The Diet of the Nation: The State, Family Budgets and the 1930s Nutritional Crisis in Britain
Ingrid Jeaclea
aThe University of Edinburgh Business School
29 Buccleuch Place,
Edinburgh EH8 9JS,
Scotland,
United Kingdom
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Abstract
In 1930s Britain a new attention to physical culture emerged in the shape of a National Fitness Campaign. At the same time a fierce political debate took place over the state of nutritional health of the nation. Left wing activists argued that the working classes were significantly malnourished due to an insufficiency of income. The government responded by arguing that it was the domestic ignorance of the working class housewife that was the problem. This debate raged in public forums from parliament to popular press – the term ‘Hungry England’ becoming a common catchphrase. It enrolled a host of medical experts, public bodies and voluntary organisations. Surveys of poor neighbourhoods were conducted to determine nutritional health. Based on family household budgets, these surveys revealed that working class incomes were insufficient to achieve optimum dietary needs and inferences were drawn regarding the nutritional state of the nation. Ultimately, a host of welfare policies to combat these nutritional deficiencies were initiated and we witness the rise of the British Welfare State. This paper examines the polarised political debates of this period from a governmentality perspective (Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose and Miller, 1992). The framework facilitates an understanding of the way in which diverse actors became enrolled in the two nutritional discourses and the mediating role of experts in the process. It also reveals the influential role of calculative technologies, particularly the budget, within the programmatic of government. Finally, this theoretical approach highlights the governance of the body inherent in these dietary and fitness interventions. The notion of the fit and healthy disciplined body that emerged during this time period reflects the cultural trends to come in terms of contemporary obsessions with diet and body image.
Keywords: Diet, calories, governmentality, household budget, nutrition, physical culture
1. Introduction
Obsession with diet and physical culture is omnipresent in contemporary society. The latest sliming fad is a regular feature of women’s magazines while celebrity endorsement of fitness programmes is pervasive. To understand this particular juncture in popular culture and the position of the body within it, it is useful to reflect upon a period of history in which modern concepts of diet and exercise were shaped. The free choice to engage with the discipline of dieting or the pursuit of physical exercise presupposes certain conditions. To purposefully reduce food intake assumes a surfeit of food in the first instance, an understanding of dietary nutrition, and the means of measuring the calorific composition of food consumption. Equally, an engagement with exercise assumes a degree of health and fitness and the leisure time in which to pursue such physical activities. Both diet and exercise also presuppose the cultural conditions under which it is not only socially acceptable to engage with these actions, but that it is actually regarded as a form of good citizenship. From a Foucauldian perspective, the lean, fit and healthy body is a public manifestation of self-discipline (Foucault, 1979).
It is possible to trace the shaping of such contemporary perspectives to 1930s Britain, a decade during which the diet and fitness of the population came under an unprecedented degree of scrutiny. From the mid-nineteenth century, since the early advances in nutritional research, there had been a growing awareness of the nation’s health and fitness (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2010). By 1920, the formal offices of both state and profession associated with health provision, such as the Ministry of Health and the British Medical Research Council, were established (Webster, 1982, p.111). Consequently, the scene was set for a significant surge of interest in all aspects of the citizen’s diet and physical culture during the 1930s. In terms of exercise, the physical pursuits of the populace were promoted during this decade through a host of newly formed clubs and voluntary organisations. Public spaces devoted to sports and leisure activities opened up, while mass displays of gymnastics were a common spectacle. The image of the fit and healthy citizen becomes a powerful propaganda symbol in the government’s National Fitness Campaign. During the same period, a discourse on diet becomes manifest in which the nutritional status of the poor becomes a subject of press and political debate. Two polar camps, each supported by eminent experts, emerge to explain the existence of malnutrition as either a problem of insufficient income or a problem of domestic ignorance. Left wing activists call for significant welfare reforms while the government pursue a low cost solution centred upon domestic education. Consequently, 1930s Britain marks a fascinating period in which not only are the cultural conditions for contemporary obsessions with food and exercise moulded, but also an era in which we witness the emergence of the modern welfare state through government interventions into the diet and fitness of the nation (Kamminga and Cunningham, 1995; Webster, 1982).
From an accounting perspective, this decade provides an opportunity to highlight the way in which calculative technologies, in the form of the household budget, became entangled in political debate and controversy. The role of the household budget has previously been a fruitful subject of inquiry within accounting scholarship (Walker and Carnegie, 2007; Komori, 2012). In this particular case, drawing upon a mixture of contemporary literature and 1930s publications, the paper examines the use of the budget by left wing reformers in confirming the problem of malnutrition amongst the working classes. Consequently the paper seeks to illustrate the manner in which calculative practices became bound up with discourses surrounding the diet of the nation.
In making this argument, the paper draws upon the governmentality framework based on the seminal works of scholars Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose (Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose and Miller; 1992). Governmentality offers a useful theoretical lens from which to view the nutritional debates of the 1930s; the polarised political approaches to the problem of malnutrition can be seen to represent two programmes of government. It explains the mediating role of an array of medical and dietary experts in the nutritional discourse, and it facilitates an understanding of the role of calculative technologies within the programmatic of government. The governmentality framework also provides the tools by which the macro programmes of government can be linked to the actions of autonomous citizens, in this case highlighting how the government’s National Fitness Campaign and dietary education initiatives sought to promote the fit and healthy self-disciplining body.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. The next section introduces the paper’s theoretical framework and outlines the value of a governmentality lens in understanding the means by which the self regulating citizen is cultivated in the modern state. Section 3 recounts a key political crisis that dominated 1930s Britain: the problem of a hungry nation. Set against the background of an economic depression, this section outlines the political divide which emerged between the government and left wing activists over the nutritional health of the poor and whether the problem was due to a deficit of income or ignorance. Section 4 describes the government’s solution to the nation’s nutritional crisis in the shape of a programme of domestic education and the launch of a National Fitness Campaign. Section 5 examines two significant surveys of family budgets which were conducted during this era and assesses their role as technologies of government. In section 6 we see how the results of these surveys were seen as objective evidence that malnutrition was an economic problem rather than one which could simply be ascribed to the extravagance, ignorance and moral failings of the working class housewife. Section 7 recounts the resulting programme of welfare reform which led to the creation of the British Welfare State. Finally, section 8 discusses the insights of the paper for understanding contemporary obsessions with diet and exercise and contains some concluding thoughts on the contribution of accounting scholarship for cultural studies.
2. Governing the nation
The governmentality framework (Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose and Miller, 1992) offers an explanation of how power operates in contemporary liberal democracies. In other words, it provides an insight into the indirect mechanisms by which the actions of free thinking, autonomous citizens are influenced. Drawing upon the work of Foucault (1991), the framework recognises that political power in contemporary society is embedded in the myriad of techniques for knowing and governing the populace. To understand power then, one needs to move “beyond the state” (Rose and Miller, 1992, p.173) and examine how authorities regulate the lives of individuals in an indirect manner.
Such shaping commences with an initial intervention, with a specific purpose or problem to cure (Rose and Miller, 1992, p.181). Through discourse, a domain and space is opened up for this problem such that it becomes defined and knowable (Miller and Rose, 1990, p.5). Discourse also provides the “moral justifications” for intervention (Rose and Miller, 1992, p.175). In this manner, governmentality possesses a programmatic character as it constructs a realm in need of governing. A programme of government possesses the promise to remedy the problem, it presents an “idealized schemata for the ordering of social and economic life” (Miller and Rose, 1990, p.14).
Programmes in turn become enabled through technologies of government. These represent the “calculations, techniques, apparatuses, documents and procedures through which authorities seek to embody and give effect to governmental ambitions” (Rose and Miller, 1992, 175). It is this exhaustive array of techniques of inscription, notation and calculation that make programmes operable, and accounting and other calculative practices constitute prime examples of such technologies (Miller, 2001).
For governance to be achieved in an indirect and self-regulating manner, Miller and Rose draw upon Latour (1986, 1987) and Callon’s (1986) work on the theory of translation. The process of translation explains how a network of interests becomes aligned “such that the problems of one and those of another seem intrinsically linked in their basis and their solution” (Rose and Miller, 1992, p.184). Through the enrolment and mobilisation of such diverse actors, governance at a distance becomes possible (Miller and Rose, 1990, p.34). Accounting and calculative practices more generally play an important role in this process as they construct centres of calculation which render distant domains knowable and calculable (Rose and Miller, 1992, p.185). In this manner governance from afar is enabled.
The process of governing also depends heavily on the role of experts. These knowledgeable characters construct enclosures around a body of knowledge and seek to claim it as their own (Rose and Miller, 1992, p.188). Offering objective opinion, experts act as vital linking mechanisms between the goals of government and the thoughts and deeds of the free thinking individual. “By means of expertise, self regulatory techniques can be installed in citizens that will align their personal choices with the ends of government” (Rose and Miller, 1992, p.189). Experts therefore mediate between the realms of the individual and the state.
In summary, in providing a framework for understanding the exercise of power in the modern state, and the manner in which links are created between macro programmes of government and the micro actions of autonomous citizens, the governmentality thesis is a powerful tool for the qualitative researcher. It explains the “self-government of individuals” (Miller and Rose, 1990, p.28). Indeed, such is the contribution of the governmentality perspective that Rose and Miller’s (1992) paper has been recognised by the British Journal of Sociology as one of the most influential articles in the field of sociology in the last 60 years. As McKinlay and Pezet (2010, p.494) similarly observe, the combined works of Miller and Rose, whom they refer to as ‘the London governmentalists’, has led to “the development of a coherent, sustained research programme that has generated new theoretical and empirical insights about a wide range of topics – from marketing to social welfare – and spanning two centuries.” Perhaps one of the reasons for its significance is that governmentality is not confined to government. While the institutions of education, health, and public planning form illustrative instances of governance, it is important to note that the governmentality framework is not restricted to understanding the influence of ‘the state’, but rather has a much broader reach in explaining the many and varied modes for governing and regulating individual lives in contemporary society. Indeed, suggest Miller and Rose (2008, p.20) it is these non-state modes of power that are “the defining features of our present”.
For the accounting researcher, the framework offers a valuable lens to view the role of calculative technologies in the process of governing. Important contributions have already been made in this regard by a number of scholars. Commencing with the seminal study of Miller and O’Leary (1987), the possibilities of calculative practices for sociological research have been theoretically debated by Vollmer (2003), while empirical insights into the self regulating impact of accounting have been revealed in the works of Neu and Heincke 2004, Graham (2010), and Spence and Rinaldi (2013). Such studies are important in order to understand the far reaching influence of accounting within contemporary society. For accounting is not confined to financial statements or factory processes, but is an active participant in shaping the contours of an array of diverse domains. Governmentality recognises this inherent role of calculative practices and hence embeds them within the framework. In this manner, the governmentality framework facilitates an understanding of the broader role of accounting within its social and organizational context (Hopwood, 1983).
The next sections deploy the governmentality framework in considering the exercise initiatives and diet debates that dominated 1930s Britain.
3. Hungry Britain: a nation’s nutritional crisis
3.1 Setting the nutritional norm
The origins of modern nutrition date back to the work of the mid-nineteenth century German chemist Justus von Liebig (Finlay, 1995, p.49) and in particular to his 1842 seminal study Animal Chemistry in which he illustrated chemistry’s significance for diet (Kamminga and Cunningham, 1995 p.4). It was another German chemist, Karl Voit who established dietary norms for the daily intake of protein, fat, and carbohydrate (Milles, 1995, p.78) while his pupil Max Rubner subsequently determined the exact energy values of food in the form of calories in the 1880s (Weatherall, 1995, p.190). Vitamin research was developed during the period 1910-1920. A key pioneer in this field was US biochemist Elmer V. McCollum, who in 1918 authored the popular text The Newer Knowledge of Nutrition (Aronson, 1986, p.638). It was at this stage that the importance of a diet rich in vitamins in the prevention of disorders such as rickets and scurvy was recognised. Consequently, by the 1920s, the dietary and nutritional needs of the body had been calibrated and an early calculative technology of calories and vitamins intake had been created.