“If average consumption is any guide, then people ate quite a lot of healthy food: almost 8 pounds of pears per person in 1851, compared with just 3 pounds now; almost 9 pounds of grapes and other soft fruits, roughly double the amount eaten now; and just under 18 pounds of dried fruit, as against 3.5 pounds today. For vegetables the figures are even more striking. The average Londoner in 1851 ate 31.8 pounds of onions, as against 13.2 pounds today; consumedover 40 pounds of turnips and rutabagas, compared with 2.3 pounds today; and packed away almost 70 pounds of cabbages per year, as against 21 pounds now. Sugar consumption was about 30 pounds a head—less than a third the amount consumed today. So on the whole it seems that people ate pretty healthily. Yet most anecdotal accounts, written then and subsequently, indicate the very opposite. Henry Mayhew, in his classic London Labour and the London Poor, published in the year our rectory was built, suggested that a piece of bread and an onion constituted a typical dinner for a laborer, while a much more recent (and deservedly much praised) history, Consuming Passions by Judith Flanders, states that “the staple diet of the working classes and much of the lower middle classes in the mid-nineteenth century consisted of bread or potatoes, a little bit of butter, cheese or bacon, tea with sugar.” Bryson, Bill. At Home (pp. 130-131). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 130). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ”