Growing Well: Dirt, Health and Domestic Horticulture in Britain, 1900-1970. (360G-Wellcome-104966_Z_14_Z)

My project examines tensions between cultural practices of domestic hygiene and the organic movement's view of healthy soil (i.e. dirt) as fundamental to human health. I will detect subtle changes in a broad range of representations of domestic food growth, purchase and preparation between 1900 and 1970. I will look at whether vegetables were portrayed as dirty, clean, wholesome or perishable, and at who was seen as responsible for their production, purchase or preparation. Paternalist commercia l organisations will be a major focus as these both encouraged domestic horticulture and presented particular images of products as wholesome and/or hygienic. My research will assess the impact of the take up of mains drainage on cultural attitudes to domestic soil husbandry, and to the organic movement, for whom the return of wastes to the soil was central. My thesis will argue that the construction of a notion of hygienic domesticity in part explains the marginalisation of the organic movement and the decline in domestic vegetable cultivation after 1945. My key goals, alongside my thesis, are to produce two articles, for Medical History and Social History of Medicine, and a number of public engagement activities.