John Nott’s Between Feast and Famine offers a rigorously reconstructed history of food, health, and political economy across Ghana’s long twentieth century. Drawing on colonial archival records, anthropometric records, public health surveys, and the history of nutritional science, Nott argues that malnutrition cannot be understood simply as a consequence of food scarcity or ecological constraint. Rather, nutritional outcomes emerge through changing relationships among political economy, social reproduction, and nutritional expertise. A core objective is to trace malnutrition in the early twentieth-century Gold Coast back to colonial disruptions of social reproduction while demonstrating that nutritional science itself was constituted by, and served, the political economy of empire and, later, the logics of postcolonial governance. The book is also notable for its historical-geographical approach, treating Ghana not as a single nutritional landscape but as a set of distinct ecological and political-economic regions whose experiences of hunger, malnutrition, and dietary change diverged significantly over time.
Two particularly innovative chapters trace the history of nutritional science itself. Chapter Two situates the emergence of nutritional science within the political context of empire, demonstrating how colonial officials and researchers came to frame protein deficiency and kwashiorkor as quintessential African nutritional challenges. Nott argues that these interpretations reflected broader colonial assumptions about African diets and societies while obscuring the social and economic transformations reshaping food systems in the Gold Coast. Kwashiorkor occupies a central place in this analysis, not because Nott disputes its existence as a clinical condition, but because colonial researchers elevated protein deficiency as its defining explanation in ways that aligned with wider narratives of African nutritional deficiency. Chapter Seven carries this analysis into the postcolonial era, demonstrating how international nutrition science retained many of these assumptions through its continued emphasis on technical solutions to protein deficiency long after evidence pointed toward broader social and economic determinants of malnutrition.
Bookended by investigations of social reproduction and nutrition on the eve of colonialism and the epidemiology of malnutrition amid 1980s market reforms, Nott’s examination of colonial disruptions to rural life revolves around the gendered implications of the transformation from subsistence production toward cocoa cultivation for cash. Here Nott provides a compelling account of the large-scale changes to the lives of women and children resulting from the emergence of a colonial cash-crop economy that progressively displaced the diversified food economies of rural Asante. Because Asante society was matrilineal and cocoa production and sales were dominated by men, the emerging agrarian colonial economy had profound implications for gendered food systems. Nott finds that women’s unpaid conjugal labor on cocoa farms expanded dramatically while their traditional authority over food production and child welfare was simultaneously eroded, with direct consequences for household nutrition.
The changing social relations of food and cocoa production are explored with careful attention to the emergence of new patterns of food entitlement. As cocoa trees matured, they increasingly crowded out food crops beneath their expanding canopy. The gradual substitution of cassava for maize as a weaning food—a crop requiring less labor from women already burdened by intensified conjugal obligations—is cited as a potentially important factor in declining infant nutritional status, although expanding markets also enabled some households to offset these pressures through purchased foods. This period was likewise marked by the growing presence of casual wage workers from northern Ghana in cocoa production, contributing to new forms of class stratification as migrant labor increasingly supplanted family labor. Access to food for this migrant wage-earning class was particularly vulnerable to price fluctuations given their limited access to domestic production and kin-based food-sharing networks.
Nott develops a parallel analysis of northern Ghana as a colonial labor reserve, examining the combined effects of colonial peripherality and male out-migration on local food systems. Here he engages productively and critically with both dependency theory and Malthusian interpretations of food insecurity. This analysis provides a foundation for later chapters that examine postcolonial agricultural modernization schemes, broad trends toward declining nutritional status, and the vulnerability of populations increasingly dependent on market-based food entitlements.
Nott draws extensively on official reports, colonial publications, nutritional surveys, and published scholarship to reconstruct how medical and scientific authorities came to define African ignorance as the central nutritional challenge. These evolving expert understandings are woven into a wider narrative of political-economic change. His achievement is to demonstrate that neither malnutrition nor nutritional science can be understood outside the political economies that produced them. By linking changing food systems, household reproduction, colonial governance, and the evolution of nutritional expertise across more than a century of Ghanaian history, Between Feast and Famine makes an important contribution not only to African political and economic history but also to contemporary debates on food security, nutrition, and public health.
Geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians of Africa will all find much of value in this ambitious project. Nott’s historical treatment of nutritional science will likewise appeal to scholars in science and technology studies (STS). For food-security scholars in particular, the book offers rich historical examples that speak to wider critiques of productivist and modernist tendencies of agricultural development globally. Several chapters would work especially well in graduate seminars concerned with food security, political ecology, development studies, or the social production of health.
