From Beveridge Britain to Birds Eye Britain: shaping knowledge about ‘healthy eating’ in the mid-to-late twentieth-century

By the late 1980s, ‘healthy eating’ had largely failed as a public health discourse in Britain. Rather than providing consumers with a clear set of behavioural guidelines, it had fragmented into a confusing and ill-defined set of messages. In direct contrast to the anti-smoking campaign, which had succeeded in convincing large swathes of the British population to quit an unhealthy habit, the injunction to eat healthily failed to counteract...