As everywhere that was subject to colonisation, Ghana’s twentieth century was one of dramatic political, economic, and environmental change. These transformations had significant, if rarely uniform, repercussions for the determinants of good and bad nutrition. All across this new and uneven polity, food production, domestic reproduction, gender relations, childhood, and diet saw radical and rapid change. This volatile national history was matched only by the scientific instability of nutritional medicine during these same years.
Moving between the dry Northern savannah, the mineral-rich and food-secure Southern rainforest, and the youthful, ever-expanding cities, Between Feast and Famine is a comparative history of nutrition in Ghana since the end of the nineteenth century. At the heart of this story is an analysis of how an uneven capitalist transformation variously affected the lives of women and children. It traces the change from sporadic periods of hunger in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through epidemics of childhood malnutrition during the twentieth century, and into the emergent epidemics of diabetes and obesity in the twenty-first century. Employing a novel, critical approach to historical epidemiology, John Nott argues that detailing the coproduction of science and its subjects in the past is essential for understanding and improving health in the present.
Praise for Between Feast and Famine
’This is a tour de force. Ghana was an important site for the development of nutritional science in the colonial period, as well as a site for its application. It is therefore central to the history of a global nutritional science. Not only has John Nott pieced together a complex history of that changing science and its application in Ghana in the twentieth century, he has also provided a carefully constructed analysis of what was actually happening in terms of food supply, health and nutrition in Ghana in this period. Few other works manage to do both these things.’
Megan Vaughan, Professor of African History and Health, Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL
Innehållsförteckning
List of figures
List of tables
List of abbreviations
1 Nutrition in African history, the history of African nutrition
2 African foodways, British government, and the new science of nutrition
3 Food and health in the nineteenth century
4 Feeding the cocoa boom, c. 1896-1957
5 Hunger in the ‘labour reservoir’, c. 1896-1957
6 Feeding Ghanaian independence, c. 1957-1983
7 Towards a political economy of postcolonial nutrition
8 Neoliberal nutrition, c. 1983-2000
9 Space, time, and the nature of nutrition in the twenty-first century
References
Index
Om författaren
John Nott is a Research Fellow in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
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