Consider the Coconut: Scientific Agriculture and the Racialization of Risk in the American Colonial Philippines

Abstract

Perhaps no commodity better conjures the tropical imaginary than the coconut. Whether depicted in postcards of tree-lined beaches or featured in rum-based drinks, the stone fruit signifies a life of ease and splendour in equatorial climes. The more recent embrace of low-carb and high-fat diets, however, elevated coconut oil to the pantheon of "superfoods"-fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins hailed not just for their nutritive content but as aids to weight loss, disease prevention, and healing. In five printings between 1999 and 2013, Bruce Fife's The Coconut Oil Miracle deemed it "the premier dietary fat of all time." 1 Cherie and John Calbom's The Coconut Diet (2005) touted coconut oil's ability to make the consumer feel "Healthy, trim, energetic, and alive!" during a three-week journey "to a slimmer you." 2 For proof of coconut oil's enduring goodness, Fife pointed to "the natives who inhabit the islands of the South Pacific." "These people in their tropical paradise," he informed his readers, "enjoy a remarkable degree of good health, relatively free from the aches and pains of degenerative disease that plague most of the rest of the world." 3 Likewise, the Calboms held the pre-World War II Pacific, in which "people who ate traditional foods in countries such as the Philippines were rarely sick or overweight," as evidence of the coconut's healing power. 4 Such claims launched a coconut cottage industry in which diet gurus and web-based influencers offered coconut oil supplements and extrarefined cold-pressed virgin coconut oil as an alternative to soy and canola oils. The coconut craze quickly extended beyond oil to include coconut flour pounded from the dried meat as a high-fiber, gluten-free alternative to wheat flour; coconut sugar 38 Worcester, "Coconut Growing in the Philippines." 39 Worcester, "Coconut Growing in the Philippines," 3.