La difusión de un nuevo alimento: producción y consumo de leche en España, 1865-1936.

Abstract

Changes in European diet which were evident from the nineteenth century have been explained with the nutrition transition model. Broadly, changes in European feeding were materialized in the substitution of diets based on cereal consumption by others based on legumes, tubers and products of animal origin such as meat, eggs and milk. Far from being homogeneous, the transition from one to another diet experienced significant differences between countries and regions. Internationally, the process began in the countries of Central and Northern Europe while Mediterranean countries joined later. Within the different countries, urban areas and rural areas were ahead in the introduction and assimilation of new food patterns. However, in the Spanish case, and unlike other Central and Northern European countries, fluid milk or, more specifically, cow’s milk, was not a food for the Spanish population during most of the nineteenth century and its presence in the diet only became significant well into the twentieth century. The fundamental hypothesis of this research is that at the beginning of the period the demand for milk was very insensitive to changes in income (as opposed to products such as meat and fish), because the milk was little valued as food. The social conception regarding milk and its nutritional properties changed around 1900, when it began to be considered by different groups of population as a whole and healthy food. The thesis analyzes technical, livestock, environmental and cultural constraints which the spread of milk consumption confronted in the Spanish context. For this purpose, the research deals with the following issues: (1) examines the theoretical contributions regarding the introduction of fluid milk in the Western diet; (2) provides new quantitative evidence on milk consumption in Spain and other European countries between 1850s and 2000; (3) explains the quantitative evolution of the Spanish cattle in each province and its ability to offer milk to the Spanish market in the context of a country without a remarkable dairy tradition; (4) provides a new interpretation of the evolution of Spanish cattle from the qualitative transformation experienced by some of these cattle to enhance milk production; (5) provides new estimates of milk consumption at the provincial level; (6) compares the milk supply models of Barcelona and Madrid with other European cities, highlighting the technical and environmental difficulties which affected the supply of milk in Spanish cities; and (7) evaluates the impact of advances in medicine and nutrition in the promotion of milk as food. In conclusion, this paper integrates new variables in the study of the nutrition transition in our country. I started from the premise that dietary transformation of a society cannot be explained only from a single variable. On the contrary, I considered that the transformation of the diet is a complex phenomenon in which participated, and still they do, different agricultural, social, economic and technical factors. The spread of fluid milk as food in Spain shows that the introduction of a food in the diet depends on several variables, which do not always behave in the same way in different contexts and that some of them are beyond a strictly economic interpretation.

Date of Award	27 Apr 2012
Original language	Undefined/Unknown
Supervisor	Josep Pujol Andreu (Director)