Anna Selby, ed., Thomas Allinson, A Victorian Guide to Healthy Living, Pen and Sword, 2009, hardback, 192 pp, £19.99, ISBN 9781844680764

Dr Thomas Allinson was a healthy eating campaigner long before Jamie Oliver transformed school dinners in twenty-first century British schools. He founded the famous Allinson Bread firm in 1892 and wrote five volumes of medical essays outlining his beliefs that food was an important factor in health during the late Victorian era when almost half of all children failed to reach the age of five and life expectancy averaged a mere 43 years. Allinson's campaigning zeal for nutritionand living in accordance with the laws of nature resulted in his being ultimately struck off the medical register for his criticism of the widespread use of mercury, opiates and arsenic in the medicines of the day. Today, most of his advice is taken for granted, for example, that smoking can damage your health and cause cancer; that obesity should be avoided by exercise and healthy eating and that wholefoods are more healthy than processed ones. This fascinating Victorian primary source with its recipes for healthy eating offers a range of unusual cross-curricular opportunities linking history with food technology and with personal, social and health education and may well result in students and teachers being able to share Thomas Allinson's boast in his introduction that his health was ‘phenomenally good' because he lived ‘by rule' and as a consequence had enough energy in him ‘for two or three people'.