#highlighting circling underlining and drawing arrows pointing to ''rice in particular was condemned''

[leroibobo]

The problem of poor nutrition among the urban poor was not only of interest to those engaged with industry and labour, but also to militaries—and thus there was also a military impetus behind the project of identifying protein requirements. During the Boer War of 1899-1902 the British military had struggled to find sufficiently tall and healthy recruits: 40-60% of would-be soldiers failed to meet the statutory height requirement (compared with around 10% in 1845) and this was suspected to be the result of poor nutrition in situations of urban poverty. A committee was set up to investigate, and the nutritional scientists they interviewed were confidently able to pinpoint the root of the problem: too little protein, especially meat and milk (although excessive drinking of overly-stewed tea was also considered a major worry). At the same time, it was feared that problems of public health might be a symptom of the “deterioration of the British race” instead of the result of poverty. The two explanations were intimately connected, since meat-eating in particular was increasingly understood as a site of racial difference and imperial superiority. Meat was believed to be necessary for bodily strength and was at least connotatively linked with desirable psychological traits like bravery and rationality; when it was found that certain populations (particularly in the US, Australia and Germany) had particularly high intakes of meat and that many Asian and African populations particularly low, this offered 19th century thinkers one possible explanation of imperial power and domination as a consequence of natural law (“the effeminate rice- eaters of India and China have again and again yielded to the superior moral courage of an infinitely smaller number of meat-eating Englishmen”). In India, distinctions were made between colonial subjects according to whether their traditional diets promoted ‘courage’ and ‘strength’. Rice in particular was condemned for its low protein content and wheat and lentils identified as preferable — but vegetarian diets of beans and grains were still fundamentally poverty diets compared with meat and milk.  The ‘ability’ to go without eating meat became a racialised symbol that could be weaponised in conflicts over labour and Asian immigration in the US (“you cannot work a man who must have beef and bread alongside of a man who can live on rice”). Institutions in the colonies offered European scientists opportunities to undertake nutritional experiments on populations “limited neither by unwillingness nor small numbers” which identified increased protein (meat, dairy, and possibly wheat) consumption as a means of improving the yield of colonial labour; thus the development of nutritional science was both informed and facilitated by racist-colonial beliefs. That said, it is hard to untangle racial from nationalist motivations here, as meat-eating also played a role in competition between western nations: the USDA saw evidence of US national superiority not just in the “starvation diets” of India and China but also in the fact that US protein recommendations were higher than those issued by European scientists.

Blaxter, T., & Garnett, T. (2022). Primed for power: a short cultural history of protein