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Prison, plantation, and peninsula: colonial

knowledge and experimental technique in
the post-war Bataan Rice Enrichment Project,
1910–1950

Theresa Ventura

To cite this article: Theresa Ventura (2019) Prison, plantation, and peninsula: colonial knowledge
and experimental technique in the post-war Bataan Rice Enrichment Project, 1910–1950, History
and Technology, 35:3, 293-315, DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2019.1680153

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Published online: 20 Jan 2020.

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HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY
2019, VOL. 35, NO. 3, 293–315
https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1680153

Prison, plantation, and peninsula: colonial knowledge and

experimental technique in the post-war Bataan Rice
Enrichment Project, 1910–1950
Theresa Ventura
Department of History, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The 1946 Bataan Rice Enrichment Project illuminates the intimate United States; Philippines;
connections between Euro-American empire, scientific nationalism, nutrition; thiamine; beriberi;
and post-war demonstration in the Philippines. The project was development;
demonstration
conducted by former American colonial chemist turned philanthro-
pist Robert R. Williams, who sought to prove the efficacy of syn-
thetic-thiamine fortified rice in the fight against beriberi. Yet by
willfully exposing half of Bataan’s food scarce residents to beriberi,
Williams effectively recreated the prisons and asylums that Euro-
American researchers had used as living laboratories to induce
beriberi in unwilling subjects. These ‘carceral laboratories’ were
highly contested by the people imprisoned within and by nation-
alist Philippine physicians who understood deficiency disease as a
symptom of colonialism. Returning the carceral laboratory to the
making of nutritional science explains the post-war Philippine rejec-
tion of mandatory rice fortification and is a reminder that the Asian
countryside was a creation of colonial modernity and a contested
space long before the Cold War.

The Philippine province of Bataan occupies a peninsula that juts southward into Manila
Bay. In 1946, it was recovering from the intense fighting of the Second World War. Just
one main road connected the province to the rest of Luzon and its residents depended on
white rice for the majority of their calories. Like many other Filipinos, they suffered from
high rates of beriberi, a severe and sometimes fatal Vitamin B1 (thiamine) deficiency that
results when little but white rice is consumed. For the philanthropist Robert R. Williams,
Bataan’s isolation, scant infrastructure, and poverty likened it to the prisons, asylums,
leper colonies, plantations, and soldiers’ barracks that he had once used to investigate
beriberi as a chemist in the American colonial Bureau of Science. Because confined
populations did not control their daily living arrangements, biomedical researchers
performed controlled eating experiments that eventually proved milled rice deficient in
thiamine. Widely replicated across the imperial tropics, these dietary experiments coa-
lesced into nutritional science and gave rise to a utopian vision of deficiency disease
eradication. In post-war Bataan, Williams once again saw a confined population on
which to experiment. His private non-profit funded the division of the peninsula’s

CONTACT Theresa Ventura [email protected]

Special Issue: Empires of Knowledge
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
294 T. VENTURA

93,000 residents into two. Those in an experimental zone ate rice enriched with synthetic
thiamine; those in the control zone did not. No longer searching for a cause of the
disease, the Bataan Rice Enrichment Project (1946–1949) sought to demonstrate the
benefits of rice fortified with synthetic vitamin B1 to the newly independent Philippine
government and its citizen-consumers. The task of deficiency disease eradication had
shifted from colonial states to postwar decolonizing governments and private
philanthropy.1
Robert R. Williams and thiamine have long played a central role in the history of
nutrition. The Dutch physician Christian Eijkman’s late nineteenth century experiments
with fowls pointed to a link between beriberi and diets composed mainly of white rice. In
1911, Casimir Funk’s isolation of an anti-beriberi factor paved the way for the identifica-
tion of vitamins and the development of nutritional science.2 Back in the United States,
Williams synthesized thiamine in 1936, patented his method, and licensed the rights to
the Hoffman LaRoche Pharmaceutical Corporation. He channeled the profits into the
Williams-Waterman Fund for the Combat of Dietary Disease (W-WF). As reflected in
the W-WF’s name and in the League of Nations’ efforts to standardize recommended
daily vitamin intakes, nutritional science raised the possibility of worldwide deficiency
disease eradication through international governance. But it also medicalized food
scarcities born of structural inequalities.3 In place of a tougher confrontation with
consolidated land holdings, uneven trade, and rural credit, enrichment fortified staple
grains with otherwise missing vitamins. Enrichment was a penultimate technical fix. By
the Cold War, the United States countered the revolutionary appeal of Soviet planned
economies and land redistribution with ever more technical solutions to hunger. Seen in
this light, the Bataan Rice Enrichment Project was a prelude to the promises and limits of
the Green Revolution.4
A deep contextualization of the Bataan Rice Enrichment Project forces a refinement of
this narrative in three ways. First, the discoveries we now associate with the birth of
nutrition would not have been possible without the unwilling participation of popula-
tions confined in what I call ‘carceral laboratories’ – prisons, plantations, barracks, and
leper colonies. The resistance of people confined within to the removal of milled white
rice from their diets forced administrators and biomedical researchers to consider the
importance of taste in planning diets for optimal health. Enrichment, which fortifies
grains without altering appearance or taste, was as much a nod to the cultural appeal of
white rice as it was a technical solution to food scarcity.
Second, returning the history of nutrition to the American colonial Philippines sheds
light on the relationship between scientific practices and national independence projects
prior to the Second World War. Whereas Euro-American biomedical practitioners dis-
covered beriberi in carceral laboratories, Filipino physicians encountered beriberi as a
problem of infant mortality and maternal health. Often working in tension with
American health bureaucrats, Filipino physicians, pharmacists, and elite clubwomen pio-
neered approaches to infant mortality that mixed rural health and maternal education with
a thiamine-rich rice bran supplementation known as tiki-tiki. Tiki-tiki was a low technology
that, like fortification, obscured structural inequality but could be produced at a low cost.
Philippine health technocrats forged a nascent welfare-state around tiki-tiki’s free distribu-
tion, in effect promising national independence by safeguarding future citizens without
altering land distribution and labor relations. Though the Depression and Second World
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 295

War hindered this nascent welfare-state, Williams’ return to the post-war Philippines
nonetheless depended on the support of the Philippine technocratic elite. Their knowledge
and competing vision of an independent Philippine future must be considered as another
form of expertise that crossed the chronological divide of the Second World War.
Indeed, and third, Williams’ post-war return to the Philippines as an international
philanthropist also sheds light on both the transfer of colonial experimental technique
and the persistence of tensions between American and Philippine experts in the post-war
period.
Having learned in the crucible of colonialism that dietary change could not be
imposed, Williams sought viscerally to demonstrate the benefits of fortified foods
through demonstration in post-war Bataan. By denying enriched rice to a control
group, the Bataan Rice Enrichment Project knowingly increased that group’s risk of
beriberi, in essence recreating the carceral laboratories of the early twentieth century. Yet
the project relied more directly on the assistance of Philippine health technocrats who
embraced the Bataan demonstration as proof of what the state they sought to rebuild
could do for citizens. These health technocrats rejected mandatory enrichment laws as
envisioned by Williams because it would give American pharmaceutical companies a
long-term stake in the Philippine dietary context. In the immediate post-war period, at
least, a Philippine nationalism that defined sovereignty as freedom from the influence of
the United States government and corporate power tempered the seductive power of
demonstration to ‘visualize a boundary between tradition and modernity’.5
We have lost sight of the colonial and carceral origins of nutrition and demonstration
due, in part, to how Williams narrated his work when faced with Philippine and United
Nations resistance to mandatory enrichment. His 1961 tome, Toward the Conquest of
Beriberi, swept away the violence that turned prisons into laboratories along with the
Philippine contribution to the study of beriberi that informed Williams’ isolation of
thiamine. In its stead, Williams Americanized nutrition and enrichment by casting his
scientific work and corporate-funded private philanthropy as a heroic if misunderstood
endeavor to stave off an impending nutritional crisis. His narrative blended all too well
with the Rostovian development theory then ascendant in Washington that tied foreign
aid to the modernization of the Asian countryside. Returning the carceral laboratory and
Philippine work to the making of nutrition necessarily reminds us that the Asian
countryside was a creation of colonial modernity and a contested space long before the
Cold War. Charting how an erstwhile colonial expert like Williams navigated the
uncertain terrain of decolonization accounts for how that contested history was lost to
overly simplistic notions of US interventions in the ‘Third World’ as technologically
driven.6 The escalating Cold War did not lead to the birth of development so much as it
foreclosed on a different set of paths to development.

Beriberi and colonial modernity

Thiamine is essential for metabolizing carbohydrates and nervous system function. Its
absence causes polyneuritis, which is manifest in adults and infants alike. Adults develop
polyneuritis in either one of two forms. ‘Wet polyneuritis’ swells extremities, especially
lower limbs; ‘dry polyneuritis’ etiolates the legs and feet.7 Nursing infants can develop
infantile polyneuritis if they depend on the breast milk of a thiamine deficient and
296 T. VENTURA

asymptomatic woman. When inborn thiamine reserves deplete around 6 weeks of life,
seemingly healthy and plump babies are seized with fits of uncontrollable crying before
going into cardiac failure. Infantile polyneuritis at this stage is nearly always fatal.8 In an
adult, symptoms can be reversed when whole grains, legumes, green vegetables, meat, or
synthetic thiamine are consumed. Recorded instances of polyneuritis can be found as far
back in time as medieval China and, in the modern era, as far north as Halifax. But the
deficiency disease became associated with the Asian tropics in the late nineteenth century
due to the combined forces of imperialism and global trade. Indeed, its modern moniker,
beriberi, is purportedly Sinhalese for ‘I cannot’ (said twice for emphasis).9 The differing
manner in which the deficiency disease became legible to Euro-American administrators
and Philippine physicians, this next section argues, informed competing possibilities for
its treatment and governance.
Though it is difficult to quantify rates of beriberi, it is undeniable that the political
ecology of mid- to late-nineteenth century empire contributed to the rise of beriberi in
the Asian tropics. European capital financed the rapid spread of steam and electricity-
driven mills capable of removing the entire grain from its hull, including the thiamine
rich pericarp. The nutritionally bereft grain could pack more tightly and ship longer
distances without spoiling. The ensuing regional trade in milled Thai, Burmese, and
Indochinese rice to parts of the Philippines, Malaysia, and the Indian subcontinent
allowed those areas to devote more land to export crops.10 Consumers preferred
mechanically milled rice for its relative ease of preparation; women especially were
spared the burden of hand pounding rice. Polished with talc, the grain was white and
pristine; its consumption a marker of prestige. ‘Modernity’, to quote David Arnold, ‘lay
in a bowl of shimmering, fragrant, polished white rice’.11 Polished white rice alone does
not cause beriberi. But when eaten to the exclusion of other foods for a matter of months
or even weeks, thiamine deficiency ensues. Beriberi appeared endemic then in places of
confinement and during times of privation.
In terms of the former, the ‘social acceptability’ of mechanically milled white rice
made it ‘the principal – even exclusive – diet of social groups in “modern” occupations
and institutions’.12 Prisoners, asylum inmates, soldiers, sailors, and plantation workers
fed little else but mechanically milled rice frequently experienced what appeared to be
sudden outbreaks of beriberi. Laboring under the emerging framework of germ theory,
Euro-American doctors assumed beriberi was contagious. The disease, wrote a Dutch
physician, ‘develops in prisons and other institutions and this is evidence that hygienic
mistakes have been made by the government which the natives instinctively avoid’
whereas ‘the free-living Javanese are almost free from beriberi’.13 Manila’s shockingly
high infant mortality following the Philippine American War, however, alerted
Philippine nationalist physicians to endemic beriberi among the so-called ‘free-living’.
The American military waged a total war in the Philippines in an attempt to
starve guerilla forces. No region could claim a surplus of food by the war’s official
end in 1902.14 To be sure, imported milled rice spared the country from famine. But
the dependence on milled rice and the insecurity in non-rice foods produced the
highest rates of infant mortality in the turn of the twentieth century world. In 1904,
Manila registered 6345 infant births and 6029 infant deaths – a rate of nearly 100
percent.15 Even when accounting for unreported births, the 73 percent rate of
mortality among breastfed infants points to beriberi.16 Filipinos called these deaths
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 297

taon or suba, Tagalog respectively for ‘year’, an indication of the tender age of the
infants, and ‘convulsion’, the last symptom of infantile beriberi before death.
Philippine physicians lamented infant mortality as a tragic yet consistent feature of
the Philippines’ colonial history. Much like their creole counterparts in Spanish
America, educated elites – commonly known as ilustrados – forged patriotic sciences
that reclaimed the tropical landscape and general health from colonial tropical medi-
cine and asserted their right to steward an independent Philippine nation. In the
ilustrado rendering, the luxuriance and heat of tropical nature did not result in the
inevitable degeneration of creole bodies but had instead produced creativity and
genius.17 Spanish colonialism and friar superstition, by contrast, condemned people
to early and avoidable deaths. As Raquel Reyes has shown, ilustrados often cast women
and children as allegories for the deferred nation and in the process turned gynecology
and obstetrics into a patriotic science.18 Ilustrados were therefore already disposed to
read the high death rate among breastfed infants after the American war as further
evidence of colonialism’s power to disrupt natural life processes. In the words of the
former revolutionary and pediatrician José Albert, ‘It is a single fact unparalleled in the
history of medicine that human milk as a food appears a scourge to the Philippine
infant, an inverse phenomenon to the experience of other nations where human milk is
the strongest bulwark of child hygiene, the magic liquid that guarantees the life of the
infant’.19
Ilustrado cosmopolitanism led Philippine physicians to suspect that taon/suba
may be linked to beriberi. Working with German translations of Japanese texts,
Albert encountered Hirota’s groundbreaking 1891 suggestion that nurslings could
contract beriberi from their mothers’ breast milk.20 The American colonial health
service rejected Philippine work on beriberi, instead naturalizing infant mortality as
a consequence of Filipina physiology and ignorance of sanitation. The first
American authored study of infant mortality in the colony compared breast milk
from women categorized as ‘Filipina – lower class,’ ‘Filipina – of better class,’ and
‘Caucasian – Manila’ and concluded that the ‘average Filipino woman is poorly
developed and even those who have borne several children usually have small
breasts, so that the milk giving capacity is at a minimum’.21 The study’s emphasis
on small breast size was characteristic of an American corporeal colonialism in
which height and weight served as a marker of difference between Americans and
Filipinos. As Gideon Lasco writes, the alleged ‘smallness’ of Filipinos legitimized
American visions of a ‘benevolent colonialism that would “civilize” what they
termed “little brown brothers”’.22 For Americans, then, infant mortality was sub-
sumed by a colonial tropical medicine that, in its focus on germs and physiology,
understood Filipinos as vectors of disease. Infant mortality was simultaneously an
unchanging fact and proof of the need for American intervention in the
Philippines.23
These different ways of encountering beriberi led to competing approaches to the
study of its etiology and management. Euro-American physicians turned prison-like
institutions into living laboratories. Inmates served as the raw materials on which
colonial physicians and sanitarians tested ideas about the nature of the disease,
contagion, and eventually rice-based diets. Through their ability to refuse and
recommend treatments, inmates co-produced what we today think of as nutritional
298 T. VENTURA

knowledge. Prisoners at the Bangkok central jail, for instance, cured themselves of
beriberi when those unaccustomed to eating milled rice demanded hand-pounded
grains. ‘The change having been made’, a physician wrote, ‘beriberi died down and
has since then given practically no trouble, as the prison authorities have continued
to supply this form of rice, which is actually prepared in the jail by convict labor’.24
Eijkmann’s late nineteenth century experiments inducing polyneuritis in chickens fed
an exclusive diet of milled rice and curing the birds by switching to under-milled or
brown rice earned him a Nobel Prize for physiology in 1929. But in the immediate,
Eijkmann’s work with fowls set off a flurry of experiments with the diet of colonial
captives. Non-human analogues, his contemporaries argued, were no substitute for
actual humans. ‘While experiments on fowls have been of very great benefit in elucidat-
ing many problems relating to the etiology and cure of beriberi’, wrote two Americans
with the Philippine Bureau of Science, ‘without similar experiments or observations on
man, the results obtained with the former would not be applicable to man’.25 According
to British researchers in the Federated Malay States, ‘The fact that certain white rices
when forming the staple diet in man produce beriberi rests on quite other testimony than
that supplied by experiments on domestic fowls’.26 Moreover, confined populations with
limited mobility remained the ideal experiment subject. E.D. Kilbourne, a member of the
U.S. Army Board for the Study of Tropical Diseases, argued that ‘to obtain reliable and
accurate data from the civilian natives is impossible; only [in] a military organization,
prison, school or other similar body is it possible to exercise a control sufficient to make
the findings of any value’.27
Between 1908 and 1912, colonial scientists preformed remarkably similar studies on
confined peoples, which they then shared at inter-imperial medical conferences.28 The
Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine (FEATM), founded in 1908 at the behest of
Victor Heiser, the American director of public health in the Philippines, was the most
important venue. Heiser intended the FEATM to announce the United States as a major
force in tropical medicine. The nationalist-driven internationalism of the FEATM further
informed beriberi research. Indeed, the ability to present one’s own national findings at
subsequent FEATM meetings encouraged the replication of studies in which researchers
continually re-proved an association between mechanically milled white rice and beriberi
by inflicting intentional harm on confined populations.29
The controlled feeding experiments mirrored the exploitation and violence of
colonial labor regimes. Prisoners had to be fed very little but milled rice for a period
of weeks to months. In the longest such experiment, researchers kept inmates in the
Kuala Lumpur Lunatic Asylum in a near state of near food deprivation for one year and
twenty-seven days.30 Inmates in the Singapore Lunatic Asylum had a daily ration of
just four ounces of meat and vegetable in addition to milled rice.31 Experiments also
relied on linguistic and physical isolation. Between 1908 and 1909, British researchers
Fraser and Stanton conducted what the American army physician Edward B. Vedder
glowingly praised as the most ‘carefully planned and controlled human feeding experi-
ment’ on 300 male Javanese laborers contracted to build a road in Malaysia’s then
remote Jelebu district.32 The area was ‘sufficiently remote from towns or villages to
exclude as far as possible the entrance of a supposed infection’. It also lacked shops so
that ‘the men under observation could not readily obtain food other than that supplied
to them’ by the employer.33 They then divided the laborers into two, feeding the
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 299

experimental group ‘polished’ rice and the control group parboiled rice. Parboiling
entailed soaking the grains in the hull prior to threshing, a simple process that
preserved the thiamine. After a period of at least six weeks of the monotonous diet,
laborers in the experiment group developed neuritis in their limbs. At this point, Fraser
and Stanton switched the groups, curing the nueritic men with parboiled rice and
inducing beriberi in the others. Having established the relationship between beriberi
and milled polished rice, Fraser and Stanton only then began working with fowls, as
Eijkmann had done a decade earlier. Their experiment, widely discussed at the 1910
FEATM, inspired the American physicians Strong and Crowell to induce and then cure
Philippine prisoners in Bilibid with beriberi.34
The institutional structure of the FEATM raised the possibility of disease eradication
through inter-imperial governance. Heiser viewed all of Southeast Asia as a prison for
which he could plan rations. His goal was to discourage the consumption of milled rice
through an international tax on mechanical milling, driving up the price for the very
poorest. Indochinese millers protested, killing the proposal. But though FEATM had the
tacit support of imperial and national governments, it did not have the legal capacity to
enact policy.35 Heiser was left to try an intra-imperial approach to beriberi eradication,
again focused on replacing mechanically milled white rice with under-milled rice
(pinawa). In May 1911, the Philippine Commission passed an ordinance banning the
use of mechanically milled white rice in jails, prisons, lighthouses, charitable institutions,
government vessels, and by the Philippine Scouts and Constabulary.
The confined people covered under the white rice ban protested vigorously. Patients at
the Culion Leper Colony, located on a small island in the South China Sea, revolted when
offered pinawa with mangoes in place of white rice. Heiser joked at the next FEATM that
the residents ‘preferred to deny themselves food rather than eat mangoes, so that the
authorities had starvation as well as improper diet to deal with’.36 In another case of
pinawa refusal, an American judge sentenced several sailors to jail. The nationalist press
took up the sailors’ plight. La Vanguardia questioned the colonial government’s power to
‘impose on the men who work in its establishments, hospitals, asylums, prisons, sanator-
iums, orphanages, shops, steamers, etc. an article of food which the stomach rejects and
which is repugnant to the eye, the nose, and palate and is opposed to custom?’. Calling
the sentence neither ‘just, nor even humane’, the paper noted that ‘science has not said
the last word on the subject nor has anyone dared to take steps to prevent the importation
of polished rice or its local production’.37 This of course was not true. Heiser criminalized
milled rice because he tried and failed to create an international policy while banning
mechanically milled rice imports would have exacerbated food shortages. Nor was this
necessarily La Vanguardia’s concern either. Rather, the editorial reflected the ways in
which the freedom to consume polished white rice was becoming central to nationalist
criticisms of the US.
US officials approached beriberi eradication as a matter of policing rather than
reorienting land and agricultural policies toward pulses and vegetables. In some ways,
this is not surprising given that medical expertise was often military. But Americans also
acknowledged the difficulty of changing food and taste preferences. When mixed with
Orientalist assumptions about cultural stasis, officials concluded that dietary education
was doomed to fail. To quote the US Army physician Edward B. Vedder:
300 T. VENTURA

Let us suppose, for instance, that some serious disease such as cancer were caused by eating
white bread and that it could be entirely prevented by eating whole-wheat bread. How long
would it take us to change the habits of the entire people by a campaign of education and
induce them all to eat whole-wheat bread? Europeans and Americans are intelligent and are
not constitutionally opposed to a change of custom, yet it must be admitted that it would
require years to effect such a change, probably at least a decade.38

Focused on infantile beriberi, Philippine physicians pioneered ways to treat the disease
that did not entail dietary coercion or a radical restructuring of land and agriculture. The
pharmacists Manuel Zamora and Primo C. Arambulo began working with the thiamine-
rich rice hulls that millers sold as animal fodder. Reasoning that rice hulls and bran –
darak in Tagalog – contained the necessary element missing from milled white rice,
Zamora and Arambulo sought to turn milling by-products into a shelf-stable extract over
a decade before Donath and Jansen isolated thiamine from rice polishings in 1926.
Zamora developed his formula in 1909, basing the taste on vinegar made from calamansi,
a lime-like sour citrus fruit ubiquitous in Philippine cooking. He called the extract tiki-
tiki, Tagalog for rice bran. When offered to the ill, tiki-tiki reversed beriberi symptoms
within days. The New York based Parke Davis is alleged to have sought the rights to
Zamora’s formula. Zamora, however, refused.
Tiki-tiki’s distribution and marketing speaks to the technoscientific appeal of nation-
alism. Just as Zamora refused to sell his formula to an American firm, Arambulo equated
tiki-tiki as a route to national self-sufficiency. He was a charter member of the National
Economic Protection Association; his firm, Arambulo Products, Inc., competed against
major import firms for a share of the Philippine market. A later painting by Wilford Jan
C. Almoro of Emilio Aguinaldo on behalf of the Philippine Science Heritage Center
makes the nationalist appeal even more explicit. Resplendent in khaki uniform with the
sun of the national flag behind him like a halo, the first president of the Philippine
Republic and leader of the insurgent army lovingly cradles a bottle of tiki-tiki in his
gloved hands.39
Elite clubwomen and medical associations forged a welfare state around tiki-tiki. La
Liga de Proteccion and Gota de Leche distributed the tincture to nursing mothers. In 1914,
the Philippine Islands Medical Association (PIMA) passed a resolution ‘strongly recom-
mend[ing] the preparation of these extracts on a large scale by the Government of the
Philippine Islands and the free distribution in a way to facilitate their acquirement by the
public, especially for the poorer classes of the inhabitants of these Islands; that the
commercial manufacture of these extracts be so guarded, controlled, or licensed as to
insure their potency, purity, and safety’.40 The Philippine Legislature followed suit and
passed Bill No. 2376 in February 1914 providing 6000 pesos ‘for the preparation and free
distribution of the extract of tiki-tiki’.41
PIMA’s resolution contained a powerful vision of the state’s responsibility for public
welfare and commerce. In both of these things, the state was to be paramount. The state
was to shoulder the costs of the free distribution of tiki-tiki to the masses. By calling on
the state to license and inspect the private production of the extract, the PIMA resolution
also granted the state regulatory rights over the private commerce at least with regard to
public health. But rather than enforce a taste for undermilled rice, tiki-tiki supplemented
the thiamine missing from milled rice. In this sense, the method of intervention accom-
modated taste without addressing the high price of supplemental foods, consolidation of
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 301

landownership, and export agriculture. Tiki-tiki thus further allowed milled white rice to
become a national and nationalist food without challenging the political economy of the
country.
Tiki-tiki distribution took place against the backdrop of profound change in the
political relationship between the Philippines and the United States. Woodrow
Wilson’s 1912 election paved the way for ‘Filipinization’, the formal process by which
Filipinos replaced departing American bureaucrats. The pace of attrition was rapid.
Within six years, the percentage of Americans acting as civil servants declined from 29
percent to 6 percent. For the first time since 1900, Filipinos were a majority on the
presidentially appointed Philippine Commission. While the Democratic controlled US
Congress considered proposals for independence, former colonial officials organized a
retentionist lobby. Retentionists, including Heiser (now ‘Director of the East’ of the
Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Board), argued independence was at best
premature and at worst a backward slide to anarchy.42 This argument encouraged
Philippine bureaucrats to advance a Philippine-led social welfare state. In 1917, seven
years before the American Shepherd-Towner Act established maternal and child health
centers in the rural US, Philippine men and women created a network of semi-public
puericulture centers for the archipelago’s parturient women and their children. The
network’s distribution of tiki-tiki produced a noticeable reduction in beriberi-related
infant mortality. Puericulture, one Philippine health advocate noted at a 1924 conference
on child welfare, was ‘one of the cheapest as well as one of the most effective means of
reducing infant mortality and of raising the standard development of our children’.43
The worldwide depression and Second World War disrupted the nascent social
welfare state that nationalist elites had reclaimed from the United States. The Japanese
occupation collapsed the archipelago’s system of food provisioning. In Manila, residents
met their food needs by foraging in the bay for seafoods and sisid – rancid rice recovered
from sunken wrecks. By 1944, famine seized Manila, with the hungry dying in the streets
and the living survived on subsistence crops of kamote (sweet potato), kangkong (swamp
cabbage), and coconuts. The diet led to a spike in all forms of malnutrition.44 The
American experience of war, by contrast, paved the way for enrichment technologies
and the post-colonial career of Robert R. Williams.

Colonial expertise in the postwar era

Empire and the Second World War served Robert R. Williams well. Just two years out of
a degree from the University of Chicago, he arrived in the Philippines in 1910 – the
moment beriberi dominated Philippine and Euro-American research efforts. Edward B.
Vedder, the US Army physician convinced that public education about diet was impos-
sible, assigned Williams the task of distilling the qualities of Zamora’s tiki-tiki. Williams’
1961 memoir romanticized the Bureau’s ‘atmosphere as a most stimulating one’, allowing
for ‘collaborative studies . . . with kindred groups elsewhere in the Orient dedicated to the
welfare of tropical peoples and the development of a stronger economic life around
them’.45 ‘Kindred,’ in this instance, referred to the British and European physicians and
researchers who exchanged work through the FEATM, relegating Filipinos like Zamora
and Arambulo to a mass of indistinguishable ‘tropical peoples’. He continued his beriberi
302 T. VENTURA

work informally while employed as a chemist for Bell Laboratories when he synthesized
thiamine in 1936.
Williams had no formal connection to the developing field of nutrition in the 1930s
but he was very well integrated into the intellectual and social life of private professional
chemistry in the mid-twentieth century United States. He sold the rights to reproduce his
thiamine synthesis to the New Jersey based Hoffman La Roche and signed the proceeds
over to the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement (RCSA) for $1 (for reasons
discussed below). The RCSA then channeled the royalties into the Williams-Waterman
Fund for the Combat of Dietary Disease, the mission of which was to support ‘all such
activities as may be deemed useful in combating dietary diseases or other such conditions
relating thereto’.46 In practice this more narrowly meant financing the construction of
large-scale rice mills capable of fortifying rice using a ‘pre-mix’ made by Hoffman
LaRoche composed of thiamine, niacin, and iron. The W-WF would bestow over 300
grants amounting to three million dollars, financing the construction of mechanical rice
mills in nationalist China, New Zealand, Cuba, Chile, Haiti, India, Brazil, Guatemala,
South Africa, Argentina, Uganda, and Peru. In a circular manner, then, the W-WF
supported the overseas construction of mills that would ultimately increase the sale of
the source of its own funding – patented thiamine. Though profit would appear to be the
motive, it is incorrect to ascribe to either Williams or the W-WF a drive for personal
financial gain. As he would write, he arranged the patent so that ‘the manufacture and
sale of the vitamin should be conducted in a way to ensure that public ends would be
served’.47 The arrangement was part of his overall understanding of the relationship
between technology and development and the so-called division of the public and private
spheres.
In contrast to PIMA’s state-centric vision of development and research, Williams and
the RCSA saw government as a junior partner to private business and philanthropy.
Founded in 1912 by the inventor, environmentalist, and philanthropist Frederick
Gardner Cottrell, the RCSA was the second foundation in the United States. In the
interwar years it became commonplace for those funded by the RCSA to assign the
patents on their inventions back to the foundation. By this means, the RCSA grew
tremendously and shaped an understanding of private intellectual property intrinsic to
Williams’ approach to deficiency disease eradication. In a speech entitled ‘The Function
of Government in Research’, Williams distinguished between applied research for the
public good and research with the goal of invention. Government supported Agricultural
Experiment Stations, he argued, had an immediate and well-accepted benefit for the
public, which was ‘best served by its immediate transmission to everyone’.48 The benefits
of new inventions, by contrast, were not immediately clear, entailing more risk on the
part of the inventor, who, if successful, was inclined to keep the invention secret. Patents,
Williams argued, promoted invention and openness ‘by giving the inventor a temporary
monopoly in return for a full public disclosure on his part of the nature of his discovery
and how it may be practiced’. Government had no role in applied research with invention
as its prime objective: ‘Exclusive or restricted licensing of inventions to private enter-
prises is a virtually impossible policy for government because of the danger of public
corruption or the suspicion or accusation thereof’.49
Williams’ support for private intellectual property was part of his broader hostility to
government regulation. A fierce critic of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, he
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 303

wrote and spoke extensively about his fears that wartime trade regulations and worker
protections would not end with the war. Roosevelt’s inclusion of ‘freedom from want’ in
the Atlantic Charter was a stealth way of making the New Deal permanent but mis-
interpreted war’s origins. As Williams told an audience at the American Association for
the Advancement of Science in 1943, ‘Want did not cause this war. Governmental
domination of the personal lives of men did cause the war. For us to try to guarantee
freedom from want by governmental measures is to concentrate vast economic power in
government and to go over into the camp of the totalitarians whom we are fighting’.50
Yet just as his pre-war career was born of overseas empire, Williams’ postwar career
depended on American wartime power in three ways. First, Williams jumped from
private business and philanthropy back to government, serving on the War Foods
Administration (WFA). In 1943, the WFA’s order No. 1 mandated the use of vitamin-
fortified flours in bread production, the fulfillment of a voluntary campaign begun by the
American Medical Association’s Council on Food and Nutrition a decade earlier.
Though deficiency diseases were not widely prevalent in the United States, the AMA
cast enrichment as ‘insurance’ against the possibility of soldier and civilian disease;
vitamins a patriotic technology that would aid in the war effort.51 Second, and also in
1943, the member states of the new United Nations met in Hot Springs, VA to discuss
food and agriculture, resulting in the UN-Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
The FAO resuscitated the inter-imperial vision of deficiency disease eradication. Its
official report characterized malnutrition as the original sin of ill health, ‘responsible
for widespread impairment of human efficiency and for an enormous amount of ill health
and disease . . . ’.52 By framing malnutrition as the cause rather than the effect of poverty,
the FAO paved the way for programs that sought to supplement deficiencies. This did not
exclusively or even necessarily mean mandatory fortification. Wallace Aykroyd, who
served as Director of the FAO’s Nutrition Division favored local measures and public
popular education as the most important means of combatting deficiency disease.53 But,
and third, the war was a boon for the large-scale fortification technologies Williams
promoted through the W-WF.
The need to ship non-perishable and highly nutritious food to American troops and
refugees in the South Pacific led to improvements in rice fortification using patented
synthetic thiamine. The US Defense Plant Corporation financed the $750,000,000 cost of
the country’s first large rice mill designed to infuse the grain with Hoffman La Roche’s
premix. It did so using a process first developed by researchers at the University of
Arkansas’s agricultural experiment station in close consultation with Williams. The
process used pressurized machinery to vacuum air from the grain’s capillaries before
infusing it with the water-soluble pre-mix. Popularly known as the ‘conversion process’,
the method, according to the industry Rice Journal ‘in effect gives white rice the dietary
qualities of brown rice’.54 A thin adhesive film coating the grain to keep the premix
within also increased the rice’s shelf-stability and sensitivity to humidity, thus the grain
could withstand ‘long storage in hot and humid climates’.55 The adhesive did not change
the taste of enriched rice, but did give it a glossy sheen, making it easily identifiable when
mixed with un-enriched rice. Technology, for Williams, had finally caught up to the taste
preferences for white rice that American colonialists had found irrational in Filipinos.
Located in Houston, Texas, the first conversion mill operated on an economy of
scale not possible in rural Philippine provinces. The pressurized machinery
304 T. VENTURA

processed 20,000 tons of rice per batch. Consolidation of the milling industry
whether in the United States or abroad was a potential consequence of the technol-
ogy. American rice millers welcomed this consolidation, along with the potential to
sell converted rice abroad following the war. The Rice Journal stoked industry
expectations by framing post-war monsoon Asia as a tropic of malnourishment as
opposed to poverty. ‘It is believed’, wrote the Rice Journal, ‘that the people of India
are so poor that they are always on the point of starvation. Actually, the East
Indians generally have enough food but they suffer from vitamin deficiencies. East
Indians do not get enough green vegetables, and they have been eating more white
rice and white flour than is good for them’.56 The total availability of food was no
longer as important as the kind of available food.
As the war wound down, Williams tapped into a network spanning government,
private industry, and university research to take pre-mix rice and the conversion process
abroad. The Philippines were the first stop on what Williams envisioned as a global
endeavor. Williams framed his return to the Philippines as a way to finish the work he
had begun when the archipelago was a colony – ‘I am especially interested in the
Philippine situation because I began my work on beriberi in Manila and carried it on
there for six years’.57 But this was no simple act of giving back to the place that had
established his career. Rather, the past colonial relationship meant that records of
beriberi mortality were available in the US Library of Congress, allowing Williams to
statistically prove the benefits of enrichment to an audience that included the UN-FAO
and decolonizing governments. Further, Williams could make plans through American
personnel because the Philippines was transitioning from a US commonwealth to a
formally independent nation. He first contacted Paul V. McNutt, then the Federal
Security Administrator, who, at Williams’ request, put him in touch with ‘someone
who is high up in the councils of the Philippine Government’.58 McNutt directed
Williams to the American trained nutritionist, Dr. Juan Salcedo, Jr. Williams had in
fact already met Salcedo while both were at Columbia University – Williams as visiting
faculty and Salcedo as a graduate student.
Williams and Salcedo discussed what Williams called ‘rough plans’ for a ‘large-scale
demonstration in a selected area to prove that the enrichment of rice could be effected
and that, if it were, beriberi could thus be overcome in a practical sense’.59 Salcedo agreed
with the narrow lesson learned from colonial efforts to enforce a taste for undermilled or
brown rice. As he would write elsewhere:

The efforts of over one-half century along this line showed a series of dismal failures even
among armed forces personnel where dietary discipline could be possible. This observation
is hinged upon the Filipino’s desire for white rice, since the color, odor, taste, and consis-
tency of the preparation pleases him and provides the social prestige that goes with
consuming it.60

Through these two figures, the American and Philippine health technocracy once
again converged, albeit under changed circumstances. Just as post-war Japanese and
European decolonization elevated the global status of the United States, Williams
returned to the Philippines no longer a junior chemist working within a colonial
state but as a wealthy inventor, patent holder, and head of a non-profit. No longer
working within a colonial state also meant that Williams had to ‘pitch’ large-scale
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 305

industrial rice enrichment to Philippine political elites who themselves ‘turned to

the transformative potential of science and technology to fill out the contours of
imagined futures’.61 A second change refers to the status of tiki-tiki as a nationalist
and low-technology. Why wouldn’t Salcedo reject Williams’ enrichment project for
the nationalist distribution of tiki-tiki? One speculative answer may lie in the pre-
war success of puericulture and the war-time privatization of tiki-tiki. By limiting
the distribution of tiki-tiki to expectant and new mothers, the puericulture clinics
lent the tincture the appearance of an exclusively children’s supplement. When the
war shuttered the state clinics and private pharmacies stepped into the void, their
marketing campaigns further solidified the link between tiki-tiki and children.62
Post-war enrichment was meant to supplement adult diets. The independent nation,
so to speak, had come of age.
Williams and Salcedo set the rice enrichment project in Bataan precisely because the
post-war peninsula shared the features of un-freedom that structured pre-war work on
beriberi located in colonial prisons and institutions. Bataan was remote and mountai-
nous. Wartime destruction had left it with only one major road, the north-south Angeles-
Dinalupihan, which neatly divided Bataan east and west. If not necessarily confined in the
same manner of a prison, the mobility of Bataan’s residents was restricted. ‘Rice’, more-
over, ‘was not shipped by boat across Manila Bay so that a sentry on the road entering the
province from north could, with proper police authority, inspect all the rice that
entered’.63 Post-war Bataan also had a ‘uniformity of general economic and agricultural
conditions, rice self-sufficiency, and high beriberi rates’.64 In other words, Bataan’s land
tenure was such that its people grew rice but little else. As a result, beriberi was endemic
as witnessed by its high rate of infant mortality: ‘138 of a total of 164 who died in Bataan
in 1947 were infants’.65
Though officially called the Bataan Rice Enrichment Project, Williams consistently
called the project the ‘Bataan Experiment’ in his 1961 memoir. This slippage is no
accident. On the one hand, it recalls the confined populations on which nutritional
knowledge had been forged. On the other, it points to the novelty of what was happening
in Bataan. Rather than re-prove a well-established link between a monotonous white rice
diet and beriberi as colonial prison experiments had done, the Bataan ‘experiment’ tested
the efficacy of enrichment technologies in decolonizing Asia. Enrichment asked multiple
groups to do something new: millers had to purchase the vitamin premix and upgrade
their mills in order to perform the conversion process; consumers had to shoulder the
costs that would inevitably be passed on to them; governments had to pass and enforce
laws mandating fortification. In an era of post-war nationalism, enrichment also asked all
of these groups to invite the private pharmaceutical companies that manufactured and
sold the premix into their dietaries. The novelty of enrichment required a dramatic and
visible display. With the link between beriberi and milled white rice so well established,
the division of Bataan into ‘control’ and ‘experimental’ zones turned rates of beriberi into
a matter of which side of the highway one lived. Modernity, no less life and death, became
a literal line that one could cross.
The W-WF secured the participation of Bataan’s ‘experimental zone’ millers by
financing the cost of retrofitting rice mills and arranging for Hoffman LaRoche to provide
the premix at a steep discount. The project ensured that the cost of rice enrichment
passed down to the consumer was just one cent a ganta. According to Williams, the cost
306 T. VENTURA

‘had not been the subject of any complaint whatever’.66 Trained personnel capable of
distinguishing the enriched rice’s glossy sheen from unenriched polished rice conducted
periodic investigations in rice markets to guarantee the miller’s faithful participation.
The project necessarily brought Bataan’s residents into greater regular contact with
the national state. Salcedo, director of field operations, had his staff examine 22 percent of
the experimental zone’s residents and 2 out of the 5 control zone municipalities – about
2500 people – at the project’s outset and nine months later. Between 1947 and 1949,
clinicians resurveyed residents four times a year.
Helen B. Burch’s photographs of the Beriberi Survey Team at work offer a further
glimpse into the visual production of demonstration. Rather than submit residents to
quarterly blood testing in an indoor facility, the survey team worked outdoors in the
barangays of residents. The anachronistic pairing of large wooden desks against the
backdrop of nipa homes emphasized the modernity of the technocratic state aided by the
benevolence of private charity (see Figure 1). As anticipated, beriberi all but disappeared
in the experimental zone almost immediately. The control zone experienced a spike in
beriberi and infant mortality.67 Between the regular contact with clinical surveyors, the
visibility of the sentry on the Angeles- Dinalupihan dividing road, and the higher infant
mortality rate in the control zone, the Bataan project appears to have created a demand
for fortified rice. Control zone residents evaded the sentries to purchase the contraband
fortified rice. By 1949, ‘It became impossible because of public demand to continue the
exclusion of enriched rice from the control area’.68 ‘One could scarcely ask for better
evidence’ of success.69 Williams declared the project successful even before its comple-
tion, urging Puerto Rican authorities to pass mandatory rice enrichment laws in 1948
based on results in Bataan.70
The Bataan Rice Enrichment Project officially ended in 1949 as did the subsidies paid
to ensure the participation of rice millers. Between 1949 and 1951, Bataan’s municipa-
lities passed ordinances forbidding the sale of un-enriched rice. Within weeks, a depart-
ment of health inspection found that millers were adding premix to rice in amounts too
low to combat beriberi. Merchants were also importing cheaper un-enriched rice from
Pampanga, which did not have similar enrichment laws. Though Pampanga and Tarlac –
the rice bowl of the Philippines – had rates of beriberi comparable to Bataan, the
provinces’ rice mainly fed Manila. As Manila recovered from the war and the city’s
beriberi rates dropped, millers in Pampanga and Tarlac had little incentive to retrofit
mills. Beriberi retreated from the urban experience and became, for a time, a disease
limited to the countryside. The national government, meanwhile, declined requests to
fund the retrofitting due to its own lack of finance.
Other concerns hindered the program’s expansion. First, Filipino officials outside of
the health service appear to have been profoundly worried about the potential monopoly
of the premix on the part of Hoffman La Roche (which would soon merge with Pfeizer).
Williams’ role as a patent holder for synthetic thiamine also raised considerable ire. He
and Salcedo had to overcome ‘suspicion’ that they were ‘actuated by the profit motive’. In
response Williams shared the ‘disposition of the patents on thiamine. However, this
suspicion was to arise again and again in later years’. Even in 1961 he would write, it ‘may
still exist in the minds of some Filipinos’.71 Second, small provincial millers worried that
mandatory fortification would consolidate the industry. Enforcement and regulation of
enrichment laws would perhaps force millers to account for their total milling output,
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 307

leading to higher taxes. According to Williams’ memoir, provincial millers formed a

union/corporate association to resist enrichment.72
American rice millers welcomed the mandatory rice fortification laws abroad for
precisely the reasons Philippine millers resisted. Passage of these laws in the
Philippines as well as Puerto Rico meant potential new export markets for US millers
and possibly the growth of American tastes for rice. As the milling industry’s Rice Journal
wrote, ‘Rice conversion, a revolutionary method for processing rice, will not only give the
peoples of the world a more palatable and more healthful food, but in the United States it
may have an important effect on the growth of the rice industry’ by making ‘rice more
palatable and easier to cook’.73 It also saw potential to ‘revolutionize the milling of rice in
the Orient, and this would mean an important market for American manufacturers who
make machinery to be installed in new processing plants’.74
Yet the biggest obstacle to the global adoption of mandatory rice enrichment was a
lack of interest by the UN-FAO. In 1952, the organization sent a group to the Philippines
to ascertain the results of the Bataan Project with an eye toward urging other countries to
follow suit. But the final report was not favorable. Focused on Manila, which had begun
importing American canned foods and lowered its beriberi rates, the UN-FAO team
concluded that beriberi was dying out in the Philippines before the Bataan experiment
was underway. It also did not find enrichment economically feasible for all of Asia,
especially when cheaper, easier, and more practical measures existed. Parboiling rice,
cooking it in less water, or using leftover water for soup, the report held were teachable
and cheap methods that preserved thiamine in milled rice.75 It is possible that mass
enrichment was too high of a technology to be useful. Just as tiki-tiki was, for Philippine
physicians in the 1910s and 1920s a more feasible means to reduce infant death by
beriberi, so too did millers and others in the immediate postwar period reject mass
enrichment in favor of smaller, easier, and more affordable techniques.

Conclusion
Robert R. Williams’ long international career as a chemist, patent holder, and philanthro-
capitalist spanned the colonial and post-colonial eras. He expressed gratitude toward the
Philippines as the setting and inspiration for his pre-war research without acknowledging
the colonial state and war of occupation that placed him there or the tense politics of
colonial collaboration with Philippine doctors and inter-imperial networks that led
Americans to study beriberi with intensity after 1910. Williams filtered that experience
through the lens of mutual international cooperation between equals in the post-war
period. As he would recall, ‘My later success in determining the structure of vitamin B1
and producing it synthetically was an achievement in which Filipino scientists took a
certain national pride’.76 But this cooperation was and remained uneven.
Filipino national pride in Williams’ post-Philippine achievements did not translate
into Filipino national income, proprietary rights, or direct control over enrichment
programs. Williams alone held the patents to synthetic thiamine, which he shared with
Hoffman La Roche and Pfizer. That he channeled his potential personal earnings into the
non-profit Williams-Waterman Fund for the Combat of Dietary disease is not in dispute.
But forsaking personal profit for the public interest did not mitigate the act of privatiza-
tion. Rather, Williams’ patents bestowed him with the power to define the public good.
308 T. VENTURA

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he understood this good in terms indistinguishable from his

patents on thiamine and the pre-mix. His advocacy for mass rice enrichment with
thiamine reduced the more complex problem of food shortages into a shortage of a
particular aspect of food and openly disparaged the more comprehensive and varied
approach preferred by the FAO and the WHO. Unlike the pre-war period, Williams was
one actor in a world suffused with competing approaches to development.
His intellectual enclosure of synthetic thiamine was in keeping with the colonial
enclosures that contributed to the rising incidence, discovery, and treatment of beriberi
in the first place. The patent system also bestowed him with the power to sell knowledge
produced in tense collaboration with Filipino doctors and through countless experiments
with the diets of non-consenting prisoners, laborers, and soldiers. Patents privatized and
Americanized Philippine tragedy, child loss, and intellectual labor. Yet Williams could
not bend the post-war Philippines to his will. Rice enrichment faced multiple obstacles,
not the least of which was the resistance of small millers to regulation and public distrust
of private monopoly. The Bataan ‘mass feeding experiment’ temporarily overcame these
shortcomings by blending a methodology derived from colonial studies that worked with
non-consenting people who had limited to no choice about the source of their rice with a

FIGURE 1 ‘View of the Beriberi Survey Team of the Bataan Enriched Rice Project at Work, Bataan,
Philippines, ca. 1948’. Helen B. Burch Photographs, Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington
University School of Medicine, St. Louis.
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 309

new understanding of those people as citizen-consumers. While citizen-consumers

appreciated the benefits of enriched rice, millers, and Philippine government leaders,
along with the United Nations, remained deeply skeptical of the presence of pharma-
ceutical corporations in the daily dietary. For some at least independence and food
sovereignty were entangled, even if that meant slower progress on beriberi in areas
were the disease remained endemic.
Williams remained deeply embittered about his inability to turn the Bataan Rice
Enrichment Project into an international model for mandatory enrichment. He ascribed
the UN-FAO’s rejection of mandatory enrichment to ‘hostility to Americans on the part
of Europeans or hostility to Filipinos on the part of the other Asians’.77 Yet as US health
aims and aid programs became tethered to Cold War geopolitical imperatives, the
Filipino government became less free to reject US health and aid agreements mandating
that US companies supply the commodities necessary for technocratic projects. This
would especially be the case as American development experts in the late 1950s and 1960s
increasingly turned their attention to the rural countryside as the locus of Communist
insurgency. While beriberi’s disappearance from the city contributed to the waning
interest in mandatory enrichment in the immediate post-war period, beriberi’s persis-
tence in the country would lead to renewed enrichment programs alongside the
Rockefeller Foundation’s promotion of miracle rice. Aaron Moralina’s forthcoming
work on US health technocrats in the Philippines shows how the costs of American-
produced DDT, antibiotics, and other pharmaceuticals drained Philippine cash reserves
and stalled the development of a horizontal health service.78 Though the line from
colonial prison to postwar demonstration and enrichment technologies was hardly
straight or straightforward, Williams’ Bataan Rice Enrichment Project presaged elements
of the neocolonial technocracy to come.

Notes
1 Quiogue, “The Rice Enrichment Project in Bataan,” 1089.
2 Hardy, “Beriberi, Vitamin B1 and World Food Policy,” 61.
3 Worboys, “The Discovery of Colonial Malnutrition.”
4 Cullather, The Hungry World.
5 Cullather, “Miracles of Modernization,” 229.
6 Kumar, et al., “Roundatble,” 404.
7 Carpenter, Beriberi, White Rice, and Vitamin B.
8 Gregg, “Infantile Beriberi in the Philippines.”
9 In this sense, beriberi should be included in the pantheon of colonial labor diseases such as
sleeping sickness. See in brief, Webel, “Mapping the Infected Landscape.”
10 The term ‘political ecology’ comes from Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, who documents
how British policies and drought led to famine in South Asia. See too Vernon, Hunger: A
Modern History. On the rice trade and beriberi see Carpenter, Beriberi, White Rice, and
Vitamin B; Arnold, “Tropical Governance,” 7–9; Wickizer and Bennett, The Rice Economy
of Monsoon Asia; and Coclanis, “Southeast Asia’s Incorporation into the World Rice
Market.” On difficulties of quantification see Arnold, “Tropical Governance.”
11 Arnold, “Tropical Governance,” 7; Doeppers, Feeding Manila; and Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as
Self.
12 Arnold, “Tropical Governance,” 8.
13 Gelpke (1897) quoted in Williams, Toward the Conquest of Beriberi, 230.
310 T. VENTURA

14 Ileto, “Food Crisis During the Revolution”; Linn, The Philippine War; and on food supply in
Southwestern Luzon during the American War see Ileto, “Cholera and the Origins of the
American Sanitary Order.” On the Philippine rice trade and food generally see Doeppers,
Feeding Manila; on the Philippine Commission’s strategy of offering imported rice in
exchange for surrender see Ventura, “Medicalizing Gutom.”
15 De Bevoise, Agents of the Apocalypse, 135–6 and 140–1. See also McElhinny, “Kissing a Baby
is Not at All Good for Him,” 185. McLaughlin and Andrews, “Studies in Infant Mortality.”
Albert, “La Mortalidad infantile en Filipinas.”
16 Before the advent of hygienic bottle feeding and commercial infant formulas, infants raised
on non-human milks suffered a higher mortality due to gastrointestinal illness. Albert, “La
Mortalidad infantile.” This is also a line of advanced by De Bevoise, Agents of the Apocalypse,
135–6 and 141.
17 Aguilar, “Romancing Tropicality.”
18 Reyes, Love and Patriotism and “Science, Sex, and Superstition.” See also Mojares, Brains of
the Nation; Thomas, Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados; and Anderson and Pols,
“Scientific Patriotism.” On Spanish America see, in brief, Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature,
Empire, and Nation.
19 Albert, “La Mortalidad cited in a 1935 reprint of Albert,” 1. Albert roomed with José Rizal in
Europe while the latter was penning his incendiary anticolonial novel, Noli Me Tangere.
20 Hirota cited in Williams, 81. See also Bay, Beriberi in Modern Japan. On exchanges with
Germany see Parker, “Scientific Authority, Nationalism, and Colonial Entanglements.” On
the circulation and translation of medical texts see Cuerva, “Beriberi from a Historico-
Bibliographical Point of View.”
21 Musgrave and Richmond, ‘Infant Feeding and its Influence,” 364. On the political contest
over infant mortality in the colonial Philippines see Ventura, Empire Reformed (forth-
coming), chapter 5, “The Malnourished Tropics.”
22 Lasco, “Little Brown Brothers,” 377.
23 Anderson, Colonial Pathologies.
24 Highet, “Beriberi in Siam,” 75.
25 Strong and Crowell. “The Etiology of Beriberi,” 275.
26 Fraser and Stanton, “Studies from the Institute for Medical Research,” and “The Etiology of
Beriberi,” cited in Chamberlain, Bloombergh, and Kilbourne, “Rice Diet,” 199.
27 Kilbourn, “Food Salts in Relation to Beriberi,” 130.
28 The Philippine Journal of Science (1910) republished each FEATM paper on beriberi. Taken
as a whole, the papers demonstrate the breadth of communication across imperial bound-
aries and the importance of captivity to beriberi research. For instance, the Dutch physician
J. De Haan observed 24 separate outbreaks while inspecting sanitary conditions among
coalminers at Blinjoe. See, De Haan, “On the Etiology of Beriberi.” British physician
Campbell H. Highet noted that beriberi was rampant among prisoners in Siam’s Bangkok
central jail in 1890 and again among workers on the Koral Railway in 1896. See, Highet,
“Beriberi in Siam.” In the Federated Malay States, British researchers observed an outbreak
of among “Malays at the Kuala Lumpur police depot.” See, Fraser and Stanton, “The
Etiology of Beriberi,” 56. The American Edwin D. Kilbourne, meanwhile, estimated that
12 percent of Philippine Scouts, a native police force organized by the U.S. and widely hailed
as an exemplar of the American civilizing mission, had been treated for beriberi in 1908. See,
Kilbourne, “Food Salts in Relation to Beriberi.”
29 Clavin, “Defining Transnationalism,” 421–439; and Neil, Networks in Tropical Medicine.
30 Strong and Crowell, “The Etiology of Beriberi,” citing Fletcher (1909), 279.
31 Strong and Crowell, “The Etiology of Beriberi,” citing Ellis (1903), 280.
32 Vedder, “The Relation of Diet to Beriberi.”
33 Fraser and Stanton (1909) quoted in Strong and Crowell, “The Etiology of Beriberi,” 281.
34 See Strong and Crowell, “The Etiology of Beriberi.”
35 Arnold, “Tropical Governance.”
36 Heiser, “Practical Experiences with Beriberi.”
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 311

37 La Vanguardia, “Pinawa Rice.” 6 May 1911.

38 Vedder, Beriberi, 318. There seem to have been very few popular or public education
campaigns specifically on beriberi. Heiser spoke of a pamphlet called “Beriberi and How
to Prevent It” distributed in schools. Heiser, “Beriberi – An Additional Experience at
Culion.”
39 Vergara et al., Tiki-Tiki.
40 “Philippine Islands Medical Association.” Roces, “Filipino Elite Women.”
41 Albert, “Treatment of Infantile Beriberi,” 83.
42 Kramer, Blood of Government, 353–362. On Heiser and health-based arguments of reten-
tionists, Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, chapter 7.
43 Elicaño, “How to Organize and Operate a Puericulture Center,” 50.
44 Doeppers, Feeding Manila, 324.
45 Williams, Toward the Conquest of Beriberi, 95.
46 “Williams-Waterman Fund Agreement with the Research Corporation,” updated on 31
October 1946, RRW Papers, box 21, quotations 5–6.
47 Williams, Toward the Conquest of Beriberi, 171.
48 Williams, “The Function of Government in Research,” RRW Collection, Box 24: Speeches
and Articles by Year, Library of Congress, 1.
49 Williams, “The Function of Government in Research,” RRW Collection, Box 24: Speeches
and Articles by Year, Library of Congress, 1–2.
50 Williams, “Post War or More War,” RRW Collection, Box 24: Speeches and Articles by Year,
Library of Congress, 9–10.
51 Bishai and Nalubola. “The History of Food Fortification,” 42. Apple, “Vitamins win the
war.”
52 Report of the UN Conference on Food and Agriculture, Hot Springs, VA, May 18–3 June
1943.
53 Hardy, “Beriberi,” 65–6. In another example of structural planning Robert McCarrison
proposed that Britain solve malnutrition and unemployment by establishing “national
farms” worked by a “citizen army to meet, by the adequate production and distribution of
fresh vegetable foods, dairy, produce and eggs, the curse of preventable disease.” See
McCarrison, Nutrition and National Health, 66–7.
54 “The New Converted Rice Plant,” Reprint, 1.
55 Ibid., 7.
56 Ibid., 6.
57 Williams to Paul McNutt, 17 August 1945, Box 11: Subject Files: Rice Enrichment: May
1945-Feb 1946, Williams Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
58 Ibid.
59 Williams, Toward the Conquest of Beriberi, 190.
60 Salcedo, Jr., “Experience in the Etiology,” 573.
61 Krige and Wang, “Introduction,” 171.
62 A comprehensive history of Philippine pharmaceuticals and tiki-tiki remain to be written.
See Tan, Good Medicine.
63 Williams, Toward the Conquest of Beriberi, 193.
64 Quiogue, 1088.
65 Williams, Toward the Conquest of Beriberi, 194.
66 Williams, 13.
67 According to Quiogue, “Enriched rice had saved the lives of 111 people in one year” and
“220 people, mostly babies, in Bataan, even before the second year of enrichment was
completed.” See Quiogue, “The Rice Enrichment Project in Bataan,” 1091.
68 Williams, Toward the Conquest of Beriberi, 197.
69 Ibid., 13.
70 Gonzaelz, “Feeding the Colonial Subject.”
71 Williams, Toward the Conquest of Beriberi, 193.
72 Ibid., 204–206.
312 T. VENTURA

73 “The New Converted Rice Plant,” Reprint, 6.

74 Ibid.
75 Aykroyd and Burgess, “Note by the Nutrition Division of FAO.”
76 Williams, Toward the Conquest of Beriberi, 275.
77 Ibid., 202.
78 Moralina, “Technocrats in their Pristine Postcolony.” forthcoming PhD dissertation.

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Axel Jansen, John Krige, and Jessica Wang for organizing the workshop on
‘Empires of Knowledge’ at the University of British Columbia in September 2017; they, and fellow
participants, provided invaluable feedback. I am also indebted to Rachel Berger, Christopher
Capozzola, Adrian De Leon, Sarah Ghabrial, Ted McCormick, Katherine Lemons, Amy Offner,
Elena Razlogova, and the editors of History and Technology, particularly Tiago Saraiva, for
comments on various drafts. Aaron Moralina was an enthusiastic and sharp reader who graciously
shared his knowledge and work on postwar Philippine medical expertise.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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