Food, Health, Wealth and the the Origins of Inequality

Funny how things work out.  Last month, I read Angus Deaton’s book, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (2013). It was so readable, informative, and relevant to food history that I immediately made a note in my to-do file to write to him and say how much I had learned from it.

I thought it might strike a note, partly because his three-generation family trajectory from little people to the American professoriate so paralleled my own, and because his well-documented and incisive history of increased wealth gave a broader frame to the story I told in Cuisine and Empire.

And then yesterday Deaton popped up as the Economics Nobel Laureate for 2015. Writing now seems redundant or cheeky or both.

If you are interested in food history, however, do take a look at The Great Escape. One of Deaton’s specialties is household surveys and he has lots of relevant statistics and numbers, and, in my view, getting a grip on the numbers is essential to moving history beyond anecdote and opinion.

The Great Escape also made me wonder about how measures of relative and absolute poverty affect our perception of the rest of the world and most of past history.

Relative poverty, as you know, is a measure of inequality. Someone who is relatively poor lacks the income to maintain a decent standard of living compared to societal expectations (that’s a colloquial, not an economist’s definition). So as societies get richer, the income needed goes up. In the 1920s, you did not need a car. Now, unless you live in places with good public transportation, you do if you are to get to work and go to the grocery store.

Absolute poverty is the state of someone who does not have an income sufficient for basic necessities such as food and shelter.

In my own lifetime, I have seen a staggering increase in wealth.

In my village of 350 people in 1950s England, no one, not even the people with titles and big houses, had fires in more than one or two rooms, and central heating was not even on the horizon. Most had radios, but televisions were a huge luxury. We got a black and white one in 1956. Perhaps a dozen families had cars and the same number telephones. Outlying farms and cottages had neither electricity nor running water, few in the village had hot running water but boiled it in a kettle.

Admittedly, this was post WW II, but England was still powerful and rich compared to almost everywhere else.

Now, just 60 years later, all those things are taken for granted in the village, as well as a mobile phone and an annual holiday, often abroad.

But back to the 50s.  Lack of income meant life was hard and limited in ways it’s easy to forget.

Everyone was cold throughout the winter. Chilblains (oh how they itched) and bronchitis were just what happened between November and April, not a reason to go to the doctor. Nobody was surprised when the bedside glass of water froze.

Food was limited to what you grew, or what came in delivery vans, or what you could carry in a shopping bag back on the bus from the small town with one shopping street three miles away or, if you could afford the bus ticket, the bigger town ten miles away.  Technically we lived in what would now be termed a food desert.

Marriage prospects for all but the offspring of the dozen wealthiest families were limited to those you met on mystery tours or village dances served by the charter bus that came round on Saturdays.  Job prospects were limited to being a farm worker for boys or a house cleaner or a shop girl in town, especially for those who had left school at 14 (the leaving age was not raised to 15 until 1947). I knew many people who went to the town only once a year or so, who referred to people in the next valley five miles away over the downs as “foreigners.”

This was not dire absolute poverty by any manner of means. And we were one of the car-owning wealthier families.  But it was enough for me to be able to have some sense of what life must have been like a hundred years earlier yet before the benefits of the Industrial Revolution began to kick in.

So although I would never want to go back, I am grateful for the experience.

As Deaton say, “Life is better now than at almost any time in history. More people are richer and fewer people live in dire poverty. Lives are longer and parents no longer routinely watch a quarter of their children die.”

In countries like the US measures of relative poverty (and no doubt about it, relative poverty means hardship and indignity) mean that people who–in absolute terms–are vastly richer than most of the people who have ever lived are counted as poor. And those who count as middle class are off the historical scale.

How does this affect the way people who have grown up with such plenty understand history or of the contemporary world?  I think it often makes it very difficult to have any idea.

I remember an American visitor to Mexico watching men walk into town behind donkeys with a small load of wood whose sale would net them no more than a few dollars. “Those donkeys are so cute,” she said, “but wouldn’t life be easier if they just bought second hand VWs?”

Next week I’m off to a James Beard Foundation Future of Food conference. As an optimist, I’m delighted to hear upbeat visions of where food might go.

But this new-found wealth is precarious and, to quote Deaton again, “Millions still experience the horrors of destitution and of premature death.”

The past is not yet past and could so easily return.

Enough of moralizing.  And thanks to Angus Deaton for the hours of slogging to put numbers on household wealth.

• ← Coming to Terms with the Twinkie
• The Future of Food at the James Beard Foundation →