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.

中文翻译：

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为什么有些美食不旅行？描绘棕榈油从西非主食到马来亚化学品的历程

本研究以食物为视角审视三种历史现象：全球化的局限、以种植园为中心的单一文化的兴起，以及移民社会中社会规范的复原力。这篇文章仔细研究了西非油棕最初的旅程，以及马来半岛的接待，马来半岛是 20 世纪末世界上最大的棕榈油出口国之一。这篇文章特别关注了两次世界大战期间作物对食物价值的感知变化，这是早期学术忽视的一个方面。马来亚五个不同的移民群体——种植户、亚洲厨师、殖民官员、政府化学家和地产工人——在将棕榈油转变为纯粹用于工业目的而非维持生计的作物方面发挥了关键作用。