4. 1918-1955: milk, aid and biopolitics

The 1900s and early 1910s had seen the foundation of many of the first international aid organisations and NGOs (see Figure 5); 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 seenas a characteristically African and Asian problem.¹²⁴ 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.¹²⁵ 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.¹²⁶

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Figure 5: Timeline of important events in the history of international co-operation around nutrition and aid of relevance to the history of protein

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 climates¹²⁷) and had lower average height, weight and strength than the Maasai — this undermined their utility as a labour force.¹²⁸ Gilks & Orr characterised the Kikuyu as living “almost exclusively on a cereal diet”,¹²⁹ eating meat only for ceremonial reasons (“indicating possibly a physiological craving”¹³⁰), in contrast to the Maasai who lived “almost entirely on meat, milk and blood [...,] [an] exclusively protein diet”.¹³¹ 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.¹³² 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.¹³³ 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.^134,135 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.¹³⁶ 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.¹³⁷ But in the international development sphere, this was just one of two competing views: the other, “progressive view” was to ascribe hunger to poverty, setting the blame firmly on colonial governments. The goal was a joined-up approach incorporating public health, nutrition, sanitation, education and the environment, and led by health professionals from Eastern Europe, South-East Asia and Latin America.¹³⁸ In 1933, the League of Nations Health Organization challenged member states to tackle the problem of colonial nutrition head on, stating that “there is more honour to be gained in attempting to improve the situation than in concealing it”,¹³⁹ but the Health Organization’s Mixed Committee, tasked with assessing the debate, tried to walk a line between the two approaches in its report The Problem of Nutrition, published in 1936.¹⁴⁰ This report would be highly influential for many years to come.

Gilks & Orr’s study also engaged with high infant mortality rates. Again, they assigned these to dietary factors, first implying that they might be due to early weaning, but then concluding that this practice was itself a consequence of poor maternal nutrition.¹⁴¹ This was part of a wider trend: the profile of maternal, infant and child nutrition in research rose throughout the 1920s and 30s, and with these the perceived dietary importance of cow’s milk.

British governmentally-backed nutritional science during the First World War had concluded that “no diet for [infants and young children] can be considered satisfactory which does not contain a considerable proportion of milk”;¹⁴² since dairy production had been placed under state control, this put considerable pressure on governments to improve availability and prices. Influenced by reports of the cheaper, higher quality milk available to American consumers, pressure groups like the Women’s Cooperative Guild organised boycotts and marches over the period 1917-1920, calling for the government to take action to lower milk prices.¹⁴³ During the 1920s, continued nutritional research—in particular, experimental studies which tested the effects of adding milk to the diet of institutionalised children—demonstrated that milk consumption promoted child growth, an idea that the dairy industry had already long been promoting in advertising.^144,145 The equation of child growth with good health was well established in the thinking of nutritional science at this point, partly because labour and military demands for taller bodies had played such a significant role in the development of nutritional science.¹⁴⁶ As a result, such findings represented unequivocal evidence for the necessity of milk. John Boyd Orr was also involved in this work, and was an enthusiastic milk advocate.¹⁴⁷

The vehicle of motherhood and feminine care, milk carried a lot of symbolic potential. Given the focus on vitamins and protective foods, milk, a highly complex substance which could demonstrably serve as the sole source of nutrition for young mammals, seemed singularly promising; in the words of the Mixed Committee, it was “the nearest approach we possess to a perfect and complete food”.¹⁴⁸ As already seen, because milk-drinking was not culturally universal it offered a useful rationalisation of imperial power and colonial ill-health. It fitted into a view of the world in terms of racial hierarchy in which white people were physically superior either due to or evidenced by their drinking milk.¹⁴⁹ Nor was the use of milk as a nationalist symbol unique to colonising countries: in India, the cow became a metaphor for the colonised state and milk-drinking a symbolic antidote for lost strength; thus here too a lack dairy consumption came to connote national weakness.¹⁵⁰

Advertising played a major role in popularising positive links between milk, growth and strength. The idea that milk was a uniquely complete food had been utilised in adverts at least since the first milk-derived protein supplements at the turn of the century.¹⁵¹ Lobbying and marketing bodies representing the dairy industry were set up in various countries, in many cases by the state. These included the US (the National Dairy Council, 1915), Sweden (the Milk Propaganda [Mjölkpropagandan], 1923, and later Swedish National Association of Dairies [Svenska Mejeriernas Riksförening], 1932), and Britain (the National Milk Publicity Council, 1920, and later the Milk Marketing Board, 1933), as well as Germany (1927), Finland (1927), Norway (1928), Japan (1931), Denmark (1932), Belgium (1938) and the Netherlands (1930s).¹⁵² Some were highly influential, and repeated both the claims of nutritionists and racialised imagery and language in their advertising.^153,154 They also presented milk consumption in terms of a battle between unhealthy, artificial modernity and healthy nature.¹⁵⁵ The line between the commercial activities of these groups and the public good was often blurred, with government-funded school milk programmes in Britain, Norway and the Netherlands partially motivated by the desire to find a profitable use for surplus milk production.¹⁵⁶

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Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. 1929 (Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920, Duke University Libraries: CK0064)

The League of Nations’ The Problem of Nutrition included the first League-backed estimates of dietary requirements. It prescribed 1 gram per kilogram of bodyweight per day for adults. This was in line with the scientific consensus since the end of the First World War, but unlike most previous official recommendations the report also gave a value for infants: 3.5 grams per kilogram of bodyweight per day.¹⁵⁷ Here, too, great emphasis was put on the importance of milk, especially for infant nutrition (“its value is unique and we cannot do without it”) in terms which repeated the racist-colonial frame (milk characterised “the dietary of civilised peoples”).¹⁵⁸

The Second World War saw a repeat of the technocratic experiments of the First World War, with many European governments effectively nationalising food production and distribution through agricultural and horticultural programmes and rationing. These emergency measures lent prominence to nutritionists such as John Boyd Orr in Britain and led to a further reinforcement of the nutritional science of the time. As in Denmark in the First World War, countries like the Netherlands were able to partially mitigate threats to food security by rebalancing domestic food systems away from animal agriculture and towards cereals and potatoes.¹⁵⁹ In Britain, by contrast, much emphasis was put on the importance of milk — and successes in public health were confidently (although, in retrospect, erroneously) ascribed to this strategy.¹⁶⁰

Milk was now intimately associated with the creation of big, strong bodies for war (in an address in 1943, Winston Churchill commented that “There is no finer investment for a community than putting milk into babies”¹⁶¹)—and the creation of big, strong bodies continued to sit centre stage in the methods of nutritional science. As early as 1920, researchers had been aware of problems with one of the central tools of nutritional science, the study of the growth of young animals when fed different diets. Young animal growth was a singular, easily measurable metric — but one that would be especially sensitive to the nutrients required for tissue production and might be insensitive to those needed for other bodily functions. Assuming growth was an indicator of the total relationship between health and diet might thus be expected to overemphasise protein requirements and special requirements for particular amino acids.¹⁶²  This lesson had not been learnt. In a telling example, post-war research
by British nutritionists McCance & Widdowson (both of whom had been deeply involved in the government’s wartime effort) demonstrated that child growth was insensitive to the choice of brown or white bread.¹⁶³ This was taken to imply that, contrary to general belief, brown and white bread were nutritionally identical, prompting the British government to acquiesce to demands from the baking and milling industries for the freedom to produce white bread instead of brown.^164,165

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Figure 6: Svenska Mejeriernas Riksförening advert for dairy products, 1937.

The seeming success of wartime technocratic approaches to nutrition and rationing in the Allied countries helped to push back against the idea that world hunger and particularly colonial malnutrition were problems of poverty. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the contestation between technocratic and social approaches continued in the new United Nations institutions. US actors in particular tended to push for vertical, technocratic solutions to famine relief and other public health problems, which allowed them to make use of military expertise developed during the war.¹⁶⁶ In many ways, patterns seen after the First World War repeated: initially the problem of hunger was global and remedial efforts were focused on Europe; when the European situation was stabilised the focus shifted to Africa, Asia and South America, and with this shift, the politics changed.¹⁶⁷

The scene was now set for protein to return to the fore.

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