Processing for the Future: New Food Products, Sciences, and Politics in Interwar India

The history of nutrition in South Asia is a multivalent phenomenon, angled from a variety of fields and located across a range of methodological approaches. Where famines and shortages have created parameters for its study in the past, a genealogical approach to the forging of a field of inquiry in India, beginning with the opening of the fully-dedicated nutritional research lab in 1918 in Tamil Nadu, has brought to light the possibilities of thinking about nutrition sciences as both preventative and productive, and not merely a response to crisis. This paper will examine the history of nutrition through the lens of the introduction of new food technologies, bringing to light the ways in which commerce (and its contingent cultures) shaped the field. Focusing on attempts to introduce New Zealand-produced powdered milk to the Indian market, this paper examines a series of surveys conducted in boys’ orphanages and schools that sought to measure the broad scale of ‘childhood nutrition’ in Madras.  Conducted over the course of a few years, these surveys, provided one of the first attempts to gauge malnutrition and its alleviation through the creation of new data, collected solely for this purpose. As such, it introduced a model for new forms of knowledge acquisition around the broad question of nutrition: how and why did nutrition matter, how was it measured, what was its relationship to other markers of health, and what could be done about securing it for local children.  Arranged by a combination of local municipalities, the Government of India and the New Zealand milk lobby, the study and its after-effects provide insight into the order of things in the limbo of the interwar period, where local concerns, imperial controls and foreign investment joined forces to gauge the current health and future wealth of the Indian market.