Chicken used to be a treat for the middle class and an 'aspiration only' for the working class.
Now chicken is for everybody. About £3-£4 for a medium sized bird.
I recently found out that the staple diet of the poor in London during the Victorian period was oysters. It came as a surprise to me.
4 to 7.50 euros here. Supermarkets in the countryside cannot get away with selling the mass produced tasteless rubbish.
Fish too used to be cheap source of protein for the working class. My dad won't eat anything that sifts sewage for a living. Seems reasonable
.................and Eel pie became part of the staple East, and South East London diet during the early Victorian period, with hundreds of "pie men" walking the streets whilst plying their trade. Pie n' mash shops gradually took over from the 1850's.
Eel was popular because it came out of the Thames that was by then highly polluted with little in the way of fish surviving, but the eel did! Like oysters, they were readily available and cheap. The Victorian poor though generally, in and outside London, relied heavily on bread and potatoes, with cheese when they could afford it. It was not until the late 1800's that due to the food 'necessities' becoming about 30% cheaper, that the poor started to have a better and wider diet, with meat included. But, if you had no money, no job, and in those days no welfare state to help you, you would go days without any food apart from that scrounged or stolen.. Hard times indeed!