A colonial metabolism: food, nutrition and extraction in Malawi

This session is part of the Seminar Series of the Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene, led by UCL (UK), CIESAS (Mexico) and UFRGDS (Brazil).

A Colonial Metabolism: food, nutrition and extraction in Malawi

In this paper I develop the concept of a colonial metabolism through an examination of the ways in which rural communities in colonial Malawi adapted their food systems in the face of the new demands of the colonial economy in the mid twentieth century. Drawing on the insights of recent scholarship in environmental anthropology, interspecies studies, the microbiome and the ‘Anthropocene’, I re-examine the work of colonial scientists to explore the sources of nutrition that under-pinned a system of colonial extraction, paying particular attention to ‘wild’ foods, insects and the technologies of food processing.

This forms part of a larger and longer story of Malawi’s food system, of debates on the country’s record of food shortages and malnutrition, and of current challenges to a system of maize production highly dependent on the importation and subsidisation of artificial fertilisers.

Professor Megan Vaughan is Professor of African History and Health at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL. She previously held positions at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and began her academic career teaching at the University of Malawi. Her interdisciplinary work has mostly focused on the history of environment, agriculture, nutrition and gender in Malawi and Zambia. She has also published on the history of colonial medicine and psychiatry and on slavery in the Indian Ocean. Her most recent collaborative research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, examined the social and historical aspects of ‘chronic’ disease in sub-Saharan Africa (Vaughan, Adjaye-Gbewonyo and Mika eds, Epidemiological Change and Chronic Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa, UCL Press, 2021).

The Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene (collaboration between UFRGS Brazil, CIESAS Mexico and UCL in the UK) brings together environmental, indigenous, biosocial, multispecies, gender and theoretical expertise in Medical Anthropology, to extend interdisciplinary engagement concerning how the Anthropocene epoch impacts on human health. Our group aligns interest and expertise in diverse fields of inquiry relevant to the embodied inequalities of the Anthropocene including gender, justice and power, indigenous health, well-being and sustainability.