Stanton Hicks, Adelaide University physiology professor, transforms Australian army diet with a catering corps
Stanton Hicks and his 1972 book Who Called the Cook a Bastard? on his World War II experience in getting an Australian Army catering corps formed.
Stanton Hicks image courtesy Adelaide Camera Club
Cedric Stanton Hicks, Adelaide University professor of physiology and pharmacology 1927-58, is noted for studying nutrition in the Australian urban community and Aboriginal groups but most famously for promoting better eating in the Australian army.
From a New Zealand background of technical and academic achievement, including a masters of science and medical degree, he came to Adelaide University after earning a PhD at Cambridge University in 1926 for thyroid pathology fellowship research continued in Switzerland, Germany and the USA.
In 1925, Hicks won the Sheridan research fellowship and Marks lectureship in mammalian physiology at Adelaide University. In 1927, he was appointed to the new chair of physiology and pharmacology. Hicks bought and began restoring Woodley, his historic Adelaide home at Glen Osmond.
During the Depression, Adelaide University awarded him an medical doctorate in 1936 for his thesis on applying spectrophotometry “to biochemical, physiological and medico-legal problems”. Between 1926 and 1936, he made field trips to study the basal metabolism of indigenous Australians. This included travelling to Koonibba Mission Station in 1930 with a grant from the Rockefeller foundation, before going to Cockatoo Creek, Mount Liebig and Ernabella for Adelaide University’s board for anthropological research.
A member from 1936 of the commonwealth advisory council on nutrition (later, the nutrition committee of the national health and medical research council), he led surveys on the diets of Australian families including 500 families receiving relief in Adelaide.
In 1940, with a New Zealand military background, Hicks was appointed temporary captain in the Australian forces and was part-time catering supervisor for the 4th Military District, Adelaide. Transferred to army headquarters, Melbourne, as chief inspector of catering, Hicks pushed for scientific principles to feeding troops.
His persistence overcame strong resistance in 1943 when the Australian Army catering corps was formed. Hicks was first director of the corps that, by the World War II’s end, had 17,000 officers and soldiers. Hicks altered military rations based on nutrients, improved pay and promotion of cooks, started schools of cooking and catering, devised methods for preparing food, supported adopting the Wiles steam cooker, and designed jungle-patrol, emergency and air-drop rations.
Hicks's initiatives led to a dramatic cut in wastage. In 1944, he visited Britain and the USA to promote his ideas and the Australian army retained him as a scientific food consultant after the war. In 1953, Hicks authored an organ farming book From the Soil with colonel H. F. White.
Hicks was president (1958-65) of the South Australian tuberculosis association. He analysed the merits of fluoridation, investigated biological approaches to producing food and took a close interest in land reform in Italy.