Banning fresh bread doesn’t decrease human caloric needs. Wouldn’t making fresh bread less desirable just mean people replace it with other foods, spending the same amount of money overall (or more, since bread is probably cheaper than its replacement) and removing any benefit from bread price controls? Or was the English government working off a model where people were overconsuming food because of how tasty fresh bread was?
1) People are probably less likely to throw out stale bread if it’s impossible to obtain fresh bread?
2) If the price of e.g. fish is less regulated but generally higher than that of bread, banning fresh bread would lead to a larger rise in the price of fish as more rich people switch to it, which would perhaps lead to fishermen working longer hours and catching more fish, helping make up the overall calorie shortfall from the poor harvest without increasing costs for poor people who could never afford fish in the first place. Whereas letting the price of bread itself rise would be more regressive?
3) Same as with fish but with meat from livestock, pushing tradeoffs in the direction of “slaughter this year” vs “keep fattening up for next year”, which could be desirable if the wheat shortage is expected to be temporary, and might even decrease demand for wheat as livestock feed if that was a thing at the time?
Banning fresh bread doesn’t decrease human caloric needs. Wouldn’t making fresh bread less desirable just mean people replace it with other foods, spending the same amount of money overall (or more, since bread is probably cheaper than its replacement) and removing any benefit from bread price controls? Or was the English government working off a model where people were overconsuming food because of how tasty fresh bread was?
I suspect that fresh bread was actually a luxury food at the time, with pottages more common among the poor.
I don’t understand either!
They did import rice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_vessels_for_the_British_Government’s_importation_of_rice_from_Bengal_(1800–1802)
1) People are probably less likely to throw out stale bread if it’s impossible to obtain fresh bread?
2) If the price of e.g. fish is less regulated but generally higher than that of bread, banning fresh bread would lead to a larger rise in the price of fish as more rich people switch to it, which would perhaps lead to fishermen working longer hours and catching more fish, helping make up the overall calorie shortfall from the poor harvest without increasing costs for poor people who could never afford fish in the first place. Whereas letting the price of bread itself rise would be more regressive?
3) Same as with fish but with meat from livestock, pushing tradeoffs in the direction of “slaughter this year” vs “keep fattening up for next year”, which could be desirable if the wheat shortage is expected to be temporary, and might even decrease demand for wheat as livestock feed if that was a thing at the time?
Not sure how large any of these effects would be.