Please, Sir, I'm Stuffed - Did Oliver Really Need More?

Main Category: Nutrition / Diet
Article Date: 30 Dec 2008 - 0:00 PDT

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Doctors writing in the Christmas issue published on bmj.com, believe that while the 1830s workhouse diet may have been dull it was nutritionally sufficient and question whether Oliver really needed more.

Sue Thornton and colleagues compared menus and other historical material on workhouse diets with Dickens' fictional description of what Oliver ate: "three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week and half a roll on Sunday." And on feast days, the inmates received an extra two and a quarter ounces of bread.

Dickens' invented diet, say the authors, would have been completely inadequate for health and growth.

The authors used a computer programme to compare the nutritional content and population requirements in Dickens' diet to Dr Jonathan Pereira's "workhouse dietaries". Interestingly, the authors note that historians have suggested that modern dieticians might approve of workhouse diets because of the coarse, less refined, workhouse bread.

Unlike Dickens' description of gruel, the recipe analysed by the authors is substantial - each pint contains 1¼ oz of the best Berwick Oatmeal. The Pereira diet would sustain growth in a nine-year-old child unless very physical activity took place everyday. Other historical data also shows that large quantities of meat (beef and mutton) were delivered to London workhouses.

The authors conclude that assuming the workhouse children received the amount of food they were due then "the diet was not as bad or harmful as that related by Dickens". They point out that while the New Poor Laws obviously made Dickens very angry and perhaps brought back childhood memories of his own hardship and deprivation, historical evidence does not back up some of the claims he makes in his novel.

"Feature: Please, sir, I want some more?"
BMJ Online
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About BMJ (British Medical Journal)

The BMJ is published by BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Medical Association. The editor of the BMJ is Fiona Godlee.

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