Bexley: IELTS General Training Reading practice test

A shopping basket from 1950 and one from today have almost nothing in common. Rationing did not end until 1954, and the diet it left behind was built around bread, potatoes, milk, and meat in quantities that would now be thought meagre. Households then spent close to a third of their income on food; the figure is now under a tenth. The number of distinct products a family buys over a year has risen from a few hundred to several thousand. It is one of the largest changes in ordinary life of the past century and it happened without anybody proposing it.

The engine of the change was not taste but logistics. Refrigeration at every stage, the shipping container, the motorway network and the supermarket between them made the season in which something grows, and the distance it has travelled, almost irrelevant to what it costs on a shelf. A household in January eats produce from four continents without giving it a thought, and would notice only if it stopped. Nothing about British appetites changed first; the supply changed, and the appetites followed it, which is the order these things generally happen in.

Some foods left almost entirely. Offal, once a cheap and ordinary part of the week, has all but disappeared from home cooking. So has suet, and so has the daily delivery of both bread and milk. Fresh fish, outside the ports, became a special occasion. What arrived is more striking. Chicken was a luxury within living memory and is now the cheapest meat available, a change produced by selective breeding that brought the time to raise a bird from around twelve weeks to under six. Pasta and rice became staples. And a whole set of cuisines arrived with people who moved here, and within two generations had stopped being foreign at all.

The time spent preparing food fell as sharply as the price did, from something like two hours a day in an average household to well under thirty minutes. The ready meal, the freezer and the microwave are usually discussed as evidence of laziness or of lost skills. That account leaves out the main cause. Over the same decades women entered paid employment in very large numbers, without any corresponding change in who did the cooking at home, and the hours had to come from somewhere. What looks like a decline in domestic skill is mostly an unresolved argument about domestic labour.

The health record is genuinely mixed and is usually reported as though it were not. Undernutrition has effectively disappeared as a mass phenomenon, average height has risen by several centimetres, and the diseases of deficiency that filled twentieth-century textbooks are now rarities. Against that, rates of obesity and of type 2 diabetes have risen steeply over the same period, and the cheapest calories available per pound spent are now the most energy-dense ones, which is an inversion of the historical relationship between price and richness.

Most of the current argument concerns processing, and it suffers from a definition problem. Processing in itself is ancient and mostly benign: bread is processed, so are cheese, yoghurt and tinned tomatoes, and nobody proposes we stop. The newer concern is with foods that are industrially formulated from refined ingredients and additives into products with no obvious equivalent in a domestic kitchen. The strongest single piece of evidence is a controlled study in which participants ate freely from two diets matched for nutrients, and consumed around five hundred calories a day more on the ultra-processed one. That is a striking result from a small study, and the category it uses is contested by nutritionists who point out that it groups mass-produced bread with confectionery.

What runs through all of this is that the diet was not chosen. It is the sum of transport costs, working hours, planning decisions about where shops may be built, agricultural subsidy, marketing regulation and forty years of relative prices, none of which was set with anybody's dinner in mind. That is why campaigns addressed to the individual shopper, urging better choices in a shop whose layout, range and pricing were all determined elsewhere, have produced so little measurable effect. The choice is real, and it is made inside a structure that nobody chose and that very few people can see.