Between Feast and Famine: Food, Health, and the History of Ghana's Long Twentieth Century

Shortlisted for the RHS First Book Prize 2026

Ghana's twentieth century was one of dramatic political, economic, and environmental change. Sparked initially by the impositions of colonial rule, these transformations had significant, if rarely uniform, repercussions for the determinants of good and bad nutrition. All across this new and uneven polity, food production, domestic reproduction, gender relations, and food cultures underwent radical and rapid change. This volatile national history was matched only by the scientific instability of nutritional medicine during these same years.

Moving between the dry Northern savannah, the mineral-rich and food-secure Southern rainforest, and the youthful, ever-expanding cities, Between Feast and Famine is a comparative history of nutrition in Ghana since the end of the nineteenth century. At the heart of this story is an analysis of how an uneven capitalist transformation variously affected the lives of women and children. It traces the change from sporadic periods of hunger in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through epidemics of childhood malnutrition during the twentieth century, and into emergent epidemics of diet-related non-communicable disease in the twenty-first century. Employing a novel, critical approach to historical epidemiology, John Nott argues that detailing the co-production of science and its subjects in the past is essential for understanding and improving health in the present.