Food hasFootnote clearly played a major role in many of the debates about the course of global economic development, notably, in recent years, those over comparative living standards and the Great Divergence. In the picture that has emerged out of current research on the trajectory of dietary change across Eurasia, diversification away from a limited early modern diet, towards greater consumption of livestock products in particular and more nutritious food in general, has come to be seen as a central element in the divergence in living standards between the leading parts of northern Europe and the apparently lagging regions of Asia. On the western side, the higher labour productivity resulting from the development of commercial agriculture freed rural workers for new forms of employment, and turned them into consumers of a meat- and dairy-centred diet that eventually ensured their nutrition. Conversely, the persistently grain-based diets prevalent on the eastern side have to be seen as condemning the mass of the population to poor nutrition, the threat of famine, and the dominance of labour-intensive forms of agriculture, which tied workers to subsistence cultivation and failed to generate measurable improvements in living standards.
These conclusions have been substantiated by means of a growing body of quantitative estimates of agricultural output, calorie consumption, and real wages, covering long periods of time across widely varying environments on either side of the divergence. As brought together in Broadberry et al.’s recent compilation, these place China, Japan, and India already behind key regions of northern Europe by 1600, with the divergence in living standards expanding consistently thereafter.Footnote 1
However, a major part of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence was devoted to alternative evidence suggesting that the level of living standards, dominated by diet, in parts at least of pre-industrial China (and possibly Japan and India too) was not necessarily lower than that of comparable regions in Europe, and the ensuing debate has continued to cast doubt on the conclusion that the divergence was apparent well before the Industrial Revolution.Footnote 2 Meanwhile, on a conceptual level, Pat Hudson, in reviewing Broadberry et al.’s compilation, queries the basis of its estimates as necessarily both dependent on, and at the same time confirming the superiority of, a particular model of the process of economic development and industrialization.Footnote 3 For Morten Jerven, this amounts to ‘telling history backwards’, as ‘our retrospectively created data … are shaped by presumed notions of the origin, paths, direction, and destination of the development that the data are supposed to describe’.Footnote 4
On the western side of the divergence, it is living standards in England, as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, that have received most attention, although it is recognized that the pattern of dietary change, in particular, was by no means uniform even across all parts of the British Isles, let alone elsewhere in Europe. The work of Broadberry and his associates has in fact tapped into a more long-standing debate as to the course of English living standards during the process of industrialization, and the quantitative basis of their measures of agricultural output, calorie availability, and the buying power of real wages has been challenged and revised in a substantial literature on how best to deal with the absence of custom-built macro-level statistical data for the relevant periods.Footnote 5
At the same time, however, the debate over living standards in industrializing England has encouraged the search for alternative forms of micro-level and qualitative evidence as to what ordinary people actually consumed in the past. In relation to diet, as will be described below, this work has begun to offer a more complex and nuanced analysis of the pattern of change over the course of industrialization, suggesting that pre-industrial English people may have eaten a more varied and nutritious diet than can be reflected in existing measurements, but one which was to be undermined by developments in the agricultural and wider economies, and eventually replaced by a commercialized diet in which livestock products played a more central role. Hence, while diets in England certainly changed with economic growth, the relation of this to measurable improvements in nutritional living standards is not straightforward.
This conclusion also complicates comparison of dietary living standards across the divergence, which has typically relied on efforts such as those of the Broadberry team to find measures of agricultural output, calorie availability, and real wages, as far as possible at national level. Such estimates are most developed for Japan, for which potential data sources, going back to the early modern Tokugawa period (1603–1867), do exist. As the basis for comparisons of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and other indicators of living standards, these show that Japan was already well behind England and Holland, the most advanced regions of Europe, by the eighteenth century, although lagging other parts of Europe less, and subsequently overtaking China and India within the Asian ‘Little Divergence’.Footnote 6 While the Japanese diet, historically as now, is no more typical of the whole of Asia than is England’s of Europe, it does share important features, such as a persistently central role for grain (in particular intensively grown rice), with other major parts of the region. Yet, despite participating in the apparent ‘failure’ of the eastern side of the divergence to follow the pattern of dietary change established in the leading regions on the western side, it was in Japan alone, before the Second World War, that modern industrial growth began to take root.
At the same time, there now exists a substantial body of work on the food history that underlies Japan’s distinctive dietary pattern. The main historiographical purpose of this has been to trace the origins of what has become a globally recognized cuisine, very different from its Western counterparts. Reflecting this, in 2013 UNESCO declared the ‘traditional Japanese diet and cuisine’ to be a part of the ‘intangible cultural heritage of humanity’, and the basis for a healthy and sustainable, as well as tasty and socially and culturally satisfying, pattern of food consumption. In particular, the citation praised the Japanese meal structure, involving plain rice and small side dishes of fish or vegetables, as promoting dietary diversity and the consumption of a wide range of locally produced and seasonal items.Footnote 7 In its supporting documentation, the Japanese government also makes a link between the balanced, low-fat, ‘traditional’ diet and contemporary Japan’s high longevity and low obesity rates.Footnote 8 Indeed, well before this, the American economic historian of Japan Susan Hanley had already suggested that the Tokugawa diet might have been healthier than both its contemporary European equivalents and its Japanese successors.Footnote 9
Such arguments suggest that, in the context of very different dietary patterns, comparative levels of living standards – and their changes over the course of economic development – cannot necessarily be assessed by means of simple quantitative indicators. In this light, the work of Japanese food historians described below represents a repository of evidence as to what people actually ate in the past that can be utilized, as work on England suggests, to offer an alternative window on to changing living standards. In what follows, after summarizing the prevailing quantitative assessments and the issues they have raised, I assess what we know, from the work of food historians, about the development of the Japanese diet in the past and, through comparison with England, the implications of this for understanding of the paths of comparative living standards across the Great Divergence.
Food and living standards in pre-industrial England and Japan: output, calories, and ‘trading up’
The consensus view that living standards, as reflected in real wages and GDP per capita, were diverging across Eurasia from the seventeenth century onwards depends on a broad, national-level assessment of food production and consumption that, in the case of Japan, confirms the once dominant view of historians that ordinary living standards remained low and precarious throughout the pre-Second World War period.Footnote 10 In fact, it has long been accepted that the processes of change that led to northern Europe’s lead in the Great Divergence were closely related to developments in agriculture that increased output and, in particular, raised labour productivity. These involved the adoption of larger-scale, more land- and capital-intensive forms of farming, which made greater use of livestock and increased production of meat and dairy produce. Hence, for England, Broadberry et al. conclude that real agricultural output was growing at 0.77% p.a. over the period from 1700 to the 1860s, with the share of the livestock sector increasing from around 40% to 60% over the same period.Footnote 11 Meanwhile, as a consequence of these developments, the food supply was becoming more and more commercialized and professionally processed. Nonetheless, accelerating population growth meant that, by the end of the eighteenth century, food imports from other parts of Great Britain, and increasingly from the rest of the world, had become essential to keeping England adequately fed.Footnote 12
The comparable estimates of food availability in Japan that underlie Broadberry et al.’s assessment of the relative levels of living standards are based on surviving records of arable area, combined with such information as is available on yields, to give aggregate agricultural output.Footnote 13 They generate an annual average growth rate of 0.34% over the period 1600–1874, while population growth averaged 0.26% p.a. over the whole period, though slowing down to virtual stagnation after 1730.Footnote 14 Consequently, while famines still occurred, this was with declining frequency and increasingly as a result of market failures and disturbed political conditions in the less diversified and developed north-east, in the context of a generally adequate food supply.Footnote 15 More detailed studies imply some deficiencies in the typical diet, especially of vitamin A and calcium, while it contained what would nowadays be regarded as much too much salt, and these factors may be reflected in relatively high rates of infant and maternal mortality and of stroke as a cause of death, compared with, for example, England.Footnote 16 Nonetheless, in overall terms, the increasing food supply of pre-industrial Japan appears to have been, on average, at least adequate in terms of energy provision and basic nutrition. However, while the gradual increase in the per capita consumption of food that output growth permitted is in line with the expansion in demand that might be predicted, given known wage rates and prices, it remained significantly slower than that observed in England, and without any structural shift away from labour-intensive grain production.
Strangely, however, in neither England nor Japan does increasing food availability appear to have manifested itself through a significant increase in average calorie consumption. For Japan as a whole, Bassino et al. calculate that this remained in the region of 2,000–2,400 kcal per capita per day from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries.Footnote 17 Slightly lower estimates emerge from the two extant regional surveys of nineteenth-century food availability which have been extensively analysed. One covered 326 villages (population around 500,000) in the south-western domain of Chōshū in the 1840s, and the other 416 villages (population 92,000) in the mountainous region of Hida in 1879–83. For Chōshū, reckoned by Nishikawa to have been reasonably representative of the national average, staple foods (grains plus potatoes) yielded an overall average of 1,663.7 kcal per person per day, while all recorded output was equivalent to 1,860.Footnote 18 The comparable overall figure for the rather different region of Hida, some twenty years later, is 1,850.Footnote 19 Remarkably, this level of calorie consumption is not greatly below that estimated by Broadberry et al. for England throughout the long period from the 1270s to the 1850s, over which it appears to have remained around the 2,000 kcal mark, representing enough for subsistence and survival but not much more.Footnote 20
Broadberry et al.’s explanation of the apparent failure of English consumers to translate increases in their incomes into increases in calorie consumption, above what would represent a basic subsistence level, lies in the changing composition of their diet. Hence, from the eighteenth century onwards, households were ‘trading up’ to what they regarded as a ‘respectability basket’ of food. This included more meat and dairy produce, but also more highly processed food items, such as bread instead of pottage (thick soup) and beer, all of which were more wasteful, in calorie terms, than non-animal-based and less processed alternatives.Footnote 21 At the same time, a growing amount of the grain produced was used to feed the horses that supplied the power required by more productive forms of agriculture, as increasingly land- and capital-intensive systems of farming and food processing came to the fore.Footnote 22
A substantial literature has now grown up querying the statistical basis of Broadberry et al.’s estimates.Footnote 23 At the same time, others have suggested that the ‘calorie puzzle’ might in fact be intrinsic to macro-level estimates, which are simply unable to reflect the quantity and range of food available to English households by the eighteenth century. Craig Muldrew argues that, given what we know about increases in labour input, an average of 2,000 kcal per day would not have been enough to sustain the labour force that generated higher levels of agricultural output and GDP.Footnote 24 He finds evidence that eighteenth-century agricultural labourers in fact had available to them a wider and more nutritious range of food than prevailing macro-level and market-based averages might suggest. This included significant amounts of meat, cheese, and beer, along with the considerable variety of fruit and vegetables that Joan Thirsk has also described as being cultivated and foraged in the early modern countryside.Footnote 25 Many rural households still had access to a plot of land on which to grow garden produce, as well as to common pasture, and some were able to keep a pig or even a cow; the knowledge required to engage in hunting, trapping, and foraging was widespread. Meanwhile, significant amounts of energy-giving food and drink, over and above what could be bought with wages, were provided by employers to live-in servants or those hired to work in the fields. Altogether, therefore, Muldrew concludes that eighteenth-century agricultural labourers in England certainly had available to them the 3,000–4,000 kcal per day that they would have needed to sustain themselves through hard farming labour.
Meredith and Oxley, using different kinds of dietary record, similarly find that, by the 1700–1770 period, English households were experiencing a ‘golden age’ in which they were well fed on both commercial and home-grown food.Footnote 26 However, they also show how, thereafter, population growth, urbanization, and industrialization appear to have brought about a significant decline in the nutritional value of the diet, as households lost the ability to produce food for themselves. It was only increasing inflows of imported food from the 1870s onwards that enabled it to recover to a sustainable level.
The dietary golden age of the eighteenth century may therefore have represented only a passing phase along England’s path to industrialization, even if the higher estimates of calorie consumption are to be believed.Footnote 27 Nonetheless, the available micro-level evidence points to the possibility that, if we could take account of the full range of food sources utilized by early modern households, we might find that their diet was a good deal more varied and nutritious than is implied by macro-level estimates of quantifiable food production and consumption. If so, subsequent dietary changes, and their implied impact on living standards, would appear to have been more significantly related to developments in the composition and methods of production and supply of food than to the quantity and nutritional value of what was eaten.
In the case of Japan, as detailed below, despite estimates of calorie consumption little above subsistence level, food historians are able to exploit a wealth of evidence that Tokugawa-period consumers were coming to eat elements of what now constitutes the unique ‘Japanese cuisine’, lauded for its nutritional and taste-related qualities. To some extent this evidence is derived from sources such as banquet menus and cookery books that do not reflect what ordinary people, especially outside the great urban centres, actually ate day to day. However, local historians, in particular, have begun to uncover more evidence of ordinary rural diets, and work such as that of Muldrew and Thirsk on England suggests alternative ways in which such sources might be used to reveal the shifting patterns of everyday food consumption. This would enable us to consider whether or not Japanese working households in the pre-industrial period were, like their English counterparts, ‘trading up’ as the economy grew, towards more varied, highly processed, and tasty, if not necessarily more nutritious, foods. However, in the Japanese case, the dietary pattern that emerged in the early modern period appears to have persisted into the era of industrialization and there is little evidence of the kinds of structural change in food consumption and production that are held to have played a central role in the transition to modern economic growth in England. Such differing trajectories of dietary change clearly complicate global comparisons of living standards, raising issues that can only be resolved through evidence that goes beyond available macro-level data.
By the eighteenth century, the practice of eating three meals a day (often with mid morning and afternoon snacks in between) had become the norm in both England and Japan. In Japanese households, grain was typically cooked first thing in the morning for breakfast, with the leftovers eaten cold for lunch. Households able to cook again in the evening would consume another hot meal, others something cold (or warmed up in tea or soup) or something prepared outside the home.Footnote 28 Meanwhile, in England, meal patterns involving breakfast, lunch (at home or at work), and something in the evening had become established by the early modern period, although exact mealtimes varied across classes.Footnote 29
In the sections that follow, the work of food historians of England and Japan is employed as evidence of what went into these meals, in order to demonstrate and compare the changing ways in which the components of the available food supply were utilized and consumed. The conclusion will then return to consideration of what this might mean for the assessment of comparative living standards at either end of Eurasia.
Grain: the staple of the diet
In both England and Japan, throughout the process of dietary change that preceded and accompanied industrialization, grain remained the most important source of calories for rural and urban households alike. For England, staple grains and legumes (whether domestically produced or imported) continued to supply around three-quarters of the recorded calories consumed well into the nineteenth century, despite the growth in consumption of livestock products.Footnote 30 By the eighteenth century, the dominant grain was wheat, although oats, barley, and rye, which had once been important food grains, persisted in some regional diets.Footnote 31 Hence, by the middle of the eighteenth century, 63% of the English population are estimated to have eaten wheat bread as their staple, though these were concentrated in the south of the country.Footnote 32 Wheat bread is the staple in the consumption basket for northern Europe used in Allen’s estimates of comparative real wages, although his ‘bare-bones’ subsistence basket for late medieval Europe is based on oats, as a cheaper source of calories.Footnote 33
By the eighteenth century, wheat was typically being produced by commercial farmers and processed by millers, more and more into the whiter flour that reflected higher social, though not nutritional, status. Rural households with access to plentiful fuel supplies continued to buy flour from millers and bake their own bread, but commercial bakers were ubiquitous in the towns and increasingly available in the countryside.Footnote 34 Pottages, involving oats or other grains as thickeners of meat and vegetable stocks, remained common in some regions, and potatoes were beginning to spread by the eighteenth century. However, wheat bread was steadily becoming the basis of most meals for rich and poor alike, eaten with stews or cheese, and washed down with beer. The variety of dietary staples that had prevailed in earlier times was thus reduced as commercial grain cultivation and processing took over.
In Japan, too, grain continued to represent far-and-away the most significant element of the food supply through the pre-industrial period and indeed afterwards. In 1840s Chōshū, for example, it accounted for 86% of the recorded calories available and over 70% of the protein; in Hida, the figures are 90% and 77% respectively.Footnote 35 Japanese interest in the grain that thus constituted the major part of the diet has always focused on the share within it of the polished white rice favoured by the urban better-off. It is true that, wherever suitable paddy fields could be created, rice was grown. However, during the Tokugawa period, it was the rice crop above all that the feudal authorities were able to assess and tax, with the result that a major part of it found its way into the granaries of feudal lords, who used it to pay their samurai in kind or to sell on the commercial markets that supplied rice to urban areas. In addition, cultivators had every incentive to sell whatever rice they were able to retain, given the high price that it commanded relative to other grain crops, or indeed to put their effort into growing less easily recorded and taxed non-rice crops for their own consumption.
Hence, from the point of view of the ordinary diet of the rural areas in which the vast majority of the pre-twentieth-century population lived, the grain on which meals centred was by no means exclusively rice. Von Verschuer argues, on the basis of a wide range of qualitative evidence, that few Tokugawa-period rural households can have retained enough rice to provide subsistence.Footnote 36 Rather, most were clearly continuing the dietary practices of earlier times, utilizing non-rice foods to meet a significant part of their day-to-day needs. Barley and wheat, collectively known as mugi, were the most important of these, followed by various kinds of millet and buckwheat (soba). In Chōshū, rice available for consumption accounted for 52.6% of recorded calories consumed, and was typically eaten in combination with mugi (25.6% of total calories), potatoes, or other vegetables; in the Hida villages, grain was eaten at all three meals, but in varying forms – typically as rice (52.1% of total calories) mixed with barnyard millet, beans, or potatoes, or as buckwheat flour.Footnote 37 By the time of the first national-level attempt to estimate the overall output of the economy, the Fuken Bussanhyō of 1874, rice accounted for 63% of total agricultural output by value, compared with mugi’s 11%, under prevailing relative prices. However, in crude volume terms, the mugi harvest was equivalent to almost 40% of the rice harvest.Footnote 38
Such a mixed-grain dietary pattern allowed for considerable local variation. By the end of the Tokugawa period, the majority of households resident in cities clearly relied on commercial supplies of rice to provide the bulk of their everyday meals. Hence, by 1888, when an official government survey into the composition of ‘staple foods’ (grains and potatoes) at the prefectural level was conducted, the share of rice was found to be 60%–70% in the big cities of Honshū and even higher in the rice-monoculture prefectures of the north-east, where double-cropping with a non-rice winter crop was impossible.Footnote 39 Elsewhere, however, this survey found the share of rice in staple foods to be typically below 50%, and as low as 30%–40% in regions where it was feasible to grow other grains as dry-field or winter crops. The most common of these – barley, wheat, and millet – were used in soup-stews and pottages, ground into flour for dumplings or noodles, or combined with whatever rice was available to create well-recognized staple mixtures with other grains, beans, or vegetables. A wider range of common staples, including buckwheat, were labelled ‘miscellaneous grains’ (zakkoku) and often combined with rice, as in the pre-packed mixes – promoted as more nutritious and tasty than plain rice – that are nowadays available in supermarkets. In addition, the sweet potato, a new import into Japan in the early seventeenth century, was widely adopted as a cheap and relatively nutritious supplement to the range of staple foods, as it spread outwards from the south-west.
For Gotō, therefore, the major difference between the diet of Tokugawa-period Chōshū and that of later years lies not in the overall role of grain and potatoes as the major sources of calories and nutrients, but in the range and variety of staples consumed.Footnote 40 Ōmameuda dates increasing consumption of rice in rural areas to the later nineteenth century. He attributes it to the effects of the Meiji land-tax reform, agricultural improvements that raised rice yields, and the increased use of dry-field capacity for commercial crops rather than non-rice grains.Footnote 41 Even so, rice and mugi mixtures remained the staple of most meals in the countryside into the twentieth century, and the basis of a more diverse and nutritious diet than that consumed by those able to afford a higher proportion of white rice.
Bassino and Ma, in work that underlies Japan’s position in Allen et al.’s comparisons of real wage rates, recognize this in their specification of two consumption baskets – one based on rice and the other on mugi – used to estimate what Japanese wages could buy.Footnote 42 However, they regard the rice-based basket as the ‘normal’ one, which indeed it may well have been for the kinds of urban wage-workers whose living standards are being compared, and it is this which is reflected in the relatively low Japanese real-wage rate found in comparisons with Europe. The food historians’ evidence, however, would suggest that, at least among the mass of rural households, who grew a significant part of what they ate, it was a non-rice or mixed-rice basket that was the norm. This enabled the majority to consume the calories and nutrients of which grain staples were the main source in less costly ways, in terms of labour, cash outlays, and food security, than would have been the case had they relied on rice. Moreover, as Bassino et al. recognize, since non-rice grains represented cheaper sources of calories than rice, the same expenditure, valued at market prices, would generate a greater number of calories, the higher the proportion of mugi in the basket consumed.Footnote 43
Comparative measures of Japanese living standards based on the price and output of rice, for which naturally much more information survives than for the assortment of other foods cultivated and gathered for local sale or subsistence, may therefore not accurately reflect what more typical Japanese workers and consumers were able to attain in terms of nutrition and calories, even if (and this is rarely demonstrated) they would have preferred to eat rice alone.Footnote 44 At the same time, while their English counterparts were coming to consume a narrowing range of commercially produced grain staples, the diets of the rural majority of Japanese households continued to be based on a variety of grains adapted to local environmental, economic, and cultural circumstances, the impact of which on living standards is much harder to capture in quantifiable form. With urbanization and industrialization in the twentieth century, the preference for white rice, just like that for white bread in Europe, began to assert itself in nationwide food consumption patterns. However, the main change that modern growth thereby brought to Japan was in the composition of the grain component within the diet, rather than, as in England, a shift away from a predominantly grain-based structure.
Taste and variety: vegetables, fruit, and pulses
Both Thirsk and Muldrew present abundant evidence that a wide range of fruit, vegetables, and herbs was being grown or gathered in the early modern English countryside, while large quantities were also supplied commercially to the major cities.Footnote 45 Root vegetables, including potatoes, as well as cabbage, onions, leeks, and much else, were considered essential ingredients of stews and pottages, while apples, pears, and many sorts of berry were eaten in pies and puddings. Muldrew thus describes the suggestion that the early modern English did not eat vegetables as a ‘myth’. However, much of such produce was grown in garden allotments and orchards for household use and, by the eighteenth century, access to such land was beginning to decline, as landowners commercialized the use of their holdings and rural workers began the process of moving into urban wage-work.Footnote 46 Increasing reliance on the market for everyday food thus appears to have led to the substitution of cheaper or more easily prepared ingredients, such as sugar and tea, for the range of self-supplied items that characterized the early modern diet.
In Japan, the grains and potatoes that continued to form the major component in the everyday diet well into the twentieth century were produced, for the most part, as subsistence crops, to be processed as required within the household. The same is true of the many fruits and vegetables that were grown across the country, although commercial cultivation of such crops was also increasingly significant, and substantial areas of market gardening developed to supply the major urban centres. From a nutritional point of view, the most important non-grain crop, and the major source of protein in the diet apart from grain, remained the soya bean, usually eaten processed into miso or tofu (see below). However, farm households are also recorded as cultivating a wide range of fruit and vegetables for commercial use or home consumption.
The most widely grown of these was giant radish (daikon) – in the Chōshū survey, its output was equivalent to 130 g per person per day – followed by turnip. Also recorded throughout the Chōshū villages are burdock, aubergines, melons, cucumbers (kyūri), pumpkins, matsutake and shiitake mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and various kinds of peas and beans.Footnote 47 Many other vegetables were cultivated as speciality products in particular areas, while Japanese leeks (negi) were grown everywhere in small quantities for home use.Footnote 48 Some crops newly introduced to Tokugawa Japan, such as carrots, were also becoming increasingly common. As a result, although giant radish accounted for almost 40% of the value of non-staple vegetable output recorded in the 1874 national survey, the remainder was spread over a very wide variety of items.Footnote 49 Meanwhile, the most common fruit appears to have been the persimmon – 30% of the value of fruit output in the 1874 surveyFootnote 50 – but plums, pears, peaches, and mikan (mandarin) oranges were also widely cultivated. Hence, in suitable areas, as agricultural techniques developed to enable household labour forces to engage in intensive multiple cropping, the range of non-grain crops (including tea and tobacco too) grown for both subsistence consumption and the market continued to widen.Footnote 51
Many of the vegetables grown were destined to be included with grain in one-pot soups and stews, or mixed with rice as extenders, but the practice of eating them as side dishes separate from the staple grain was also spreading. Vegetables such as taro or carrot simmered in a broth, or cooked greens in a dressing, served alongside rice, pickles, and a bowl of miso soup, became standard elements in the cheap takeaway meals available from stalls in Tokugawa-period cities.Footnote 52 In much of the countryside, such trends were restricted to those who had the facilities to prepare more complex meals, but even poorer villagers were clearly coming to experience them at communal banquets and festivities, or when away from home. In the cities, vegetables were cheap relative to, for example, rice or fish, and so preferred as everyday side-dish ingredients, while, in the countryside, most were home-grown and readily available.Footnote 53
Given the emerging structure of the ‘traditional Japanese diet’, therefore, consumption of a wide range of non-grain crops, even if in only small quantities, persisted and even expanded, on the basis of the continued capacity of Japanese rural households to grow multiple crops on their holdings. English households, in contrast, were increasingly, by the eighteenth century, relying on the market for the commercially supplied items that substituted for the fruit and vegetables they were less and less able to produce for themselves.
Protein and taste: animal and marine products
In the standard interpretation of England’s path to industrialization, increasing consumption of meat and dairy produce plays a key role in facilitating the shift towards forms of commercial agriculture that generated higher labour productivity, and that supplied a more nutritious and ‘respectable’ diet. The English were famous, even before the eighteenth century, for the amount of beef they ate, and by then households across the board appear to have regarded some form of meat as essential to the diet.Footnote 54 Meanwhile, consumption of butter and, even more so, cheese increased rapidly after 1700.Footnote 55 Thereafter, although grains remained the largest source of per-capita energy supplies, their contribution was clearly declining in favour of the meat and dairy produce that households ‘trading up’ regarded as the key to an acceptable diet.Footnote 56 Meat, roast or stewed, became an increasingly essential ingredient of proper meals, while bread and cheese made convenient lunches and snacks for wage-workers without the time or facilities for more elaborate cooking. Where once many households would have been able to raise their own animals as sources of meat and milk, however, by the eighteenth century less and less land was available for subsistence production, so that it was commercial butchers and dairies that met the growing demand for meat and cheese.Footnote 57
In Japan, it is clear that animals were rarely reared for food purposes, and that dairy produce was not consumed at all, at least until efforts to copy elements of the Western diet began in the later nineteenth century, and only with difficulty then. This is typically attributed to the Buddhist proscription of meat-eating, although hunted animals were eaten, and the raising of some domestic animals for food was not unknown. Chickens, for instance, were widely kept for their eggs, though to what extent their meat was eaten is not clear.Footnote 58
Moreover, the proscription on eating animal products did not extend to fish or other marine produce. Much of Japan’s populated area is close to the sea or to rivers from which fish and shellfish could be gathered for home use, while commercial fishing and whaling expanded significantly over the Tokugawa period, as the number of fishing grounds increased and fishery technology developed.Footnote 59 Fresh produce was supplied to the large-scale fish markets of the cities, but, as preservation techniques improved and distribution systems expanded, it became possible for small amounts of fish to appear as common components in ordinary meals, at least a few times per month, throughout the country. Preserved marine products, including seaweed, also became ubiquitous flavouring ingredients. In Hida, for instance, which is not on the coast, villagers caught freshwater fish for their own consumption, while also processing it for sale in local towns, where fish was as important as soya beans as a source of protein.Footnote 60 Over half of the Chōshū villages caught eels, while sweetfish and dace were also widely recorded; in coastal villages a large variety of sea fish and shellfish (especially oysters) was also available.Footnote 61 Where organized whaling – a relatively large-scale and capital-intensive commercial activity – was carried out, fresh whale meat was available, and salted whale meat was marketed further afield. Whales could also be made to yield products that contributed to the food supply in more indirect ways, for example as insecticide on rice fields.Footnote 62
Fish (fresh or preserved) was also a common food source in England, but its consumption in no way matched that of the meat and dairy produce that was coming to play a more and more important role in the English diet. Nonetheless, while this may have had important implications for the nature of rural development on the supply side, it does not mean that the Japanese diet was nutritionally deficient, in absolute terms, in protein. Allen’s ‘respectability basket’, based on the known consumption patterns of eighteenth-century northern European workers, has them consuming 112 g of protein per person per day from meat and dairy produce, while Broadberry et al.’s national-level data and, even more so, Muldrew’s micro-level evidence of actual diets imply an even higher level of protein consumption in England.Footnote 63 That said, the Food and Agriculture Organization currently recommends an intake of 0.75 g of protein per day per kilogram of body weight for adult men and women, which works out at 45 g for someone weighing 60 kg.Footnote 64 Average daily protein availability, from grain, pulses, and (marginally) fish and other animal sources, in both the Chōshū and Hida surveys clearly exceeded this requirement (52.4 g and 50 g respectively), even if it did not permit what Allen describes as the ‘extravagant consumption of protein by English labourers’.Footnote 65
‘Food for free’: hunted and foraged products
One of Thirsk’s many contributions to understanding of the early modern English diet lies in her evidence of the role of ‘food for free’ in enhancing its variety, taste, and nutritional value. Wild birds and rabbits, nuts, mushrooms, herbs, and flavourings were widely hunted and foraged, and it cannot be assumed that the commercial products consumed by the better-off were necessarily more nutritious or tasty.Footnote 66 The ‘golden age’ of the eighteenth-century English diet thus relied not only on the expansion of agricultural production but also on continued access to the woods, forests, rivers, and moors where hunting, fishing, trapping, and foraging could take place. Nonetheless, enclosure and the commercialization of agricultural land were already limiting the scope for such activities and, by the nineteenth century, urbanization was increasingly restricting the diet of most households to cultivated and commercial products.
In Japan, the limitations to the area of land suitable for settled cultivation mean that a large part of the country even now remains densely forested and a potential source of much of dietary value. In earlier times, slash-and-burn cultivation was common and von Verschuer provides evidence that the practice continued into the Tokugawa period, representing as it did a relatively easy way of supplying basic subsistence crops, such as millet, that did not require as much labour time and care as permanent cultivation (especially of rice) and that were well beyond the gaze of the tax collector.Footnote 67
At the same time, for villages everywhere, forests offered a range of foods that could be foraged and collected. Chestnuts and acorns gathered in the forests were the second most important source of calories (after millet) for the mountain villages in the Hida survey that did not grow rice; elsewhere, records exist of households living on chestnuts for parts of the year, while devoting their labour to market-based activities such as silk-cocoon production, suggesting that, in places at least, foraged nuts were consumed as part of the regular diet, not just as ‘famine food’.Footnote 68 Fodder for animals was also collected in forests.
Forests also supplied foragers with a wide range of fruit, bracken, roots, fungi, and other plants that offered dietary variety and medicinal benefits. Starch, derived (by a very time-consuming process) from foraged roots and bracken, was a staple food in mountain areas, and was also increasingly in demand as an ingredient in Japanese-style cakes. Many familiar elements of Japanese cuisine were initially foraged plants that continued to be collected in the wild.Footnote 69 Some wild plants were clearly exotic delicacies that could be sold on the urban gourmet market or as medicinal items, and professional hunters employed by villages to protect their land supplemented their incomes by gathering plants as they passed through the forests.Footnote 70 But others continued to be locally consumed – often in preserved form – to give variety, taste, and nutritional value to ordinary diets. Rendering such plants edible, in forms that could be preserved, was clearly often a painstaking process, but the persistence of such food products in the diet implies that, as in eighteenth-century England but less and less thereafter, foraged plants retained sufficient significance, or commercial value, to merit the labour of collecting and processing them.Footnote 71 Meanwhile, the extent of early modern hunting and trapping, both by samurai as a sport and by villages seeking to protect their crops from pests, is now widely recognized.Footnote 72
In Japan as in England, therefore, the early modern diet may well have contained a greater variety of elements than can be reflected in the data for cultivated crops and domesticated animal sources. Moreover, many of these foods were hunted or foraged for their taste and nutritional value, rather than as a last resort. However, in the Japanese case, although hunting became more and more restricted, as urbanization and industrialization proceeded, wild fruits and plants retained their significance in the cuisine and cannot be discounted as elements in the diet, as it developed, even if commercial production of them was slow to emerge.
Processed foods
In England, the dietary change that accompanied economic growth involved increasing amounts of processed food, including bread, beer, bacon, butter, cheese, and other dairy products, as well as imported products such as sugar and tea, many of which were wasteful, in terms of the conversion of plants into calories, but convenient and tasty. Rural households had long developed techniques for preserving perishable food through salting, smoking, pickling, and fermenting: most meat and fish was eaten smoked or salted, and fruit and vegetables were widely preserved as pickles and jams.Footnote 73 Where facilities were available, such practices continued into the eighteenth century and beyond. By then, however, increasing demands on the household labour force, the switch from wood to coal (which is unsuitable for smoking food) as fuel, and changing tastes appear to have driven a shift towards greater reliance on commercial food processing by professionals such as bakers, grocers, and brewers.Footnote 74 Clark, Huberman, and Lindert point out the growing divergence between the value of agricultural output and recorded expenditure on food in England, which clearly reflects the increasing importance of commercial processing, transporting, and retailing in the provision of food items.Footnote 75
To some extent, similar developments were happening in Tokugawa Japan, such that by the time of the Fuken Bussanhyō survey in 1874, food and drink processing (dominated by the manufacture of sake, soy sauce, and miso) had come to represent the largest single category of industrial production, generating 12% of the total national output and 42% of the manufacturing sector.Footnote 76 However, since almost all Japanese rural households continued to retain control of cultivation on land that they themselves managed, the scope for supplying one’s own processed foods was greater, provided that home-grown crops could be prepared and preserved using the household’s labour and facilities. While, in the cases of some products and some markets, commercial processing made for a better and more marketable product, evidence from food history clearly suggests that diets were also becoming more varied and tasty as a result of the unrecorded labour of household members.
All grain requires some degree of processing before it can be eaten. In England, by the early modern period, most grain destined for bread was ground into flour for a fee in a local mill.Footnote 77 In Japan, as far as rice was concerned, rural households were able to hull, and to some extent mill, the grain themselves using their own labour power or water-driven equipment.Footnote 78 However, what resulted was genmai or brown rice, which was easier to cook in boiled forms and is, as is now well known, more nutritious than the highly polished white rice that commercial rice polishers were able to produce to meet urban demand. Barley and millet required only home processing before cooking as whole grain or pounding into cakes or dumplings. Wheat has to be milled before cooking and has typically been consumed in the form of udon noodles, but the extra labour and equipment required to produce these was probably not worthwhile on a day-to-day basis within rural households. Otherwise, though, the grain that supplied the bulk of the ordinary diet continued to be processed for the most part within the home, using household labour, rather than by commercial specialists.
Much the same can be said of many of the items that accompanied grain in day-to-day diets. Although fruit and vegetables, typically home-grown, were eaten fresh in stews and soups and as side dishes, many were also preserved to be used as pickles (tsukemono). Salting and drying were well-established techniques by the Tokugawa period, but miso, sake lees, rice bran (a by-product of the growing urban demand for highly polished rice), and other taste-giving ingredients were increasingly used, alongside rice vinegar, to preserve food. In many cases, this was perfectly possible to achieve within the household: giant radishes and persimmons were dried on the roofs of farmhouses; cucumber and aubergine were pickled in rice bran at home; Japanese plums preserved in salt (umeboshi) were very widely produced and consumed domestically.Footnote 79 Local groceries also produced and supplied pickles, and more complex products came to be manufactured as commercial sidelines by farm households within the orbit of major markets, but even samurai households pickled and preserved their own garden produce.Footnote 80
The soya bean was also eaten largely in processed forms. Tofu could be made within the household, although commercial techniques resulted in a smoother and whiter product that was not expensive and was widely eaten in the cities.Footnote 81 Miso – a highly nutritious source of protein, eaten as a soup but also used as a flavouring in many dishes and products – was typically home-produced (from home-grown soya beans and purchased salt) throughout the Tokugawa period. Records of ordinary eating patterns from across the country suggest that it was consumed in some form at most meals, even by the poorest.Footnote 82 The soya bean was also processed into the other major flavouring ingredient in Japanese cooking, soy sauce (shōyū), the commercial brewing of which was a major growth industry of the Tokugawa period, both at large-scale level supplying the cities and at local level.Footnote 83 Meanwhile, a range of processed fish and other marine products was coming to play a similar role in adding flavouring to the grain-based diet, as techniques for preserving flavour improved and marketing networks expanded.Footnote 84 Such everyday processed foods must have been exclusively commercial items for most households, widely available from hawkers and pedlars in the countryside, but consumed in the small quantities required to add flavouring to home-grown basics.Footnote 85
The growth in both commercial and domestic food processing is reflected in the profitable expansion in the production of salt, the key ingredient in most preservation techniques, which was widely promoted by domain governments throughout the country.Footnote 86 In Hida, the salt brought into the region, which was mainly used in miso making and pickling, represented 20% of the value of its imports (second only to rice) and averaged out at 70 g per person per day, an extraordinarily high level compared with present-day consumption.Footnote 87 Sugar, however, remained a relatively rare flavouring and preserving ingredient, mainly used in the production of sweets and cakes.Footnote 88 Hence, in contrast to England, although salt consumption was likely to have been at unhealthily high levels, the contribution of sugar-based products to the overall supply of calories cannot have been great, even as they became more accessible as commercial treats.
Meanwhile, the production of drinks represents another major area of food processing. In Japan, some form of tea, whether home-grown or commercially produced, clearly became a regular accompaniment to meals and snacks for ordinary working people during the Tokugawa period.Footnote 89 Although, as drunk in Japan, tea provides no calories, Hanley points out the health and hygiene benefits of drinks involving boiled water, such as tea, which was apparently sufficiently widely drunk, even in the early seventeenth century, to be remarked on by foreign visitors.Footnote 90 Tea and coffee did not become everyday drinks for ordinary people in England until the later eighteenth century and of course had to be imported from distant places and commercially processed and marketed, along with the (calorie-giving) sugar that sweetened them.Footnote 91
The drink with which early modern English people did wash down their meals, however, was beer, and Muldrew demonstrates the considerable contribution that this must have made to the calorie intake of hard-working agricultural labourers.Footnote 92 The equivalent Japanese alcoholic drink was sake, which seems similarly to have been consumed both as an accompaniment to meals and as a social drink in bars and at home, and there is evidence that agricultural workers did drink and derive energy from it, just as their English counterparts consumed beer with their meals during the working day.Footnote 93 Sake produced in commercial breweries was refined and better quality than its homemade counterpart and the growth in demand for the commercial product was clearly reflected in both the establishment of large-scale producers supplying the major urban markets and the spread of local breweries in towns and villages throughout the country. In the Hida villages, for instance, about 20% of the rice crop was devoted to making sake.Footnote 94 There thus seems little doubt that, in Japan as in England, a growing share of grain output was being processed (inefficiently in calorie terms) into the alcohol that made a significant contribution to everyday energy requirements, even as it also lubricated the wheels of social interaction in an increasingly commercial economy.
Cooking and eating at home and away
Finally, recent work on England’s food history suggests some other means by which to assess and confirm the pattern of ordinary diets in the past and the contents of the ‘respectability basket’ that embodied changing dietary living standards. These involve surviving evidence of the circumstances in which food was prepared and eaten. Within the home, the history of kitchen facilities and utensils tells a story both of production – processing tools, cooking methods – and of consumption – the plates, bowls, and dishes on which particular kinds of food were served. Meanwhile, the contribution, both nutritional and in terms of taste and variety, of food prepared and eaten outside the home to everyday diets and living standards is increasingly being recognized in the English case.
In most English households, food continued to be cooked over an open fire, using a spit or suspended pot, through the early modern period. Bread, even where the dough was made at home, was typically cooked in the oven of a commercial baker, and domestic stove ranges with ovens do not appear to have been common, outside large houses, until at least the late eighteenth century.Footnote 95 Evidence from wills and inventories has been used to show growing accumulations of eating and drinking vessels, though mainly among the upper and middle layers of English society, as china plates and glasses began to replace wooden and earthenware platters and tankards, and as more complex meals and the consumption of hot drinks made a greater number of specialized eating and drinking vessels essential to respectable eating practices.Footnote 96 However, the spread of such goods down the social scale and beyond the more highly developed regions of the country appears to have been quite limited, at least before the nineteenth century, except in as far as it was possible to access food prepared outside the home.Footnote 97
In Japan, too, the earliest forms of cooking involved boiling over an open fire, and fire-pits with arrangements for hanging pots over them remained standard features of rural houses until the large-scale modernization of the post-Second World War period. Such facilities were all that was required to cook boiled stews of grain and vegetables, and, being located in the living areas of houses, provided heating at the same time. However, by the Tokugawa period, in the more developed (and warmer) south-west of the country, as well as in towns and cities, separate kitchen areas were being built into houses, and even the tenement apartment buildings constructed to house those moving into the cities to work were equipped with kitchen areas.Footnote 98 There it was possible to house a cooking stove, or at least a portable, charcoal-burning, grill-type device (shichirin), on which to cook in forms other than the stew.
Japanese-style stoves (kamado), usually made of clay, involve an enclosed fuel-burning compartment beneath one or more openings into which cooking pots can be fitted. This is clearly more fuel efficient than an open fire, but also enables more controlled and diversified forms of cooking, including the steaming of rice. Such stoves were in use before 1600, but appear to have spread much more widely thereafter, and could range from very basic one-ring models to the huge multi-ring examples that were fitted in restaurants and large houses. As we have seen, in the countryside, especially in more remote and colder areas, boiled stews of mixed grains and vegetables, rather than kamado-style steamed rice, continued to provide the basis of everyday meals. However, in the cities, and increasingly among the better-off in the countryside too, improved cooking facilities were making it possible to cook a greater variety of dishes to accompany staple grain, and so to prepare meals closer to the ‘grain plus side dishes’ pattern that has come to characterize Japanese cuisine.
This increased dietary variety is confirmed by evidence that more and more households were becoming equipped with the cooking tools necessary to prepare something other than a basic stew. The standard set of utensils required by households living in urban tenements, for example, consisted of a two-ring kamado stove, a pestle and mortar set, cooking chopsticks, a ladle, a grater, a kitchen knife, a draining basket, a rice bin, a tray, and a water container.Footnote 99 Hashimoto adds a kettle, chopping board, and cooking pot to the list and such items were also increasingly to be found in rural homes as well.Footnote 100 Archaeological and other evidence suggests that, by the later Tokugawa period, even poorer households were acquiring the set of eating vessels required to eat meals involving more than one dish, with the quantity and quality of household goods owned significantly increasing across the board.Footnote 101 Local industries producing ceramics and lacquer-ware were clearly expanding, so that, by 1874, household goods (dominated by ceramics) represented the third largest category of manufacturing output (after food/drink and textiles) in the Fuken Bussanhyō survey.Footnote 102
However, in Japan as in England, home cooking was by no means the only source of food in the early modern period. One of Muldrew’s most interesting contributions to the assessment of the living standards of English agricultural labourers is his demonstration of how much of their diet was supplied outside the home by those able to mobilize the resources and equipment necessary for more varied and highly processed food.Footnote 103 Most rural labourers worked as live-in, seasonal, or day employees of larger-scale agricultural enterprises, and regularly received meals produced for them. This affected both the quantity and the quality of what they had to eat and drink, and Muldrew suggests that, for example, beer brewed by larger-scale farmers and supplied to workers in the fields made a significant contribution to the calories that sustained their labour. At the same time, the proliferation of alehouses and inns throughout the eighteenth-century countryside suggests something of the extent to which rural people supplemented what they could grow, gather, buy, and process themselves with commercially supplied meals and drink.Footnote 104
In pre-industrial Japan, full-time employed labourers of the sort described by Muldrew were in fact rare, and most agricultural work was devoted to the cultivation of land that the household managed for itself. Workers took packed lunches and snacks with them when they could not go home to eat during the day, but these were supplied and prepared within their own households.Footnote 105 At the village level, however, feasts and banquets given by village leaders and larger-scale landowners were not uncommon. At these events, ordinary villagers were able to consume more elaborate and varied kinds of food, as well as significant quantities of drink, which they would not have been able to produce or buy for themselves. After transplanting and harvest, and at weddings, funerals, and shrine festivals, ordinary villagers expected to take part in multi-course banquets, where they would have the opportunity to eat, for example, fresh fish, more varied fruit and vegetables, and white rice, which they would not have eaten on an everyday basis at home.Footnote 106
Meanwhile, although most of the rural population would have spent much of their lives as part of their own household’s labour force, limited periods of employment away from home as a live-in worker or servant represented a common phase in the life cycle. Hired-in workers typically lived as members of their employer’s household. Although they were surely not provided on an everyday basis with the same range of food as family members, the quality of the diet on offer was certainly a factor in the recruitment and retention of workers. Agricultural servants living in the household of an early nineteenth-century landlord/cultivator were fed the standard staple of mixed rice and mugi (30% rice) with miso, beans, and boiled vegetables, except on special occasions, when they ate something better. A more generous agricultural employer supplied a 50 : 50 rice mix and sometimes tea, along with similar side dishes.Footnote 107
Large-scale non-agricultural employers remained rare, but records do exist of the food supplied to the labour forces of the large textile stores in Edo, which employed workers numbering in the hundreds. The day-to-day food provided was basic and bland, but more elaborate meals, involving fish, sushi, noodles, and a lot of sake, were regularly available on the quite frequent festive occasions that both employees and customers attended.Footnote 108 Similarly, lower-ranking samurai, whose day-to-day diet of grain, dried fish, and vegetables resembled that of ordinary commoners, were frequently able to attend their lord’s banquets, where they ate sushi, sashimi, and in general a much greater variety of dishes.Footnote 109
As in England, moreover, for those who travelled and spent time in towns and cities, there were many opportunities to supplement ordinary diets with commercially supplied food. Only the upper levels of mercantile and samurai society would have been able to afford the sophisticated meals available in the high-class restaurants and tea-houses of the cities. However, as numerous contemporary woodblock prints attest, mass-market demand was met by suppliers ranging from izakaya pubs, through street-food stalls, to itinerant sellers of cheap treats.Footnote 110 Local specialities – eels in season, fried fish or vegetables, sushi – could be purchased as street food at prices most could have afforded, while simple meals, such as rice with miso and a side dish or a bowl of noodles, were easily available and increasingly tasty, as processed flavourings became more common.Footnote 111
Although much more investigation is required in this area, the available evidence briefly surveyed here does suggest that, in Japan as in England, access to a greater variety of food, prepared and served in more complex ways, was increasing through the early modern period. While in Japan in particular, ordinary households appear to have been becoming better equipped to serve meals involving a greater variety of ingredients, in neither case can we assume that everyday food prepared at home necessarily prescribed universal limits to the quality and variety of the diet. Taking account of food eaten outside the home suggests in both cases alternative routes by which early modern food consumption might have become more varied, enjoyable, and possibly nutritious, as communications improved, the economy developed, and opportunities to ‘trade up’ increased.
Conclusion
Work on the changing components of the English diet, as economic development and eventual industrialization took place, reveals a shift away from a variety of grains, fruit, vegetables, and animal products, many of them self-supplied and home-processed. They were replaced by a more limited range of grain, meat, and dairy produce, together with imported ‘luxuries’ such as sugar and tea, all of which were increasingly supplied by commercial processors and retailers. In Japan, in contrast, while commercial production of food and drink items certainly expanded as the economy grew through the Tokugawa period and beyond, rural producers appear to have used growth in the productivity of agriculture, in part at least, to supply the ingredients of a more diverse and tasty, though still largely home-processed, diet. Many foods were grown, gathered, and prepared for the flavour, variety, and seasonality that they added to staple grain-based meals. The food historians’ evidence of increasing Japanese consumption of an expanding range of both home-produced and commercially supplied or processed products thus suggests a process of ‘trading up’, even if, as in England, this did not necessarily involve an increasing intake of calories or improved nutrition.
Such changes in the quality and variety of food consumed are difficult to capture in the quantitative data on which historical comparisons of living standards are based. Hence, such estimates continue to suggest that pre-industrial Japanese people must have had available to them no more than a basic diet of grains, supplemented to a limited extent with fish, beans, and vegetables, which provided them with fewer calories and less satisfactory nutrition than was on offer in the northern European regions at the other extreme of Eurasia. When viewed through the lens of macro-level dietary change in England, therefore, the persistently grain-heavy and apparently monotonous diet of early modern Japan can only imply a less satisfactory standard of living, and a ‘failure’ to develop in the directions that gave northern Europe its lead in the Great Divergence.
The growing evidence from food history, however, suggests that, across the Great Divergence, pre-modern diets may have included many items that rendered them more varied and tasty than macro-level quantitative assessments can capture. Even in England, the pattern of dietary change can no longer be regarded as simply a matter of increasing calorie consumption, but rather as a shift away from a diverse pre-industrial diet in the direction of greater consumption of animal products and commercially processed foods. In the case of Japan, the evidence presented here can be used to demonstrate, following the lead of scholars such as Thirsk and Muldrew for England, that the pre-industrial diet was similarly more varied and nutritious than might have been thought, and that even ordinary consumers were ‘trading up’, if in a distinctive direction towards the qualities of taste, seasonality, and local sustainability that UNESCO now praises. Thereafter, urbanization and industrialization in England brought significant shifts towards a potentially less healthy and sustainable, as well as more import-dependent, diet, and, even in Japan, produced an eventual substitution of polished white rice for more varied and healthy alternatives. Nonetheless, the grain-based, early modern Japanese dietary pattern persisted, and proved far from incompatible with rising incomes and industrialization.
The contrasting cases of England and Japan therefore suggest that, in a dietary context, meaningful comparison of living standards needs to reflect evidence of what people actually ate, in their particular economic, environmental, and cultural circumstances. Even if dietary change did not follow, in quantitative terms, the path laid down in the northern European model, this does not necessarily mean that meals were not becoming more varied, nutritious, or satisfying. Different patterns of food production and commercialization surely have implications for the overall path of development followed, but this cannot be translated straightforwardly into quantifiable divergences in living standards. As restaurant-goers worldwide now enjoy the delights (and health benefits) of ‘traditional Japanese cuisine’, global and comparative historians might thus be spurred to consider different kinds of evidence and new questions, as they try to understand the ways in which living standards have developed across the industrializing world.
Penelope Francks is Honorary Fellow in Japanese Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research looks at Japanese economic history in a global context and her most recent publication is Japan and the Great Divergence: a short guide (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
