Originally published in 2008 and now issued as a paperback, Yuriko Akiyama's Feeding the Nation: Nutrition and Health in Britain before World War One investigates the decades from the middle of the nineteenth century through the first decade of the twentieth, as food and its preparation finally began to be recognized as a public health issue rather than a private or domestic matter. Akiyama provides an informative and fascinating insight into the history of cookery in schools, nursing, and the armed services in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, she explores the vitally important contribution of the National Training School for Cookery in Kensington established in 1874, which facilitated this transformation. This initiative led to the establishment of thirty cookery centers in London alone by 1884, with cities such as Liverpool and Edinburgh also developing their own cookery schools

The book's outstanding strength is the way Akiyama enhances understanding of the role of these schools and, in particular, the role of health reformers who promoted cookery education as a means of caring for the sick, among them the highly acclaimed social reformer and “lady with lamp,” Florence Nightingale, who laid the foundation of professional nursing. Akiyama shows how Nightingale considered cookery essential for the health missionary role of district nursing, advocating sickroom cookery in nurse training, but that she recognized that opportunities were limited in hospitals with central catering departments. She reveals how Eva Lückes, matron of the London Hospital, introduced sickroom cookery instruction for probationer nurses from 1895. Akiyama's analysis includes many of the lesser-known figures of cookery education: Fanny Calder, of the Liverpool school, persuasively showed by example how cooking could improve the nation's wealth, health, and strength; Margaret Pillow, the first woman to be awarded a London Sanitary Institute diploma, went on to co-author, with Arthur Newsholme, the leading text in the field, Domestic Economy: Comprising the Laws of Health in their Application to Home Life and Work (1893).

Reforms following the Crimean War feature strongly in the story of military cookery. Edmund Parkes, professor of hygiene at the army medical school, took a strong interest in food and cookery, and the War Office published Instructions to Military Hospital Cooks (1860). Cooking and food advice became part of health and hygiene instruction conveyed to soldiers, as initially to deal with the threat posed by enteric fever. In the navy, cooking became a recognized role after the establishment of the cookery school at Portsmouth in 1873. Cookery was integral to the regime of training ships such as the Exmouth, which enlisted pauper boys, many of whom would become cooks. In 1884, both the army and navy began to train staff in sickroom cookery, with the National Training School playing a crucial role in this process.

Akiyama astutely shows that historians have traditionally paid scant attention to the way cookery was located centrally within wider questions related to public health, tending to dismiss it as an adjunct, rather than an integral component of efforts to improve public health. She correctly argues that during the late nineteenth century, cookery and food gradually became understood as a public health issue. Further, once understood as an important aspect of practical preventive medicine and medical care, cookery was accepted as an agent for improving health and combating disease. Akiyama is particularly effective in exploring the way cookery and domestic economy education were instrumental in addressing the issue of poor physique among the lower-income members of society.

As noted above, Akiyama explains that many of these reforms can be traced back the to the establishment of the National Training School of Cookery in London in 1874. The school trained cookery teachers to be instructors in elementary schools, hospitals, and the armed services, and spawned a raft of similar schools in London and many other cities.

Developed from her PhD dissertation, Feeding the Nation is impressive for Akiyama's extensive use of numerous previously neglected personal and institutional archives, such as Admiralty records, Haslar Hospital Records, Ministry of Health Records, the Pillow Family Papers, the Wilby Hart Diaries, and the Sir James Porter Papers. That said, Akiyama could have, in places, made better use of these primary sources. The strictly narrative history has few quotations, and in some places the analysis is unduly convoluted and repetitive. It is disappointing that Akiyama did not make a more determined effort to engage with policy formation and implementation, including, in particular, the contribution of scientific knowledge to the reform movement. Presenting some of the statistics in tabular form would have enhanced the quantitative analysis. (Such a criticism is rather ironic, given that Florence Nightingale, one of the leading figures in promoting public health reform, was a pioneer in data visualization with the use of what is now termed infographics, effectively using graphic presentations of statistical data.) However, the extensive bibliography, which lists the sources consulted up to 2008, constitutes a very useful resource for researchers.