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The Foreign Policy of the Calorie
NICK CULLATHER
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A too naïve theory used to prevail for explaining regeneration
through food. The human system was thought of as an engine,
and you kept it stoked with foods to produce energy.
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| Irma S. Rombauer and Marion
Rombauer Becker, Joy of Cooking (1975) |
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In Super Size Me
, his documentary on the fast-food industry, Morgan Spurlock asks
ninth-graders in Brooklyn, West Virginia, to define a calorie. A
few shake their heads, but most gamely guess that it has something
to do with fat. "It's something you should count," one advises.
"It's on the side of the cereal box," explains another. The adults
interviewed fare little better. "Calories are not good," one man
knows for sure. Even the specialist who finally has an answer studies
the ceiling for a minute before recalling that a calorie is a measure
of the energy content of food, an amount sufficient to raise the
temperature of one kilogram of water one degree. One might try the
same experiment with other numerical yardsticks used to gauge individual
or social well-being—GNP, T-cell counts, or crime rates—and
find a similar cultural lost-wax process: the soft material of objective
measurement falls away, leaving a subjective impression on the things
measured. The ninth-graders had fully absorbed the governmentality
of the calorie; they understood that it patterns food with particular
obligations, aesthetic and hygienic norms, and techniques of management.
Knowing too much about an indicator's original purpose, or what
it actually records, might only diminish its authority.
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In the first half of the twentieth
century, the arithmetic of standards of living, revenues, education,
and population gained significance in assessments of the relative
status of states and empires. As doctrines of development first
began to inform the practice of international relations, numerical
indicators prepared the way, jumping linguistic boundaries and displacing
local knowledge and native informants. The empiricism of states
and international institutions, Timothy Mitchell contends, acquired
a "character of calculability" that mediated between material realities
and the abstractions of science and politics. Neither constructed
nor imagined but fabricated from a mix of cultural and material
ingredients, numerical indicators were tangible enough to mold facts.
They were the conceptual components of a new realism in international
affairs.
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Historians and theorists of foreign
relations often associate number with explanatory rigor. Although
E. H. Carr, Hans J. Morgenthau, Charles Beard, and other founders
cautioned against scientism, realist and revisionist historiographies
grew to recognize quantifiable material factors as the constituents
of international reality, exercising, according to Jeffrey W. Legro
and Andrew Moravcsik, "an exogenous influence on state behavior
no matter what states seek, believe, or construct." More recently,
scholars have employed measurability to distinguish between established
analytic methods and cultural or "constructivist" approaches bidding
for scholarly credibility. The history of the calorie suggests a
few of the problems with this distinction. As Spurlock's ninth-graders
revealed, supposedly "hard" data came laden with presuppositions
that were cultural but not superficial. In the early part of the
twentieth century, "food" lost its subjective, cultural character
and evolved into a material instrument of statecraft. To do so,
it had to be quantifiable, but its numerical index also had to be
furnished with a suitable context of goals, analogies, and claims.
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Although few statistical measures
seem more innocuous, the calorie has never been a neutral, objective
measure of the contents of a dinner plate. From the first, its purpose
was to render food, and the eating habits of populations, politically
legible. In this sense it was one of the lesser tools facilitating
a widening of the state's supervision of the welfare and conduct
of whole populations that has been referred to in different contexts
as state building, modernism, or regulating the social. It was also
instrumental in a transformation in the ethics of hunger identified
by James Vernon in an earlier issue of this journal: to be defined
as a social problem, hunger had first to be precisely quantified.
The calorie was also a technology for classifying food within the
inventory of resources (the "standing reserve") at the disposal
of the state. As such, it had a part in an evolving developmental
discourse that registered the requirements and aspirations of nations
largely in numerical terms.
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Europeans first measured food in
calories, but Americans constructed the calorie by giving it practical
value, standardizing it and embedding it in systems of distribution
and administration. It was in the United States that the calorie
left its most visible imprint on foreign policy. It popularized
and factualized a set of assumptions that allowed Americans to see
food as an instrument of power, and to envisage a "world food problem"
amenable to political and scientific intervention. In 1974, J. George
Harrar, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, maintained that
the discovery of the calorie had led directly to an "informal alliance"
of "scientists, farmers, government agencies, educators, and processors"
working to eliminate famine worldwide. A closer examination of the
calorie's early years, however, shows that the path from knowledge
to organization was not quite so straightforward. Scientific food
measurement authorized and guided a succession of different schemes
of food management. The U.S. government first employed the calorie
during the Progressive Era, as a gauge of social and industrial
efficiency. It was adopted by military planners to marshal scarce
resources during World War I, and was disseminated along with relief
supplies to stricken areas of Europe. In the interwar years, numeration
opened the way for competing imperial, autarkic, and internationalist
food regimes, each applying quantitative logic toward different
ends. The current world pattern of humanitarianism, exchange, and
subsidized dumping began to emerge only after the Anglo-American
allies recaptured the calorie among the spoils of World War II.
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Today, the problem of "world hunger"
is characterized by a style of calculability that assigns reciprocal
routines and obligations to national governments and the international
community. Topping the list of the United Nations' Millennium Development
Goals is the commitment to "halve, by the year 2015, the proportion
of the world's people who suffer from hunger." The UN World Food
Programme (WFP) marks progress on its website with an "interactive
hunger map" on which the outlines of the caloric deficit align with
national frontiers; hungry nations are marked in bright red, while
cooler shades of blue and green indicate progressive degrees of
satiety. The image sharpens the juxtaposition of surplus and dearth,
visually conveying a reproof familiar to youngsters of a certain
generation: "Clean your plate; there are starving children in China."
This understanding of the reciprocity of abundance and shortage
rests on a claim that "food" has a uniform meaning in green nations
and red nations and a standard value that can be tabulated as easily
as currency or petroleum. The calorie represents the sum of these
assumptions.
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The work of rendering food
into hard figures began just after breakfast on Monday, March 23,
1896, when Wilbur O. Atwater sealed a graduate student into an airtight
chamber in the basement of Judd Hall on the Wesleyan University
campus. The apparatus was described by the press as resembling a
meat locker, a room "about as large as an ordinary convict's cell"
lined with copper and zinc, its interior visible through a triple-paned
glass aperture. Its occupant, A. W. Smith, took measured quantities
of bread, baked beans, Hamburg steak, milk, and mashed potatoes
through an airlock during rest periods, which alternated with intervals
of weightlifting and mental exertion, "studying German treatises
on physics and the like." Meanwhile, thermometers, hygrometers,
and electrically powered condensers, pumps, and fans precisely measured
the movement of heat, air, and matter into and out of the chamber.
Smith was inside a calorimeter, a device previously used to measure
the combustive efficiency of explosives and engines. It recorded
his food intake and labor output in units of thermal energy.
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The national penny press found a
Chekhovian parable in the "Wesleyan glass cage," printing "sensational"
and "wholly imaginary" reports on the voluntary captivity of Smith,
alternately described as "the man in the box" and "the prisoner
of science." On the second day of the experiment, Atwater had to
turn away a young New York woman who appeared at the lab asking
to be allowed to take Smith's place in the chamber, but despite
distractions, the calorimeter's first run was an enormous success,
generating pages of data and a $10,000 congressional appropriation.
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) built a copy of Atwater's device
in Washington, D.C., and Francis Benedict, another of Atwater's
students, persuaded the Carnegie Institute to construct a larger
and more elaborate version at Harvard University.
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Subsequent experiments attracted
equally keen interest. Atwater invited champion cyclist Nat Butler
into the calorimeter to establish "how far a man ought to ride a
bicycle on one egg." Wesleyan's football captain volunteered to
take his French final inside to help determine the quantum of heat
generated by an hour of cogitation. But it was the statistical results
issuing from Middletown after 1899—tables that assigned calorie
counts to specific foods and tasks—that stirred up national
controversy and made Atwater a household name. Clergymen applauded
his discovery that the body created in the divine image produced
energy more efficiently than a locomotive. The Women's Christian
Temperance Union organized an anti-Atwater campaign when he confirmed—by
sustaining a test subject for six days on a diet "largely composed
of alcohol"—that liquor was a food. But most sensational of
all was Atwater's pronouncement that mathematical laws governed
the ordinary act of eating.
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Figure
1: "An instrument as delicate and sensitive as the
nerves of the human body." Atwater's experiments with
men sealed inside the respiration calorimeter captivated
the national press. Wesleyan University Archives,
Special Collections.
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As federal officials recognized,
the calorimeter had ramifications for the management of factories,
prisons, and schools, as well as the provisioning of armies. It
could reduce the cost of rations, and test their suitability for
the tropics and for varying conditions of work. Atwater expected
an even greater benefit. For the first time, scientists would be
able to make precise comparisons between the diets of different
social classes and nations. Excusing himself from negotiations with
Japan in November 1908, Secretary of State Elihu Root traveled to
Boston for the "express purpose" of seeing the Carnegie calorimeter,
proclaiming it an "invaluable invention." Journalists anticipated
that its greatest impact would be on the "Asiatic races," whose
improvement could begin once their diet was brought up to an American
standard. Economic and social progress in Asia would have to await
nutritional progress, the Review of Reviews observed, since
"what can we expect either of physical or moral vigor from communities
who live on the physical plane of millions in the Orient?" With
a numerical gauge, Americans could begin to imagine the influence
to be gained by manipulating the diets of distant peoples. The calorie,
Atwater declared, would determine the "food supply of the future."
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As Atwater's invention came into
use as an international measure of food value in the early twentieth
century, a number of important claims and metaphors gained acceptance
with it, constituting a scientifically authorized, "realistic" view
of the international food regime. These included a conviction that
food was uniform and comparable between nations and time periods;
that the state had an obligation to ensure a "balance" between the
supply of food and the dietary needs of the nation; that wheat was
uniquely important as an international conveyor of bulk food value;
and that the interests of world peace might ultimately require a
global food balance rationalized through some form of international
regulation. At the time, these ideas did not constitute a policy
but only a direction for policy, a notion of which way progress
was headed and where the United States could lead.
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Official enthusiasm for Atwater's
experiments indicated the degree to which the need for an index
of food consumption had already been recognized. Before the invention
of a quantitative measure, it was difficult to speak of food in
competitive, evolutionary terms, or to foresee the direction that
improvements might take. While mechanical efficiency could be measured
by mechanical means, no scale had yet been devised to assess human
fuel. Notions of efficiency applied only loosely to agriculture—which
relied on uncontrolled inputs, such as sunshine and rainfall—and
even less to cooking or eating. The "science" of nutrition was largely
the domain of vegetarians and iconoclasts, such as Horace Fletcher
and John Harvey Kellogg, who judged diet by moral and aesthetic
criteria rather than the objective, numerical standards of an industrial
age. The son of a Methodist minister, Atwater began his nutritional
research at Yale in this vein, but graduate work in Berlin and Leipzig
introduced him to the chemical and physiological studies of Carl
von Voit and Ludwig Max Rubner in Germany and Armand Gautier in
Paris. The handful of biochemists conducting dietary observations
in Europe in the 1880s formed a scientific avant-garde, working
with little official support in the face of skepticism from leading
biologists and physicians, but Atwater, on returning to the United
States, found industrialists, universities, and state and federal
governments eager to fund nutritional research.
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Atwater framed his investigations
as a tool of "scientific management," allied with Frederick Winslow
Taylor's efforts to resolve industrial unrest through the methodical
study of time and motion. In strike actions and congressional debates,
representatives of labor argued for leisure, meat, and bread as
matters of justice, but scientific reformers presented them instead
as issues of efficiency and cost. Proceeding from a Taylorist conception
of a mechanomorphic body, Atwater led an effort by manufacturers,
municipalities, and the federal government to set scientific "standards
of living" that could be used to contain wage levels while maintaining
a healthy, contented workforce. Between 1885, when he designed the
first survey of factory workers in Massachusetts, and 1910, nutritionists
conducted more than five hundred investigations of the eating habits
of inhabitants of slums, boarding schools, Indian reservations,
Chinese railroad camps, and Georgia plantations, but researchers
were unsatisfied with their findings. Predictably, unions and individual
subjects resisted efforts to locate their wage floor. More disturbing,
the growing pile of surveys documented an almost unclassifiable
diversity of food customs, yielding data that only complicated the
reformist argument for enforcing norms. Atwater, in collaboration
with Rubner and Gautier, began investigating a system for rendering
food and labor into thermal units.
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The necessity of a standard gauge
was evident at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Among the
least visited but most impressive exhibits was the Agricultural
Building, a glass-domed arcade housing nineteen acres of distinctive
foods—French cheeses, Indian curries, Javanese coffees, Greek
oils, and an eleven-foot statue of Germania carved from a solid
block of chocolate. "In walking through the corridors of this Agricultural
Building, the earth and its nations seem drawn up for martial review,"
commented one juror. "The history of the older nations, the customs
of the new, the social status of all, are revealed." But the terms
of comparison were unclear. Although care was taken to impose a
taxonomic order, the effect on the viewer was of a culinary Babel.
Mechanical displays excited "wonder and admiration" for being "more
typical of the genius of America," a reporter noted, but the Agricultural
Building was more apt to evoke "a strain of idealistic poetry."
The raw variety of comestibles impelled exhibitors to identify underlying
principles supporting claims to advancement. The United States backed
its displays with statistical charts showing the volume of grain
production, while France mounted diagrams tracking the price of
bread from 1830 to 1891, and Ceylon illustrated its share of Asian
and European tea markets. At Chicago, "the line of triangulation
into the future," Henry Adams observed, was measured in units of
"power, tonnage, and speed," but in the Agricultural Building the
heterogeneity of flavor, color, and custom simply yielded to an
equally ambiguous surfeit of numbers.
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This metrical handicap excluded food
from the turn toward statistical reasoning that was altering social
debate in the United States. Americans increasingly digested information
in numerical form. In 1898, the U.S. Bureau of Statistics reformatted
its publications to increase their influence and circulation; instead
of annual compilations, it issued weekly bulletins containing the
latest figures. The Census Bureau followed suit, issuing serialized
dispatches highlighting correlations culled from its decennial reports.
Official figures only augmented a growing stream of private data.
The public learned the risks of accident, typhoid, and homicide
from monthly actuarial digests issued by insurance companies. After
1905, gamblers judged horses by the statistical portents in the
Daily Racing Form, and baseball fans sized up hitters by
the tables in The Sporting News. Newspapers published an
avalanche of statistics evaluating business acumen by quarterly
earnings, literature by copies sold, and drama by the number of
weeks on Broadway. Historians have described the metric revolution
nurtured by the great European bureaux statistiques in the
nineteenth century, but to contemporary observers in the twentieth,
this shift toward mass consumption of statistics appeared to be
a new and not altogether positive development.
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Numerical expression fostered an
altered worldview both more definite about solutions to complex
problems and more attuned to indicators of rising and falling fortunes,
especially among nations. Moral and legal argument had lost authority,
Princeton historian Winthrop More Daniels remarked in 1902: "today
the man of average intelligence ... has in his mental make-up a
numerical frame-work, more or less exact, in which unconsciously
the main facts of political and economic geography comfortably pigeonhole
themselves." Instead of holding a fixed place in a hierarchy of
inherently dissimilar races and nations, Americans could track their
country's movement along a sliding scale of humanity on any number
of axes of advancement. Carroll D. Wright, a Labor Department statistician,
noted that "it is nothing rare for a public man to ask an official
statistician to give him offhand the average wages paid in the United
States or the wages paid in half a dozen designated countries, or
to state in a few lines the criminal conditions or ... the cost
of producing various articles in different countries." Official
discourse consisted in such comparisons, which defined problems
and indicated the urgency of commercial and military threats. Many
observers considered such quantitative reasoning a modern and distinctly
American trait. "If the English are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans
are a nation of expert accountants," critic and playwright Eugene
Richard White observed. "We go about reforming and purifying the
world with a committee report at elbow and a statistical compilation
in each hand."
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The calorimeter thus translated the
vernacular customs of food into the numerical language of empire.
Atwater revolutionized nutritional science, as historian Hillel
Schwartz observes, by theorizing food "without reference to taste,
ethnic tradition, or social context," but he changed his field in
other ways, too. Under his direction, the discipline of nutrition
left its descriptive, reformist roots and became a quantitative,
technocratic specialization. Where diet experts had formerly directed
advice at individual patients, they now studied whole populations
at the behest of the state. Their terms of analysis adapted to the
new calculative logic; the critique of working-class diets receded,
and the notion of an "American diet" to be compared with other national
diets assumed prominence. The calorie lent food a conceptual coherence
and established boundaries and hierarchies that defined it as a
social object. Atwater's schedules ranked grain, meat, and dairy
goods as important national resources, while fruits, leafy vegetables,
and fish registered such slight nutritional value that they could
scarcely be classified as food. Tea, coffee, and spices, on which
whole imperial systems had once flourished, had no value at all.
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The calorie represented food as uniform,
composed of interchangeable parts, and comparable across time and
between nations and races. In 1911, C. F. Langworthy, who succeeded
Atwater as the head of nutrition investigations at USDA, compiled
surveys undertaken by missionaries and ethnographers into a ranked
list of the peoples of "each country and each epoch" on a scale
of daily caloric consumption, with the "native laborer" of the Congo
at the bottom (2,812 calories) and the American athlete at the top
(4,510 calories). Challenging dietary theories of racial difference,
Langworthy stressed that the human diet was far less diverse than
had formerly been thought. Broken down into chemicals, the potatoes
and cheese that fed the Irish laborer were identical, except in
quantity, to the rice and ghee that nourished an Indian coolie.
The central component in every diet was nitrogen, the element that
lent "energy value" to meat, milk, and wheat. The thermodynamic
theory of nutrition superseded whole systems of colonial knowledge
of "useful plants," native diets, and the "seasoning" of Europeans
in the tropics. Langworthy could also reassure Americans that their
nitrogen-rich diet constituted the "finest food supply of any country
in the world."
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Treating societies as closed systems,
nutritionists suggested that a "physiological economy" of food governed
institutions and nations, and that "scientific eating" based on
caloric "bookkeeping" would increase national efficiency. Langworthy
and Atwater identified "balance" as characteristic of a progressive
diet, and enumerated several ways that personal and market behavior
could be modified to square the food ledger: individuals should
balance physical exertion and caloric consumption; meals should
balance luxury proteins against necessary carbohydrates; and economic
policies should match supplies, on the basis of calories, to the
specific requirements of populations. As a measure of optimization,
the calorie represented a significant advance over the kinds of
statistics used since the eighteenth century. Officials had studied
tables of tax receipts, birth rates, harvests, mortality, and crime
to discover natural laws and constants in human behavior that would
serve as foundations for policy, but the calorie revealed a wide
discrepancy between "natural" behavior and the ideal balance that
might be achieved through social regulation. As Atwater and Langworthy
never tired of pointing out, people of all classes and educations
ate the wrong things in the wrong amounts, and neither the appetite
nor the market could accurately assess needs. So while nineteenth-century
statistics guided and limited the state, the calorie prefigured
the use of gross national products, poverty rates, intelligence
quotients, and the panoply of indices that in the twentieth century
authorized government to tell people what was best for them.
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Figure
2: Advertisers exploited the calorie's ability to
present scientific comparisons between dissimilar
foods. Nutritionists also used it to compare national
diets. Washington Post, July 25, 1903, 2; Los
Angeles Times, August 16, 1915, ii2.
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Calories presented a thin simplification
of nutrition better suited to gauging large populations than to
guiding personal eating habits, as physicians repeatedly pointed
out. In 1917, the American Medical Association warned against the
"unwise domination" of the calorie in the popular mind, but its
use persisted through the enthusiasm of advertisers, who emblazoned
calorie counts on cereal boxes and instructed consumers that "calories
measure food energy the same as dollars measure money." The federal
government also eagerly seized upon the calorie to fill an urgent
need for statistical information on food. After war broke out in
Europe, speculative runs on commodities and food panics in major
U.S. cities revealed the inadequacy of both the market mechanism
and official knowledge. The agriculture department needed to balance
Europe's requirements against the danger of domestic scarcity, but,
the secretary admitted to congressional investigators, "where the
food supply is located, who owns it, what may be the difficulties
of securing it, whether the local market conditions are due to shortage,
whether there can be artificial manipulation or control, no one
can state with certainty." Combined with censuses, caloric tables
could be used to estimate rations for cities, armies, or even nations.
Military rather than hygienic necessity made the calorie an international
standard measure of food.
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Under pressure of war, the successful
marshaling of food consumption and production became a state responsibility.
American observers paid anxious attention to the warring powers'
use of blockades to starve their adversaries to defeat. Correspondents
assessed the offerings of restaurants and meat markets and the caloric
content of soldiers' rations. The New York Times suggested
that Germany, with its ports sealed, represented a closed chamber
within which national energy and food production would have to balance.
When a group of American engineers organized a massive food drive
for occupied Belgium, they turned to the new "science of dietetics,"
which, having been rescued from "the hands of vegetarians and other
extremists, seem[ed] at last to have arrived upon solid ground."
The commission calculated purchases and rations on the basis of
calories, which it considered "almost the only thing to be considered"
in managing famine relief. As U.S. supplies became critical on both
sides of the Western Front, Europeans learned to calculate food
by American numbers.
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In the United States, mobilization
for war began in 1917 when President Woodrow Wilson created a national
food authority under the leadership of Herbert Hoover, a mining
engineer and chief organizer of the Belgium relief. From his headquarters
in the Willard Hotel, Hoover launched a drive to conserve sugar,
fats, and grain for export to the front. Administrators took immediate
steps to expand the cultivation of wheat, "by far" the most essential
commodity because of its portability, abundance, and destabilizing
potential. Dry, compact, and calorie-dense, wheat could "stand shipment"
better than other staples. Despite a poor 1917 crop, "our stock
of wheat offered the largest supply of calories available from any
single raw food material," officials noted. More importantly, riots
in American cities and Hoover's own experience in Belgium confirmed
that shortages of bread led to unrest. The "industrial classes"
valued wheat as an affordable luxury, and consequently "bread affects
the morale of a people more quickly than any other food." European
governments had long recognized this requirement for domestic order,
but Hoover stressed its symbolic and practical ramifications for
U.S. strategy. In the midst of war, he told his staff, "the wheat
loaf has ascended in the imagination of men, women, and children
as the emblem of national survival and national tranquility."
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In Hoover's view, the net outflow
of 20 million bushels would leave a morale deficit in the United
States that could be filled only by social discipline. Over the
heads of striking farmers and protesting bakers, Hoover appealed
to his "police force—the American woman" to enforce wheatless
Wednesdays and flourless "victory meals." As an instructional tool,
the calorie was indispensable for setting rations, identifying substitutes,
and defining the patriotic self-control expected of citizens. "You
should know and also use the word calorie as frequently, or more
frequently, than you use the words foot, yard, quart, [or] gallon,"
instructed one guidebook, "Instead of saying one slice of bread,
or a piece of pie, you will say 100 calories of bread, 350 calories
of pie." Consuming surplus calories amounted to "overeating," which
sapped personal and national efficiency. Manhattan restaurants helpfully
listed calorie counts next to each item along with the recommended
totals for each "walk of life."
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The conscription of individual appetites
disturbed conventional distinctions between public duty and personal
conduct. Leading churchman Lyman Abbot disparaged calorie counting
as "spiritual hypochondria," while another critic wistfully recalled
days when "the highest science known to eating was to be able to
balance green peas on a knife." Hoover deployed "higher mathematics
... to order your lives and grub." An unnamed Philadelphia poet
lampooned the specter Hoovering over every American hearth: "An'
all us other children when our scanty meal is done, / We gather
round the fire and has the mostest fun / A-listnin' to the proteins
that Herbie tells about / An' the Calories that git you ef you don't
watch out!"
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Figure
3: "We dominated central and southeastern Europe,"
an ARA official boasted. Polish children await handouts
in 1919. Hoover Library, West Branch, Iowa.
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Historians have described the enduring
effect that war rationing had on perceptions of diet and body image,
and social theorists have associated the emergence of modern sovereignty
with a move from "wholesale" methods of policing to "retail" forms
in which individuals internalize state demands as rules of personal
behavior. Hoover summed up the point in the slogan "Centralize ideas
but decentralize execution." He stressed an intimate connection
between the "test" of bodily discipline and the trials that would
face the nation during the war emergency and after. Personal dietary
sacrifice indicated the United States' arrival at a "stage of development"
at which it was prepared to "protect its own institutions and those
of Europe." Russia had never attained that stage, he argued, "and
the result has been a massacre." He urged Americans to seek "victory
over ourselves; victory over the enemy of freedom."
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Hoover defined food as both a core
vulnerability in the international order and an instrument of U.S.
influence. Experts from the United States Food Administration created
a ledger of global food resources and caloric requirements, and
shortly before the armistice, Hoover informed Wilson that the United
States would have to undertake relief efforts in forty-five nations
"if we are to preserve these countries from Bolshevism and rank
anarchy." Britain and France continued the blockade after the armistice,
but U.S. officials, with Hoover in the lead, pressured them to lift
it. The new American Relief Administration (ARA) then poured food
through every German port. It took control of telegraph, treasuries,
and transport. "In this crisis, we dominated central and southeastern
Europe," an ARA official observed. "Our problem was to feed and
rehabilitate countries inhabited by eighty-five million people."
Allied and enemy governments received aid on equal terms, and the
ARA even dealt with Bela Kun's Soviet regime in Hungary while conspiring
to overthrow it. Distinctions between allies and enemies offered
only temporary security, Hoover insisted; ultimately, resources
and distribution would make the difference between war and peace,
order and revolution.
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In defining security, Hoover rejected
traditional balance-of-power concerns as well as Wilson's emphasis
on international law and world opinion. Among the earliest and most
forceful proponents of a novel strategic concept that linked security
to social welfare, he located the germ of future wars in reaction
and revolution incubated by scarcity. Material abundance bred stability,
he argued, but "famine breeds anarchy. Anarchy is infectious, the
infections of such a cess-pool will jeopardize France and Britain,
[and] will yet spread to the United States." Hunger and unemployment
"will not be cured at all by law or by legalistic processes," he
warned, nor by nationalism or Bolshevism, although desperate populations
would take up radical creeds. To forestall war, he believed, the
United States would have to provide, in example and theory, an alternative
route to progress, a progress measured in standards of living.
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Hoover disdained the "indescribable
malignity" of Paris, often feeling alone in his conviction that
safety could not be ensured by treaties, plebiscites, or border
adjustments, but influential delegates, including leading socialists
and members of inter-Allied mobilization councils, shared his hope
for a peace based on managed social and economic amelioration. British
economist John Maynard Keynes and French planners Jean Monnet and
Albert Thomas each advocated technocratic direction of production
and consumption as an alternative to the instability inherent in
the prewar laissez-faire model. Charles S. Maier has catalogued
the diverse European constituencies that sought salvation from reparations
and industrial conflict in Taylorist and Fordist methods. But Hoover
seemed more interested in defining exceptionalism than in fostering
commonality. He sought to position scientific management as a uniquely
American ideological response to Leninism.
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Believing that the appeal of radical
doctrines lay in their ability to explain crisis and progress through
iron laws of history and economics, Hoover set out to define an
"American substitute" for "these disintegrating theories of Europe."
His American Individualism (1922) laid out a stage theory
of history, modeled on Marx but culminating in an era of "high pitch"
mass consumption. Transitions between phases were marked not by
crisis, but by innovations in cooperation that would "enable us
to synchronize socially and economically this gigantic machine which
we have built out of applied science." Techniques of social optimization—such
as advertising, standardization, market research, and dietetics—would
harmonize wages, production, consumption, labor, and health. More
importantly, they sublimated ideological demands for peace, land,
and bread within a neutral, quantitative language of entitlement.
Optimization opened pathways to progress that bypassed developmental
dead-ends predicted by Marx and Malthus. Poverty represented not
the crisis of capitalism but the open frontier of the market without
limits. In the modern age, security would rest on an ability to
dominate the strategic terrain of global consumption. "There are
continents of human welfare," he affirmed, "of which we have penetrated
only the coastal plain."
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Figure
4: You are what you eat. Following the Atwater method,
the ARA assigned rations in Vienna by job categories.
Hoover Papers, Pre-Commerce, ARA Printed Miscellaneous,
1919–1921, Hoover Library, West Branch, Iowa.
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Figure
5: The calorie as currency. $10 and $50 "food drafts"
could be redeemed for a standard package of flour,
fat, and dried milk at food banks in these zones of
Eastern Europe. Hoover Papers, Pre-Commerce, ARA Printed
Miscellaneous, 1919–1921, Hoover Library, West
Branch, Iowa.
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In 1920, Chase Osborn
, Michigan's progressive governor, modestly proposed that the postwar
system of international trade employ the calorie as a universal
currency. A secure, expanding commerce, he explained, rested more
solidly on units of sustenance than on the "imaginary" value of
metal. "Nothing has value beyond its use in giving and sustaining
life ... The quest of the calorie instead of the quest of wealth
in gold would be the seeking of a permanent and not a changeable
good." In the years following the armistice, claims to legitimacy
increasingly came to be expressed in the idiom of development. As
weakened metropolitan powers struggled to justify stewardship over
restive colonies, and citizens, politicized by wartime sacrifices,
demanded recognition of an entitlement to welfare, leaders sought
political solutions in the economic and scientific spheres. But
without a unified conception of civilization or "the West," development
was necessarily a fractured discourse, with colonial, international,
and national variants vying to fix norms of social achievement.
Quantitative measurement, as Osborn's creative proposal suggested,
offered innovative possibilities for expressing claims to developmental
authority. Although Americans encouraged the diffusion of standard
measures as a basis for open-door trade and international scientific
partnership, they were also used—as the calorie was—to
support agendas of autarkic and colonial development antagonistic
to U.S. interests.
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Even as statistics became internationally
standardized, their political uses grew more varied. Imperial regimes,
independence movements, modernizing states, and new international
agencies each validated their distinct hierarchies and ambitions
in a numerical medium. The chief innovations of interwar diplomacy
consisted in techniques of fixing calculable relations between powers:
setting ratios of warships, quotas on immigration and trade, currency
rates, and reparations payments. Despite the withdrawal into isolationism,
the United States was closely identified with the movement to set
quantitative norms. At the center of global finance and manufacturing,
notes Emily Rosenberg, the United States emerged as a "leader in
developing scientific and objective methods of organization and
accounting." Nutritional science kept pace, devising an array of
new and more precise metrics. By 1925, the British magazine The
Spectator could observe that "the great American work of dietetics
... has won all along the line, despite vigorous resistance in this
country ... [T]he idea of balance is becoming ever more insistent."
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European observers in the interwar
years regarded enthusiasm for measurement and scientific regulation
as both characteristically American and a grim portent of modernity's
future course. To Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, the American penchant
for reducing heterogeneity to numerical classifications represented
a "Taylorism of the mind," a sacrifice of intellectual freedom to
the dictates of efficiency. Used this way, science reached for sheltered
and familiar terrain rather than the unknown. French novelist Georges
Duhamel recognized that he had arrived at the "world of the future"
when his American host urged him to order oatmeal rather than potatoes
because "it will give you two hundred more calories." To Duhamel,
the incident illustrated a distinctively American application of
science as a palliative, and he reproached his hapless messmate
for evading civilization's duty to confront uncertainty and disorder.
"The word 'calorie' contains nothing to frighten me," he admonished.
"I have lived in laboratories, but I think that laboratories and
private life are two separate things ... Your faith in science doesn't
bring you tranquility: it merely gives your uneasiness a different
twist."
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Still, quantitative nutrition obtruded
into European life through the agency of governments and advertisers,
although not always with the approval of the subjects of their interventions.
Italian statisticians investigated the kitchens of peasants and
fisherfolk. German factory managers posted calorie charts in workers'
canteens. When Lord Shaw, presiding over a British commission of
inquiry on the minimum wage, proposed a sliding scale based on calorie
allowances, labor unions drew the line. Ernest Bevin, representing
the National Transport Workers' Federation, protested that "it placed
the worker as a distinct class on the basis of the animal, the basis
of food alone, and that I would never discuss." But as Americans
promoted "scientific" measures of opinion, consumer behavior, and
efficiency abroad, they regarded the neutrality and clarity of their
statistics as a gift to mankind. "Our latest symbol is not the big
stick," the New York Times diplomatic correspondent wrote
in 1929, "but the irrefutable and passionless yardstick."
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Ironically, the calorie's significance
for nutritional science diminished while it gained official recognition
as a measure of national vitality. Wartime rationing had fostered
an international network of food experts and laboratories and pushed
research in new directions. The isolation of minute compounds tied
to specific diseases revolutionized the field in the 1920s. But
while the "discovery of vitamins" discredited the notion of a single,
definitive measure of food value, the calorie's application as a
criterion of social hygiene proliferated globally, linked now to
notions of competition and trusteeship. Elmer V. McCollum's laboratory
at Johns Hopkins set international standards for measuring vitamins,
minerals, and amino acids. These innovations rehabilitated the once-devalued
oranges, cabbages, and cod, while reaffirming the importance of
milk and wheat, now identified as "protective" foods vital to the
growth of children. Balance remained the ideal, but in place of
the calorie's double-entry bookkeeping, it now meant a distribution
across a spreadsheet of five or more columns, an audit capable of
identifying deficiencies by type as well as degree. By linking measurable
substances to conditions such as pellagra, rickets, and beriberi,
the "newer science of nutrition" achieved the clinical efficacy
Atwater unsuccessfully sought.
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Crucially, it also revised the calorie's
universalist premise, reintroducing a connection between diet and
race. Where calories had ranked consumption on a unilinear scale
of under- and over-nutrition, vitamins allowed classification of
specific diets into categories of "malnutrition." A student of McCollum's,
Lieutenant Colonel Robert McCarrison of the Indian Health Service,
represented racial variations graphically in the form of trajectories,
with the Indian races joined at birth in a common humanity but then
arcing through time and consumption toward separate, nutritionally
determined potentialities. In 1928, Victor G. Heiser, director of
the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Board, told the
readers of Foreign Affairs that innovations in food measurement
confirmed that physical differences identified as eugenic might
in fact be nutritional, suggesting that "the races that first avail
themselves of the new values of nutrition may decrease the handicaps
of disease, lengthen their lives, and so become the leaders of the
future." Nor was this purely an American apprehension. Allyre Chassevant,
a nutritionist in the French military health service, warned that
"the first nation which manages" the improvement of its popular
diet "will create an incalculable national energy."
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No less than any other discipline,
nutrition was subject to the moral ambivalence that afflicted modern
science. Research that fostered international awareness of malnutrition
and affirmed a universal entitlement to a healthy diet could simultaneously
initiate a nutritional arms race or validate theories of racial
dominion. Although the interwar years saw an intensified interest
in food planning and the growth of an international network of nutritional
institutes and specialists, the outlines of a unitary "food regime"
did not appear until 1937. Instead, dietary research was conscripted
into three conflicting agendas that can be labeled international,
autarkic, and imperial development. Although each applied measurement
as an administrative tool, they subordinated the caloric ideal of
a fully optimized consumption to state or institutional goals, leaving
Hoover's "continent" of human welfare unexplored.
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Despite the defeat of Wilson's internationalist
ideal by the U.S. Senate, officers of the new League of Nations
aspired to create an organization that could address the root sources
of international conflict by adjusting systems of labor, productivity,
migration, and consumption. The first secretariat—led by Sir
Eric Drummond, Jean Monnet, and, during the brief period before
the Senate struck down the League treaty, an American, Raymond B.
Fosdick—sought to "humanize" the Versailles system by displacing
balance-of-power politics with "a systematic approach to international
problems where everybody has everything to gain and nothing to lose."
License for this "new technique" of international activism was contained
in League articles 23 and 24, which authorized international commissions
for disease prevention, opium control, transit, and weights and
measures.
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Beginning in 1925, the League Health
Organization and the International Labor Office (ILO), headed by
Albert Thomas, initiated a series of national nutritional surveys
based on the Atwater method. By 1935, the League had set a global
dietary standard of 2,500 calories per day for a laboring adult.
Like the eight-hour day advocated by the ILO, this represented an
unenforced, unlegislated ideal, but it nonetheless set a benchmark
for school lunch programs, famine relief, and wage comparisons around
the world. Thomas advocated universal norms as a method of international
institution building. The process of debating and fixing social
standards threw "into relief the common ideal toward which we are
all advancing" and established a common vocabulary for supranational
governance.
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In Geneva, as Monnet later observed,
the vision of an "organized peace" founded on integrated planning
soon faded into familiar habits of diplomacy, but private philanthropies
quickly seized upon the new style of international activism. The
Carnegie Endowment and the Twentieth Century Fund promoted the diffusion
of an American standard of living as a basis for amity. Fosdick,
on leaving the League secretariat to take charge of the Rockefeller
Foundation, noted that because of its measurability, food presented
a unique vehicle for demonstrating the advantages of rationalization.
"Through modern statistics we are able, in our generation, to get
a complete picture of supply and demand in relation to the world's
food," he explained. "What we need now is synthetic thinking, constructive
brains, and a plan, laid down in world terms."
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One such plan came from James Lossing
Buck, an American missionary who conducted the first caloric surveys
in China. Reporting in 1930, he noted that dietetic and farming
patterns in China were the reverse of those in the United States'
own troubled system of agriculture; the "pressure of population"
compelled peasants to practice an intensive agriculture that produced
a larger ratio of calories per acre, chiefly in the form of grain.
In the United States, a meat-based diet supported expansive farming
patterns that used technology to compensate for inefficient land
use. As land grew scarce, Buck predicted, Americans would grow and
consume food more like the Chinese, and as China modernized, American
technology would allow cultivators to eke more from their tiny plots.
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The theme of a natural partnership
between American engineers and Chinese peasants reached a broad
audience through Pearl Buck's 1931 bestseller The Good Earth.
Buck's husband's tabulations outlined in broad terms an agenda for
joint action: preserving China's food balance would ultimately require
"some method of population control," but a short-range solution
could be found in "more intensive methods of raising crops." The
Rockefeller Foundation funded schemes to distribute farm machinery
and improved seeds in central China until 1937, when the Japanese
invasion interrupted the work. The foundation then transferred the
research effort to Mexico, where it developed techniques that would
return to Asia as the "green revolution" in the 1960s. A massive
program of rural modernization and nation building, the green revolution
is customarily explained as a response to the post–World War
II population boom, but the project began before any demographic
shift was evident. As Fosdick insisted, it sprang from the quantitative
logic of the food inventory.
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A second food regime emerged alongside
interwar trends toward national autarky. The narrowing pattern of
international exchange, evident by the mid-1920s, deeply worried
U.S. leaders. Protective tariffs imposed in Europe, Japan, and the
colonies, and the formation of currency blocs in response to the
Depression, cordoned the world into closed spheres, a nightmare
for American free traders. But economic regimentation on such a
scale could not have been imposed without the use of the calorie,
which facilitated market manipulations, propaganda, and planning.
In Italy, for example, the Instituto Centrale di Statistica (ISTAT)
regularly issued caloric tables illustrating the steady improvement
of the national diet under fascism. Measures to subsidize and supplement
rations enjoyed support from labor unions as well as scientific
and military officials who urged an orthogenetic program for enhancing
racial quality and fitness for military service.
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While ancient Rome had ensured panem
et circenses through a system of imperial tribute, Mussolini
made food self-sufficiency the foundation of the New Rome. His Battle
for Grain in 1925 aimed to achieve freedom from the "slavery" of
imported bread by marshaling consumption and expanding wheat production.
As governments in Europe, North America, and Argentina encouraged
wheat cultivation on marginal lands, international grain prices
plummeted, motivating further economic insulation. Following the
invasion of Ethiopia, ISTAT investigated minimum metabolic requirements
as a tool for predicting Italy's ability to survive a prolonged
embargo. Increasingly, as Carol Helstosky has shown, national food
controls designed to reform and enhance popular diets were employed
instead to enforce military austerity.
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Japan's dietary reform movement applied
the calculative logic of nutritional science to reconcile the imperatives
of autarky and preparations for war. In 1921, the newly established
Imperial State Institute for Nutrition began research with a calorimeter
manufactured in Boston. Comparing Atwater's factors with results
from Tokyo policemen, tram motormen, barbers, and primary school
teachers, chief investigator Hideo Takahira confirmed that Japanese
subjects required calories and protein in the same amounts as their
American counterparts, a revelation that overturned a system of
military victualing based on distinctive local cuisines. In the
1920s, the imperial army and navy systematically reformed rations,
adding "Western" recipes and "ingredients of poor quality" to raise
caloric content while cutting costs. Changes such as the addition
of more beef and pork and the incorporation of wheat in the form
of noodles, breads, and fried batter (tempura) were designed to
invigorate the troops and place them on a nutritional par with their
prospective American and British adversaries. The government then
popularized the new "national" cuisine among civilians through recipe
books, magazines, and exhibitions. Dietary reform was part of a
"food plan" that, in combination with a "population plan" involving
resettlement to Manchuria, aimed to maintain "imperial self-sufficiency"
in the home islands.
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Even when official regimentation
was light, the translation of food into numbers had a substantial
influence on "national" cuisines. The interwar decades marked the
high point of the "textualization of the culinary realm," but cookbook
authors were less interested in heirloom recipes than in conforming
local tastes to a progressive, international standard, typically
by enlarging the consumption of wheat. The cuisine globally recognized
as Greek, for example, appeared first in the cookbooks of Nikolaos
Tselementes in the interwar years. A chef in Parisian restaurants,
Tselementes Europeanized moussaka and pastitsio by eliminating Anatolian
yogurt, oils, and spices and introducing a floury Béchamel
identical to a high-calorie "white sauce" that American nutritionists
were pushing as a meat substitute. Jeffrey M. Pilcher has examined
the diverse ways in which Mexico's revolutionary government sought
to assimilate Mesoamericans into a revitalized nation by promoting
"the Spanish language, the capitalist work ethic, and the cuisine
of wheat." The practice of condensing national character into recipes
predated the calorie by a hundred years, but numerical standards
lent scientific authority to the process as well as to certain choices,
associating wheat with a cosmopolitan, forward-looking identity,
and local ingredients, such as yogurt and corn, with a vernacular
past. One effect was to encourage mass consumption of wheat even
as autarkic policies increasingly segregated the world market, a
combination that would prove disastrous after October 1929.
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In the British Empire, and especially
India, innovations in nutritional research contributed to a reformulation
of the imperial project around a mission of development and welfare
known as the dual mandate. The double impact of Wilson's Fourteen
Points and the Russian Revolution made it imperative, according
to Sir Keith Hancock, to lend "positive economic and social content
to the philosophy of colonial trusteeship by affirming the need
for minimum standards of nutrition, health, and education." The
dual mandate also adjusted policy to the requirements of an emerging
empire-wide consumer-goods economy. Continuous-process manufacturing
required reliable outlets for the branded toiletries, household
equipment, cereals, and canned goods issuing from assembly lines,
and the colonies contained Britain's largest potential sales territory.
Reimagining subject populations as customers opened new possibilities
and goals for imperial development.
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The "discovery of colonial malnutrition,"
according to Michael Worboys, occurred when investigations suggested
that an improved diet might enhance the labor efficiency and buying
power of rural, colonial populations. Under the new paradigm, colonial
officials viewed formerly tolerable rates of disease and mortality
as "a heavy drag upon prosperity," while seeking to raise "the standard
of life of the Indian countryside" as a stimulus to "demand for
food, clothing, and every form of manufacture." Dietary statistics
identified areas of deficiency and guided investment. Thus positioned,
nutrition held the key to linked problems of public health, agricultural
revitalization, and economic development, giving British officials
a broad injunction to manage markets, irrigation, property rights,
social services, and consumption in the name of the public welfare.
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As Mohandas Gandhi and other nationalists
recognized, the crisis of malnutrition furnished an expansive justification
for Britain's continuing stewardship, while nutritional science
supplied a seemingly neutral, calculative language in which to reassert
the claims of imperial ideology. In the course of their investigations,
for example, nutritionists updated hoary distinctions between "martial"
and sedentary races, classifying meat-, milk-, and wheat-eating
peoples as physically efficient and prosperous owing to their superior
diet. John Boyd Orr found that the "meat, milk, and blood" diet
of Kenya's Masai produced a stronger physique than the vegetarian
cuisine of the Kikuyu. McCarrison confirmed the "remarkable difference
in physical efficiency of different Indian races" owing to variations
in diet. The chief indicator of efficiency was the quantity of milk
and the quality of grain consumed. European nutritionists uniformly
disparaged rice, while dal, according to McCarrison, had a nutritive
value so low as to be "toxic." These lessons were absorbed into
the school curriculum, and Indian students were counseled that "rice
is not very nourishing," while dal induced "paralysis of the legs."
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Challenges to these claims made dietary
measurement a locus of nationalist resistance, which played out
in two ways. The first was a move by subaltern critics to rehabilitate
indigenous foods, particularly the devalued grains. Nishikanta Ray,
a nutritionist at the University of Calcutta, praised rice as "the
greatest of all cereals," and dal as richer in protein "pound for
pound" than meat. Dudley Senanayake, who would later become the
first prime minister of independent Sri Lanka, urged patriots to
restore the "dignity" of rice and other native comestibles displaced
by imperial commodities such as tea, sugar, and coffee. These critiques
operated within the medium of nutritional science, affirming the
necessity of hygienic measures to address malnutrition while challenging
the colonial authority's accuracy, and consequently its jurisdiction
over the embattled ground of social welfare.
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Gandhi, by contrast, premised his
critique on the urgency of preventing modern science from gaining
authority to set universal norms. Choosing diet as his point of
attack, he challenged science's fundamental claims to realism. Dietetics,
he acknowledged, introduced techniques "fraught with the greatest
consequences for the world and especially for the famishing millions
of India," but he rejected the validity of calculative methods—and
by extension the universalistic claims of all expertise—advocating
instead a descriptive, particularistic empiricism. He urged followers
not to copy his own regimen of fruit, milk, and uncooked vegetables
but to do their own experiments, insisting on the specificity of
individual appetites and the distinct properties of each food. Satyagraha
required a consciousness of diet attuned to the body, the community,
and ahimsa, the principle of nonviolence. Since science abstracted
food from the labor of growing, cooking, and digesting, Gandhi mingled
his dietary advice with un-abstract discussions of urine, frying
oils, mastication, the life cycles of plants, and techniques for
kneading manure into the soil. Apart from caloric values, each vegetable
and fruit possessed "physical and spiritual values" that could also
be measured, but only in the unique laboratory of each human body.
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In crafting a link between diet and
nationalism, Gandhi used food as a potent symbol of the value of
the particular, the local, and the individual under assault from
the homogenizing logic of modern science. As Ashis Nandy observes,
Gandhi conceptualized development as an expression of personal morality
and happiness, and disparaged the penchant of industrial civilization
for "gauging progress in terms of calories and comforts." To accept
the West's terms of reference, he contended, was to risk incorporation
into a developmental regime in which singular cultural values would
not count.
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The crisis of agriculture
that followed the reverberations of the stock market crash around
the world starkly exposed the inadequacy of food regulation on a
purely national basis. As prices plummeted and stocks of grain and
meat rotted in storage, militant farmers' unions in North America,
Australia, and Europe demanded interventions to shore up prices,
but restrictions that dumped milk and plowed under crops while urban
laborers starved could scarcely be justified as rationalization.
Trade ministries found that they could buttress agriculture only
at the expense of manufacturing; protectionist controls hurt overall
consumption, while subsidies, the solution eventually improvised
in the United States, Australia, and Canada, led to the accumulation
of enormous unused stockpiles. Sir William Haldane warned in 1933
that a glut of 350 million bushels of wheat was strangling all other
markets, precluding the resuscitation of world trade. It was in
these circumstances that a global scheme for disposing of surpluses
in the statistically malnourished colonial and semicolonial areas
took shape.
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Figure
6: The experts confront the poor. In the 1930s, international
commissions fixed a minimum daily caloric requirement
as a gauge for living standards, food relief, and
wages. George Strube, Daily Express, May 18,
1934. British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent.
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The UN Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) claims the 1936 report of the League commission on nutrition
as its founding document. A compilation of research on nutritional
requirements, dietetic surveys, and policy comparisons, it aroused
an emotional response seemingly out of sync with its content. The
Spectator found its findings "little short of revolutionary."
The commission had laid bare, according to the New York Times,
"the challenge underlying the disorders of this epoch, the pretext
for modern wars." The power of the report's message was conveyed
by a juxtaposition of three columns of data, all in calories, previously
considered in separate contexts: figures on the minimum requirements
for mothers and children, per capita consumption of food in various
countries, and total volume of food produced. The tables illustrated
("irrefutably," according to commentators) a connection between
the crisis of agricultural overproduction in some countries and
the problem of malnutrition in others, a planetary imbalance requiring,
according to Australian delegate Stanley Bruce, "a marriage of health
to agriculture."
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The report proposed a grand design
for a "consumer economics" that would reconcile local autonomy and
multilateral trade. Intensified national efforts at food self-sufficiency
coupled with international food redistribution would spearhead a
demand-driven expansion of global commerce. Advances in statistics,
it concluded, made it possible to predict "the probable increase
in demand which would follow on the adoption of an optimum regime
of nutrition." The gains were potentially huge. Asia, for instance,
could easily absorb all of North America's surplus stocks of milk
and wheat. Moreover, the commission anticipated, transfers would
provide a durable solution to instability. Since shortfalls were
not episodic but chronic, food shipments would carve out permanent
markets and channels of trade. "Generally speaking," the report
found, "most Chinese are in a state of malnutrition all of the time."
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Britain's Parliament hailed the strategy
as an indirect assault on economic nationalism. The United States,
abandoning its customary detachment, lent it increasing support
out of a conviction, articulated by Agriculture Secretary Henry
Wallace, that the overproduction crisis could be solved only by
optimizing consumption in low-income areas of Latin America and
Asia through measures that presaged postwar foreign aid programs.
When Henry Luce appealed for an "American Century" based on the
dissemination of U.S. laws, the U.S. Constitution, and "magnificent
industrial products," Wallace countered with a vision of a global
consumer's century founded on technical aid and modern science,
which "made it possible to see all of the people of the world get
enough to eat." The construction of a postwar international order
began with food. In 1943, the Roosevelt administration gathered
seventy-seven nations to institute the first component of a new
United Nations system, the FAO, with the mission of balancing mass
production against the "mass buying power" of the world's farmers.
By then, Franklin Roosevelt had declared freedom from want an American
war aim, and Atwater's "food supply of the future" had become a
political reality.
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Of the traces left by the calorie
on the food regime that came into its own after the war, three merit
particular attention for the magnitude and durability of their effects.
The first was a recasting of hunger as an aggregate problem for
which nations and international agencies bore primary responsibility.
The FAO, incorporated into the new United Nations organization,
cultivated a network of national food ministries and published annual
"balance sheets" for each nation. Beginning with India's 1946 crisis,
"famine" came to be understood as a national caloric deficit rather
than the strictly localized emergency defined by imperial famine
codes. Hoover, delegated to survey the scarcity in April 1946, reported
levels of 800 calories a day in Austria and India, 1,000 in Germany.
Caloric accounting reversed the flow of information about famine;
international authorities decreed emergencies, while officials in
stricken areas complied with mandated remedies.
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Secondly, the United States, as the
leading exporter, recognized the value of grain shipments in fortifying
clients against ideological assault. Hoover's remedy for Bolshevism
became an axiom of national security. To General Lucius Clay, U.S.
occupation governor in Germany, it was self-evident that offering
a "choice between becoming a communist on 1500 calories and a believer
in democracy on 1000 calories" would "pave the way to a Communist
Europe." The China White Paper attributed the collapse of the nationalist
regime to its "failure to provide China with enough to eat." Beginning
in 1954, U.S. officials wielded transfers through Public Law 480,
the Food for Peace program, as instruments of influence. In the
atmosphere of the Cold War, quantitatively comparable food supplies | |