Changing Diets and Forgotten Food-Staples in Iceland c. 1850-1950. Historical study of trends and determinants of grain consumption in Iceland
Pálmi Gautur Sverrisson, Faculty of Humanities, Department of history and philosophy, University of Iceland
As in large parts of Europe food-ways in Iceland underwent great transformation in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. In Iceland a fundamental dietary shift occurred from diets dominated by animal-based food to diets increasingly involving plant-based foodstuffs. For a large part it seems this shift can be accounted for, in the period from the mid 19th to the first decades of the 20th century, with reference to an increasingly important role of grains in feeding the population of Iceland.
This project aims at accounting for and contextualizing how grains came to be among the staple foodstuffs in Iceland and play an important dietary role after centuries of almost non-existence in diets of the Icelandic population. As a result the project will address and discuss changing food-system elements, such as food allocation and eating habits, in the 19th and 20th centuries and how the influx of grains into the diets of Icelanders connected and related too social, economic and cultural change such as the rise of a commercial fishing industry and the growing importance and possibility of trade in 19th century Iceland.