The Foreign Policy of the Calorie

NICK CULLATHER

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A too naı̈ve 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.
Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, Joy of Cooking (1975)

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 par-
ticular 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.1
In the first half of the twentieth century, the arithmetic of standards of living,
revenues, education, and population gained significance in assessments of the rel-
ative status of states and empires. As doctrines of development first began to inform
the practice of international relations, numerical indicators prepared the way, jump-
ing linguistic boundaries and displacing local knowledge and native informants. The
empiricism of states and international institutions, Timothy Mitchell contends, ac-
quired a “character of calculability” that mediated between material realities and the
abstractions of science and politics. Neither constructed nor imagined but fabricated
I wish to thank David Engerman, Sarah Knott, Marc Frey, Melvyn P. Leffler, Brian Balogh, Matthew
Connelly, David Ellwood, Robert Schneider, and the AHR reviewers for their valuable comments and
encouragement. The ideas in this essay benefited from discussions at the Zentrum für Nordamerika-
Forschung, Universität Frankfurt am Main, and the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public
Affairs.
1 Super Size Me, 2005, distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films, Los Angeles. The “calorie” used by

nutritionists is actually the kilocalorie, or large calorie, equivalent to 1,000 of the gram calories used
in other scientific contexts.

337
338 Nick Cullather

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.2
Historians and theorists of foreign relations often associate number with explan-
atory rigor. Although E. H. Carr, Hans J. Morgenthau, Charles Beard, and other
founders cautioned against scientism, realist and revisionist historiographies grew to

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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 dis-
tinction. 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.3
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 leg-
ible. 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

2 David Ludden, “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge,” in Carol A.

Breckinridge and Peter van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives
on South Asia (Philadelphia, 1993), 262; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Mo-
dernity (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 82. Historians have recently begun to investigate measurement as an
aspect of modernization. See Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact (Chicago, 1998); Silvana Pa-
triarca, Numbers and Nationhood (Cambridge, 1996); J. Adam Tooze, Statistics and the German State,
1900–1945 (Cambridge, 2001). For demography, see Matthew Connelly, “A Power beyond Measure:
How Population Growth Has Changed the Way People Think about the World” (Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, Population, Environmental Change, and Security Project, Working
Paper, 2002); for standards of living, see Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance
through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 75–129; on national incomes accounting,
see Scott O’Bryan, “Economic Knowledge and the Science of National Income in Twentieth-Century
Japan,” Japan Studies Review 6 (Fall 2002): 1–19.
3 Edward H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London, 1949), 3; Hans J. Morgenthau,

Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago, 1946). Diplomatic historians are hardly alone in splitting the
field in this way. Eric Hobsbawm has commended “a sound sense of statistics” as an antidote to the
solecisms of identity history, while Dipesh Chakrabarty distinguishes subaltern studies from historicism’s
“secular calculative” practices. Hobsbawm, On History (New York, 1997), 198–199, 271–272;
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 14. See also Robert Buzzanco, “Where’s the
Beef?” Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 630; Robert Jervis, “Realism in the Study of World
Politics,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 974; Jeffrey W. Legro and Andrew Morav-
csik, “Is Anybody Still a Realist?” International Security 24, no. 2 (1999): 18.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2007

 The Foreign Policy of the Calorie 339

state. As such, it had a part in an evolving developmental discourse that registered

the requirements and aspirations of nations largely in numerical terms.4
Europeans first measured food in calories, but Americans constructed the calorie
by giving it practical value, standardizing it and embedding it in systems of distri-
bution 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

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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 dis-
covery 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 hu-
manitarianism, exchange, and subsidized dumping began to emerge only after the
Anglo-American allies recaptured the calorie among the spoils of World War II.5
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 De-
velopment 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 con-
veying a reproof familiar to youngsters of a certain generation: “Clean your plate;
there are starving children in China.” This understanding of the reciprocity of abun-
dance 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 cur-
rency or petroleum. The calorie represents the sum of these assumptions.6
4 See C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons

(London, 2004), 271–273; Stephen Skowronek, Building the New American State: The Expansion of Na-
tional Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York, 1982); George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social:
The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, N.J., 1993); James C. Scott, Seeing
Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.,
1998); see also the symposium “Seeing Like a State,” AHR 106, no. 1 (February 2001): 107–129; James
Vernon, “The Ethics of Hunger and the Assembly of Society: The Techno-Politics of the School Meal
in Modern Britain,” AHR 110, no. 3 (June 2005): 693–725; Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays (New York, 1977), 14 –35; Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the
Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J., 1999), 159–161.
5 J. George Harrar, “Nutrition and Numbers in the Third World,” BioScience 24, no. 9 (September

1974): 514.
6 United Nations, Millennium Declaration, September 18, 2000, A/res/55/2, http://www.un.org/

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340 Nick Cullather

THE WORK OF RENDERING FOOD into hard figures began just after breakfast on Mon-
day, 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

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quantities of bread, baked beans, Hamburg steak, milk, and mashed potatoes
through an airlock during rest periods, which alternated with intervals of weight-
lifting 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.7
The national penny press found a Chekhovian parable in the “Wesleyan glass
cage,” printing “sensational” and “wholly imaginary” reports on the voluntary cap-
tivity 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.8
Subsequent experiments attracted equally keen interest. Atwater invited cham-
pion 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 cogi-
tation. 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 dis-
covery that the body created in the divine image produced energy more efficiently

millennium/declaration/ares552e.pdf (accessed February 20, 2007); World Food Programme, Interactive

Hunger Map, http://www.wfp.org/country_brief/hunger_map/map/hungermap_popup/map_popup.html
(accessed February 20, 2007); the World Bank also tracks the improvement of standards of living in the
rising arc of caloric intake. Merlinda D. Ingco et al., Global Food Supply Prospects (Washington, D.C.,
1996); the website for Bono’s charity, DATA, updates the cliché by highlighting the “fact” that the cost
of AIDS drugs for all of Africa is equivalent to what Europeans spend on ice cream; http://www.data.org/
archives/USandUK_AIDS_spendingnov20.pdf (accessed February 20, 2007).
7 “The Wesleyan Calorimeter,” New York Times, April 5, 1896, 5; “Occupants of the Wesleyan Glass

Cage Changed,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 24, 1896, 10; “The Human Body,” Los Angeles Times,
May 3, 1896, 22; “Conservation of Energy in the Human Body,” Scientific American, August 5, 1899, 85;
“Almost a Hero,” Boston Daily Globe, March 22, 1896, 1.
8 “Human Body and Food,” New York Times, March 23, 1899, 3; “Human Body as an Engine,”

Philadelphia Inquirer, May 3, 1896, 28; “The Man in the Copper Box,” Century Illustrated Magazine, June
1897, 314; “The Food Test at Middletown,” New York Times, March 25, 1896, 1; “The People’s Food—A
Great National Inquiry,” Review of Reviews 13 (June 1896): 679–690; W. O. Atwater, “How Food Is Used
in the Body: Experiments with Men in a Respiration Apparatus,” Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1897,
246.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2007

 The Foreign Policy of the Calorie 341

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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.

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.9
As federal officials recognized, the calorimeter had ramifications for the man-
agement 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 inven-
tion.” 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
9 “Cyclist to Aid Cause of Science,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 30, 1904, A4; “Nine Days in

a Sealed Box,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 21, 1899, 1; “New Test in Examinations,” Chicago Daily
Tribune, February 13, 1905, 3; “The Human Machine,” Washington Post, December 29, 1904, 6; “Alcohol
as Brain Food,” Omaha World Herald, February 13, 1900, 3; “Will Fight Alcohol as Food,” New York
Times, June 30, 1900, 3; “Declares War: Connecticut W.C.T.U. Is against Atwater,” Boston Daily Globe,
February 5, 1900, 3.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2007

342 Nick Cullather

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 de-
clared, would determine the “food supply of the future.”10

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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.
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 agricul-
ture—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 veg-
etarians and iconoclasts, such as Horace Fletcher and John Harvey Kellogg, who
judged diet by moral and aesthetic criteria rather than the objective, numerical stan-
dards of an industrial age. The son of a Methodist minister, Atwater began his nu-
tritional research at Yale in this vein, but graduate work in Berlin and Leipzig in-
troduced 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 bi-
ologists and physicians, but Atwater, on returning to the United States, found in-
dustrialists, universities, and state and federal governments eager to fund nutritional
research.11
10 “Machine to Test Food,” Washington Post, January 10, 1910, E1; C. F. Langworthy and R. D.

Milner, Investigations on the Nutrition of Man (Washington, D.C., 1904); Mildred R. Ziegler, “The His-
tory of the Calorie in Nutrition,” Scientific Monthly 15, no. 6 (December 1922): 520–526; Russell H.
Chittenden, Physiological Economy in Nutrition (New York, 1913); “Plan Energy Test,” Washington Post,
December 30, 1908, 1; “Measures Human Energy,” New York Times, December 21, 1908, 3; “Mystery
of Body Read Like a Book,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 21, 1908, 1; W. O. Atwater, “What the
Coming Man Will Eat,” Forum, June 1892, 498; “The People’s Food,” Review of Reviews, June 1896,
687–689.
11 On the application of Taylorist models to agriculture, see Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Fac-

tory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven, Conn., 2003), 48; James C. Whorton,
Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health (Princeton, N.J., 1982). Dana Simmons notes that
dietary studies in France before World War I were largely “restricted to eccentric scientists and ‘pro-
fessional fasters.’ ” Although Voit and Rubner were clearly at the forefront, leading German physiol-

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2007

 The Foreign Policy of the Calorie 343

Atwater framed his investigations as a tool of “scientific management,” allied

with Frederick Winslow Taylor’s efforts to resolve industrial unrest through the me-
thodical study of time and motion. In strike actions and congressional debates, rep-
resentatives of labor argued for leisure, meat, and bread as matters of justice, but
scientific reformers presented them instead as issues of efficiency and cost. Pro-
ceeding from a Taylorist conception of a mechanomorphic body, Atwater led an

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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 research-
ers were unsatisfied with their findings. Predictably, unions and individual subjects
resisted efforts to locate their wage floor. More disturbing, the growing pile of sur-
veys documented an almost unclassifiable diversity of food customs, yielding data
that only complicated the reformist argument for enforcing norms. Atwater, in col-
laboration with Rubner and Gautier, began investigating a system for rendering food
and labor into thermal units.12
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 Build-
ing was more apt to evoke “a strain of idealistic poetry.” The raw variety of co-
mestibles impelled exhibitors to identify underlying principles supporting claims to
advancement. The United States backed its displays with statistical charts showing

ogists remained dubious. Dana Jean Simmons, “Minimal Frenchmen: Science and Standards of Living,
1840–1960” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2004), 171–172; Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor:
Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York, 1990), 127–128; “About Experiments,” Dallas
Morning News, May 30, 1896, 8.
12 On the evolution of the “standard of living” concept, see Alan Berolzheimer, “A Nation of Con-

sumers: Mass Consumption, Middle Class Standards of Living, and American Identity” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Virginia, 1996); Lawrence Glickman, “Inventing the ‘American Standard of Living’: Gen-
der, Race, and Working Class Identity, 1880–1925,” Labor History 34, no. 2 (1993): 221–235; de Grazia,
Irresistible Empire, 75–129. Naomi Aronson’s work on the construction of nutrition science reveals its
connections to debates on wages and labor; see Aronson, “Comment on Bryan Turner’s ‘The Govern-
ment of the Body,’ ” British Journal of Sociology 35, no. 1 (March 1984): 62–65; Aronson, “Nutrition as
a Social Problem: A Case Study of Entrepreneurial Strategy in Science,” Social Problems 29, no. 5 (June
1982): 474 – 487; and Aronson, “Social Definitions of Entitlement: Food Needs, 1885–1920,” Media,
Culture, and Society 4, no. 1 (1982): 51–61. On Atwater’s career, see Harvey Levenstein, “The New
England Kitchen and the Origins of Modern American Eating Habits,” American Quarterly 32, no. 4
(Autumn 1980): 369–386; John Coveney, Food, Morals, and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating
(London, 2000), 72–78.

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344 Nick Cullather

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 Agri-
cultural Building the heterogeneity of flavor, color, and custom simply yielded to an
equally ambiguous surfeit of numbers.13

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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 com-
pilations, 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 ac-
tuarial 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 con-
sumption of statistics appeared to be a new and not altogether positive develop-
ment.14
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 ge-
ography 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 compar-

13 “Statue of Germania Dedicated,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 26, 1893, 2; Mary E. Green, Food

Products of the World (Chicago, 1895), 3– 4; “America’s Vast Resources,” New York Times, December
3, 1893, 13; “French Agricultural Display,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 17, 1893, 9; “Tea Is Their Text,”
Chicago Daily Tribune, June 18, 1893, 12; Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1961),
342.
14 “New System Devised to Prevent Figures from Telling Lies,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November

28, 1898, 10. The Spectator was a New York insurance industry review issued monthly from 1868 to 1918,
after which it became a weekly. On the history of statistical reasoning, see Alain Desrosières, The Politics
of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Theodore M. Porter, The
Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton, N.J., 1986); and especially Ian Hacking, The Taming
of Chance (Cambridge, 1990).

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 The Foreign Policy of the Calorie 345

isons, which defined problems and indicated the urgency of commercial and military
threats. Many observers considered such quantitative reasoning a modern and dis-
tinctly American trait. “If the English are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are
a nation of expert accountants,” critic and playwright Eugene Richard White ob-
served. “We go about reforming and purifying the world with a committee report
at elbow and a statistical compilation in each hand.”15

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The calorimeter thus translated the vernacular customs of food into the numer-
ical language of empire. Atwater revolutionized nutritional science, as historian Hil-
lel Schwartz observes, by theorizing food “without reference to taste, ethnic tradi-
tion, 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 na-
tional resources, while fruits, leafy vegetables, and fish registered such slight nu-
tritional 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.16
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 peo-
ples 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 Amer-
icans that their nitrogen-rich diet constituted the “finest food supply of any country
in the world.”17
Treating societies as closed systems, nutritionists suggested that a “physiological
economy” of food governed institutions and nations, and that “scientific eating”
15 Winthrop More Daniels, “Divination by Statistics,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1902, 101; Carroll

D. Wright, “The Limitations and Difficulties of Statistics,” Yale Review 3 (May 1894): 121; Eugene
Richard White, “The Plague of Statistics,” Atlantic Monthly, December 1901, 842–843.
16 Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat (New York, 1986),

87; Aronson, “Social Definitions of Entitlement,” 53.

17 C. F. Langworthy and R. D. Milner, “The Respiration Calorimeter and the Results of Experiments

with It,” in Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture, 1910 (Washington, 1911), 307–318;
Langworthy, Food, Customs, and Diet in American Homes (Washington, D.C., 1911); “World’s Finest
Food Supply,” Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1911, 19.

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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.

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 pol-
icies should match supplies, on the basis of calories, to the specific requirements of
populations. As a measure of optimization, the calorie represented a significant ad-
vance 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

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 The Foreign Policy of the Calorie 347

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, in-
telligence quotients, and the panoply of indices that in the twentieth century au-
thorized government to tell people what was best for them.18

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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 dom-
ination” of the calorie in the popular mind, but its use persisted through the en-
thusiasm of advertisers, who emblazoned calorie counts on cereal boxes and in-
structed 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.19
Under pressure of war, the successful marshaling of food consumption and pro-
duction became a state responsibility. American observers paid anxious attention to
the warring powers’ use of blockades to starve their adversaries to defeat. Corre-
spondents 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 di-
etetics,” which, having been rescued from “the hands of vegetarians and other ex-
tremists, seem[ed] at last to have arrived upon solid ground.” The commission cal-
culated 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

18 W. O. Atwater, Methods and Results of Investigations on the Chemistry and Economy of Food (Wash-

ington, D.C., 1895), 9, 214 –218; C. F. Langworthy and R. D. Milner, Investigations on the Nutrition of
Man (Washington, D.C., 1904). In 1937, Labourite editor Douglas Jay memorably summed up this ar-
rogation of knowledge: “In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gen-
tleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves”;
Richard Toye, “ ‘The Gentleman in Whitehall’ Reconsidered: The Evolution of Douglas Jay’s Views on
Economic Planning and Consumer Choice, 1937– 47,” Labour History Review 67, no. 2 (August 2002):
188–204.
19 “Beware the Calorie,” Literary Digest, December 8, 1917, 27; “Food Control,” New Republic, March

10, 1917, 155.

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348 Nick Cullather

critical on both sides of the Western Front, Europeans learned to calculate food by
American numbers.20
In the United States, mobilization for war began in 1917 when President Wood-
row Wilson created a national food authority under the leadership of Herbert
Hoover, a mining engineer and chief organizer of the Belgium relief. From his head-
quarters in the Willard Hotel, Hoover launched a drive to conserve sugar, fats, and

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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.”21
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 “vic-
tory 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.”22
The conscription of individual appetites disturbed conventional distinctions be-
tween public duty and personal conduct. Leading churchman Lyman Abbot dispar-
aged calorie counting as “spiritual hypochondria,” while another critic wistfully re-
called 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
20 “How Germany’s Food Problem Was Met,” New York Times, April 16, 1916, 6; “Germany’s Food

Problem,” Literary Digest, February 24, 1917, 454; Sarah T. Barrows, “A Triumph of Scientific House-
keeping,” Journal of Home Economics 8, no. 9 (September 1916): 495– 498; “How European War De-
partments Solve the Food Problems of Armies in the Field,” Current Opinion, October 1914, 257; Rob-
inson Smith, Food Values and the Rationing of a Country (London, 1917), 5.
21 United States Food Administration, Food and the War (Boston, 1918), 129–130; Herbert Hoover,

The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure, 1874 –1920 (New York, 1961), 279.
22 George H. Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover: Master of Emergencies, 1917–1918 (New York, 1996),

206, 232; Lulu Hunt Peters, Diet and Health with a Key to the Calories (Chicago, 1918), 24; Harry A.
Williams, “On the Way to Berlin,” Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1918, 10.

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 The Foreign Policy of the Calorie 349

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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.

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!”23
Historians have described the enduring effect that war rationing had on per-
ceptions 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 ex-
ecution.” 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. Per-
sonal dietary sacrifice indicated the United States’ arrival at a “stage of develop-
ment” 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 mas-
sacre.” He urged Americans to seek “victory over ourselves; victory over the enemy
of freedom.”24
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 Administra-
23 Lyman Abbott, “The Pernicious Habit of Self-Examination,” Outlook, May 30, 1917, 185; Williams,

“On the Way to Berlin”; “Herbie Hoover,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 29, 1917, 10.
24 Jean Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Cambridge,

Mass., 1988); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York, 1995), 214 –224; Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (New
York, 1984), 88; “500 Hotels to Stop Serving Wheat,” New York Times, March 30, 1918, 9; Nash, The
Life of Herbert Hoover, 232.

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350 Nick Cullather

tion 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

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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 peo-
ple.” 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.25
In defining security, Hoover rejected traditional balance-of-power concerns as
well as Wilson’s emphasis on international law and world opinion. Among the ear-
liest 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 in-
cubated by scarcity. Material abundance bred stability, he argued, but “famine
breeds anarchy. Anarchy is infectious, the infections of such a cess-pool will jeop-
ardize 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.26
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 di-
rection of production and consumption as an alternative to the instability inherent
in the prewar laissez-faire model. Charles S. Maier has catalogued the diverse Eu-
ropean 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 man-
agement as a uniquely American ideological response to Leninism.27
Believing that the appeal of radical doctrines lay in their ability to explain crisis
25 Herbert Hoover, An American Epic, 4 vols. (Chicago, 1960), 2: 248; Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert

Hoover, 398; T. T. C. Gregory, “Stemming the Red Tide,” World’s Work, May 1921, 95–97; Gregory,
“Overthrowing a Red Regime,” World’s Work, June 1921, 153–164.
26 Quoted in Frank Ninkovich, Modernity and Power: The History of the Domino Theory in the Twen-

tieth Century (Chicago, 1990), 76.

27 Charles S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of

Industrial Productivity in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970): 27–61; Martin Fine,
“Albert Thomas: A Reformer’s Vision of Modernization, 1914 –32,” Journal of Contemporary History 12,
no. 3 (July 1977): 545–564; Jean Monnet, Memoirs (Garden City, N.Y., 1978), 95–98.

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 The Foreign Policy of the Calorie 351

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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.

and progress through iron laws of history and economics, Hoover set out to define
an “American substitute” for “these disintegrating theories of Europe.” His Amer-
ican 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, produc-
tion, consumption, labor, and health. More importantly, they sublimated ideological
demands for peace, land, and bread within a neutral, quantitative language of en-
titlement. 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 con-

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352 Nick Cullather

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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.

sumption. “There are continents of human welfare,” he affirmed, “of which we have
penetrated only the coastal plain.”28

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 sus-
tenance 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
28 Herbert Hoover, “The Paramount Business of Every American Today,” System, July 1920, 24;

Hoover, American Individualism (Garden City, N.Y., 1922); Smith, An Uncommon Man, 93, 94; Herbert
Hoover, “The Nation and Science,” Science 65, no. 1672 (January 14, 1927): 26–29.

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 The Foreign Policy of the Calorie 353

idiom of development. As weakened metropolitan powers struggled to justify stew-

ardship over restive colonies, and citizens, politicized by wartime sacrifices, de-
manded recognition of an entitlement to welfare, leaders sought political solutions
in the economic and scientific spheres. But without a unified conception of civili-
zation or “the West,” development was necessarily a fractured discourse, with co-
lonial, international, and national variants vying to fix norms of social achievement.

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Quantitative measurement, as Osborn’s creative proposal suggested, offered inno-
vative 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.29
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 tech-
niques of fixing calculable relations between powers: setting ratios of warships, quo-
tas on immigration and trade, currency rates, and reparations payments. Despite the
withdrawal into isolationism, the United States was closely identified with the move-
ment to set quantitative norms. At the center of global finance and manufacturing,
notes Emily Rosenberg, the United States emerged as a “leader in developing sci-
entific 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.”30
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 pen-
chant for reducing heterogeneity to numerical classifications represented a “Tay-
lorism 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

29 “Now for Calorie Dollars Instead of Gold Dollars,” Current Opinion, January 1920, 132. The idea

was not farfetched. Food was already in use as a medium of foreign exchange between the United States
and Poland. “Food Now Foreign Exchange Medium,” New York Times, April 23, 1919, 23.
30 Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Di-

plomacy, 1900–1930 (Durham, N.C., 2003), 192; “The New Dietetics,” The Spectator, August 22, 1925,
296.

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354 Nick Cullather

life are two separate things . . . Your faith in science doesn’t bring you tranquility:
it merely gives your uneasiness a different twist.”31
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.

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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, pro-
tested 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.”32
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 re-
search in new directions. The isolation of minute compounds tied to specific diseases
revolutionized the field in the 1920s. But while the “discovery of vitamins” discred-
ited 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 com-
petition and trusteeship. Elmer V. McCollum’s laboratory at Johns Hopkins set in-
ternational standards for measuring vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. These in-
novations 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 cal-
orie’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.33
Crucially, it also revised the calorie’s universalist premise, reintroducing a con-
nection between diet and race. Where calories had ranked consumption on a uni-
linear scale of under- and over-nutrition, vitamins allowed classification of specific
diets into categories of “malnutrition.” A student of McCollum’s, Lieutenant Colo-

31 Johan Huizinga, America: A Dutch Historian’s Vision from Afar and Near, trans. Herbert H. Rowen

(New York, 1972), 114; see also André Siegfried, America Comes of Age (New York, 1927), 181–182;
Hilaire Belloc, The Contrast (New York, 1924), 53; C. H. Bretherton, Midas; or, The United States and
the Future (New York, 1926), 59; Georges Duhamel, America the Menace, trans. Charles M. Thompson
(Boston, 1931), 13–14.
32 “Calories,” The Nation, February 28, 1920, 736–738; Anne O’Hare McCormick, “Hoover Molds

a Foreign Policy,” New York Times Magazine, June 16, 1929, 1.

33 Two Americans share credit with F. Gowland Hopkins of Cambridge University for the identi-

fication of the first five vitamins. Lafayette B. Mendel of Yale and Elmer V. McCollum both served in
Hoover’s National Food Administration. Harry G. Day, “Nutrition and E. V. McCollum,” Science 205,
no. 4404 (July 27, 1979): 359; Naomi Aronson, “The Discovery of Resistance: Historical Accounts and
Scientific Careers,” Isis 77, no. 4 (December 1986): 630–646.

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 The Foreign Policy of the Calorie 355

nel 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

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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 dis-
ease, 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 improve-
ment of its popular diet “will create an incalculable national energy.”34
No less than any other discipline, nutrition was subject to the moral ambivalence
that afflicted modern science. Research that fostered international awareness of mal-
nutrition 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 uni-
tary “food regime” did not appear until 1937. Instead, dietary research was con-
scripted into three conflicting agendas that can be labeled international, autarkic,
and imperial development. Although each applied measurement as an administra-
tive tool, they subordinated the caloric ideal of a fully optimized consumption to state
or institutional goals, leaving Hoover’s “continent” of human welfare unexplored.
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 in-
ternational 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 preven-
tion, opium control, transit, and weights and measures.35
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 ad-
vocated by the ILO, this represented an unenforced, unlegislated ideal, but it none-

34 Royal Commission on Agriculture in India, Evidence of the Officers Serving under the Government

of India, 3 vols. (Calcutta, 1927), 1, pt. 2: 101; Victor G. Heiser, “Food and Race,” Foreign Affairs 6,
no. 3 (April 1928): 431. The president of the American Medical Association agreed, predicting that
strategic nutrition science would endow favored nations with “a higher level of cultural development.
To a measurable degree, man is now master of his own destiny.” “Food and Human Evolution,” New
York Times, June 13, 1935, 22; Simmons, “Minimal Frenchmen,” 167.
35 Monnet, Memoirs, 98; Raymond B. Fosdick, Letters on the League of Nations: From the Files of

Raymond B. Fosdick (Princeton, N.J., 1966), 9, 22.

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356 Nick Cullather

theless set a benchmark for school lunch programs, famine relief, and wage com-
parisons 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 es-
tablished a common vocabulary for supranational governance.36
In Geneva, as Monnet later observed, the vision of an “organized peace” founded

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on integrated planning soon faded into familiar habits of diplomacy, but private
philanthropies quickly seized upon the new style of international activism. The Car-
negie 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.”37
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 ex-
pansive 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 cul-
tivators to eke more from their tiny plots.38
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 ac-
tion: 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

36 League Health Organization, Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition (Geneva, 1935); Fine,

“Albert Thomas,” 556; ILO, Monthly Summary 7 (July 1929): 40.

37 “Wanted: An Aristotle, Raymond Fosdick’s Plea for the Spirit of Organization,” Current Opinion,

August 1, 1924, 212–213; the full text of the speech is in Raymond B. Fosdick, The Old Savage in the
New Civilization (Garden City, N.Y., 1931), 177–180.
38 John Lossing Buck, Chinese Farm Economy (Chicago, 1930); Buck, “Agriculture and the Future

of China,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 152 (November 1930): 109–
115.

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 The Foreign Policy of the Calorie 357

was evident. As Fosdick insisted, it sprang from the quantitative logic of the food
inventory.39
A second food regime emerged alongside interwar trends toward national au-
tarky. 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, cor-

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doned 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 plan-
ning. 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.40
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 require-
ments as a tool for predicting Italy’s ability to survive a prolonged embargo. In-
creasingly, as Carol Helstosky has shown, national food controls designed to reform
and enhance popular diets were employed instead to enforce military austerity.41
Japan’s dietary reform movement applied the calculative logic of nutritional sci-
ence to reconcile the imperatives of autarky and preparations for war. In 1921, the
newly established Imperial State Institute for Nutrition began research with a cal-
orimeter manufactured in Boston. Comparing Atwater’s factors with results from
Tokyo policemen, tram motormen, barbers, and primary school teachers, chief in-
vestigator Hideo Takahira confirmed that Japanese subjects required calories and
protein in the same amounts as their American counterparts, a revelation that over-
turned a system of military victualing based on distinctive local cuisines. In the 1920s,
the imperial army and navy systematically reformed rations, adding “Western” rec-
ipes 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 invig-
orate the troops and place them on a nutritional par with their prospective American

39 Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth (New York, 1931); Michael H. Hunt, “Pearl Buck—Popular Expert

on China, 1931–1949,” Modern China 3 (January 1977) 1: 33–64; Blake Allmendinger, “Little House on
the Rice Paddy,” American Literary History 10, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 360–377; Buck, Chinese Farm
Economy, 424; Frank Ninkovich, “The Rockefeller Foundation, China, and Cultural Change,” Journal
of American History 70, no. 4 (March 1984): 811–812; “China to Train Farm Aides,” New York Times,
March 7, 1940, 4. See, for instance, Norman Borlaug’s 1970 Nobel Prize citation, Rockefeller Foundation
Papers, RG 6.7, series 4, subseries 6, box 88, Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, New York. John
H. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution (New York, 1997).
40 Carl Ipsen, Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (New York, 1996),

186–187.
41 Carol Helstosky, Garlic and Oil: Politics and Food in Italy (Oxford, 2004), 74 –81, 91–121.

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358 Nick Cullather

and British adversaries. The government then popularized the new “national” cui-
sine among civilians through recipe books, magazines, and exhibitions. Dietary re-
form was part of a “food plan” that, in combination with a “population plan” in-
volving resettlement to Manchuria, aimed to maintain “imperial self-sufficiency” in
the home islands.42
Even when official regimentation was light, the translation of food into numbers

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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 Ni-
kolaos Tselementes in the interwar years. A chef in Parisian restaurants, Tsele-
mentes 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 seg-
regated the world market, a combination that would prove disastrous after October
1929.43
In the British Empire, and especially India, innovations in nutritional research
contributed to a reformulation of the imperial project around a mission of devel-
opment 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 man-
ufacturing required reliable outlets for the branded toiletries, household equipment,
42 League of Nations Health Organization, Progress of the Science of Nutrition in Japan (Geneva,

1926), 13–36; Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, “Popularizing a Military Diet in Wartime and Postwar Japan,”
Asian Anthropology 1 (2002): 1–30; “Food and Population Problems Attacked by Government Body,”
The Trans-Pacific, October 22, 1927, 13a; Michael A. Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search
for Economic Security, 1919–1941 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987).
43 Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,” Com-

parative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 1 (January 1988): 3–24; Shannan Peckham, “Consuming
Nations,” in Sian Griffiths and Jennifer Wallace, eds., Consuming Passions: Food in the Age of Anxiety
(Manchester, 1998), 173; Jane Eddington, “A Meatless Meal,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 7, 1917, 10;
Jeffrey M. Pilcher, ¡Que Vivan Los Tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (Albuquerque,
1998), 90. On other national cuisines, see Igor Cusack, “African Cuisines: Recipe for Nation-Building,”
Journal of African Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (December 2000): 207–225; Catherine Salzman, “Continuity
and Change in the Culinary History of the Netherlands, 1945–1975,” Journal of Contemporary History
21, no. 4 (October 1986): 605–628. See Rebecca Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern
Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 27, on the early use of cookbooks to create national
publics.

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 The Foreign Policy of the Calorie 359

cereals, and canned goods issuing from assembly lines, and the colonies contained
Britain’s largest potential sales territory. Reimagining subject populations as cus-
tomers opened new possibilities and goals for imperial development.44
The “discovery of colonial malnutrition,” according to Michael Worboys, oc-
curred when investigations suggested that an improved diet might enhance the labor
efficiency and buying power of rural, colonial populations. Under the new paradigm,

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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 man-
ufacture.” Dietary statistics identified areas of deficiency and guided investment.
Thus positioned, nutrition held the key to linked problems of public health, agri-
cultural revitalization, and economic development, giving British officials a broad
injunction to manage markets, irrigation, property rights, social services, and con-
sumption in the name of the public welfare.45
As Mohandas Gandhi and other nationalists recognized, the crisis of malnutrition
furnished an expansive justification for Britain’s continuing stewardship, while nu-
tritional science supplied a seemingly neutral, calculative language in which to re-
assert the claims of imperial ideology. In the course of their investigations, for ex-
ample, 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.”46
Challenges to these claims made dietary measurement a locus of nationalist re-
sistance, 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
44 W. K. Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, vol. 2: Problems of Economic Policy, 1918–

1939 (London, 1942), pt. 2: 267.

45 Michael Worboys, “The Discovery of Colonial Malnutrition between the Wars,” in David Arnold,

ed., Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester, 1988), 208–225; Arnold, “The ‘Discovery’
of Malnutrition and Diet in Colonial India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 31, no. 1 (1994):
1–26; Cynthia Brantley, Feeding Families: African Realities and British Ideas of Nutrition and Development
in Early Colonial Africa (Portsmouth, N.H., 2002); Lt. Col. Christopher, “What Disease Costs India,”
Indian Medical Gazette, April 1924, 196–200; “Development of the Empire: A Higher Standard of Liv-
ing,” The Times, November 26, 1937, 11.
46 J. L. Gilks and J. B. Orr, “The Nutritional Condition of the East African Native,” The Lancet,

March 12, 1927, 560–562; Royal Commission on Agriculture, Evidence of the Officers, 96–97; Robert
McCarrison, “The Nutritive Value of Wheat, Paddy, and Certain Other Food-Grains,” Indian Journal
of Medical Research 14, no. 3 (1927): 631–639; Dagmar Curjel Wilson and E. M. Widdowson, “Nutrition
and Diet in Northern India,” The Lancet 233 (December 18, 1937): 1445–1448; W. R. Akroyd, The
Nutritive Value of Indian Foods and the Planning of Satisfactory Diets (Delhi, 1937); John Wallace Megaw,
The First Laws of Health: A Health Reader for Indian Schools (Bombay, 1924), 12–13.

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360 Nick Cullather

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 me-
dium 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.47

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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 acknowl-
edged, 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 prop-
erties 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 val-
ues, each vegetable and fruit possessed “physical and spiritual values” that could also
be measured, but only in the unique laboratory of each human body.48
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 con-
ceptualized 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.49

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 in-
terventions to shore up prices, but restrictions that dumped milk and plowed under
crops while urban laborers starved could scarcely be justified as rationalization.

47 Nishikanta Ray, Cheap Balanced Diets (For Bengalis) (Calcutta, 1939), 57, 65; Radhakamal Muk-

erjee, Food Planning for Four Hundred Millions (London, 1938); D. S. Senanayake, Agriculture and Pa-
triotism (Colombo, 1935), 6.
48 Mahatma Gandhi, “The Struggles of a Worker,” June 1, 1935, in Gandhi, Collected Works, 90 vols.

(Delhi, 1958–1984), 61: 127; Gandhi, Diet and Diet Reform (Ahmedabad, 1949); Gandhi, Food Shortage
and Agriculture (Ahmedabad, 1949); Gandhi to Vijaypal Singh, July 17, 1927, in Collected Works, 34:
184 –185.
49 Joseph S. Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia, 2000); Ashis

Nandy, The Savage Freud (New Delhi, 1998), 182.

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 The Foreign Policy of the Calorie 361

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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.

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.50
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) claims the 1936 report of the
League commission on nutrition as its founding document. A compilation of re-
search 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, ac-
cording 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 pro-
duced. The tables illustrated (“irrefutably,” according to commentators) a connec-
tion between the crisis of agricultural overproduction in some countries and the
50 C. H. Lee, “The Effects of the Depression on Primary Producing Countries,” Journal of Con-

temporary History 4, no. 4 (October 1969): 139–155; William Haldane, “Too Much Wheat, a Burden on
the World,” The Times, March 20, 1933, 13.

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362 Nick Cullather

problem of malnutrition in others, a planetary imbalance requiring, according to

Australian delegate Stanley Bruce, “a marriage of health to agriculture.”51
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,

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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.”52
Britain’s Parliament hailed the strategy as an indirect assault on economic na-
tionalism. The United States, abandoning its customary detachment, lent it increas-
ing 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 post-
war 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 inter-
national order began with food. In 1943, the Roosevelt administration gathered sev-
enty-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.53
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 min-
istries 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
51 “A Nutrition Policy,” The Spectator, July 24, 1936, 129; “The Staff of Nations,” New York Times,

September 4, 1937, 4. Bruce’s metaphor became the formulaic expression of the FAO’s mission. See
Norris E. Dodd, The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (San Francisco, 1953), 15; Ralph
Wesley Phillips, FAO: Its Origins, Formation, and Evolution, 1945–1981 (Rome, 1981), 4.
52 F. L. McDougall, “Food and Welfare,” Geneva Studies 9, no. 5 (November 1938): 10; League of

Nations, Nutrition: Report of the Mixed Committee of the League of Nations on the Relation of Nutrition
to Health, Agriculture, and Economic Policy, 4 vols. (Geneva, 1936), 2A: 11; 3: 270. On the founding of
the FAO, see Amy L. S. Staples, “To Win the Peace: The Food and Agriculture Organization, Sir John
Boyd Orr, and the World Food Board Proposals,” Peace & Change 28, no. 4 (October 2003): 495–523;
“The Standard of Living Way to Economic Appeasement,” The Times, September 8, 1937, 9.
53 Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941, 61–65; “Text of Vice President

Wallace’s Address on This Nation’s War Aims,” New York Times, April 9, 1941, 18; Russell B. Porter,
“Food Conferees Depict World of Cooperation,” New York Times, May 30, 1943, E7.

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 The Foreign Policy of the Calorie 363

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.54
Secondly, the United States, as the leading exporter, recognized the value of grain

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shipments in fortifying clients against ideological assault. Hoover’s remedy for Bol-
shevism became an axiom of national security. To General Lucius Clay, U.S. oc-
cupation 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 cal-
ories” would “pave the way to a Communist Europe.” The China White Paper at-
tributed 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 became yet another score-
card in the ideological contest, a position encapsulated in the Eisenhower admin-
istration’s assertion that “free men eat better” and the Kennedy administration’s
claim that “wherever Communism goes, hunger follows.”55
Finally, the calamity of starvation in the poorest countries came to be inextricably
entangled with issues of rural welfare in the wealthiest. P.L. 480 and the FAO’s
World Food Programme fostered the growth of powerful farm/industry constitu-
encies that sustained price support policies in the United States and the European
Union. Despite authoritative studies demonstrating that “tied” food aid—surpluses
shipped from donor countries—disrupts local markets and prolongs scarcity, the
belief in a world food balance and a reciprocity of surplus and dearth, ratified by the
calorie, upholds the logic of international transfers. Transnational shipments of
wheat remain the principal mechanism of international hunger relief. In interna-
tional forums and the advertisements of the Archer Daniels Midland Corporation,
world hunger continues to justify crop subsidies. In the contentious Doha round of
world trade talks in 2005, delegates once again failed to dissolve “the marriage of
health to agriculture” solemnized in 1936.56

IN 1935, HISTORIAN CHARLES A. BEARD wrote The Open Door at Home, an extended
essay on the failings of scientistic foreign policy. U.S. diplomacy, he observed, pro-
ceeded from a misguided assumption that “everything that exists, even knowledge
and the affections, exists in some quantity, [and] is therefore measurable and can be
54 Binay R. Sen, “Director General’s Monthly Letter No. 67,” September 1958, Sen Papers, RG 8,

FAO Archives, Rome, Italy; Sen, Towards a Newer World (Dublin, 1982), 141; “Cry for Food,” Wash-
ington Post, April 16, 1946, 6; “Text of Secretary Acheson’s Letter Transmitting White Paper,” New York
Times, August 6, 1949, 4; John M. Cabot, “Wise Distribution of U.S. Food Surpluses,” Department of
State Bulletin, April 1, 1959, 636.
55 David W. Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America, and Postwar Reconstruction (Lon-

don, 1992), 54; “Text of Secretary Acheson’s Letter,” New York Times, August 6, 1949, 4; John M. Cabot,
“Wise Distribution of U.D. Food Surpluses,” Department of State Bulletin, April 1, 1959, 636; Dean Rusk,
“The Tragedy of Cuba,” Vital Speeches, February 15, 1962, 258–262.
56 Alan Beattie, “Food Aid Less Efficient Than Cash, Says Study,” Financial Times, September 27,

2005, 6.

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364 Nick Cullather

reduced to system.” Beard expected that the Depression, by exposing the many “in-
tangibles and immeasurables” lurking outside the quantitative view, would finally
discredit this empirical style, but even as he wrote a new foreign policy, “realism”
based on calculations of economic interest and a presumed mastery of the social and
natural environment was already germinating. Between 1937 and 1945, new sciences
of demography, national incomes accounting, and econometric modeling profoundly

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expanded the jurisdiction of state policy and the influence of international expertise.
What had escaped Beard’s notice was the capacity of science to renew positivism
by inventing new metrics and new ways of deploying them. Quantitative reasoning
was not a singular approach that could be disproved, but a succession of rhetorics
tied to particular ways of counting. The inception of new numbering schemes revived
a mandate for international social engineering that imperial ideologies could no
longer support. Critics of modernization have associated the certitude and ambition
of this sensibility with a moment in the mid-twentieth century, and with particular
projects manifesting an extravagant style of architecture, planning, and gover-
nance—Brasilia, the Aswan High Dam, or the War on Poverty—but fragments of
this vision of an orderly world, in which resources align neatly with desires and every
person is entitled to a minimum daily requirement, may still be found even in or-
dinary places, such as on the side of a cereal box.57
57 Charles A. Beard, The Open Door at Home (New York, 1935), 17, 28–29.

Nick Cullather is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloom-

ington, Indiana.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2007