Food, eating and social trends (FEAST)

A line of cooking oil jars

Principal Investigator:

Charles Pattie (Geography); Danny Dorling (Geography)

Researcher:

Martin Pitts

Aims and objectives:

To construct a time-line and international comparator dataset on the consumption of food (possible including production and price). Ideally the time line will cover most of the last century and the international coverage will be global, at least for more recent years. The bulk of good quantitative data is unlikely to directly tell us about the changing family in relation to food (except for rich nations in recent years); but that data should indirectly inform our understanding.

Research questions:

  • What sources of good quality data are there?
  • Can ILO data on food prices by type year and country be used for this project?
  • Can FES, FRS and other British surveys be sampled around census years from say 1951 onwards to provide a detailed timeline of consumption by family in Britain coincident with the main data on changing family structure?
  • Can consumption by quantity be geographically disaggregated across the UK in recent years? (not by inference from type two diabetes to claim that Hull is the fat city!)
  • Do those who eat together vote together?