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Why don’t some cuisines travel? Charting palm oil’s journey from West African staple to Malayan chemical

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Geoffrey Pakiam at ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute
Geoffrey Pakiam
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Abstract

This study uses food as a lens to examine three historical phenomena: globalization’s limits, the rise of plantation-centric monocultures, and the resilience of social norms within migrant societies. The article scrutinizes the West African oil palm’s initial journey to, and reception within, the Malay Peninsula, one of the world’s largest exporters of palm oil by the end of the twentieth century. The article pays special attention to changes in the crop’s perceived food value during the interwar years, a facet overlooked by earlier scholarship. Five different migrant groups in Malaya – planter households, Asian cooks, colonial officials, government chemists, and estate labourers – played critical roles in transforming palm oil into a crop purely for industrial purposes, rather than subsistence. The peculiarities of Malaya’s social context are further sharpened by comparisons with Latin America and West Africa, where different clusters of migrants propagated the oil palm’s subsistence cultures, instead of shunning them.
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Why don’t some cuisines travel? Charting palm oil’s
journey from West African staple to Malayan chemical
Journal of Global History, Volume 15, Issue 1
GEOFFREY KEVIN PAKIAM
DOI: 10.1017/S1740022819000329
Published online: 13 February 2020, pp. 39-60
Print publication: March 2020
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Abstract
This study uses food as a lens to examine three historical phenomena: globalization’s limits, the rise of
plantation-centric monocultures, and the resilience of social norms within migrant societies. The article scrutinizes
the West African oil palm’s initial journey to, and reception within, the Malay Peninsula, one of the world’s largest
exporters of palm oil by the end of the twentieth century. The article pays special attention to changes in the crop’s
perceived food value during the interwar years, a facet overlooked by earlier scholarship. Five different migrant
groups in Malaya – planter households, Asian cooks, colonial officials, government chemists, and estate labourers –
played critical roles in transforming palm oil into a crop purely for industrial purposes, rather than subsistence. The
peculiarities of Malaya’s social context are further sharpened by comparisons with Latin America and West Africa,
where different clusters of migrants propagated the oil palm’s subsistence cultures, instead of shunning them.
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... 56 In Southeast Asia, by contrast, oil palms were progressively introduced during the mid-to-late nineteenth century by salaried economic botanists and commercial planters. 57 Local Asian populations had less time and opportunity to familiarize themselves with the palm's bounty, particularly from the viewpoint of subsistence farming. Even at present, there is little popular knowledge of and regional interest in unrefined culinary palm oil. ...
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... 56 In Southeast Asia, by contrast, oil palms were progressively introduced during the mid-to-late nineteenth century by salaried economic botanists and commercial planters. 57 Local Asian populations had less time and opportunity to familiarize themselves with the palm's bounty, particularly from the viewpoint of subsistence farming. Even at present, there is little popular knowledge of and regional interest in unrefined culinary palm oil. ...
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