Inequality and Nutritional Transition in Economic History by Medina-Albaladejo, Francisco J.; Martínez-Carrión, José Miguel; Calatayud, Salvador;

Short description:

Food consumption and nutrition are historically among the most characteristic features of inequality in living standards. Nutrition directly impacts mortality, life expectancy, height and illness. However, one issue that remains unresolved is how to measure past diet inequalities with the available sources. This book tackles these.

Long description:

Food consumption and nutrition are historically among the most characteristic features of inequality in living standards driven by socioeconomic, gender, generational and geographical reasons. Nutrition directly impacts mortality, life expectancy, height and illness and thus becomes a good indicator of living standards and their evolution over time. However, one issue that remains unresolved is how to measure past diet inequalities with the available sources.

This book evaluates nutritional inequalities in Spain from the nineteenth century to the present day. It explores the socioeconomic, gender, generational and geographical variations in food consumption and nutrition in Spain during this period. Deriving historical data on nutrition and diet has always been difficult due to issues with available sources. This book adopts a multi-dimensional approach and two complementary methodologies capable of presenting a more comprehensive picture: the first analyses diets based on primary sources, while the second examines the effect of nutritional inequalities on biological living standards, with special emphasis on average height. This combination allows for greater precision than previous studies on the impacts of food inequality.

This book will be of significant interest to scholars from different academic branches, especially historians, economic historians and historians of science, economists, and also doctors, endocrinologists, paediatricians, anthropologists, nutritionists and expert in cooperation and development.

"[A] compct set of rigorous and varied chapters, supported on laboriously reconstructed empirical foundations. It is a fantastic contribution that will be extraordinarily useful not only for researchers interested in Spain but also for those interested in producing truly international histories of living standards, or simply positioning their case studies within a historiographical landscape richer than that formed by early industrializers with high levels of economic development."

Fernando Collantes, Social History of Medicine

Table of Contents:

Inequality and nutritional transition in economic history: Spain between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. New research and findings 1. Diet and social inequality at the beginning of the nutritional transition in Mediterranean Spane, 1822–1936 2. The rural–urban gap in nutritional status during the first phases of modern economic growth in Spain, 1836–1936 3. The nutritional status of the Spanish population, 1860–2020: an approach to consider differences by sex and generations  4. Poor but tall. The height premium in the Canary Islands at the beginning of nutritional transition  5. Secular trends in height in Madrid (cohorts 1915–1953). An approach to urban stratification and SEPE factors differences in Spain during the twentieth century  6. Food and nutrition of the soldiers of the Spanish Armed Forces (1940–1972)  7. Malnutrition and regional inequalities in the context of a period of economic growth in Spain (1964–1972): rural food surveys 8. From massification to diversification: inequalities in the consumption of dairy products, meat and alcoholic drinks in Spain (1964–2018)  9. Inequality, health, and nutrition in Spain: a regional and sociodemographic view of the body mass index  10. Inequalities in the patterns of the consumption of healthy food during the Great Recession of 2008