Locating low-protein life: post-war colonial nutrition science, subsistence metabolisms and food cultures in the South-Western Pacific Islands

ABSTRACT

Can bodies be healthy if consuming scant amounts of protein? To answer this in the 1960s, nutrition researchers, working through the Australian Institute of Anatomy and South Pacific Commission rendered food cultures into research variables to compare the metabolisms of research participants living in different food systems and economies (subsistence and wage) in the south-western Pacific Islands. Their research on certain Pacific Islanders’ high carbohydrate food culture, of “sweet potatoes” in particular, figured into varying economic concerns and universal protein standards. Through a focus on research design, I argue that nutrition research where food cultures become a variable for identifying and isolating a research population primarily render indigenous metabolisms legible in conjunction with the operationalization of economic differences and, to a lesser extent, raced and sexed capacities. A focus on food cultures and systems as a way of isolating a research population can situate populations in opposition to market economies and presume unidirectional social change. This article analyzes thus how “nutritional primitivism” is entangled with research practices, colonial administrative goals and the humanitarian concern with universal protein standards.

KEYWORDS:

• Food cultures
• colonial nutrition research
• metabolism
• subsistence
• pacific Islands

Acknowledgments

I first presented this article at Warwick Anderson’s ARC Laureate workshop, co-organized with Emma Kowal and Joanna Radin. Grateful thanks to these organizers and workshop participants and other audiences, especially, Raheleh Abbasinejad, Hokulani Aikau, Janelle Curry, Valaruthy Indran, Lisa Uperesa, Penny van Esterik, Sonja van Wichelen and Christine Winter for their insightful comments. All limitations are mine.

Disclosure statement

The author has no potential conflict of interest to report.

Notes

1. The impacts of these projects on local communities, worthy topics of study, would require different methods and sources than the ones I consider here.

2. Dr. Trowell is credited with arriving at the technical definition of dietary fiber in 1972.

3. Though intended to mark this word as an actor’s term for the entire article, I only use quotation marks in the introduction.

4. Oomen and Corden also used “external economy”, “‘civilized’ money economy” (quotation marks on civilized in original) (115).

5. An inflatable bag that could hold expired air whose content could be analyzed for chemical content.

Additional information

Funding

A grant from the York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies supported the work.

Notes on contributors

Alexandra Widmer

Alexandra Widmer is an Assistant Professor and anthropologist currently conducting research on the colonial entanglements of nutrition research in the South-Western Pacific.