Differentiation of the Peasantry in the Light of Food Consumption Levels (Galicia at the End of the 19th Century)

Abstract

This article examines the social and economic differentiation of the peasantry in Galicia towards the end of the nineteenth century, using peasant food consumption as an indicator of rural social stratification. The aim is to measure the degree of economic differentiation within the Galician peasantry and to evaluate its participation in the food market.
The main source is a survey on peasant nutrition in Galicia conducted in 1891, consisting of questionnaires on 39 questions concerning the composition and frequency of meals, the consumption of bread, flour, dairy products, meat, vegetables, and alcohol, differentiated by season and social rank. The author conducted a sample study covering 54 villages with 99,144 inhabitants and established, by combining the official wealth criterion with the number of daily meals as an objective indicator, a fourfold classification of the population by consumption level.
The results show that the diet of approximately 55 per cent of the Galician peasant population amounted to qualitative famine and was close to quantitative famine: the first group, eating once a day (1.6 per cent), was reduced to six basic foodstuffs; the second group (38.5 per cent), eating twice a day, fell below the nutritional minimum. Economic differentiation between groups was considerable: the fourth group, the wealthy (12 per cent), consumed fats, dairy products, and meat at least once a week. The Galician agrarian structure of poverty is thus confirmed and quantified.
Peasant participation in the food market was very limited, with the poorest paid in kind. The author concludes that emigration, rather than the still embryonic industrialization, was the principal external factor of change in this backward agrarian society.