sometimes it just fries my brain how colonials can turn literally anything into racism. for example: the fact that wheat is the primary grain crop in britain.

"We are wheat-eaters. Other races, vastly superior to us in numbers, but differing widely in material and intellectual progress, are eaters of Indian corn, rice, millet, and other grains; but none of these grains have the food values, the concentrated health sustaining power of wheat, and it is on this account that the accumulated experience of civilized mankind has set wheat apart as the fit and proper food for the development of muscle and brains." - from an 1898 speech by william crookes, then president of the Scientific Society (UK)

the quote was found in the book "the agricultural dilemma: how not to feed the world" by glenn davis stone (it's a very nice book)

stone continues: "(Winston Churchill would later echo Crookes’ grain chauvinism, writing that “yellow men, brown men and black men” had not “learned to demand and become able to afford a diet superior to rice” (Belasco 2006, 34).)"

oh, and the solution is apparently chemistry (in order to make synthetic nitrogen that would improve soils and give better yields and feed the whites)!: "But Crookes saw a way out: “It is the chemist who must come to the rescue.” The key would be nitrogen, the fixation of which was a great discovery “awaiting the ingenuity of chemists”; otherwise, “the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost in the world, and will be squeezed out of existence.”

...all this reminds me that i have to eventually get to the book "The Globalization of Wheat: A Critical History of the Green Revolution" by marci r. baranski

#books #colonialism #racism #wheat #agriculture #history #food