Pre-industrial farms were never that isolated. You were always going to be seeing the other people in your village, demesne or manor, daily.
What you’re describing sounds more like the American frontier, which is largely post-IR in timing.
Eggs and milk were always breakfast foods on the farm because those were the first things you collected in the morning from the animals. Soak yesterday’s stale bread or some oats in milk to soften them up, and fry up the eggs the chickens laid last night. Bread in the morning was untenable because it takes too long to rise and bake.
I think this is the biggie, from which so many other changes mentioned in this thread are downstream. Time-keeping, greasy spoons, leisure and travel as a distinct sphere from work - they all flow from the development of the class system which Marx identifies here.
This class system evolves from its feudal/mercantile predecessors because of Capital (there’s a reason he chose that title!). To quote from teh essay I linked above (quoting Marx quoting Ashworth):
“When a labourer lays down his spade, he renders useless, for that period, a capital
worth eighteen pence. When one of our people leaves the mill he renders useless a
capital that has cost £100,000”
Before the IR, rich people owned land from which they derived rents. (Some might own ships, or otherwise invest in trade. In either case, productivity and return on investment were measured over the long term.) When it became possible to take ones wealth and invest it machinery that produced outputs daily, the questions of how much it produced per day, and the relative value of the capital-as-machine vs the costs of labour, as the above quote indicates, all sorts of new considerations came into play.
Return on investment would be maximised by maximising the output of the machines, which cost vastly more than the daily sum of machine-workers’ wages. So it made sense operationally to enforce discipline and ensure the workforce worked long hours, were forced to work hard in those hours, didn’t have expensive fripperies like protective equipment etc.
It also made sense that these workers, and the running of the factory generally, be closely supervised. If something broke or a process got disrupted or a delivery didn’t happen, someone needed to be on the spot to deal with that, and more generally to deal with suppliers, labour force issues etc. That’s a time consuming pain in the arse, especially when your consortium of investors has better stuff to do with their time, so it made sense to hire clerks, foremen and a manager to run the place. For reasons of status as well as a reflection of the importance of the role, and because the alternative was you doing it, it made sense to pay these men rather better than the ordinary labourer. And so a middle-class was born, whose days were more varied and whose productivity was not directly tied into the machines and so developed a different relationship of production. They could have more leisure time - and take Thomas Cook holidays - and invest some proportion of their wages, becoming petit-bourgeouis. The need to keep social distinctions encouraged new forms of culture - the novel, for example - and new ways of living - the train, for example, enable physical separation from the working class who had to live near the factory and hence teh suburb, the villa etc.
And of course the capitalist class emerged, who may initially have been landowners exploiting e.g. their own coal and fast-flowing rivers, but who could become even more detached from the source of their wealth, investing in a number of enterprises and industries and spreading their wealth, and thus their relationships of production, wide and thin.
Yup. The Industrial Revolution, specifically rail travel, allowed farmers to ship fresh milk and eggs to the city every day. That’s actually what made the full English breakfast accessible to everyone.
Although it probably isn’t one of the overlooked impacts of the industrial revolution, just wanted to give a shoutout to pollution, carbon emissions, global climate change and various other negative externalities as an impact of the IR that affects everyday lives.
What about quick breads like (American) biscuits, pancakes or johnny cake?
To expand on what I alluded to earlier, the Soviets were ironically “capitalists” in the industrial machinery sense of the word; they simply substituted the ability to command the allocation of resources for raising cash in a market economy. If you think a factory owner answering to his bankers is exploitive of labor, that’s absolutely nothing compared to a commissar with a quota to fill. The elite Party members became the new “capitalist” class.
I’ve seen it suggested that the horror novel arose in part as a way for the middle class to examine its role within the new hierarchy of the Industrial Age, with each of the three canonical English horror novels providing an extended metaphor for a particular middle-class fear:
Frankenstein: middle class’s fear of the poor
Dracula: middle class’s fear of the rich
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: middle class’s fear of itself
Which use baking soda or baking powder, products of the industrial revolution. 
Hence the knowing nudge-nudge joke “Grandad had a bicycle…..”
The development of an industrial working class community spirit attracted those who tried to channel it into less combustible activities - churches, for one, and employers also encouraged, even set up, choral societies, brass bands, football teams and the like. Add to that the development of rules for games like football that derived from chaotic near-riots.
The mentions of food and meals above: industrial urbanisation encouraged the development of fast/takeaway food, like fish and chips.
Yes, I’ve seen something similar. Also, a lot of “literature” type novels where the hero worries about his role in the great machine of society, how to balance ones personal moral instincts with one’s obligations to peers, superiors, “the poor”, notions of duty, perils of ambition etc.
I’ve always thought Dracula is about fear of foreigners.
Did the Industrial Revolution lead to plastics?
Eventually. There were early plastics and semi-synthetics like nitrocellulose aka celluloid, bakelite, and cellophane, then plastics like vinyl and acrylic came on the market in the 1930s. Plastics really took off during World War Two and afterwards hit the civilian market big time.
And to add to my earlier reply, this was recognized by left activists and thinkers even before the Bolshevik coup d’état of 1917. As Michael Bakunin (1814-1876) put it, “when the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called ‘the people’s stick.’” See also Peter Kropotkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek (seriously), Emma Goldman, Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, for examples. Paresh Chattopadhyay’s recent Socialism and Commodity Production argues pretty persuasively that the Soviet Union rejected Marx very early on. You will find no support for the Soviet Union’s take on socialism in Marx, and indeed, the Soviet Union is better described as state capitalism. It’s not a matter of “no true socialist”; it’s a matter of definitions and analysis.
On a related matter, capitalism should be thought of not as industrialization per se but by how people are organized to produce the goods and services in a society. Robert Brenner, expanding on Marx’s insight, suggests capitalism actually starts in agriculture and the transformation of peasants into wage labourers who have to seek work on farms after they have been kicked off the land and the commons. Industrialization follows, for a number of reasons. The impacts we have been talking about here may be better thought of as caused by capitalism, not the IR. In a similar way, some people talk about the “Anthropocene,” the period when human activity causes huge environmental shifts, but it may be more accurate to talk about the “Capitalocene.”
It’s hard to know what could be a viable alternative however. Hilaire Belloc’s notion that machinists might own the individual machines that they worked on with the factory as a whole being run as a co-op is nobly idealistic but probably unrealizable. Or to go in an opposite direction, Mao Zedong (and even more insanely radical movements like the Khmer Rouge or Shining Path) thought that a sufficient degree of peasant collectivism could do away with centralized large-scale industrialism altogether! Hence the experiment with village steel production and forced de-urbanization.
One of the more overlooked impacts, imho, is the death of the family trade. Few people nowadays expects the son to follow in his father’s footsteps, but prior to the IR, this was the predominant means by which one learned a trade.
A good example of this is the near-total collapse of the Bach family tree of musicians. As you can see in the following link, only 6 post-IR-born Bach’s are identified as musicians, but prior to the IR there were 70 Bach’s who were musicians by trade.
I’ve seen this pattern elsewhere, but it’s pretty stark (and well-documented) in the Bach line. It’s not unique - Mozart’s dad was a musician (and music teacher), 2 of Mozart’s kids were musicians of varying skill (one gave it up in his 20s, the other continued until his death), but there is little record of the grandchildren of W. Mozart being musicians.
If I may offer an opinion, I think this is a rather tragic outcome. Nowadays kids who do the same work, especially in the same firm/business, as their parents are sneered at as being “nepo-babies” which is just stupid on the part of those who mock. Bach was a nepo-baby, Mozart was a nepo-baby, Mendelssohn (in banking, nonetheless), Bernoulli, more were all nepo-babies, and the world would be a much poorer place if they weren’t.
That’s an interesting point I hadn’t thought of.
Thanks to everyone who’s answered me so far, this is a great discussion. I’ve been here 20+ years and I think this is the longest thread I’ve ever started.
A common trope in late Victorian literature was “clogs to clogs in three generations”: first, a smart lad of humble origins set up his own business and built it up, but he also made sure the next generation had it better than he (and a better education), they (or the eldest son) grew the business even more, cementing the family pretty close to the upper crust, with the third generation taking wealth for granted - and frittering it all away on bad investments, careless gambling and generally living the life of Riley.
So you think that it’s great that some musicians were the children of other musicians and some mathematicians (like Daniel Bernoulli) were the children of other mathematicians. What about the children of people in professions that paid very poorly? Since my father was a farmer and factory worker, does that mean that I would have to be a farmer and factory worker too? Do you think it’s terrible that I instead became a mathematician?
I think that in an ideal world, the child of parents in any profession can become members of any other profession depending only upon their own ability. Yes, the term “nepo baby” is pretty stupid. We shouldn’t talk about how good someone’s parents were but how good they are in their profession. We haven’t really reached that goal yet. It’s still true that in many places and many social classes that you are restricted of what jobs you can even dream of getting.