Inescapable hunger? Energy cost accounting and the costs of digestion, pregnancy, and lactation

Eric Schneider

European Review of Economic History, 2013, vol. 17, issue 3, 340-363

Abstract: This paper adjusts reconstructions of per capita food consumption in England from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries by factoring in the energy costs of digestion, pregnancy, and lactation. Digestion costs arise because the body has difficulty digesting certain components of food. Incorporating digestion costs reduced the calories available per capita by 12.7 per cent in 1700 but only by 4.9 per cent in 1909 because of changes in diet. The energy costs of pregnancy and lactation were lower only reducing calorie consumption by 2.5 per cent. These adjustments suggest a more pessimistic level of calorie availability before the twentieth century. Copyright , Oxford University Press.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ereh/het011 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:ereveh:v:17:y:2013:i:3:p:340-363

Access Statistics for this article

European Review of Economic History is currently edited by Christopher M. Meissner, Steven Nafziger and Alessandro Nuvolari

More articles in European Review of Economic History from European Historical Economics Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().