Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup: Conflicting British Nutrition Education Policy Approaches and African Responses

This article examines the process by which the League of Nations and British colonial officials came to pin their hopes of ending malnutrition on the education of women in the 1930s. Then, the article zooms in to illustrate how those global concerns impacted women in Southern Nigeria. Nigerian women's education transitioned from being controlled by missions to being controlled by the state as a result of the proposed solutions of colonial nutrition surveys. Furthermore, as a priority of the colonial state, the pedagogy of Nigerian women's nutrition education became its own kind of colonial experiment as educators and students disagreed on the best means of relating the new knowledge of nutrition. State-sponsored education attempted to create a new kind of colonial subject concerned with science, which revealed the limits of state intervention and provided a new arena for Nigerian women to shape their own futures.