Milk in Spain and the History of Diet Change: The Political Economy of Dairy Consumption Since 1950

In barely three generations the Spanish diet has changed beyond recognition. The traditional concerns around nutritional health and scarcity have been mostly left behind, but they have given way to new problems linked to excess. In this book Fernando Collantes shows how the dairy industry has been central to this societal shift. From widespread calcium deficiency in the 1950s to the more recent, and controversial, turn to highly processed foods, it provides a recent history of diet change in Spain. Probing the reasons behind why this shift has occurred, and how, it shows that when it comes to food society, politics, economics and the law are intrinsically linked.

Taking the reader beyond the world of food, Milk in Spain and the History of Diet Change combines qualitative and quantitative methods to position diet change within the broader debate on consumer society and ’the good life’. Contrasting two models of food consumption, it shows that unless public policy takes the challenge of affluence seriously, the food system can become an obstacle to a better society.

Fernando Collantes is Associate Professor of Socio-Economic History at University of Oviedo, Spain. He is the author of Peaceful surrender: the depopulation of rural Spain in the twentieth century (with Vicente Pinilla 2011) and The political economy of the Common Agricultural Policy: coordinated capitalism or bureaucratic monster? (2020).