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BRITAIN AND THE WORLD
Women and the Rise

of Nutrition Science
in Interwar Britain and
British Africa
Lacey Sparks
Britain and the World
Series Editors
Martin Farr, School of History, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon
Tyne, UK
Michelle D. Brock, Department of History, Washington and Lee
University, Lexington, VA, USA
Eric G. E. Zuelow, Department of History, University of New England,
Biddeford, ME, USA
Britain and the World is a series of books on ‘British world’ history. The
editors invite book proposals from historians of all ranks on the ways
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Britain and the World is made up of people from around the world
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edu) is Series Editor for titles focusing on the pre-1800 period and Eric
G. E. Zuelow (ezuelow@une.edu) is Series Editor for titles covering the
post-1800 period.
Lacey Sparks
Women and the Rise

of Nutrition Science
in Interwar Britain
and British Africa
Lacey Sparks
University of Southern Maine
Portland, ME, USA
ISSN 2947-7182 ISSN 2947-7190 (electronic)

Britain and the World
ISBN 978-3-031-23520-7 ISBN 978-3-031-23521-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23521-4
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To Courtney, Kathy, Pat, and Ian.
To Jezebel, Lilith, Delilah, and the crows.

Contents
1 Setting the Table: Debates on the New Science

of Nutrition 1
2 Gathering Ingredients: Collecting Data on Nutrition
in Britain and British Africa 21
The Interwar Context of Nutrition Science 24
The Domestic Problem of Nutrition in Britain 28
The Transnational Problem of Nutrition 41
The British Secretary of State for the Colonies Responds 45
Conclusion 52
3 Picky Eaters: Policymakers Turn to Education to Solve
Malnutrition 55
The Committee on Nutrition in the Colonial Empire 56
The Blacklock Report 69
The Esdaile Memo 74
The Domestic Science Survey 78
Conclusion 84
4 Not Your Grandmother’s Cooking: Domestic Science
in Britain and British Africa 85
Victorian Roots 87
Victorian Domestic Science Background in Britain and Africa 90
The Schools: Berridge House and Queen’s College 100
Conclusion 104
vii
viii CONTENTS
5 Fusion Cooking: Nutrition Education in Britain

and British Africa 105
Material Realities of Domestic Science Facilities in London
and Lagos 106
Degrees and Courses in Britain and Nigeria 109
Exams in Britain and Nigeria 118
Conclusion 120
6 Experimenting with the Recipe: Nutrition Education
Pedagogies 121
The White Woman’s Burden 124
Civilizing Revolution Without Colonial Revolt 128
Morality and African Education 138
Conclusion 149
7 A Seat at the Table: Nigerian Women Shape
the Curriculum 151
Practical versus Traditional Education 152
Nigerians Create the Kind of Classroom They Want 165
Conclusion 176
8 The Proof is in the Pudding: Indigenous Farming
Points the Way Forward 177
Immediate Aftermath 180
Long-Term Aftermath 182
The Bigger Picture 187
Bibliography 189
Index 203
CHAPTER 1
Setting the Table: Debates on the New

Science of Nutrition
When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed,
harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome
food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply
pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out
and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have
a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are [on the
dole].1
George Orwell’s 1937 The Road to Wigan Pier captured the fraught
relationship between income and food in interwar Britain, a time when
malnutrition became a central concern of the British state. Expansive
studies backed up what Orwell implied: poorer Britons had poorer nutri-
tion. The impact of availability and affordability of food on nutrition in
both Britain and the empire remained a source of debate throughout
the interwar period. Ignorance of good nutrition, however, remained a
quicker and easier problem to tackle. Women garnered particular atten-
tion from the state and nutrition experts, as they were the ones assumed
to be feeding their families, were most likely to sacrifice their own nutri-
tion for the sake of their families’ and were the ones who possessed
special nutritional needs during pregnancy. With these considerations in
1 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1937).
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
L. Sparks, Women and the Rise of Nutrition Science in Interwar
Britain and British Africa, Britain and the World,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23521-4_1
2 L. SPARKS
mind, women’s nutrition education, both at home and abroad, became a

growing state concern throughout the interwar period.
The Great War had marked a turning point in the relationship between
nutrition and the state. “You cannot conduct an A-1 Empire on a C-3
population,” Prime Minister Lloyd George intoned in a stirring 1918
speech, looking back to the weaknesses of World War I and looking
forward to a Britain built for maximum national fitness.2 In the imme-
diate postwar moment, the Prime Minister’s militarized vocabulary for
the health of the British nation as a whole provided interwar Brits
with a framework for improving British health generally and nutrition in
particular. The effectiveness of the British government in implementing
nutritious rations in wartime, standing in stark contrast to Germany’s
crisis of malnutrition and even outright starvation, shook the liberal sensi-
bilities of some British scientists and government officials to varying
degrees. In the age of total war and the height of the empire, a permanent
standing army of A-1 citizens had become a necessity. Ensuring the acces-
sibility and knowledge of good nutrition served as an important step in
the creation of that army.3 Echoing a similar set of concerns after the
struggle to win the Boer War, the interwar British state renewed the
effort to improve national fitness by targeting nutrition and the diseases
malnutrition caused.
Throughout the interwar period, and especially at the height of
the Great Depression, newspapers captured the plight of malnourished
Britons as vividly as Orwell. “Heroic Mother Starves in Silence” and
“Hungry England” the papers proclaimed in 1933 upon the death of
thirty-seven-year-old mother of seven, Minnie Weaving. While her offi-
cial cause of death was pneumonia, the coroner ruled that the disease
would not have killed her if she had not been so malnourished.4 During
the Great Depression, low wages, high rent, and the high cost of food
plagued the British working class. While the government was less involved
in managing the welfare of its citizens than it had been in World War I, it
2 “The War and After” The Times, 13 September 1918.

3 Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in
Britain 1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); G.R. Searle, The Quest for
National Efficiency (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1990); Davin, “Imperialism and Moth-
erhood,” in Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper, Tensions of Empire (Oakland: University of
California Press, 1997).
4 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 284.
1 SETTING THE TABLE: DEBATES ON THE NEW SCIENCE … 3
was still more hands-on than it had ever been before World War I. Cries
for increased state intervention to assist needy Brits battled against small
Depression-era budgets as the government slashed spending. Women,
especially working-class women, were disproportionately affected as they
went without in order to provide as much as they could for their families.
At the same time, new standards of beauty promoted strong fit women
capable of producing the next generation of soldiers by both eating right
and properly feeding their families.
The rise of nutrition science redefined what it meant to eat right.
Building off late nineteenth-century interest in studying the chemical
composition of food, European and American scientists discovered the
existence of nine vitamins and twelve minerals between 1912 and the
end of the 1930s, which demonstrated more conclusively than ever that
it was not only how much one ate, but rather the quality of what one
ate that mattered. With these discoveries, nutrition scientists theorized
that with enough research, the foundation of an adequate diet could
become objective, measurable, and quantifiable. Scientists demonstrated
more conclusively that it was not just the quantity of food, but the quality
of the food that went into a nutritious diet. The scientific, and then polit-
ical, vocabulary of diet became increasingly refined as scientists drew the
distinctions between undernutrition, or inadequate calories, versus malnu-
trition, or inadequate vitamins, minerals, protein, and fats. Scientists set to
work trying to determine the optimum diet for different ages, genders,
and races. The pursuit of this new knowledge of nutrition in the quest
for objective nutrition standards only led to more debate as scientists
disagreed on how to interpret the results of their preliminary research,
which spurred them to conduct further research. This call for more
research came to underpin British policy both at home and abroad, as
it conveniently justified further colonial intervention under the palatable
banner of a humanitarian project to improve nutrition.
Nutrition scientists and amateur advocates decried the fried and tinned
diets of the average British person and began looking toward the simple,
fresh diets they imagined the subjects of the colonial empire ate. The
need to research further into the rapidly growing field of nutrition science
prompted nutritionists to look toward colonial Africa, which struck them
as the natural laboratory to collect information to help better feed the
British; however, malnourishment in the colonies did not go unnoticed.
A new wave of paternalism, fueled by concerns over a languishing African
workforce, stoked a desire for the British government to help hungry
4 L. SPARKS
Africans as well as hungry British people. As in the metropole, the call

for increased nutrition intervention was greater than the government’s
coffers, so the dream of ending hunger in the colonies extended further
than the reality. In the typical alignment of imperial financial priorities,
administrators controlling the purse strings saw more money to be made
in the empire than to be spent. At the same time, colonial subjects could
use the western arguments of state responsibility for colonial welfare as
a bargaining chip, harnessing the spectacle of colonial malnutrition as a
damning critique of colonial rule. Ultimately, the rise of nutrition science
opened up a new arena of debate and possibility for everyone in the impe-
rial hierarchy, providing a means for political and economic elites to justify
their power in new ways, for white women to expand opportunities for
themselves in new ways, and for colonial subjects to navigate and chal-
lenge colonial rule in new ways. In this precarious interwar moment of
new and contested nutrition science discourse, everyone made their bid
to bend that discourse in their favor.
To analyze the unwieldy political, economic, and agricultural contexts
this rise in nutrition science occurred within, a framework of political
ecology helps provide some order to this book, in a similar vein as Mike
Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of
the Third World, Peder Anker’s Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order
in the British Empire, 1895–1945, and more recently, Chris Otter’s Diet
for a Large Planet : Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology.5
Political ecology, or a political economy of the environment, centers its
analysis on the importance of power relations to environmental manage-
ment. Nutrition science discourse promised more rational and efficient
means of feeding Britain’s empire, itself already a complex food system
that fueled all the rest of the imperial systems of agriculture, labor, and
trade. Regardless of the many disparate motivations for engaging within
Britain’s imperial system, everyone had to eat. In the discourse of interwar
nutrition experts and politicians, policy informed by nutrition science had
the potential to remake the imperial food system that fueled the empire.
This dense, shifting web of imperial food production, shipping, taxation,
5 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third
World (London: Verso, 2002); Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in
the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Chris Otter,
Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2020).
and consumption, regulated by colonial and metropolitan governments,

formed a nexus of politics, economics, and environment. For this reason,
an overarching framework of political ecology serves as the container for
the content of this book.
Political ecology contends that politics, the economy, and the environ-
mental status quo all exist in balance; if one changes, the others change.
Changes in the environment affect different people differently, based on
their level privilege and access to resources, which means that environ-
mental changes, in turn, change the balance of power between people.
Thus, political ecology places particular emphasis on the struggles and
strategies of marginalized groups, including women, Black and indige-
nous peoples, and the poor, each of whom had unique parts to play
in the debate about nutrition science and its potential impacts on the
British Empire. Political ecology provides a way to analyze any shift within
that nexus of politics, economics, and environment, both from the top
down—for example, imperial legislation of food tariffs—and from the
bottom up—for example, a Nigerian woman’s choice to build a colo-
nial school for nutrition science classes, or another Nigerian woman’s
choice not to attend its classes. Political ecology provides a way to analyze
the environment in relation to both the imperial systems governing food,
and resistance to those systems. A shift in any part of the system rippled
into shifts of every part of the system. This book looks at changes
that emanated from multiple nodes of this nexus, both top-down from
Whitehall and bottom-up in London and Lagos, Nigeria.6
In the wake of World War I, the rapid advances in nutrition science
occurred within the broader context of societal and political shifts rocking
Europe and the world. A renewed dedication to preventing another global
war led to the creation of the League of Nations, a transnational orga-
nization spearheaded by Europe. Its aims were twofold: foster global
cooperation to maintain peace, and improve the state of global welfare,
including nutrition. In the aftermath of the war, Great Britain managed a
6 Mark Tilzey, Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty: Crisis, Resistance,
and Resilience (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and
James McCarthy, The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology (New York: Routledge,
2015); Sinead Bailey and Raymond Bryant, Third World Political Ecology: An Introduc-
tion (New York: Routledge, 1997); Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on
Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); Davis, Late Victorian
Holocausts.
6 L. SPARKS
larger empire than ever before, and these increased responsibilities led to
increased anxieties about maintaining its might.
The British state also scrambled to address a harsh truth that the
war had revealed: much of the country was in poor health, partly due
to poor nutrition. Britain’s social and political concerns over nutrition
aligned with the League of Nations’ increasing interest in improving
global nutrition. Governing a quarter of the world’s population, Britain’s
great power status made it a major player in initiatives to improve global
nutrition, which the League took up at the same time with similar goals.
Despite Britain’s unenthusiastic relationship with the League, the two
global forces promoted similar discourses on the energetic embrace of
the new science of nutrition and its paternalistic application to colonies
under the Mandate System. Both Britain and the League had the same
bottom line: maintain the political and economic domination of European
empires by using a discourse of paternalism to justify their environmental
control. Improving global nutrition easily justified calls for increased
experimentation on colonial populations and increased agricultural output
by better-nourished colonial laborers, each of which reinforced European,
and particularly British, global power. In balancing an empire seeking infi-
nite capitalist growth on the one hand, and seeking legitimized rule via
improved colonial welfare, on the other, British legislators landed on a
discourse of improving global nutrition that would seem to satisfy both
aims. These initiatives would ultimately result in increased state focus on
women’s nutrition education, which targeted malnutrition as a problem
to be solved without disrupting the imperial political, economic, and envi-
ronmental balance of power that kept money and food flowing from
colonies to metropole.
Even before the close of World War I, however, anxieties of dimin-
ished national efficiency, reminiscent of the Boer War, motivated both
politicians and the populace. Following the post-World War I fears of a
nation of malnourished citizens, nutrition became an important part of
the life reform movement, which emphasized health, strength, and beauty
in all British citizens. These ideals, however, stood starkly at odds with the
growing economic depression, and the Hungry 1930s saw an impassioned
debate about the proper role of the government in ensuring the proper
nutrition of its people. New institutions, such as the Ministry of Health,
new economic policies, such as imperial preference, and new international
projects, such as the African Research Survey, swept across the empire in
the interwar period. Local, central, and colonial governments balanced

calls for increased intervention in citizens’ and subjects’ malnutrition as a
matter of public health against retrenchment and the shrinking budgets
of the Great Depression.
Spurred by anxiety over a malnourished and faltering empire, the
British state created a committee dedicated to studying this problem—
the Committee for Nutrition in the Colonial Empire (CNCE)—which
launched an empire-wide survey investigating malnutrition. The survey
focused in particular on both the metropole and colonial Africa, which
experts considered underpopulated and in the most urgent need of
improved welfare. A 1935 League of Nations report described how
“in certain Asiatic colonies, there is a tendency towards overpopulation,
while in Africa…the opposite trend is visible.” British scientists attributed
Africa’s perceived underpopulation to both poor resistance to diseases and
to high rates of infant mortality, each of which could be traced back in
large part to malnutrition.7 Inquiries into this problem in both Britain
and Africa identified the root causes of malnutrition as poverty and the
ignorance of both how to budget and how to select and prepare nutritious
food.
In Britain, 1930s studies by the British Medical Association indi-
cated that unemployment benefits did not adequately cover the cost of
food, implying that the state could do more to ameliorate British malnu-
trition. At the same time, surveys by nutrition experts revealed that
poorer Britons had less access to nutritious food and thus ate poorer
diets. In Africa, the role of the British state in exacerbating or failing to
improve nutrition was even more complex. African patterns of agriculture
determined diets within Africa. Colonial agriculture radically disrupted
precolonial farming practices, which in turn radically disrupted African
diets as well. Precolonial African farming had numerous fail safes in place
to hedge against unpredictable and volatile tropical climates and thin soils.
In West Africa, for example, African farmers employed polyculture, or
planting several different kinds of crops in a single field. This practice
protected the thin soil from erosion and ensured that, regardless of the
level of rainfall that year, at least some of the crops would survive. In
7 Et. Burnet and W.R. Aykroyd, Nutrition and Public Health, 1935 NA, CAB 58/199.
8 L. SPARKS
general, the African farming year cycled through seasons of harvest, rain,
and hunger as food stores thinned just before the next harvest time.8
Colonial agricultural systems shifted from polyculture to monoculture
in the pursuit of maximum profit from cash crops and an effort to ratio-
nalize what British agriculturalists saw as irrational and wasteful African
methods. Arable land increasingly went toward white landowners and
cash crop farms, leaving less and less for individual African subsistence
farmers, who eventually used small plots in their own personal yards. Mine
and farm workers also received meals on the job, and Africans living near
more urban spaces also had access to European grocery stores in addition
to African markets. The shift to monoculture farming transformed the
yearly fluctuation of extremes from harvest to hunger. The result was a
more steady, year-round level of poverty and scraping to make ends meet
and to grow and afford adequate, nutritious food.
This focus on “rational” western-style farming also led to an emphasis
on growing the hardiest, highest-yielding monocrops in soils that were
better suited to polyculture. Cassava, for example, grew faster and more
easily than yams in single-crop plots, thus becoming a colonial favorite.
According to colonial logic, cassava, grown in neatly manicured, ratio-
nally laid out plots grew more abundantly, leading to more profit and
greater food distribution to African populations. Cassava, however, also
had lower levels of protein and vitamins than its less hardy cousin, the
yam. Prioritizing crop hardiness—using suboptimal agricultural methods
for the soil and climate, no less—over nutrition content led to a general
reduction in African nutrition levels in the 1920s.9
Precolonial African agriculture followed not only yearly patterns but
broader patterns as well. If one region, which may have served several
generations of Africans, ceased to yield adequate crops, the group
migrated to a more fertile region nearby, and back again as the soil
replenished in the original spot. This ability to mobilize and relocate
8 Philip Curtin, “Nutrition in African History,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

14:2, Hunger and History: The Impact of Changing Food Production and Consumption
Patterns on Society (Autumn, 1983), 371–382; Audrey Richards and Elsie Widdowson, “A
Dietary Study in Northeastern Rhodesia,” Africa IIALC 9:2 (April 1936) CAB 58/199.
9 Jérôme Destombes, “From Long-Term Patterns of Seasonal Hunger to Changing
Experiences of Everyday Poverty: Northeastern Ghana c. 1930–2000,” The Journal of
African History 47:2 (2006), 181–205; James Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain
Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1999).
to a more sustainable region served as another fail safe against hunger,

a critical tactic of food resilience. As with other precolonial agricultural
practices, colonialism clamped down on the mobility of entire commu-
nities, enforcing sedentary settlements which were easier for colonial
governments to control. This denial of food sovereignty via environ-
mental control reinscribed the political and economic control of the
British Empire.10
Faced with the reality these changes brought, nutrition researchers
sought to find solutions. Studies from the League of Nations as well
as nutritional surveys in colonial Africa argued that greater African food
sovereignty—by reducing import taxes on nutritious food and allowing
more mixed farming—would improve nutrition in colonial Africa. In
particular, League of Nations officials and colonial medical officers advo-
cated for those two solutions. Reducing import taxes lowered the costs to
African consumers, making healthy food cheaper. Sparing more land for
mixed farming rather than concentrating it on cash crop farming would
enable more Africans to grow a greater variety of their own subsistence
produce. More mixed farming on a larger scale would also enable greater
economic independence for a given colony because it would be less reliant
on food imports if it grew more of its own food itself. Putting money back
in the pockets of African consumers took it out of the pockets of British
farmers and British landowners in Africa, however, so colonial governors
did not ultimately promote mixed farming. The British economic elite
profiting from this agricultural system sought solutions to the problem
of malnutrition that their system had introduced, without altering that
system. The question for them, then, became how to improve nutrition
while also maintaining their current balance of political, economic, and
environmental power.
Reluctant to tamper with unemployment benefits and colonial
economies, central and colonial governments thus focused their solu-
tions regarding malnutrition on ending ignorance by promoting nutrition
education. This education primarily targeted women as the grocery shop-
pers and meal preparers. The British state invested in nutrition education
programs in both Britain and Africa which were intended to create home-
makers who knew how to inexpensively nourish their husbands and
10 Curtin, “Nutrition in African History,” 375.

10 L. SPARKS
children. These programs fit into a pre-existing education model in Britain

and opened up a new arena of colonial experimentation in Africa.
As nutrition experts sought solutions to end hunger in the metropole
and African colonies, there were multiple streams of information. Africa
served as a laboratory that fed scientific information to the metropole,
just as metropolitan experts went into the empire to spread their new
understandings of nutrition. A shift in colonial thinking and adminis-
tration occurred in the 1930s as both officials and scientists realized
that they badly needed new, more, and better information on African
environments, cultures, and diets. While remaining paternalistic, British
nutritional experts were driven by the desire to accumulate colonial
knowledge in order to be better stewards of the colonial empire in
addition to helping the metropolitan population.
This desire to be better stewards stemmed from a much broader
trend in Britain’s relationship to the empire in the interwar period. After
World War I, the League of Nations increasingly discussed the issue of
self-determination for smaller, less advantaged states and peoples. As a
result, the League implemented a paternalistic system of trusteeships in
which powerful western nations were to serve as the mentors of colo-
nial subjects whom they believed needed to be slowly shepherded toward
civilization and self-government. Given Britain’s increasingly souring rela-
tionship with India, British administrators became more convinced than
ever that they needed to take a different tack with the rest of the colonial
empire. The British state would not give the rest of its subjects the tools
to agitate for democracy and independence—namely, a western education
and English literacy—when it had no intention of granting independence
in the foreseeable future.
Facing pressure from the Indian National Congress to prove why the
British needed to continue ruling India, the British state also felt pres-
sure to prove the legitimacy and value of the empire to its own subjects
elsewhere. Britain’s relationship to India played a large part in Britain’s
approach to the rest of the empire by the 1930s. Agitating strongly
for Home Rule, the Indian National Congress called Britain’s bluff as
a worthy steward, casting doubt on the validity of the entire imperial
enterprise. To justify its colonial holdings, the British state saw the need
to retool its approach to colonialism to avoid another India. In colo-
nial Africa, this approach fixated on preventing “detribalization,” or the
breakdown of African society, which British experts feared would happen
if they introduced too much “civilization” and westernization too quickly.
Broadly, this new approach entailed a renewed dedication to colonial

development, intended as a demonstration of the usefulness of Britain
as a benevolent colonial ruler.11
This dynamic intensified during and after the Great Depression. As
Michael Worboys argues in “The Discovery of Colonial Malnutrition
between the Wars,” Britain attempted to use the flow of money and
goods through the empire to solve the economic problems the Depres-
sion wrought in both the metropole and the colonies. For example, the
1929 Colonial Development Fund provided financial support to British
colonies, aiming to give them a boost toward economic self-sufficiency
and eventually take the financial burden off the central British state. The
Colonial Development Fund included funding for new schools as well as
for campaigns to improve nutrition. Furthermore, the institution of impe-
rial preference in 1932 reduced economic competition and gave imperial
sellers an edge in the world market.12
Nutrition in India had long occupied British state and scientific atten-
tion, even before the 1920s developments in nutrition science. The two
major famines of the 1890s revealed the ineffectiveness of British famine
policies that prioritized grain speculation and the free market over millions
of starving Indians. Failing to demonstrate the utility of British rule
in India, the British state faced increased campaigning for Indian self-
government. By the 1930s, the British state turned instead to salvage its
reputation with the rest of the colonial empire. The empire-wide nutrition
surveys of the mid-1930s reflect this attitude, as colonial Africa dominated
the survey results while India appeared only occasionally.
The British state’s relationship to nutrition in the empire intertwined
with its role in the metropole. The empire informed both major scientific
undertakings and policy decisions, and filtered down into popular media.
The biggest name in interwar nutrition science in the metropole and the
colonies was John Boyd Orr, who worked extensively in both Britain and
Africa. He conducted nutritional research in Britain, founding the Rowett
Institute for Research into Animal Nutrition, which ultimately led him to
11 Benjamin Robert Siegel, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern
India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 11–12; Davis, Late Victorian
Holocausts.
12 M. Worboys, “The Discovery of Colonial Malnutrition Between the Wars,” in David
Arnold, Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1988), 216.
12 L. SPARKS
study human nutrition as well. He published the groundbreaking 1936

Food, Health, and Income, arguing that higher incomes led to better diets.
He also served on numerous boards dedicated to improving nutrition,
such as the Ministry of Health’s Advisory Committee on Nutrition, the
Committee on Nutrition in the Colonial Empire, and in 1945, became
the first Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Without his sustained analyses of nutrition in Africa, his pioneering schol-
arship and campaign for welfare reform in the metropole would not have
happened.
The ideas generated in the metropole and in the colonies impacted
each other. For example, popular media exhorted British mothers to
raise their offspring with the health and strength of the empire in mind,
and mission teachers exhorted African women to run their homes with
proper British domesticity in mind, particularly in Nigeria where mission
education was well-established by the 1920s. While Nigerian and British
women’s experiences were often radically different from one another, the
ideological underpinnings of motherhood and nutrition which informed
women’s treatment existed along the same continuum. For example,
attaining social and racial progress through the increased government
regulation of public health motivated officials in the metropole and the
colonies. Malthusian fears of over- or underpopulation sent scientists
into panics over whether the British Empire provided an adequately fit
ruling class or adequate food for a growing African population. Officials
routinely blamed poor mothers for their infants’ poor health instead of
the overarching, systematic problems of poverty and exploitative labor
systems. The desire to create good British homes, housewives, mothers,
and healthy babies across the empire justified the use of experts to inspect
the homes and educate the populace that those experts deemed in need
of reform. Finally, white, class-privileged women in both the metropole
and the colonies used their femininity to become experts in their sphere,
the home.
Of course, these concepts took drastically different turns in a colonial
context than in the metropole. British experts approached African fami-
lies as though they were mysterious, foreign, and unknown, relying on the
field of anthropology to render African food systems legible to the British
before they could embark on a project to try and improve them. Not
without flaws, anthropologists and other experts suffered from colonial
arrogance, which resulted in African voices getting distorted or ignored
completely. African food systems were frequently met with harsh judg-
ment by British experts who struggled to find an African diet that they
found suitably balanced and nutritious without requiring British input.
This judgment then paved the way for colonial officials to radically disrupt
precolonial African farming and labor systems in attempts to enrich the
colony and hope that it trickled down. These disruptions exacerbated
problems of undernutrition and malnutrition, justifying further colonial
intervention.
In the context of increasing state intervention, British and African
women did not passively receive these latest concepts of nutrition and
mothercraft. Since nutrition played such a key role in the domestic sphere,
more privileged and educated women became experts on the matter
as formally trained anthropologists, philanthropists, club organizers, or
inspectors. While most political and scientific authorities were men, my
focus on women teaching other women nevertheless serves as an impor-
tant undertaking because it illuminates a more nuanced understanding
of the complex relationships of power both in the metropole and the
colonies. Differing levels of race and class privilege reveal the ways in
which women exercised some forms of power and stood on the receiving
end of others.
In sum, widespread malnutrition both before and after the Great
Depression called into question the role of the British state in preserving
the welfare of both its citizens and its subjects. International organizations
such as the League of Nations, empire-wide projects such as nutrition
surveys conducted by the CNCE, sub-imperial networks of medical and
teaching professionals, and individuals on-the-spot in different colonies
wove a dense web of ideas on nutrition. African women quickly became
the focus of efforts to end malnutrition due to Malthusian concerns of
underpopulation in Africa and African women’s role as both farmers and
mothers.
Ultimately, food, recipes, people, and their ideas about nutrition circu-
lated throughout the empire and drew attention to Britain and British
Africa’s unique relationship on questions of nutrition. The rise of nutri-
tion science expanded political, economic, and environmental possibilities
for everyone who could imagine its many potential applications. Offering
ways to both reinforce and challenge imperial hierarchies, the contested
discourse of the new science of nutrition created a new arena for historical
actors at every node on the nexus to use for their own advantage. This
book uses four main points to illustrate this claim. First, the book argues
14 L. SPARKS
that women’s nutrition education acted as the compromise between

the state’s desire to maintain laissez-faire economic policies and the
state’s desire to intervene on behalf of its citizens’ and subjects’ welfare,
including their nutrition. While nutrition studies argued that both poverty
and ignorance led to malnutrition in the metropole and the colonies,
central and colonial governments hesitated to intervene economically,
which would have disrupted the political, economic, and environmental
status quo from which they profited. They turned instead to the other
perceived cause, ignorance, and focused on improving women’s education
to tackle that ignorance.
Second, the book uses Nigeria as a case study to argue that the
empire critically shaped metropolitan understandings of nutrition, and
the presence of metropolitan ideas fundamentally shaped colonial African
understandings of nutrition. The empire was not a one-way flow of ideas
from metropole to colonies; it was instead a multidirectional flow as new
knowledge created in the colonies went back to the metropole as well as
to other colonies.13
Third, the book argues that colonial nutrition education pedagogy
served as an arena to shape and contest the future of Nigerian women.
British policymakers and teachers debated over how much hard science
and literacy they should teach versus how much their lessons should
simply focus on teaching nutritious recipes in cookery class. With their
own ideas about how best to advance with a western education, Nigerian
chiefs, parents, and the female students themselves all lobbied for their
own version of Nigerian girls’ and women’s nutrition education. While
British teachers and Nigerian chiefs generally preferred to keep lessons
simple and to use local ingredients, ambitious Nigerian women and their
elite parents agitated for a more prestigious western education of literacy
and English cookery.
The fourth and final main point of the book is that the produc-
tion and education of knowledge on nutrition was a deeply raced,
classed, and gendered process. These axes of privilege and oppression
13 David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Impe-
rial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006) developed the notion of empire as a network, which has since been expanded
in different directions, including imperial science as a network of people and ideas. For
more on imperial science networks, see Brett Bennett and Joseph Hodge, eds., Science
and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science Across the British Empire, 1800–1970
(London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).
determined one’s scope of influence in the political, economic, and envi-

ronmental nexus of empire, and historical actors navigated their privileged
and oppressed roles strategically for their own advancement. As wives
and mothers in charge of feeding their families, women’s knowledge
of healthy diets became central to the project of improving nutrition.
As research increasingly indicated the correlation between poverty and
malnutrition in both the metropole and the colonies, a paternalistic
hierarchy of middle-class white women made it their project to uplift
working-class white women and African women. From anthropological
and medical research on nutrition to the creation of nutrition education
textbooks and syllabi, white women fought to make improving African
women’s nutrition their imperial project—and burden. Navigating colo-
nialism and attempting to improve their own lives within it became
Nigerian women’s work, and they used all tools available, including
increased attention to their own education, to do so.
This book emerges from a wealth of scholarship on histories of Britain,
Africa, and British Africa. This book argues that two stories histori-
ographically treated as separate narratives—of economic recovery and
nutritional improvement in interwar Britain and simultaneous decline
in British Africa—are two of many sides of a single, global story. The
British state buoyed the economic slump of the Great Depression in
the metropole by importing more colonial goods more cheaply, feeding
metropolitan Brits on the back of the colonial empire, particularly in
Africa. Furthermore, while histories of science, medicine, and the British
Empire have provided fertile analytical ground for decades, the field of
nutrition science has received comparatively little attention. The interwar
rise of nutrition science set into motion a decades-long dynamic that
stretches into the present, a dynamic which establishes nutrition science
as the white man’s—and often woman’s—medical burden, tasked with
alleviating malnutrition in the Global South.
Currently, the field tends to focus either on the history of nutrition
science in Britain, such as David Smith’s Nutrition in Britain, or on
the history of scientists of all disciplines in Africa, such as Helen Tilley’s
Africa as a Living Lab. Most recently, Nadja Durbach’s Many Mouths :
The Politics of Food in Britain from the Workhouse to the Welfare State and
Otter’s Diet for a Large Planet each use an imperial lens to contextualize
food in metropolitan Britain. Emerging from this context and using my
own approach, I argue that the story of interwar nutrition improving in
Britain as it worsened in Africa is the same story, and this project unites
16 L. SPARKS
nutrition science in both Britain and Africa under a single analytic lens of
economics, gender, and empire that de-centers Britain in its exploration of
the links between Britain and colonial Nigeria. As Britain seeks to renew
its economic ties to Africa in the wake of Brexit, this book contributes to
debates on the relationship between citizen and state, global capitalism,
the ways in which these dynamics intersect with gender, and the legacies
of British imperialism.14
This book engages with existing scholarship across a spectrum of over-
lapping themes. I built this book on a foundation of classic touchstones
of British imperial history, including John Mackenzie’s Imperialism and
Popular Culture and Anna Davin’s “Imperialism and Motherhood.”15
The Mackenzie Moment established the presence, however shifting and
contested, of empire discourse in the metropole. Similarly, Davin estab-
lished both that the discourse of white motherhood made up a key arena
in which some of that empire discourse took place, and that British
women had roles to play in the empire. Together, these works illustrate
the cross-pollination of culture, gender, and empire that my work seeks to
build upon by providing a specific example of this multidirectional flow
of ideas in the context of nutrition science.
Likewise, Worboys’s “The Discovery of Colonial Malnutrition between
the Wars,” in David Arnold’s Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies,
comprises another older work that forms a crucial bedrock for mine.16
This article laid the foundation for the history of nutrition science in
the British Empire in the interwar period. While this article makes argu-
ments about women’s involvement in interwar colonial nutrition science,
however, it does not draw on primary sources generated by women of
any race, but rather tells the story from white, male government admin-
istrators’ perspectives. My work, by contrast, seeks to center both white
and Black women’s historical voices and experiences.
14 David F. Smith, ed., Nutrition in Britain: Science, Scientists, and Politics in the Twen-
tieth Century (New York: Routledge, 1997); Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory:
Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011); Nadja Durbach, Many Mouths: The Politics of Food in Britain from
the Workhouse to the Welfare State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Chris
Otter, Diet for a Large Planet.
15 John M. Mackenzie, Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1986); Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” in Ann Stoler and
Frederick Cooper, Tensions of Empire (Oakland: University of California Press, 1997).
16 Worboys, “The Discovery of Colonial Malnutrition.”
While Worboys’s article provides concrete and direct context for my

arguments, Tracey Rizzo and Steven Gerontakis’s Intimate Empires: Body,
Race, and Gender in the Modern World provides the broad context in
which my book sits.17 An ambitious survey of comparative empires,
this work examines a swath of ideas, people, and commodity goods—
including food and drink—and how they circulated globally within trade
networks defined by imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. This
book provides the big context and general approach of social and cultural
history of empire that my work fits inside.
Naturally, a rich and recent body of work on the history of food and
drink in the British Empire also informs this project, especially Erika
Rappaport’s A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World,
Lizzie Collingham’s The Taste of Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food
Shaped the Modern World, and Otter’s Diet for a Large Planet, each of
which provide a clear, strong framework for imperial food networks and
the ideas that also circulated along those same networks.18
As an examination of British and African history in one lens, with
British Nigeria as the case study, this book also engages with British
metropolitan history and Nigerian history. Regarding Nigerian history,
Saheed Aderinto’s When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nation-
alism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 and Abosede George’s
Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Develop-
ment in Colonial Lagos each explore the ways in which Nigerian girls and
women navigated education and social advancement in the context of
colonization.19 Regarding British metropolitan history, James Vernon’s
Hunger: A Modern History and Durbach’s Many Mouths each explore
the evolving relationship between the British state and the level of its
17 Tracey Rizzo and Steven Gerontakis, Intimate Empires: Body, Race, and Gender in
the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
18 Erica Rappaport, Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2017); Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of Empire: How Britain’s
Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, 2017); Otter, Diet for
a Large Planet.
19 Saheed Aderinto, When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and
Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014);
Abosede A. George, Making Modern Girls : A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social
Development in Colonial Lagos (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014).
18 L. SPARKS
responsibility to feed both its citizens and its subjects.20 While each of
these works primarily focuses on metropolitan history, they also include
some imperial context in their analyses as well. My book contains more
British history in its analysis of Nigeria than Aderinto’s and George’s, and
contains more Nigerian history in its analysis of Britain than Vernon’s
and Durbach’s. Ultimately, my work sits at the intersection of histories of
empire, food, Britain, and Nigeria, situating itself as a close examination
of one case study within the broad context of twentieth-century empire.
Emerging from this rich historiographical context, this book shows
how research in the 1920s and 1930s in Africa led to new discoveries
in the science of nutrition. The League of Nations and the British state
wanted to use that new knowledge to improve the nutrition of its citi-
zens and subjects, and those citizens and subjects played active roles in
that project. This book centers on how women’s education emerged in
colonial administrators’ thinking as the most important intervention in
preventing malnutrition, and how that education model, formulated in
Britain and carried out by British teachers, evolved on the ground in
response to Nigerian students and environments. While administrators
heralded nutrition science education as the best solution, it did not signif-
icantly intervene to reduce malnutrition. Nutrition education illustrated
both the limits of colonial power and the ability of Nigerian women to
use colonial education for their own ends. First, this dynamic demon-
strates the limits of nutrition education specifically: just because Nigerian
women’s education did not accomplish what the League of Nations
or British state thought it would did not mean it did not accomplish
anything—it shaped the way Nigerian women achieved their own personal
goals. Second, this dynamic also demonstrates the limits of the relation-
ship between international organizations, the British state, and colonial
subjects more broadly, by disrupting the concept of a streamlined, unified
colonial mind and demonstrating the importance of local conditions and
Nigerian creativity in approaches to trusteeships and colonial policy.
To illustrate these points, this book is broken down into six body
chapters, which collectively examine the question of women’s nutrition
education from various nodes on the political, economic, and environ-
mental nexus. The first two chapters tell the story from the vantage point
of the political and economic elite, the institutions profiting from that
20 James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007);

Durbach, Many Mouths.
political, economic, and environmental status quo, and with the most
power to maintain that status quo. Chapter 2 traces the imperial line of
thinking from the interwar discovery of malnutrition to the decision to
focus on female education as one of the main solutions. Malnutrition,
once rendered quantifiable by the discovery of vitamins and minerals,
sprang to the fore as a global problem. International, national, and sub-
imperial organizations spurred the search for more and yet more data
on the state of nutrition across the globe. Chapter 3 shows how, within
the British Empire, metropolitan Britons’ health remained the primary
concern. Malthusian fears of an underpopulated Africa—and thus a labor
shortage—also pinpointed colonial Africa as the starting place for colo-
nial efforts to improve nutrition. A colonial committee devoted to the
task and open to a multitude of possible solutions, reviewed a decade
of nutrition research. After reviewing the data, the committee settled on
two main solutions to ending malnutrition: more scientific research on
nutrition and female education.
The remainder of book shifts to tell the story from less powerful actors’
vantage points, namely women and men involved in metropolitan and
colonial educational institutions. Chapter 4 delves into the structure of
that female education in both Britain and Africa by comparing a school
in London to a school in Lagos, Nigeria. In both places, it made the most
sense to incorporate nutrition education into pre-existing classes on the
topics of food and cooking, which were handled under the broad subject
of domestic science. Chapter 5 looks at the degrees, courses, and exams
for domestic science programs in both Britain and Nigeria, arguing that
the Nigerian domestic science classroom became a space of hybrid prac-
tices as Nigerian students learned both British and Nigerian recipes using
Nigerian kitchen facilities. British domestic science teachers and Nigerian
students each learned techniques from the other in order to cook food in
their domestic science classrooms.
Chapter 6 outlines the competing philosophies underpinning domestic
science education pedagogy in Africa. After the inadvertent creation
of a discontented, westernized elite in India, British education policy-
makers were anxious not to repeat the experience. Instead, many British
teachers in Africa wanted to experiment with new education techniques
that altered as little of Africans’ daily habits as possible, adding in only
minor changes informed by western nutrition science. Rooted in Victo-
rian mission tradition, the colonial project of attempting to create the
African housewife also continued into the interwar period, in part through
20 L. SPARKS
using education to build character. Education policymakers hoped that

domestic science education would impart qualities such as resourceful-
ness, reliability, and efficiency to their African pupils. The intangible
quality of character occupied an important space in British discussions
of colonial nutrition education.
Finally, Chapter 7 tells the story from the least advantaged node in the
political, economic, and environmental nexus, arguing that young Nige-
rian women used the British interest in their cookery lessons to learn
pastry-baking and English recipes, both of which served as status-markers
for women aiming to marry into the westernized Nigerian elite. Different
groups of people had different visions for Nigerian women’s futures.
Based on those competing visions, each group lobbied for a different
kind of education to achieve that future. While state interest in African
female education increased due to attempts to improve nutrition, class
was only in session when Nigerians chose to show. To recruit and main-
tain students, British teachers had to compromise and teach subjects that
their students wanted, which sometimes included literacy or cake-making
rather than nutrition science.
Ultimately, the up-in-the-air discourse on nutrition science and its
possibilities opened an arena of debate about its applications that various
parties used for their own advantage. Local, central, and colonial govern-
ments navigated a fraught atmosphere in which their responsibility to
maintain the welfare of citizens and subjects, including their nutrition,
struggled against prewar laissez-faire ideals and the relentless pursuit of
profit in the colonial empire. Female education emerged as a compromise
course of taking action that did not threaten the free market and profit
from agricultural trade. Just as food circulated through the empire, so too
did nutrition education pedagogy, textbooks, and teachers. The empire
created a multidirectional flow of goods, ideas, and people as female nutri-
tion education expanded in both Britain and Africa. While that education
expanded, so did the debates around it, as teachers and students across
Britain and Africa debated the best way to provide an education that set
women up for their version of success. Nigerian women took advantage
of the increased attention to their education by lobbying for classes that
would strategically help them rise into the westernized Nigerian elite. The
nutrition education debates continued throughout the 1930s until the
outbreak of World War II, when both Britons and Africans had bigger
fish to fry as the war opened new nutritional questions and challenges.
CHAPTER 2
Gathering Ingredients: Collecting Data

on Nutrition in Britain and British Africa
In the early 1930s, a British anthropologist was studying the diet of a

tribe from the Gold Coast when he reported that an African man asked
the anthropologist what a British diet was like. Upon hearing the answer,
the African man reportedly exclaimed, “what, no porridge? I call that
starvation.”1
This exchange illuminated some of the challenges of studying African
colonial nutrition between the wars. An African man in the Gold Coast
was sure to have a different perspective on nourishment than an African
woman in a neighboring colony, a medical officer, a governor, a Colonial
Office committee member, or a British representative of the League of
Nations. In the 1930s, a dense network of institutions and individuals,
each with differing relationships to political, economic, and environ-
mental balance of power, tackled what researchers had identified as the
problems of malnutrition. At local, national, and international levels,
a variety of initiatives took shape with the goal of ending malnutri-
tion across the globe. Drawing on different perspectives and funded
unequally, different groups approached the problem of nutrition from
different angles and arrived at different conclusions. The League of
1 M. and L. Fortes, “Food in the Domestic Economy of the Tallensi,” Africa IIALC
Vol. IX No. 2 (April 1936) CAB 58/199.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2023
L. Sparks, Women and the Rise of Nutrition Science in Interwar
Britain and British Africa, Britain and the World,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23521-4_2
22 L. SPARKS
Nations, concerned not only with global political stability but also global
health and well-being from its inception, generally took an ostensibly
humanitarian approach, steeped in the racism of the paternalistic mandate
system. Funding widespread research on nutrition, the League called on
individual nations to take action, locating responsibility for ending malnu-
trition squarely with the state. In the case of Africa, that often meant
the European colonial state: after the late nineteenth century scramble
for Africa and the mandate system established after World War I, only
Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent African countries.
Concurrent with the League’s call for state action, the British govern-
ment in turn conducted extensive research into nutrition and created
smaller governing bodies across the empire to respond to the local
conditions that research illuminated. While largely independent from one
another, these committees were also in frequent communication, as they
advocated a holistic, cooperation-oriented approach. The main committee
responsible for studying and improving colonial malnutrition was the
Committee for Nutrition in the Colonial Empire (CNCE), which was
established in 1935. It reviewed the state of nutrition across the colonial
empire and further delegated responsibility based on its findings. Coordi-
nating with colonial governors, medical officers, and agricultural officers,
the CNCE found itself engaged in a balancing act between the bird’s eye
view of the League and officials from different fields who were on the
spot. Working with these different groups, the CNCE cooperated with
two other committees, one devoted to interpreting nutrition research
and one devoted to tailoring colonial education to incorporate the find-
ings of that research. These European committees tended to generalize
when they discussed Africa. While they knew that local conditions would
vary from place to place, they considered those variations the priority of
the administrators on the spot. The committee members often spoke of
colonies categorized by continent, speaking of “Africa” in broad strokes,
and letting colonial administrators provide the specific details.
The Advisory Committee for Education in the Colonies (ACEC),
established in 1924 as an expanded version of the Advisory Committee
on Native Education in British Tropical Africa, worked under the Colo-
nial Office and in tandem with the CNCE after its creation. Ultimately,
after a few years of nutrition research, the ACEC created a subcom-
mittee focused on the education of African women and girls. The latter
committee drew on the findings of the former to create a policy of
improving African nutrition through the education of women and girls.
2 GATHERING INGREDIENTS: COLLECTING DATA … 23
Echoing similar interwar schemes in metropolitan Britain that sought

to teach better domestic economy, including nutrition, to housewives,
this colonial nutrition policy also positioned the problem of malnutrition
as up to the individual to solve on the level of the household with guid-
ance from the state, without the state having to take responsibility for
ensuring access to nutritious food. These committees and the communi-
cations between them formed a complex matrix of thought on colonial
African nutrition policy and education. The ACEC Subcommittee itself
acted within a wide, intersecting network of mission and state educa-
tors, medical doctors, scientists, anthropologists, and Africans of different
ranks, ages, and genders. From above, the Subcommittee received input
from a humanitarian-minded League of Nations and a largely economic-
minded Colonial Office. From below, the Subcommittee received input at
the sub-imperial level from colonial Agricultural, Educational, Veterinary,
and Medical Departments as well as African chiefs and communities. The
Subcommittee represented a central node of colonial thought on nutri-
tion that both tried and failed, at different times and in different ways, to
serve everyone with whom it corresponded.2
The ACEC appointed the Subcommittee in 1939 with the goal “to
report on the means of accelerating social progress in the colonial empire
by raising the standard of education of women and girls and by welfare
work among them.”3 While the specific Subcommittee was not created
until the end of the decade, various colonial experts and entities had
collected considerable data on the subject over the previous ten to twenty
years. The Subcommittee attempted to collate this data to assess the
status of female education and devise a new policy going forward. Rife
with uncertainty, the Subcommittee arrived at a central idea: solving the
African nutrition problem rested on improving the education of African
women and girls.
The impetus for the Subcommittee was to create a cogent response
to numerous circular despatches which made the rounds through African
colonial governments in 1936–1937. These despatches included nutri-
tion and domestic science surveys sent out from the Secretary of State
2 Sonia F. G. Parkinson, Sir Hanns Vischer, in Clive Whitehead, Colonial Educators: The
British Indian and Colonial Education Service, 1858–1983 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003),
106.
3 “Introduction,” Advisory Committee for Education in the Colonies, Subcommittee
for the Education and Welfare of Women and Girls CO 859/1/9.
24 L. SPARKS
for the Colonies, an article by a British professor of domestic science, and

an article by a British female doctor working in Africa and India. These
articles and input from British women promoted the White Woman’s
Burden, arguing that the empire needed the unique insights of white
British women to speak to colonial women’s issues.4 The open-ended
questions of the early surveys paved the way for the narrowly focused arti-
cles, which in turn served as the final prompt for the Colonial Office to
designate a specific committee devoted to the goal of improving African
colonial malnutrition via African women’s nutrition education. By the end
of the 1930s, the state decided to focus its resources on African female
education as a solution to colonial malnutrition because of the outcomes
of numerous, sometimes contradictory findings of international, national,
and sub-imperial measures to study the problem.
This chapter seeks to make three main points. First, the chapter
argues that overlapping, uneven networks of both institutions and indi-
viduals held competing visions of the underlying causes of malnutrition
and the solutions to it. Second, it argues that the British government
faced pressure from myriad sources—doctors, scientists, working-class and
women’s health advocates, anthropologists—to improve nutrition in both
the metropole and colonial Africa. In both cases, the state ultimately chose
to target ignorance, especially women’s ignorance, more than poverty, as
the root cause of malnutrition. Third, the chapter argues that early Colo-
nial Office surveys on the state of colonial nutrition provided a space for
colonial officials to explore a wide variety of solutions to malnutrition,
where education was considered one of numerous potential solutions.
In exploring all the different solutions available to try, tension emerged
between medical officials’ focus on public health and governors’ focus on
the economy.
The Interwar Context of Nutrition Science

The application of scientific knowledge and principles to food, what ulti-
mately became nutrition science, emerged in the nineteenth century and
expanded in a broad global context after World War I. The Great War
led to advancements across medical and scientific fields, including nutri-
tion, and saw food used as a weapon in new ways as well. The fitness of
4 Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial
Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
soldiers had also led Europeans to be increasingly interested in questions

of nutrition. Within this context, the British Empire also saw a renewed
dedication to proving that colonialism benefited the colonies and that
Britain served as a worthy steward of them. Colonial administrator Fred-
erick Lugard’s 1922 The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa, asserting that
Britain could both profit and serve as a trustee in charge of the peoples
and resources of its colonial empire, stoked the desire for a recommitment
to good colonial governance. In the metropole as well as the colonies,
good governance increasingly came to be seen as underpinned by accu-
rate medical and scientific research informing national and colonial policy.
This desire for good governance thus manifested most clearly in the waves
of scientific and medical research conducted in the empire during this
period. In the eyes of colonial officials, Africa stood to both give and
receive new knowledge of nutrition. Colonial officials hoped to capitalize
on Africa as a laboratory with a population of experimental subjects; colo-
nial officials also hoped that spreading scientific advancement throughout
the empire would legitimize Britain’s presence in its colonial holdings.5
This process of securing and justifying the legitimacy of colonial rule
emerged in large part through discourses of development. The buzzword
of the interwar period, development served as a kind of twentieth-century
civilizing mission, but in the interwar period, the gospel of empire was
science. Coming out of a nineteenth-century tradition of the attempted
religious conversion of colonial subjects, scientific experts and educa-
tors in the interwar period proselytized western science and medicine. A
significant shift occurred in the interwar period that disrupted the evolu-
tion of the colonial civilizing mission: British experts increasingly studied
and valued local methods and knowledge. British scientists undertook
sweeping new projects to understand the colonial empire, with partic-
ular emphasis on Africa, incorporating local knowledge to a greater extent
than ever before.6
It was within this context that nutrition science significantly debuted
in Britain in 1925 when Dr. John Boyd Orr, funded by the Empire
5 Barona and Vilar, The Problem of Nutrition, 24–25, 28–29; Dane Kennedy, Britain
and Empire, 1880–1945 (London: Routledge, 2002), 63; Helen Tilley, Africa as a
Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011).
6 Tilley, Africa, 69–73.
26 L. SPARKS
Marketing Board (EMB) and armed with the recent discoveries of vita-
mins and minerals, began studying the nutrition of ailing African cattle.
From there, Orr took notice of African people’s nutrition and launched
additional research studying Kenyan diets in the late 1920s and British
diets in the early 1930s. Invigorated by the latest discoveries, medical
doctors and scientists embraced the application of science to the study
of nutrition, bolstered by the League of Nations’ global inquiry into
nutrition. Because of their sizable empire, the British led the way in the
project of collecting data on the chemical composition of food and the
dietary habits of people around the world, including considerable research
across colonial Africa. Acting within the scope of the widespread African
Research Survey, in which researchers across numerous disciplines sought
to gather new scientific knowledge on the African continent, chemists,
soil scientists, and anthropologists set to work throughout the 1930s
to understand nutrition from social, scientific, and medical angles. Their
research indicated that while death from starvation was relatively rare in
Africa, inadequate diets were widespread across the continent.7
New data led to new debates over that data. With the discovery of
vitamins and minerals, the foundation of an adequate diet became objec-
tive, measurable, and quantifiable—theoretically. Building on nineteenth-
century discussion over components of a healthy diet, scientists demon-
strated that it was not just the quantity of food, but the quality of the
food that went into a nutritious diet. Nutrition scientists worked to devise
their own ways of measuring that quantity and quality in order to estab-
lish their authority in this new field. Their findings could have political
and economic implications, which shaped the ways in which society and
state respected that authority.
The scientific, and then political, vocabulary of diet came increasingly
under debate as scientists discovered and drew the distinctions between
undernutrition, or inadequate calories, and malnutrition, or inadequate
vitamins, minerals, proteins, and fats. Nutrition scientists differentiated
between various types of foods: protective foods, full of vitamins and
minerals, provided resistance to the diseases of malnutrition, such as
rickets, beri beri, and pellagra. Energy-giving foods, such as carbohy-
drates, fueled physical activity and labor. A mixed, or balanced, diet
7 Michael Worboys, “The Discovery of Colonial Malnutrition,” 208–225; CAB 58/

199. Tilley, Africa, 73, 77; CAB 58/199.
contained a variety of both protective and energy-giving foods.8 With

these new concepts, nutrition science was still expertise in the making
and deeply political.
The project at hand quickly became the scientific determination of
the optimum diet, or the ideal number of calories consumed through
the perfect balance of protective and energy-giving foods, across gender,
age, class, and racial categories. The determination of the optimum diet
had implications far beyond the field of nutrition science. Changes in the
science of nutrition led to changes in the place of nutrition in political,
economic, and cultural intervention, both in Europe and in the colonial
empire. With the quantification of an adequate diet, it followed that diet
could be studied and regulated by that science. In the discourse of the
League of Nations as well as Britain, the best science available under-
pinned good governance, and cutting-edge nutrition science promised to
revolutionize the definition of good governance as states could now use
science to understand and optimize citizens’ and subjects’ nutrition and
thus their overall health. The more accurate and encompassing the scien-
tific knowledge, the better the capacity of the state to utilize it, which
prompted international, national, and sub-imperial organizations to prior-
itize increased nutrition research.9 The findings of that swell of research,
however, challenged the British state’s discursive promise to use good
science to create good governance and promote nutrition across Britain
and empire—which, as the research revealed, would not come cheap.
Coming from a humanitarian perspective, and without an economy
of its own, the League urged its members to make healthy food afford-
able to all their citizens and subjects by reducing taxes on imported food
and encouraging mixed farming. These recommendations were easier for
the League to make than they were for individual governments to enact.
For Britain in particular, African colonial governments’ goal had been
to prioritize the economic self-sufficiency of their respective colonies.
The League’s recommendations of deprioritizing cash crops and reducing
farmers’ profit margins clashed with the pre-existing economic goals of
African colonial governments. The more that African colonies paid for
food imported from Britain, and the cheaper African colonies sold their
cash crops, the more affordable food became in metropolitan Britain.
8 Barona and Vilar, The Problem of Nutrition, 37–38.

9 Barona and Vilar, The Problem of Nutrition, 37–38.
28 L. SPARKS
To follow the League’s economic recommendations in Britain often

meant discarding them in the colonies. From a public health perspec-
tive, however, the League’s goals meshed much more naturally, and many
colonial health practitioners came out in support of the League’s food
policy suggestions.10
The Domestic Problem of Nutrition in Britain

The British government deviated from the goal of the League of Nations
on more than just economic issues. British anxiety over the state of nutri-
tion stemmed both from holding together a vast but precarious empire,
and from the harsh reality of the unfitness of prospective soldiers in World
War I. As a result, institutions devoted, in whole or in part, to addressing
problems of nutrition took off in the interwar period. As the Royal Soci-
ety’s Food (War) Committee entwined scientific research and government
policy more tightly than ever before, it paved the way for the establish-
ment of new state institutions such as the Ministry of Health in 1919 and
the Advisory Committee on Nutrition (ACN) in 1931. Preexisting insti-
tutions such as the British Medical Association (BMA) found new avenues
of inquiry and intervention into questions of nutrition and answers to
eradicating widespread malnutrition. The tension in the debates over
the problems and solutions to malnutrition characterized the interwar
struggle between the desire to shrink government back down to its prewar
size and the desire for strategic increased state intervention in regulating
the nutrition of the public.11
If the Great War, and the state of military recruits, built up the
momentum to launch nutrition into prominence as a subject of national
interest, Prime Minister Lloyd George’s September 1918 address on
building an A-1 Empire served as the immediate catalyst, sparking a flurry
of new public health research questions to answer and problems to solve,
from government institutions such as the Ministry of National Service to
scientific institutions such as the Lister Institute to more popular institu-
tions, such as the People’s League of Health and a general craze in health,
beauty, and fitness.
10 Barona and Vilar, The Problem of Nutrition, 28, 31; Worboys, “The Discovery of
Malnutrition,” 220; Tilley, Africa, 73–75.
11 Phil Harling, The Modern British State: An Historical Introduction (Cambridge:
Polity, 2001); Pat Thane, Foundations of the Welfare State (London: Routledge, 1996).
As soon as World War I concluded, and officials began planning to

tackle the problems of nutrition that the war had laid bare, the tension
immediately surfaced between prewar liberal attitudes and postwar open-
ness to increased government intervention. Ernest Starling, for example,
served as second chairman of the Food (War) Committee of the Royal
Society during the war and scientific advisor to the Ministry of Food
afterward. His pivotal wartime research helped design rations with the
optimized, balanced diet of protective and energy-giving foods in mind.
His analysis of Germany’s struggle to cope with their own food blockade
only reinforced his views. The tangible and widespread effects of his scien-
tific knowledge applied via government in a national scheme made him
a believer in the power of rational, science-backed government policy to
improve the nutrition of the British people. In a 1919 talk on “Food in
Relation to Health,” he rather scathingly asserted that “it needed a Euro-
pean war and a submarine blockade to make the government recognize
that it was its duty to look after the feeding of the people and to appoint
a Minister of Food,” and called for the creation of an entire government
Board of Nutrition to target issues of nutrition specifically rather than
subsume them under the general umbrella of public health.12
George Newman, Chief Medical Officer of that general umbrella, the
newly created Ministry of Health, held different views, despite occupying
a similar government post. His 1920 talk sponsored by the National
Health Society, epitomized the interwar seesaw between the old tradi-
tion of liberal citizenship and the new reality of total war. As the Times
summarized, the creation of the Ministry of Health
meant of course, increased intervention by the State... But there was a

further factor in reform which was in some ways more important…namely,
an educated community and an enlightened public opinion. As a nation,
we should never win through to a high physical standard until the great
mass of the people were educated sufficiently to be able to choose the way
of health.13
12 “Suggested Board of Nutrition,” The Times, March 29, 1919; John Burnett, Plenty
and Want: A Social History of Food in England from 1815 to the Present Day (New York:
Routledge, 1989), 243.
13 “The Workers’ Diet,” The Times, April 23, 1920.
30 L. SPARKS
To that end, Newman suggested the creation of a National Health

Week, comparable to Empire Day festivities, and other means of
educating the public. He explicitly rejected poverty as an overarching
explanation for malnutrition and placed the blame squarely on ignorance.
In studying working-class diets, he described how researchers found “a
tale of bread and beer, tea and pickles, canned meat and cakes, a bit of
bacon and a piece of cheese… the reason was not poverty, but lack of
knowledge of the right food to buy and how to cook it.”14 Even in the
immediate postwar period, the nature of the nutrition debate for decades
to come had already begun to take shape as similar men in similar govern-
ment positions identified different roots of the problem of malnutrition
and advocated for different solutions.
One of the earliest of state projects on nutrition, an immediate postwar
study by the Research Department of the Ministry of National Service,
with assistance from the Medical Research Committee, analyzed the
“Defects of Grade IV Men.” The study’s analysis of men’s health broke
down their demographic data by birthplace, age, occupation, nutrition,
and other categories, which then provided a foundation for the nutrition
studies that followed in the next decades. Decrying unhealthy men as the
“wastage of the manpower of the nation,” the study promised a more
sweeping look at the “the health of the nation” than ever before. The
repeated emphasis on the nation shows the preoccupation with Britain’s
fitness for both world war and race war; the emphasis on entire popula-
tions as the unit of analysis hints at the Malthusian concerns underpinning
much of the debate on global nutrition in this period.15
To tackle this “wastage” head on, the 1919 Royal Society’s Food
(War) Committee Report provided some of the most recent, compre-
hensible, and purportedly accurate information available on nutrition
science. Even this report, however, opened with a disclaimer that nutri-
tion science remained a field of study in its infancy and as such, required
further studies—a refrain that resounded throughout the interwar period,
echoed in a 1936 lament for “enquiries and still more enquiries.”16 This
14 “The Workers’ Diet,” The Times, April 23, 1920; Zweineger-Bargielowska, Managing
the Body, 152.
15 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body; Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History;
“Defects of Grade IV Men,” The Times, March 12, 1919.
16 “Man and His Diet,” The Times, March 17, 1919; Andrew J. Hull, “Food for
Thought? The Relations Between the Royal Society Food Committees and Government,
Report delineated different dietary requirements based on sex, height,

and age. The Report then analyzed how a white European man of
average height and weight, working eight hours a day, expended energy.
The total number of calories required to fuel that work comprised the
basal metabolism. For that average man, his basal metabolism at rest
equaled 39.7 calories per square meter of his body’s surface per hour,
or 1,687 calories per twenty-four hours. Different-sized men needed
different amounts of calories, and extra work required extra calories:
sedentary work needed 400 extra calories, light work 4–700, moderate
7–1,100, and heavy 1,100–2,000. Perhaps of most personal interest to
contemporary readers came the Report’s findings on “[t]he diet of the
brain worker—that large class of the population earning their living in
sedentary occupations, in which the movements of writing are the only
muscular exertion involved,” who did not require extra calories to fulfill
their jobs. All of these calculations illustrating the variability in calories
needed for different men had implications for soldiers in wartime, where
rations regardless of body size or work output were nevertheless equal, a
practice at jarring odds with the latest nutrition science.17
The general scientific consensus estimated that the average man needed
3,000 calories a day—a figure that remained largely consistent throughout
the interwar period. Equally consistent was man’s place as the basic unit of
nutritional calculation, with a man’s caloric needs referred to as the “abso-
lute value,” while calculations expressed women’s and children’s caloric
needs as various percentages of a man’s, called the “man value.”18 The
Royal Society’s Food (War) Committee Report, for example, estimated
that the average woman carried out two-thirds as much work as a man
and needed 2,500 calories, or 83 percent of the average man’s needs,
per day. Estimating children’s calorie needs led to yet further compli-
cated calculations, broken down by sex and age-range while also taking
1915–19,” Annals of Science vol. 59 2002: 263–298; “Report on the Food Requirements
of Man. By the Food (War) Committee, Royal Society,” Journal of the Society of Chemical
Industry (London: Harrison and Sons, 1919); Report of the Subcommittee on Food Statistics
of the Mixed Committee on the Problem of Nutrition, 1936 CAB 58/199; Barona, The
Problem of Nutrition, 37–38; Vernon, Hunger, 202.
17 “Man And His Diet,” The Times, March 17, 1919; “Report on the Food Require-
ments of Man. By the Food (War) Committee, Royal Society,” Journal of the Society of
Chemical Industry (London: Harrison and Sons, 1919).
18 ACN Memorandum on the Criticism and Improvement of Diets, 1933, NA MH
56/45.
32 L. SPARKS
into account their theory that children had a much higher level of energy
expended per surface area than adults.19
If counting calories led to an increasingly complex series of mathe-
matical calculations, then vitamins only added further complications to
the nutritional equation. By 1920, the Lister Institute and the Medical
Research Committee released the latest information on “the vitamins”—
A, B, and C—also called “accessory food factors.”20 By the 1930s,
much about vitamins continued to perplex nutrition scientists, who had
observed but not yet managed to explain the chemical reactions that
“devitalized,” or sapped the vitamin content, from tinned food.21 By the
end of the 1930s, scientists added vitamins B2 and D to the roster and
continued to study and debate how they fit into an optimum diet.22
Coexisting uneasily among all these calculations of the optimum diet
sat the uncomfortable wartime truth that men could survive on much less
than these estimated dietetic requirements, as studies on German civil-
ians in particular had demonstrated. Harsh wartime conditions provided
nutrition scientists with increasingly clear case studies on the correlation
between adequate diet and resistance to disease, a relationship that shaped
both metropolitan and colonial priorities on nutrition in the coming
decades. If poor nutrition during the war spurred postwar nutrition
studies, malnourished wartime bodies had also already begun to provide
data for those studies.
The Great War had also opened up more opportunities than ever
before for women to contribute to their country, including on the issue
of food. Women’s suffrage after the war reflected women’s more explicit,
more formalized relationship to the state and the unique roles society
19 “Man and His Diet,” The Times, March 17, 1919; ACN Memorandum on the Criti-
cism and Improvement of Diets 1933 MH 56/45; “Report on the Food Requirements of
Man. By the Food (War) Committee, Royal Society,” Journal of the Society of Chemical
Industry (London: Harrison and Sons, 1919).
20 “Vitamines,” The Times, February 9, 1920; Barona, The Problem of Nutrition, 24-25,
28-29.
21 The Importance of Diet in Relation to Health (London: George Routledge and Sons,
1926), ix BL 7390 cc 32.
22 ACN Memorandum on the Criticism and Improvement of Diets, 1933, NA MH
56/45; “Man and His Diet,” The Times, March 17, 1919; “Report on the Food Require-
ments of Man. By the Food (War) Committee, Royal Society,” Journal of the Society of
Chemical Industry (London: Harrison and Sons, 1919); Barona, The Problem of Nutrition
72; Vernon, Hunger, 213.
believed they would play in restoring the nation.23 Within the broader
tensions between prewar liberalism and postwar openness to increased
government intervention, women also found themselves caught in the
middle of that push and pull. William Arbuthnot Lane, founder of the
New Health Society, encapsulated this dynamic when he asserted in 1937
that “the infant cannot indeed be saved by the State…it can only be
saved by the mother. But the mother can be helped and can be taught by
the State.”24 His words illustrate the dynamic relationship between state
and citizen in the interwar period as each side aimed to find and settle
into a new compromise in the ratio between government intervention
and freedom from it. The Maternity and Child Welfare Act of 1918, for
example, represented a clear attempt to find this balance on the heels of
World War I. The Act both made provisions for an array of social services
to help pregnant women and delegated those responsibilities to county
governments.25
While scientific and political interest in the field of nutrition arose
immediately after World War I, the Great Depression stalled the efforts
that researchers had begun in the 1920s, even as it made questions of
nutrition, and the costs of nutritious food, that much more important.
Balancing a prewar desire to keep central government small and a postwar
desire to use the central government as a vehicle for providing benefi-
cial services, scientists and doctors working on nutrition research sat on
a spectrum of prescribed solutions to malnutrition ranging from almost
exclusively blaming poverty to almost exclusively blaming ignorance.
While British nutrition experts acknowledged that “no two [experienced
physician] observers employ the same criteria” when “assessing nutritional
status,” acknowledging the problem was only half the battle.26
Incorporating these unclear and contested standards of nutrition
science as part of assessing malnutrition in schoolchildren exemplified the
debates among doctors and scientists in defining nutritional standards, as
well as debates about the role of central government in providing good
23 Cecilia Gowdy-Wygant, Cultivating Victory: The Women’s Land Army and the Victory
Garden Movement (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 33, 63.
24 Arbuthnot Lane, “The Teaching of Mothercraft,” New Health, 1937, Wellcome
Collection.
25 Maternal Mortality Committee, Maternal Welfare Leaflet TUC 292/824/1/41.
26 Burnet and Aykroyd, Nutrition and Public Health, 1935 NA, CAB 58/199;
Durbach, Many Mouths, 150–151.
34 L. SPARKS
nutrition to its citizens. The provision of school meals, for example, begun
with the 1906 Education (Provision of Meals) Act, already balanced the
reach of the central government by empowering Local Education Author-
ities with the option to manage the problem of malnutrition in schools
by providing free school meals. The creation of medical selection as a
qualifying criterion for free school meals in 1934 became a way to both
use nutrition science to inform government policy, and to reduce the
number of students who qualified for the free meals. As in the empire,
the discourse of nutrition science could justify a variety of policies in the
metropole as well. From working-class parents’ perspectives, the stigma of
poverty meant that impoverished parents might still opt out of free school
meals for their children out of shame, or to avoid the deduction of the
cost of school meals from their unemployment assistance stipends, doled
from the Unemployment Assistance Board that also started in 1934.27
In the debate over school meals and in the broader debate about the
relationship between poverty, nutrition, and state responsibility, nutrition
experts from a variety of institutional bodies ultimately failed to coher-
ently organize and move forward on a concrete set of solutions. The
Ministry of Health, reluctant to open up an economic can of worms by
laying the blame mainly on poverty, established the Advisory Committee
on Nutrition (ACN) in 1931 and rendered it ineffectual by filling it
with experts who disagreed bitterly on the root causes of malnutrition.
The ACN above all did not want to make nutrition into “a far-reaching
economic issue, which is most important to avoid—an issue which might
easily affect wages, cost of food, doles, etc.”28 As a result, they argued that
adequate diets were, indeed, affordable, even on unemployment benefits.
Around the same time, the British Medical Association (BMA), using
a different, more flexible set of nutritional standards than the ACN had
created, released a report that also sought to determine the minimum
cost of an adequate diet. While the ACN’s report did not significantly
challenge the status quo of unemployment benefits, the BMA’s estimates
of the cost of an adequate diet were higher. These higher estimates set
off a chain of implications about the rates of the doles and the cost of
27 Durbach, Many Mouths, 146–151.

28 Madeleine Mayhew, “The 1930s Nutrition Controversy,” 447–452, cited in Wendy
Way, A New Idea Each Morning, 155.
food. The ACN balked at what they perceived as the lax nutritional stan-
dards and smeared the BMA report as a “Labour Party tract.” Despite the
controversy, the central government sided with the Ministry of Health’s
findings. If the problem were not mostly economic, then the problem
must have been mostly ignorant housewives’ poor budgeting.29 As far
as experts in charge were concerned, women needed to learn how to be
more efficient shoppers and cooks if they were going to make Britain
well-nourished again.
While the British government did not want to make dramatic interven-
tions in the realm of nutrition, 1933 saw a slew of government actions
that impacted nutrition. In that year, the beginning of imperial preference
spelled the end of the Empire Marketing Board, nudging the invisible
hand of the market toward British trade interests, including food imports
and exports. While the League of Nations viewed the food trade as a
global system, the British shaped their own imperial food system within
it, prioritizing affordable food in Britain and profitable cash crops abroad.
1933 also saw the establishment of institutions such as the Milk Marketing
Board, which intended to regulate and inspect the quality and safety of
food. Balancing a prewar desire to keep central government small and
a postwar desire to use the central government as a vehicle for providing
beneficial services, these institutions promised to improve British nutrition
by providing quality, affordable, nutritious food.30
Alongside government institutions, educational institutions also got
involved in improving nutrition. Elementary schools incorporated more
nutrition propaganda, such as posters. Colleges, universities, and other
institutions such as Good Housekeeping began offering more educa-
tional opportunities for women to learn about nutrition science as
it applied to cookery, from informal workshops to three-year college
degree programs. Housewives’ efficiency and rationality in budgeting the
grocery-shopping-dominated medical memoranda and magazines alike.31
Of course, British women did not passively receive the latest concepts
of nutrition and mothercraft. Since nutrition played such a key role in the
domestic sphere, more privileged and educated women became experts
29 Way, A New Idea, 155; David F. Smith, “Nutrition Science and the Two World
Wars,” in David F. Smith, ed., Nutrition in Britain, 152.
30 Kennedy, Britain and Empire; Otter, Diet for a Large Planet; Barona and Vilar, The
Problem of Nutrition, 36–38, 47–52, 64.
31 Zweineger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 256.
36 L. SPARKS
on the matter as teachers, philanthropists, club organizers, and inspectors.

In the empire, some British women found even more professional oppor-
tunity as nutrition science teachers, nurses, doctors, anthropologists, and
researchers.32 Women wielded some influence in nutrition science and the
related professions. Within the formal field of nutrition science, women
carved out a small but significant niche which demanded female profes-
sionals attain, maintain, and apply a working knowledge of the latest
developments in nutrition science.
British women, particularly of the middle class, found many more
opportunities to contribute to the spread of the new science of nutri-
tion via an assortment of voluntary associations. Frequently informed by
eugenics, the drive for greater national efficiency also led to a slew of
voluntary organizations that proliferated in the immediate postwar period,
such as the New Health Society, the Health and Strength League, and the
Sunlight League. Among the most prominent of these groups rose the
People’s League of Health, established in 1917 by actress Olga Nether-
sole. She envisioned her organization as the “Educational Limb” of the
Ministry of Health after its creation and used her organization to advocate
for both education and welfare reform, each of which included a focus
on diet. The People’s League of Health focused especially on the health
and nutrition of pregnant women and promoted the idea that women’s
most important responsibility entailed becoming “the future Mothers of
the [British] race” by properly bearing and feeding the future defenders
and administrators of the empire. To this end, Nethersole’s organiza-
tion networked with the wider world of nutrition science and used her
position to advocate for and fund studies such as the National Birthday
Trust Fund, which aimed both to study maternal and infant nutrition
and, in doing so, provide quality nutrition to working-class mothers and
children.33
32 Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–
1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 183; Margaret Strobel, European
Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
33 Olga Nethersole, An Apologetic Defense for the People’s League of Health, 1917, BL
7383 h.20; The Importance of Diet in Relation to Health, 1926, BL 7390 cc; People’s
League of Health Pamphlets Lecture Series, BL 7384 ppp 29; A. Susan Williams, “Relief
and Research: the Nutrition Work of the National Birthday Trust Fund, 1935-9,” in
David F. Smith, ed., Nutrition in Britain, 99; Zweineger-Bargielowska, Managing the
Body, 162; Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” in Ann Stoler and Frederick
Cooper, Tensions of Empire (University of California Press, 1997).
Formally educating the housewife had an even further reach. Across

Britain and concentrated in London, domestic science schools catered
both to working and middle-class students, with specific schools desig-
nated for different classes. For example, Berridge House, a case study
school examined in more detail in later chapters, offered individual classes
each week in cookery, laundry work, and housewifery, offering a more
informal and casual education opportunity for women who may not have
needed credentials for an occupation, but who were still interested in
learning about domestic science. In 1935, the same year the British
Dietetics Association was established, the three-year course on cookery
taught advanced cookery classes that included diet, “experimental work
on foods,” menu building, and catering. Since the central government did
not demand that every ignorant housewife obtain a degree in domestic
science, the aggregate of these more easily accessible individual demon-
strations would ideally add up to put a dent in British malnutrition.34 Of
course, the proliferation of women trained as domestic science teachers
made these less-formal demonstrations possible. The web of domestic
science education opportunities, from individual workshops to three-year
degree programs, fit together on a continuum to create a flexible system
of domestic science education which women with different lifestyles could
access in different ways.
More women played their part in bettering the nation’s nutrition via
domestic science education at all levels, but diet and nutrition in popular
culture reached an even wider circle of women. Reaching the target of
becoming an A-1 nation sparked a national craze in health, beauty, fitness,
and body culture trends, folding the new science of nutrition into the
broader booming interwar industry of fitness as the new beauty, with
white racial superiority as the loud subtext of it all. In tandem with the
empire-wide scientific research the EMB also funded, the extensive 1926–
1933 EMB marketing campaign to turn “Every Kitchen [into] An Empire
Kitchen” simultaneously urged women as the household grocery shoppers
to buy groceries from British producers in the colonies. These advertise-
ments frequently featured posters with lightly clad colonial laborers of
color gathering and shipping produce in exotic jungle settings; they also
frequently featured the modern white housewife at the bustling grocery
or at home, surrounded by the bounty of empire foods. Visually placing
34 Zweineger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body; Berridge House Prospectus, 1931–

1938 LMA, ACC/900.
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qu’il la surmontât ou non. A la fin ses traits se raffermirent et sa
personne se roidit.
— Cela suffit. Je vous remercie. Je ne tiens pas à en entendre
davantage.
Et il regagna sa chambre.
Brander m’entreprit ensuite et me posa des questions ridicules…
si j’avais vu Ouless lacérer la tunique sur le dos d’Ortheris. Je
connaissais la besogne accomplie par la languette d’argent
tranchante, mais je m’efforçai de convaincre Brander de ma
complète, absolument complète ignorance de cette manœuvre. Je
me mis à lui exposer en détail mes rêves concernant la nouvelle
armée territoriale de l’Inde, et il me quitta.
Je passai plusieurs jours sans voir Ortheris, mais j’appris que
quand il était revenu auprès de ses camarades il leur avait raconté
l’histoire du coup en des termes imagés. Le Juif Samuelson déclara
alors que cela ne valait pas la peine de vivre dans un régiment où
l’on vous faisait manœuvrer jusqu’à épuisement et où l’on vous
battait comme des chiens. La remarque était des plus innocentes, et
concordait exactement avec les opinions émises précédemment par
Ortheris. Malgré cela Ortheris avait traité Samuelson de Juif ignoble,
l’avait accusé de taper à coups de pied sur la tête des femmes à
Londres, et d’avoir pour cela hurlé sous le chat à neuf queues, l’avait
pourchassé comme un bantam pourchasse un coq de basse-cour,
d’un bout à l’autre de la chambrée. Après quoi il avait lancé tous les
objets de la valise de Samuelson, ainsi que sa literie, dans la
véranda et la poussière du dehors, rouant de coups Samuelson à
chaque fois que le pauvre ahuri se baissait pour ramasser quelque
chose. Mon informateur ne comprenait rien à cette incohérence,
mais il m’apparut, à moi, qu’Ortheris avait passé sa colère sur le Juif.
Mulvaney apprit l’histoire à l’hôpital. D’abord son visage
s’assombrit, puis il cracha, et finit par rire. Je lui suggérai qu’il ferait
bien de reprendre son service, mais tel n’était pas son point de vue,
et il m’affirma qu’Ortheris était bien capable de s’occuper de lui-
même et de ses propres affaires. Il ajouta :
— Et si je sortais, il est probable que j’attraperais le jeune Ouless
par le fond de sa culotte et que j’en ferais un exemple devant les
hommes. Quand Dinah reviendrait je serais en prévention de conseil
de guerre, et tout cela pour un petit bout de gamin qui deviendra
quand même un bon officier. Qu’est-ce qu’il va faire, monsieur,
savez-vous ?
— Qui donc ? fis-je.
— Le gamin, bien sûr. Je ne crains rien pour l’homme. Bon Dieu,
tout de même, si c’était arrivé à moi… mais ça n’aurait pas pu
m’arriver… je lui aurais fait percer sa dent de sagesse sur la garde
de son épée.
— Je ne pense pas qu’il sache lui-même ce qu’il veut faire,
répondis-je.
— Cela ne m’étonne pas, reprit Térence. Il y a beaucoup à
réfléchir pour un jeune homme quand il a fait le mal et qu’il le sait, et
qu’il s’évertue à le réparer. Avertissez de ma part notre petit homme
de là-bas que s’il avait mouchardé à son officier supérieur, je serais
allé au fort Amara pour l’envoyer bouler dans le fossé du fort, lequel
a quinze mètres de profondeur.
Ortheris n’était pas en assez bonnes dispositions pour qu’on pût
lui parler. Il rôdait çà et là avec Learoyd, méditant, à ce que je
pouvais comprendre, sur son honneur perdu, et usant, à ce que je
pouvais entendre, d’un langage incendiaire. Learoyd approuvait d’un
signe de tête, et crachait et fumait, et approuvait de nouveau ; il
devait être pour Ortheris d’un grand réconfort… d’un réconfort
presque aussi grand que Samuelson, qu’Ortheris rudoyait
odieusement. Samuelson le Juif ouvrait-il la bouche pour faire la
remarque la plus inoffensive, qu’Ortheris s’élançait dessus avec
armes et bagages tandis que la chambrée regardait, ébahie.
Ouless était rentré en lui-même pour méditer. Je l’apercevais de
temps à autre, mais il m’évitait parce que j’avais été témoin de sa
honte et que je lui avais dit ma façon de penser. Il semblait triste et
mélancolique, et trouvait sa demi-compagnie rien moins que
plaisante à faire manœuvrer. Les hommes accomplissaient leur
tâche et lui donnaient très peu d’ennui, mais au moment où ils
auraient dû sentir leur équilibre et montrer qu’ils le sentaient, par du
ressort, de l’allant et du mordant, toute élasticité s’évanouissait, et ce
n’était plus que de la manœuvre aux cartouches en bois. Il y a dans
une ligne d’hommes bien formés une jolie petite vibration tout à fait
analogue au jeu d’une épée bien trempée. La demi-compagnie
d’Ouless se mouvait comme un manche à balai et se serait cassée
aussi aisément.
J’en étais à me demander si Ouless avait envoyé de l’argent à
Ortheris, ce qui eût été mauvais, ou s’il lui avait fait des excuses en
particulier, ce qui eût été pire, ou s’il avait décidé de laisser passer
l’affaire sans plus, ce qui eût été le pire de tout, quand je reçus
l’ordre de quitter la garnison pour un temps. Je n’avais pas interrogé
directement Ortheris, car son honneur n’était pas mon honneur, et il
en était le gardien, et je n’aurais rien obtenu de lui que des gros
mots.
Après mon départ il m’arriva fréquemment de ressonger au sous-
lieutenant et au simple soldat du fort Amara, et je me demandais
comment tout cela finirait.
Je revins au début du printemps. La compagnie B avait quitté le
fort Amara pour reprendre son service régulier à la garnison ; sur le
mail les roses s’apprêtaient à fleurir, et le régiment, qui entre autres
choses avait été à un camp d’exercice, faisait alors son école à feu
du printemps sous la surveillance d’un adjudant-major qui jugeait
faible la moyenne de son tir. Il avait piqué d’honneur les officiers de
la compagnie, et ceux-ci avaient acheté pour leurs hommes des
munitions en supplément… celles que fournit le gouvernement sont
tout juste bonnes à encrasser les fusils… et la compagnie E, qui
comptait beaucoup de bons tireurs, exultait et offrait de se mesurer
avec toutes les autres compagnies, et les tireurs de troisième classe
étaient désolés d’avoir jamais vu le jour, et tous les lieutenants
avaient acquis un superbe teint basané pour être restés aux cibles
de six à huit heures par jour.
Après déjeuner je m’en allai aux cibles, tout brûlant de curiosité
de voir quels progrès avait faits la nouvelle classe. Ouless était là
avec ses hommes auprès du tertre pelé qui marque la portée de six
cents mètres, et les hommes étaient en kaki gris verdâtre, lequel met
en évidence les meilleures qualités d’un soldat et se confond avec
tout arrière-plan devant lequel il se tient. Avant d’être à portée
d’entendre je pus voir, à leur manière de se coucher sur l’herbe
poudreuse, ou de se relever en se secouant, que c’étaient des
hommes entièrement formés : ils portaient leurs casques sous
l’angle qui décèle la possession de soi-même, se balançaient avec
aisance et accouraient au mot d’ordre. Arrivé plus près, j’entendis
Ouless siffler en sourdine Ballyhooley, tout en inspectant le champ
de tir avec sa lorgnette, et le dos du lieutenant Ouless était celui d’un
homme libre et d’un officier. En m’apercevant, il m’adressa un signe
de tête, et je l’entendis lancer un ordre à un sous-officier, d’un ton
net et assuré. Le fanion surgit du but, et Ortheris se jeta à plat ventre
pour y envoyer ses dix balles. Il me fit un clin d’œil par-dessus la
culasse mobile, tout en s’installant, de l’air d’un homme contraint
d’exécuter des tours pour amuser des enfants.
— Regardez, vous autres, dit Ouless à l’escouade rangée
derrière. Il ne pèse que moitié de votre poids, Brannigan, mais il n’a
pas peur de son fusil.
Ortheris, comme nous tous, avait ses petites manies et ses
façons particulières. Il soupesa son fusil, le releva d’une petite
secousse, l’abaissa de nouveau, et fit feu par-dessus le champ de tir
qui commençait à onduler sous l’ardeur du soleil.
— Manqué ! dit un homme derrière lui.
— Trop de paysage en face, sacrédié ! murmura Ortheris.
— Je corrigerais de deux pieds pour la réfraction, dit Ouless.
Ortheris tira de nouveau, attrapa le cercle extérieur, se rapprocha
du noir, l’atteignit et n’en sertit plus. Le sous-officier notait les coups.
— Je ne comprends pas comment j’ai manqué le premier, dit
Ortheris, se levant et se reculant à mon côté, tandis que Learoyd
prenait sa place.
— C’est tir de compagnie ? demandai-je.
— Non. Il s’agit d’une séance quelconque. Ouless, il donne dix
roupies pour les tireurs de deuxième classe. Je n’en suis pas, bien
entendu, mais je viens leur montrer la bonne manière d’opérer.
Voyez là-bas Jock, il a l’air d’un lion de mer à l’aquarium de Brighton
quand il s’étale et qu’il rampe, n’est-ce pas ? Dieu, quelle cible ça
ferait, cette partie de sa personne.
— La compagnie B s’est fort bien éduquée, dis-je.
— Il le fallait. Ils ne sont plus aussi moches, à présent, pas vrai ?
Même Samuelson, il sait tirer de temps en temps. Nous allons aussi
bien que possible, merci.
— Où en êtes-vous avec…
— Ah ! lui ? Dans les meilleurs termes ! Rien à lui reprocher.
— C’est donc réglé ?
— Térence ne vous a pas raconté ? Je vous crois que ça l’est.
C’est un gentleman, pas d’erreur.
— Je vous écoute, repris-je.
Ortheris examina les environs, fourra son fusil en travers de ses
genoux, et répéta :
— C’est un gentleman. Et un officier aussi. Vous avez vu tout ce
gâchis au fort Amara. Il n’y avait pas de ma faute, comme vous
pouvez le deviner. Seulement un macaque de notre peloton avait
trouvé plus ou moins malin de faire l’imbécile à l’exercice. C’est
pourquoi nous manœuvrions si mal. Quand Ouless m’a frappé, j’ai
été si stupéfait que je n’ai rien su faire, et quand j’eus l’envie de lui
rendre son coup, la conversion avait continué et je me trouvais en
face de vous qui étiez couché là-haut sur les canons. Lorsque le
capitaine arriva et qu’il m’attrapa à cause de ma tunique déchirée, je
vis le regard de notre gamin, et avant de pouvoir m’en empêcher, je
commençai à mentir comme un brave. Vous m’avez entendu ? Ce
fut tout à fait instinctif, mais quand même ! J’étais dans une rage.
Alors il dit au capitaine : « Je l’ai frappé », qu’il dit, et j’entendis
Brander siffler, et alors je m’avance avec une nouvelle série de
mensonges, comme quoi en portant armes la déchirure s’était
agrandie, comme vous l’avez entendu. Je fis cela aussi avant de
savoir où j’en étais. Puis, quand on fut rentré à la caserne, j’envoyai
faire f… Samuelson. Vous auriez dû voir son fourniment lorsque j’en
eus fini avec ! Il était dispersé, crédié, aux quatre coins du fort. Alors
Jock et moi nous nous en allons voir Mulvaney à l’hôpital, une
balade de huit kilomètres, et je sautillais de rage. Ouless, il savait
que c’était le conseil de guerre pour moi si je lui rendais le coup… il
aurait dû le savoir. Eh bien, je dis à Térence, parlant à mi-voix sous
le balcon de l’hôpital :
« — Térence, que je dis, que diable vais-je faire ?
« Je lui raconte ce que vous avez vu, concernant l’esclandre. Ce
vieux Térence il siffle, crédié, comme un pinson, là-haut dans
l’hôpital, et il dit :
« — Tu n’es pas à blâmer, qu’il dit.
« — Bien sûr, que je dis. Crois-tu que j’aie fait jusqu’ici huit
kilomètres au soleil pour recevoir un blâme ? que je dis. Je veux
avoir la peau de ce jeune bougre. Je ne suis, crédié, pas un conscrit,
que je dis. Je suis un soldat au service de la Reine, et je vaux autant
que lui, que je dis, malgré son grade et ses airs et son argent, que je
dis.
— Comme vous étiez bête, interrompis-je.
Ortheris, n’étant ni un laquais, ni un Américain, mais un homme
libre, n’avait aucun prétexte pour aboyer de la sorte.
— C’est exactement ce que me dit Térence. Je m’étonne que
vous l’ayez exprimé de la même façon si exacte s’il ne vous a rien
raconté. Il me dit :
« — Tu devrais être plus raisonnable, qu’il dit, à ton âge. Quelle
différence cela fait-il pour toi, qu’il dit, s’il a un grade ou non ? Ça ne
te regarde pas. C’est une affaire entre homme et homme, qu’il dit,
aurait-il le grade de général. De plus, qu’il dit, ça ne te donne pas
bon air de sautiller comme ça sur tes pattes de derrière. Emmène-le,
Jock.
« Puis il rentra, et ce fut tout ce que je tirai de Térence. Jock, il
me dit, aussi lent qu’une marche funèbre :
« — Stanley, qu’il dit, ce jeune bougre n’a pas voulu te frapper.
« — Qu’il l’ait voulu ou non, je m’en f… Il m’a frappé, que je dis.
« — Alors, tu n’as qu’à te plaindre à Brander, que dit Jock.
« — Pour qui me prends-tu ? que je dis.
« Et j’étais si affolé que je faillis frapper Jock. Et il me prend par le
cou et me plonge la tête dans un seau d’eau dans la cambuse du
cuisinier, et alors nous retournons au fort, et je donnai à Samuelson
encore un peu d’ennui avec son fourniment. Il me dit :
« — Je n’ai jamais reçu un coup sans le rendre.
« — Eh bien, tu vas en recevoir, maintenant, que je dis.
« Et je lui en fais encaisser quelques-uns, et lui demande très
poliment de me les rendre, mais il s’en abstint. Je l’aurais tué, s’il
l’avait osé. Cela me fit beaucoup de bien.
« Ouless, il ne fit semblant de rien pendant quelques jours…
jusqu’après votre départ. Je me sentais mal à l’aise et misérable, et
je ne savais plus ce que je voulais, si ce n’est lui noircir pour de bon
ses petits yeux. J’espérais qu’il allait m’envoyer de l’argent pour ma
tunique. Alors je me serais expliqué avec lui sur le terrain et aurais
couru ma chance. Térence était encore à l’hôpital, voyez-vous, et il
refusait de me donner conseil.
« Le lendemain de votre départ, Ouless vient à moi comme je
portais un seau en corvée, et il me dit tout tranquillement :
« — Ortheris, vous allez venir chasser avec moi, qu’il dit.
« Je me sentis prêt à lui flanquer le seau à la figure, mais je me
retins. Au lieu de cela, je me mis en tenue pour l’accompagner. Oh !
c’est un gentleman ! Nous partîmes ensemble, sans rien nous dire
l’un à l’autre jusqu’au moment où nous fûmes bien enfoncés dans la
jungle au delà de la rivière avec des hautes herbes tout alentour…
fort près de cet endroit où je perdis la tête avec vous. Alors il dépose
son fusil à terre et me dit tout tranquillement :
« — Ortheris, je vous ai frappé à l’exercice, qu’il dit.
« — Oui, mon lieutenant, que je dis, vous m’avez frappé.
« — J’ai réfléchi à la chose, qu’il dit.
« Ah vraiment, tu y as réfléchi, que je me dis en moi-même ; eh
bien tu y as mis le temps, mon petit zigue…
« — Oui, mon lieutenant, que je dis.
« — Qu’est-ce qui vous a fait me couvrir ? qu’il dit.
« — Je n’en sais rien, que je dis.
« Et je n’en savais rien non plus, et je ne le sais toujours pas.
« — Je ne peux vous demander de permuter, qu’il dit. Et je ne
veux pas non plus permuter, qu’il dit.
« Où va-t-il en venir ? » que je pense en moi-même.
« — Oui, mon lieutenant, que je dis.
« Il jette un coup d’œil sur les hautes herbes qui nous
entouraient, et il dit, pour lui-même plutôt que pour moi :
« — Il faut que j’y arrive tout seul, par moi-même !
« Il eut l’air si bizarre pendant une minute que, ma parole, je
pensais que le petit bougre allait dire une prière. Alors il se tourne de
nouveau vers moi et me dit :
« — Et vous, qu’est-ce que vous en pensez ? qu’il dit.
« — Je ne vois pas bien ce que vous voulez dire, mon
lieutenant, que je dis.
« — Qu’est-ce qui vous plairait ? qu’il dit.
« Et je pensai une minute qu’il allait m’offrir de l’argent, mais il
porte sa main au premier bouton de sa veste de chasse et le défait.
« — Merci, mon lieutenant, que je dis. Cela me plaira fort bien,
que je dis.
« Et nos deux vestes furent défaites et déposées à terre.
— Bravo ! m’écriai-je sans y prendre garde.
— Ne faites pas de bruit devant les cibles, cria Ouless, de
l’endroit du tir. Cela dérange les hommes.
Je m’excusai, et Ortheris continua :
— Nous avions mis habit bas, et il me dit :
« — Êtes-vous prêt ? qu’il dit. Venez-y donc.
« Je m’avance, un peu hésitant au début, mais il m’attrape sous
le menton, ce qui m’échauffe. Je voulus marquer le petit zigue et je
tapai haut, mais il para et m’attrapa au-dessus du cœur comme un
brave. Il n’était pas si fort que moi, mais il en savait davantage, et au
bout d’environ deux minutes je crie : « Time ! » Il recule… selon les
règles du combat.
« — Venez-y quand vous serez prêt, qu’il dit.
« Et quand j’eus repris haleine j’y allai de nouveau, et je lui en
donnai un sur le nez qui lui colora sa blanche chemise
aristocratique. Cela le fâcha, et je m’en aperçus en un clin d’œil. Il
arrive tout contre moi, au corps à corps, résolu à me toucher au
cœur. Je tins tant que je pus et lui fendis l’oreille, mais alors je
commençai à hoqueter, et le jeu fut fini. J’entrai dans sa garde pour
voir si je pouvais l’abattre, et il m’envoie sur la bouche un coup qui
me jette à terre et… regardez ici !
Ortheris releva le coin gauche de sa lèvre supérieure. Il lui
manquait une canine.
— Il se tint au-dessus de moi et me dit :
« — En avez-vous assez ?
« — Merci, j’en ai assez, que je dis.
« Il me prend par la main et me relève : j’étais très ébranlé.
« — Maintenant, qu’il dit, je vais vous faire des excuses pour
vous avoir frappé. C’était uniquement de ma faute, qu’il dit, et cela
ne vous était pas destiné.
« — Je le sais, mon lieutenant, que je dis, et il n’y a pas besoin
d’excuses.
« — Alors c’est un accident, qu’il dit, et il vous faut me laisser
vous indemniser pour votre tunique ; sinon elle vous sera retenue
sur votre paye.
« Je n’aurais pas accepté l’argent auparavant, mais je l’acceptai
alors. Il me donna dix roupies… de quoi me payer deux fois une
tunique, et nous descendîmes à la rivière pour laver nos figures, qui
étaient bien marquées. La sienne n’était pas ordinaire. Puis il se dit à
lui-même, en crachant l’eau de sa bouche :
« — Je me demande si j’ai agi comme il faut, qu’il dit.
« — Oui, mon lieutenant, que je dis ; il n’y a rien à craindre à ce
sujet.
« — C’est très bien pour vous, qu’il dit, mais en ce qui regarde
les hommes de la compagnie.
« — ’Mande pardon, mon lieutenant, que je dis, je ne pense pas
que la compagnie vous donnera de l’ennui.
« Alors nous allâmes chasser, et quand nous revînmes je me
sentais aussi joyeux qu’un grillon. J’attrapai Samuelson, que je fis
valser d’un bout à l’autre de la véranda, et révélai à la compagnie
que le différend entre moi et le lieutenant Ouless était aplani à ma
satisfaction. Je racontai tout à Jock, bien entendu, et à Térence.
Jock ne dit rien, mais Térence il dit :
« — Vous faites la paire, tous les deux. Et, pardieu, je ne sais
pas lequel fut le meilleur.
« Il n’y a rien à reprocher à Ouless. C’est un gentleman du haut
en bas, et il a progressé autant que la compagnie B. Tout de même
je parie qu’il serait cassé de son grade si on venait à savoir qu’il
s’est battu avec un simple soldat. Ho ! ho ! Se battre tout l’après-midi
avec un fichu simple soldat comme moi ! Qu’en pensez-vous, ajouta-
t-il en caressant la crosse de son fusil.
— Je pense ce que disaient les arbitres au combat simulé : les
deux partis méritent beaucoup d’éloges. Mais je voudrais que vous
me disiez ce qui vous a porté à le sauver en premier lieu.
— J’étais bien sûr qu’il ne m’avait pas destiné le coup, bien que,
s’il avait écopé pour ça, cela m’eût été indifférent. Et puis il était si
jeune que cela n’aurait pas été bien. En outre, si je l’avais dénoncé
je n’aurais pas eu mon combat, et je me serais senti mal à l’aise
pendant tout mon congé. Ne voyez-vous pas les choses ainsi,
monsieur ?
— C’était votre droit de le faire casser, si vous l’aviez voulu,
insistai-je.
— Mon droit ! répliqua Ortheris avec un profond mépris. Mon
droit ! Je ne suis pas un bleu pour aller pleurnicher sur mes droits
par-ci et mes droits par-là, tout comme si je ne savais pas prendre
soin de moi-même. Mes droits ! Par le Tout-Puissant ! Je suis un
homme.
La dernière escouade épuisa ses cartouches au milieu d’une
bourrasque de plaisanteries à voix basse. Ouless se retira à quelque
distance afin de laisser les hommes à l’aise, et je vis un moment sa
figure en plein soleil ; après quoi il tira son épée, rassembla ses
hommes, et les reconduisit à la caserne. C’était parfait. Le gamin
avait fait ses preuves.
UN ASPECT DE LA QUESTION
Par Shafiz Ullah Khan, fils de Hyat Ullah Khan, à l’honorable service
de Son Altesse le Rao Sahib du Jagesur, qui est sur la frontière
nord de l’Hindoustan, et aide-de-camp de Son Altesse, à Kazi
Jamal-ud-din, fils de Kazi Ferisht-ud-din Khan, au service du Rao
Sahib, son ministre très honoré. De ce lieu que l’on nomme le
club Northbrook, dans la ville de Londres, sous l’ombre de
l’Impératrice, ceci est écrit :
Entre frère et frère d’élection, il n’est pas besoin de longues

protestations d’Amour et de Sincérité. Le Cœur parle à nu au
Cœur, et la Tête répond de tout. Gloire et Honneur sur ta maison
jusqu’à la fin des siècles et une tente sur les frontières du
paradis.
Mon Frère, — Concernant l’objet de ma mission, voici le

rapport. J’ai acheté pour le Rao Sahib et payé soixante livres sur
chaque cent, les choses qu’il désirait le plus. Soit : deux des grands
chiens-tigres couleur daim, mâle et femelle, leur pédigrée étant écrit
sur papier, et des colliers d’argent ornant leurs cous. Pour le plus
grand plaisir du Rao Sahib, je les envoie aussitôt par le steamer, aux
soins d’un homme qui en rendra compte à Bombay aux banquiers
de là-bas. Ce sont les meilleurs de tous les chiens de ce pays. Des
fusils, j’en ai acheté cinq… deux à la crosse niellée d’argent, avec
des arabesques d’or autour des chiens, tous deux à deux canons,
frappant dur, dans un étui de velours et de cuir rouge ; trois d’un
travail sans égal, mais qui manquent d’ornement ; un fusil à
répétition qui tire quatorze fois : ceci quand le Rao Sahib chasse le
sanglier ; un fusil à balle explosible à deux coups, pour le tigre, et
celui-ci est un prodige d’habileté ; et un fusil de chasse léger comme
une plume, avec des cartouches vertes et bleues par milliers.
Également, une toute petite carabine pour le chevreuil noir, qui
abattrait quand même son homme à quatre cents pas. Le harnais
aux armoiries d’or pour le carrosse du Rao Sahib n’est pas encore
terminé, à cause de la difficulté de sertir le velours rouge dans le
cuir ; mais le harnais à deux chevaux et la grande selle aux arçons
dorés qui est destinée à la cérémonie ont été mis avec du camphre
dans une boîte de fer-blanc que j’ai scellée de mon anneau. Quant à
l’écrin en cuir gaufré, d’ustensiles féminins et de petites pinces pour
les cheveux et la barbe ; quant aux parfums et aux soies et à tout ce
qu’ont demandé les femmes qui sont derrière les rideaux, je n’en ai
pas connaissance. Ce sont choses longues à venir ; et la
fauconnerie : sonnettes, capuchons et jets à chiffre d’or, sont
également en retard. Lis ceci dans l’oreille du Rao Sahib, et vante-lui
ma diligence et mon zèle, de crainte que ma faveur ne soit diminuée
par l’absence, et garde un œil vigilant sur ce chien édenté de
plaisantin… Bahadur Shah… car par ton aide et ta voix, et par ce
que j’ai fait en ce qui concerne les fusils, j’aspire, comme tu le sais,
au commandement de l’armée du Jagesur. Cet être sans conscience
l’ambitionne également, et j’ai appris que le Rao Sahib incline de ce
côté-là. En avez-vous donc fini avec la coutume de boire du vin dans
votre maison, mon frère, ou bien Bahadur Shah a-t-il renoncé à
l’eau-de-vie ? Je ne voudrais pas que la boisson fût sa fin, mais une
mixture bien dosée mène à la folie. Songes-y.
Et maintenant, au sujet de ce pays des sahibs, voici ce que tu
m’as demandé. Dieu m’est témoin que je me suis efforcé de
comprendre tout ce que j’ai vu et un peu de ce que j’ai entendu. Mes
paroles et mon intention sont celles de la vérité, mais il se peut que
je n’en écrive que des mensonges.
Depuis que l’étonnement et l’ahurissement premiers de ma vision
ont cessé, — nous remarquons d’abord les pierreries au dôme du
plafond, et plus tard seulement la crasse du plancher, — je vois
clairement que cette ville de Londres est maudite, étant sombre et
malpropre, dénuée de soleil, et pleine de gens de basse naissance,
qui sont perpétuellement ivres, et hurlent dans les rues comme des
chacals, hommes et femmes ensemble. A la tombée de la nuit, c’est
la coutume d’innombrables milliers de femmes de descendre dans
les rues et de les arpenter en hurlant, faisant des farces, et
réclamant de l’alcool. A l’heure de cette attaque, c’est l’usage des
pères de famille d’emmener leurs femmes et leurs enfants dans les
spectacles et lieux de divertissements : ainsi le mal et le bien s’en
retournent chez eux comme fait au crépuscule la gent des marais.
Je n’ai jamais vu dans tout l’univers de spectacle comme celui-ci, et
je doute que son pareil se rencontre de l’autre côté des portes de
l’Enfer. Quant au mystère de leur métier, c’en est un antique, mais
les pères de famille s’assemblent par troupeaux, hommes et
femmes, et protestent bien haut à leur Dieu que ce métier n’existe
pas ; et cependant lesdites femmes heurtent aux portes, à l’extérieur.
De plus, le jour où ils vont à la prière, les lieux de boisson ne sont
ouverts que quand les mosquées sont fermées ; tel celui qui
endiguerait le fleuve Jumna le vendredi seulement. Ainsi donc
hommes et femmes, étant contraints de satisfaire leurs appétits dans
le plus bref délai, s’enivrent d’autant plus furieusement et roulent
ensemble dans le ruisseau. Ils y sont regardés par ceux qui vont
prier. De plus, et en signe visible que ce lieu est abandonné de Dieu,
il tombe à certains jours, sans avertissement, une obscurité froide,
par quoi la lumière du soleil est entièrement ravie à la cité, et le
peuple, mâle et femelle, et les conducteurs de véhicules, vont à
tâtons et braillent en plein midi dans cet abîme sans se voir l’un
l’autre. L’air étant chargé de la fumée de l’Enfer (soufre et bitume,
comme il est écrit) ils meurent bientôt d’étouffement, et sont ainsi
enterrés dans le noir. C’est là une terreur qui dépasse la plume,
mais, par ma tête, j’écris ce que j’ai vu.
Il n’est pas vrai que les sahibs adorent un seul Dieu, comme
nous autres de la vraie Foi, ou que les divisions survenues dans leur
dogme soient comme celles qui existent à présent chez nous entre
shiites et sunnites. Je ne suis qu’un guerrier, et n’ai rien du derviche,
me souciant, comme tu sais, autant du sunni que du shii. Mais j’ai
interrogé beaucoup de gens sur la nature de leurs dieux. Ils en ont
un qui est le chef de la Mukht-i-Fauj [28] , et qui est adoré par des
hommes en habit rouge sang, qui braillent et deviennent insensés.
Un autre est une idole, devant quoi ils brûlent des cierges et de
l’encens dans un temple pareil à celui que j’ai vu quand je suis allé à
Rangoun acheter des étalons de Birmanie pour le Rao. Un troisième
encore a des autels nus faisant face à une grande assemblée de
morts. C’est surtout pour lui qu’ils chantent, mais d’autres
s’adressent à une femme qui fut la mère du grand prophète venu
avant Mahomet. Les gens du vulgaire n’ont pas de dieu, mais ils
adorent ceux qui les haranguent cramponnés aux réverbères de la
rue. Les gens les plus avisés s’adorent eux-mêmes, ainsi que les
choses qu’ils ont faites avec leurs bouches et leurs mains, et ce cas
se rencontre particulièrement chez les femmes stériles, qui sont en
grand nombre. Hommes et femmes ont la coutume de se
confectionner des dieux selon leurs désirs, en pinçant et tapotant la
molle argile de leurs pensées pour leur donner la forme
approximative de leurs envies. Chacun est ainsi pourvu d’une
divinité selon son cœur, et cette divinité se transforme en une plus
petite quand l’estomac leur tourne ou que leur santé s’altère. Tu ne
croiras pas ce récit, mon frère. Et je ne l’ai pas cru non plus quand
on me l’a conté d’abord, mais aujourd’hui ce n’est plus rien pour
moi ; tant le pied du voyage relâche les courroies d’étriers de la
croyance.
[28] Armée du Salut.
Mais tu vas dire : « Que nous importe si la barbe d’Ahmed ou

celle de Mahomet est la plus longue. Dis ce que tu sais de
l’Accomplissement du Désir. » Je voudrais que tu fusses ici pour
parler face à face et te promener en public avec moi et t’instruire.
Pour ce peuple, c’est une question de Ciel et d’Enfer de savoir si
la barbe d’Ahmed et celle de Mahomet s’équivalent ou diffèrent
seulement d’un cheveu. Connais-tu le mécanisme de leur
gouvernement ? Le voici. Certains hommes, se désignant eux-
mêmes, s’en vont çà et là et parlent aux corroyeurs, et aux
marchands d’habits, et aux femmes, disant : « Donnez-nous congé
par votre faveur de parler pour vous dans le conseil. » S’étant assuré
cette autorisation par de larges promesses, ils s’en retournent au
lieu du conseil, et siégeant sans armes, quelque six cents réunis
parlent au hasard, chacun pour soi et son propre lot de gens de
basse naissance. Les vizirs et divans de l’Impératrice sont toujours
forcés de leur mendier de l’argent, car tant que plus d’une moitié des
Six Cents n’est pas du même avis pour dépenser les finances de
l’État, pas un cheval ne peut être ferré, pas un fusil chargé, pas un
homme habillé dans tout le pays. Rappelle-toi bien ceci
continuellement. Les Six Cents sont au-dessus de l’Impératrice, au-
dessus du Vice-Roi des Indes, au-dessus du chef de l’armée et de
tout autre pouvoir que tu as jamais connu. Parce qu’ils détiennent
les finances de l’État.
Ils sont divisés en deux hordes… l’une qui ne cesse de lancer
des injures à l’autre, et engage les gens de basse naissance à
s’insurger et se rebeller contre tout ce que les autres peuvent
proposer pour gouverner. Si ce n’est qu’ils sont sans armes, et
s’appellent ainsi sans crainte menteurs, chiens et bâtards jusque
sous l’ombre du trône de l’Impératrice, ils sont en une guerre âpre et
sans fin. Ils opposent mensonge à mensonge, jusqu’à ce que les
gens de basse naissance et le vulgaire soient enivrés de mensonges
et à leur tour commencent à mentir et à refuser de payer les impôts.
En outre ils répartissent leurs femmes en troupes et les envoient à
cette bataille avec des fleurs jaunes à la main, et comme la croyance
d’une femme n’est que la croyance de son amant dépouillée de
jugement, il s’ensuit beaucoup de gros mots. Comme le dit la femme
esclave à Mamoun, dans les exquises pages du fils d’Abdullah :
L’oppression et l’épée tuent promptement ;

Ton souffle tue lentement, mais il finit par tuer.
S’ils veulent une chose ils déclarent qu’elle est vraie. S’ils ne la
veulent pas, quand ce serait la Mort elle-même, ils s’écrient : « Cela
n’existe pas ! » Ils parlent ainsi comme des enfants, et comme des
enfants ils cherchent à saisir ce qu’ils convoitent, sans considérer si
cela leur appartient ou non. Et dans leurs conseils, quand l’armée de
la déraison en vient au défilé de la dispute, et qu’il ne reste plus rien
à dire de chaque côté, ils se divisent, comptent les têtes, et la
volonté du côté qui a le plus grand nombre de têtes fait la loi. Mais le
côté surpassé en nombre s’empresse de courir parmi les gens du
vulgaire et leur enjoint de fouler aux pieds cette loi, et de massacrer
les fonctionnaires. Il s’ensuit un massacre nocturne d’hommes
désarmés, et des massacres de bétail et des outrages aux femmes.
Ils ne coupent pas le nez aux femmes, mais ils leur frisent les
cheveux et leur écorchent la peau avec des épingles. Alors ces
éhontés du conseil se présentent devant les juges en s’essuyant la
bouche et faisant serment. Ils disent : « Devant Dieu nous sommes
exempts de blâme. Avons-nous dit : « Ramassez cette pierre de la
route et lapidez-en celui-ci et non un autre » ? On ne les raccourcit
donc pas de la tête, puisqu’ils ont dit seulement : « Voici des pierres
et voilà là-bas un individu qui obéit à la loi qui n’en est pas une parce
que nous ne le voulons pas. »
Lis ceci dans l’oreille du Rao Sahib et demande-lui s’il se
souvient de cette saison où les chefs Manglôt ont refusé l’impôt, non
parce qu’ils ne pouvaient le payer, mais parce qu’ils jugeaient les
taxes abusives. Toi et moi sommes allés chez eux avec les soldats
tout un jour, et les noires lances soulevaient le chaume, en sorte qu’il
n’était même pas nécessaire de faire feu ; et il n’y eut personne de
tué. Mais ce pays-ci est livré à la guerre occulte et au meurtre voilé.
En cinq ans de paix ils ont tué dans leurs propres frontières et de
leur propre race plus d’hommes qui n’en seraient tombés si la balle
de la dissension avait été laissée au maillet de l’armée. Et pourtant il
n’y a nul espoir de paix, car les partis ne tardent pas à se diviser de
nouveau, et ils se remettent à faire tuer d’autres hommes sans
armes et dans les champs. Mais assez sur cette matière, laquelle
est à notre avantage. Il y a meilleure chose à dire, et qui tend à
l’Accomplissement du Désir. Lis ce qui suit d’un esprit reposé par le
sommeil. J’écris tel que je comprends.
Derrière toute cette guerre sans honneur il y a ce que je trouve
difficile de coucher par écrit, et tu sais que je suis peu expert à
manier la plume. Je chevaucherai l’étalon de l’Inhabileté
obliquement à la muraille de l’Expression. La terre que l’on foule est
malade et aigrie d’être trop maniée par l’homme, tel un sol gazonné
s’aigrit sous le bétail ; et l’air est épaissi également. Sur le sol de
cette ville, ils ont posé, pour ainsi dire, les planches puantes d’une
étable, et à travers les planches, entre mille milliers de maisons, les
humeurs peccantes de la terre s’infiltrent dans l’air surchargé qui les
renvoie à leur domicile ; car la fumée de leurs feux de cuisine les
tient tous à l’intérieur comme fait la toiture pour les exhalaisons des
moutons. Et semblablement il règne une chlorose chez le peuple, et
en particulier chez les Six Cents qui bavardent. Ni l’hiver ni
l’automne n’atténuent cette maladie de l’âme. Je l’ai vue sévir chez
les femmes de notre pays à nous et chez les adolescents non
encore aguerris à l’épée ; mais je n’en ai jamais encore vu autant
qu’ici. Par l’effet particulier de ce mal, le peuple, renonçant à
l’honneur et à la droiture, met en question toute autorité, non comme
le feraient des hommes, mais comme des filles, en pleurnichant, et
en pinçant dans le dos quand le dos est tourné, et en faisant des
grimaces. Si quelqu’un crie dans les rues : « On m’a fait une
injustice ! » ils admettent qu’il ne se plaigne pas aux gens en place,
mais à tous ceux qui passent, et buvant ses paroles, ils volent en
tumulte à la demeure de l’accusé et écrivent de mauvaises choses
contre lui, sa femme et ses filles ; car ils ne prennent pas soin de
peser le témoignage, et sont tels que des femmes. Et d’une main ils
frappent leurs gendarmes qui gardent les rues, et de l’autre frappent
les gendarmes pour s’être plaints de ces coups et les mettent à
l’amende. Quand ils ont en toutes choses vilipendé l’État, ils
réclament du secours à l’État, qui le leur donne, si bien que la fois
suivante ils crient encore davantage. Ceux qui sont opprimés se
déchaînent par les rues, portant des bannières dont le coût et
l’ouvrage représentent quatre jours de travail et une semaine de
pain ; et quand ni cheval ni piéton ne peuvent plus passer, ils sont
satisfaits. D’autres, recevant des salaires, refusent de travailler avant
d’en avoir obtenu de plus forts, et les prêtres les aident, et aussi des
hommes des Six Cents — car où il y a rébellion, l’un de ces hommes
ne peut manquer de venir, comme un vautour sur un bœuf mort — et
prêtres, bavards et hommes réunis déclarent qu’il est juste que
parce qu’ils ne veulent pas travailler nuls autres ne s’y risquent. De
cette manière ils ont si bien entravé le chargement et le
déchargement des bateaux qui viennent à cette ville, qu’en envoyant
au Rao Sahib fusils et harnais, j’ai jugé convenable d’envoyer les
caisses par le train à un autre bateau qui appareillait d’un autre port.
Il n’y a plus aucune certitude en aucun envoi. Mais tel qui fait injure
aux marchands ferme la porte du bien-être à la cité et à l’armée. Et
tu connais ce que dit Saâdi :
Comment le marchand voyagerait-il vers l’ouest,

Quand il entend parler des troubles de là-bas ?
Nul ne peut garder confiance parce qu’il ne saurait dire comment

agiront ses sous-ordres. Ils ont rendu le serviteur plus grand que le
maître, pour cette raison qu’il est le serviteur ; sans s’apercevoir que,
devant Dieu, l’un et l’autre sont égaux à la tâche désignée. C’est là
une chose à mettre de côté dans le buffet de l’esprit.
De plus, la misère et la clameur du vulgaire dont le sein de la
terre est las, ont si bien affecté les esprits de certaines gens qui
n’ont jamais dormi sous le poids de la crainte ni vu s’abattre le plat
du sabre sur les têtes d’une populace, qu’ils s’écrient : « Renversons
tout ce qui existe, et travaillons uniquement de nos mains nues. » A
cette tâche leurs mains se couvriraient d’ampoules dès le second
coup ; et j’ai vu que, tout émus qu’ils soient par les souffrances
d’autrui, ils ne renoncent en rien aux douceurs de l’existence. Dans
leur ignorance du vulgaire non moins que de l’esprit humain, ils
offrent cette boisson forte des mots, dont ils usent eux-mêmes, à
des ventres vides ; et ce breuvage produit l’ivresse de l’âme. Tout le
long du jour les gens malheureux se tiennent à la porte des lieux de
boisson au nombre de plusieurs milliers. Les gens bien intentionnés
mais de peu de discernement leur donnent des paroles ou tentent
pitoyablement dans les écoles de les transformer en artisans,
tisserands ou maçons, dont il y a plus qu’assez. Mais ils n’ont pas la
sagesse de veiller aux mains de ces élèves, sur lesquelles Dieu et la
Nécessité ont inscrit l’habileté de chacun et celle de son père. Ils
croient que le fils d’un ivrogne va manier un ciseau ferme et que le
charretier fera la besogne du plâtrier. Ils ne s’accordent pas de
réfléchir à la dispensation de leur générosité, laquelle ressemble aux
doigts fermés d’une main qui puise de l’eau. En conséquence les
matériaux bruts d’une très grande armée s’en vont à la dérive sans
être taillés, dans la fange de leurs rues. Si le gouvernement qui est
là aujourd’hui, et qui changera demain, dépensait pour ces
déshérités quelque argent à les vêtir et à les équiper, je n’écrirais
pas ce que j’écris. Mais ces gens du peuple méprisent le métier des
armes, et se contentent du souvenir des anciennes batailles ; les
femmes et les bavards les y aident.
Tu vas dire : « Pourquoi parler sans cesse de femmes et de
sots ? » Je réponds par Dieu, le Fabricateur du Cœur, que les sots
siègent parmi les Six Cents, et que les femmes mènent leur conseil.
As-tu oublié ce jour où arriva d’outre-mer cet ordre qui a pourri les
armées des Anglais qui sont chez nous, si bien que les soldats
tombaient malades par centaines là où auparavant il ne s’en alitait
que dix ? Ce fut l’œuvre de tout au plus vingt des hommes et environ
cinquante des femmes stériles. J’ai vu trois ou quatre d’entre eux,
mâles et femelles, et ils triomphent ouvertement, au nom de leur
Dieu, parce que trois régiments des troupes blanches ont cessé
d’exister. Ceci est à notre avantage parce que l’épée où il y a une
tache de rouille se brise sur le turban de l’ennemi. Mais s’ils
déchirent ainsi leur chair et leur sang propres avant que leur folie ait
atteint son paroxysme, que feront-ils lorsque la lune sera dans son
plein ?

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Women and the Rise of Nutrition

Science in Interwar Britain and British

Women and the Rise

Women and the Rise

ISSN 2947-7182 ISSN 2947-7190 (electronic)

Cover illustration: George Marks/Getty Images

To Jezebel, Lilith, Delilah, and the crows.

1 Setting the Table: Debates on the New Science

5 Fusion Cooking: Nutrition Education in Britain

Setting the Table: Debates on the New

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

mind, women’s nutrition education, both at home and abroad, became a

2 “The War and After” The Times, 13 September 1918.

Africans as well as hungry British people. As in the metropole, the call

and consumption, regulated by colonial and metropolitan governments,

the interwar period. Local, central, and colonial governments balanced

8 Philip Curtin, “Nutrition in African History,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

to a more sustainable region served as another fail safe against hunger,

10 Curtin, “Nutrition in African History,” 375.

children. These programs fit into a pre-existing education model in Britain

Broadly, this new approach entailed a renewed dedication to colonial

study human nutrition as well. He published the groundbreaking 1936

that women’s nutrition education acted as the compromise between

determined one’s scope of influence in the political, economic, and envi-

While Worboys’s article provides concrete and direct context for my

20 James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007);

using education to build character. Education policymakers hoped that

Gathering Ingredients: Collecting Data

In the early 1930s, a British anthropologist was studying the diet of a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Echoing similar interwar schemes in metropolitan Britain that sought

for the Colonies, an article by a British professor of domestic science, and

The Interwar Context of Nutrition Science

soldiers had also led Europeans to be increasingly interested in questions

7 Michael Worboys, “The Discovery of Colonial Malnutrition,” 208–225; CAB 58/

contained a variety of both protective and energy-giving foods.8 With

8 Barona and Vilar, The Problem of Nutrition, 37–38.

To follow the League’s economic recommendations in Britain often

The Domestic Problem of Nutrition in Britain

As soon as World War I concluded, and officials began planning to

meant of course, increased intervention by the State... But there was a

To that end, Newman suggested the creation of a National Health

Report delineated different dietary requirements based on sex, height,

27 Durbach, Many Mouths, 146–151.

on the matter as teachers, philanthropists, club organizers, and inspectors.

Formally educating the housewife had an even further reach. Across

34 Zweineger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body; Berridge House Prospectus, 1931–

Entre frère et frère d’élection, il n’est pas besoin de longues

Mon Frère, — Concernant l’objet de ma mission, voici le

Mais tu vas dire : « Que nous importe si la barbe d’Ahmed ou

L’oppression et l’épée tuent promptement ;

Comment le marchand voyagerait-il vers l’ouest,

Nul ne peut garder confiance parce qu’il ne saurait dire comment

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