From Healthy Cows to Healthy Humans: Integrated Approaches to World Hunger, c.1930–1965

“The Child Needs Milk and Milk Needs a Market”

“…As of the mid-1920s, the League of Nations Health Organization begun to conduct nutrition surveys to inform national food policies (Cullather 2007: 355-56). Coined ''a marriage of health and agriculture,'' the league called on governments to reform agricultural policies so that farmers produced foods that sustained healthy populations, while populations, as consumers, would secure a sustainable national (or imperial) agricultural sector (Little 1991;Bresalier 2018). During the next decade nutrition experts generated a movement that became authoritative enough to weigh in on national policies beyond the plate.…”

“…His studies in Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as his equally influential study in Kenya, simply confirmed what he had already believed concerning milk and dairy (Brantley 1997: 59-60). While scholars have demonstrated how agriculture came to serve the science of nutrition in the interwar period, the opposite is also true: nutrition scientists aligned with national institutions, promoting both the importance of diet and the prosperity of agricultural industries (Barona 2008: 95-97;DuPuis 2002: 114;Bresalier 2018).…”