown bread disorders their bowels. Bakers do not now make, as they formerly did, bread of unsifted flour: at some farmers’ houses, however, it is still made of flour, as it comes from the mill; but this practice is going much into disuse. 20 years ago scarcely any other than brown bread was used.’[190] At Ealing, when the charitable rich raised a subscription to provide the distressed poor with brown bread at a reduced price, many of the labourers thought it so coarse and unpalatable that they returned the tickets though wheaten bread was at 1s. 3d. the quartern loaf.[191] Correspondent after correspondent to the Annals of Agriculture notes and generally deplores the fact that the poor, as one of them phrases it, are too fine-mouthed to eat any but the finest bread.[192] Lord Sheffield, judging from his address to Quarter Sessions at the end of 1795, would have had little mercy on such grumblers. After explaining that in his parish relief was now given partly in potatoes, partly in wheaten flour, and partly in oaten or barley flour, he declared: ‘If any wretches should be found so lost to all decency, and so blind as to revolt against the dispensations of providence, and to refuse the food proposed for their relief, the parish officers will be justified in refusing other succour, and may be assured of support from the magistracy of the county.’[193]
To the rich, the reluctance of the labourer to change his food came as a painful surprise. They had thought of him as a roughly built and hardy animal, comparatively insensible to his surroundings, like the figure Lucretius drew of the primeval labourer:
Et majoribus et solidis magis ossibus intus
Fundatum, et validis aptum per viscera nervis;
Nec facile ex aestu, nec frigore quod caperetur,
Nec novitate cibi, nec labi corporis ulla.
They did not know that a romantic and adventurous appetite is one of the blessings of an easy life, and that the more miserable a man’s condition, and the fewer his comforts, the more does he shrink from experiments of diet. They were therefore surprised and displeased to find that labourers rejected soup, even soup served at a rich man’s table, exclaiming, ‘This is washy stuff, that affords no nourishment: we will not be fed on meal, and chopped potatoes like hogs.’[194] The dislike of change of food was remarked by the Poor Law Commissioners in 1834, who observed that the labourer had acquired or retained ‘with the moral helplessness some of the other peculiarities of a child. He is often disgusted to a degree which other classes scarcely conceive possible, by slight differences in diet; and is annoyed by anything that seems to him strange and new.’[195]
Apart from the constitutional conservatism of the poor there were good reasons for the obstinacy of the labourers. Davies put one aspect of the case very well. ‘If the working people of other countries are content with bread made of rye, barley, or oats, have they not milk, cheese, butter, fruits, or fish, to eat with that coarser bread? And was not this the case of our own people formerly, when these grains were the common productions of our land, and when scarcely wheat enough was grown for the use of the nobility and principal gentry? Flesh-meat, butter, and cheese, were then at such moderate prices, compared with the present prices, that poor people could afford to use them in common. And with a competent quantity of these articles, a coarser kind of bread might very well satisfy the common people of any country.’[196] He also states that where land had not been so highly improved as to produce much wheat, barley, oatmeal, or maslin bread were still in common use. Arthur Young himself realised that the labourer’s attachment to wheaten bread was not a mere superstition of the palate. ‘In the East of England I have been very generally assured, by the labourers who work the hardest, that they prefer the finest bread, not because most pleasant, but most contrary to a lax habit of body, which at once prevents all strong labour. The quality of the bread that is eaten by those who have meat, and perhaps porter and port, is of very little consequence indeed; but to the hardworking man, who nearly lives on it, the case is abundantly different.’[197] Fox put this point in a speech in the House of Commons in the debate on the high price of corn in November 1795. He urged gentlemen, who were talking of mixed bread for the people, ‘not to judge from any experiment made with respect to themselves. I have myself tasted bread of different sorts, I have found it highly pleasant, and I have no doubt it is exceedingly wholesome. But it ought to be recollected how very small a part the article of bread forms of the provisions consumed by the more opulent classes of the community. To the poor it constitutes, the chief, if not the sole article of subsistence.’[198] The truth is that the labourer living on bread and tea had too delicate a digestion to assimilate the coarser cereals, and that there was, apart from climate and tradition, a very important difference between the labourer in the north and the labourer in the south, which the rich entirely overlooked. That difference comes out in an analysis of the budgets of the Cumberland labourer and the Berkshire labourer. The Cumberland labourer who spent only £7, 9s. on his cereals, spent £2, 13s. 7d. a year on milk. The Berkshire labourer who spent £36, 8s. on wheaten bread spent 8s. 8d. a year on milk. The Cumberland family consumed about 1300 quarts in the year, the Berkshire family about two quarts a week. The same contrast appears in all budget comparisons between north and south. A weaver at Kendal (eight in the family) spends £12, 9s. on oatmeal and wheat, and £5, 4s. on milk.[199] An agricultural labourer at Wetherall in Cumberland (five in family) spends £7, 6s. 9d. on cereals and £2, 13s. 4d. on milk.[200] On the other side we have a labourer in Shropshire (four in family) spending £10, 8s. on bread (of wheat rye), and only 8s. 8d. on milk,[201] and a cooper at Frome, Somerset (seven in family) spending £45, 10s. on bread, and about 17s. on milk.[202] These figures are typical.[203]