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

Abstract

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.