RESEARCH
This project examines the racialized ecologies of biochemistry. Based on archival research in Malaysia, Singapore, and the UK, I discuss how the standardization of human nutritional health in the 1930s unfolded in British Malaya as a racialized metabolic drift (RMD). Specifically, I discuss how biochemistry rendered colonized populations as nutritionally and culturally dysfunctional and, through livestock breeding, soil fertilization, and mixed farming, attempted to rework local human-nonhuman assemblages as metabolic relations attuned to racial capitalism. As such, I show how human nutritional health, defined across various political and scientific scales, radically altered local ecologies in order to reproduce racialized articulations of life. I capture show how the RMD was effectively a colonial fantasy that was unable to grasp and contain the situated relations between life forms.