UC Irvine

This research examines the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a result of liberal, Free Trade policies implemented in 1846, Britain effectively outsourced its food supply, coming to rely on distant fields for more than four-fifths of its daily bread by the outbreak of the First World War. This globalization of the wheat ecology that fed Britain required the proliferation of new forms of biopolitical expertise, state intervention, and cultural meaning, visible in the histories of millers, bakers, physicians, and consumers. Their combined expertise served to connect British bodies to global environments, and to produce bread that was significantly whiter than before. At the same time, the cultural distance between the production and consumption of food grew to lengths never before seen: the specific origins of Britons’ chief article of diet became impossible for consumers to discern.