#there were (correct) arguments at the time that colonialism/colonial govts = malnutrition of the poor

[leroibobo]

The 1900s and early 1910s had seen the foundation of many of the first international aid organisations and NGOs; in the aftermath of the First World War, and with the establishment of the League of Nations Health Organization, these organizations came into greater prominence. They were initially focused on delivering food to war-torn Europe but, as Europe became more prosperous, ‘world hunger’ shifted to be seen as a characteristically African and Asian problem. The realisation that malnutrition was a particular issue in the colonies created a political incentive for colonial powers to find a diagnosis that was not poverty or a simple lack of food: whereas impoverishment would seem to imply colonial maladministration, if the explanation was something specific to the cultures of colonised populations then colonial governance could not be to blame. From the late 1920s onwards, this led to the renewal of the belief that many African and East Asian cultures suffered from a mistaken under-valuing of meat and dairy. Compounded by reports of the ignorance of mothers about infant nutrition, low intake of animal-sourced foods supposedly resulted in widespread protein deficiency. An important part of this story was a study by J. L. Gilks, Director of Medical Services in Kenya, and John Boyd Orr, Director of the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen. This work, first published in the Lancet in 1927 and as a longer report in 1931, compared the diets of the Maasai and Kikuyu peoples in Kenya. The Kikuyu suffered from persistent public health problems (in particular widespread tropical ulcer, a bacterial disease associated with poverty in tropical climates) and had lower average height, weight and strength than the Maasai — this undermined their utility as a labour force. Gilks & Orr characterised the Kikuyu as living “almost exclusively on a cereal diet”, eating meat only for ceremonial reasons (“indicating possibly a physiological craving”), in contrast to the Maasai who lived “almost entirely on meat, milk and blood [...,] [an] exclusively protein diet”. They concluded that the difference in public health outcomes was due to the Kikuyu’s ‘vegetarian’ diet. In retrospect, it is clear that these were not accurate characterisations of the diets; in addition, Gilks & Orr wrongly assumed that they were observing longstanding food practices unchanged by colonisation. Nevertheless, over the 1930s, these findings were progressively projected and expanded to create an image of generalised cultural vegetarianism and consequent malnutrition among African agriculturalists. This contradicted the stereotype of the hunting, meat-eating ‘noble savage’ — an image intertwined with thinking about human evolution and attached in particular to the Maasai. Apparently, however, the cultural imagination was able to tolerate any resulting cognitive dissonance. The explanation of hunger as resulting from nutritional ignorance echoed domestic politics in wealthy countries. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, nutritional investigations and explanations put particular focus on newly- discovered vitamins and minerals. Often referred to as “protective foods”, these were the nutrients du jour in the way that protein had been in the late 19th century, and it was feared that they were particularly lacking in modern, processed diets. However, this advancing nutritional science also led to great optimism that problems of malnutrition could be fixed by changing practices rather than expending more resources: if a nutritionist could construct a hypothetical healthy diet containing all the necessary nutrients on a given budget, then money could not be the cause of dietary ill-health among the poor. 

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

[candidenigma]

#there were (correct) arguments at the time that colonialism/colonial govts = malnutrition of the poor#mainly coming from ''health professionals from eastern europe south-east asia and latin america''#which the paper talks about but i removed bc the post is long enough as it is#but if you want to read more the paper is very good#i feel like nowadays some of this was ''overcorrected'' to some extent#like there's quinoa and acai crazes (which deprives ppl in peru/bolivia/brazil of it bc most is being shipped abroad#(not to mention that these things tend to be fairly expensive sold abroad and moreover seen as being for rich people)

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