Cullather N. The Foreign Policy of the Calorie. The American historical review. 2007;112(2):337-364.
doi:10.1086/ahr.112.2.337
Key words: Calorie; Foreign Policy; Discovery; Western Hegemony
Type: Review
Definition of Calorie: a unit of measurement for the energy content of food, an amount sufficient to
raise the temperature of one kilogram of water one degree
o an arithmetic standard of living? A technology for classifying food as an evolving
developmental discourse (Western i.e. MDGs/SDGs) registering the energetic requirements
and aspirations of nations on numerical terms?
“In the early part of the twentieth century, “food” lost its subjective, cultural character and evolved
into a material instrument of statecraft”
o quantified, entrenched within the context of goals, analogies, and claims (not neutral or
objective measure)
Allows consumption patterns to be politically legible (e.g. ethics of hunger; to define
hunger as a social problem required hunger to be quantified)
For example, calories embedded within US foreign policy
o popularised and factualised a set of assumptions allowing food to become an instrument of
power and to envisage a global ‘food problem’ amenable to technical interventions (i.e.
progressive era as a yardstick of social and industrial efficiency, Marshall plans for detecting
scarce resources)
(Previous US interventions with calories) Atwater’s calorimeter invention came into use as an
international measure of food value in the early twentieth century
o Assumptions: uniformity, comparability in time-space, state obliged to balance food supplies
with the nation’s dietary requirements; world peace demanded an international food
balance rationalised through international regulation
Paved a direction for policy to progress.
A scientific basis of a ‘standard of living’ to meet the demands for a healthy and
contended labour force in ‘leisure, meat and bread’ whilst containing the wage-
level.
“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.”
“Calorimeter thus translated the vernacular customs of food into the numerical language of empire.”
“Calorie represented food as uniform, composed of interchangeable parts, and comparable across
time and between nations and races.”
Ongoing discussions for the history of the ‘calorie’ and its usage as a tool for foreign policy interventions and
instrument for monitoring national vitality
‘Discovery of vitamins, minerals and amino acids’ – changing representations of food beyond calorie,
i.e. milk as a ‘protective’ food for adolescents
o International standards of nutrients, vitamins, and amino acids allowed classification of
‘malnutrition’ i.e. League Health Organisations, ILO ‘2,500’ calorie for an eight-hour labouring
adult = an unenforced, unlegislated ideal = set a bench-mark for launching school lunch
programs, famine relief, global wage comparisons
Global, but nation-specific dietary reforms since 1920’s
‘Discovery of colonial malnutrition’, “an improved diet might enhance the labour efficiency and
buying power of rural, colonial populations”
, Gandhi (1935) (critiquing modern science), “urged followers not to copy his own regimen of fruit,
milk, and uncooked vegetables but to do their own experiments, insisting on the specificity of
individual appetites and the distinct properties of each food”
o against universalism, normative
o Principle of Satyagraha; “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”
“Anything measurable can be reduced to a system” (Beard, 1935)
o Positivism – the history of calories as a critique of modernisation.
Lasting Questions:
Broader Links in Module
***
Garthwaite K., Collins P., Bambra C. Food for thought: An ethnographic study of negotiating ill health and
food insecurity in a UK foodbank. Social science & medicine (1982). 2015;132:38-44.
doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.03.019
Key words: Austerity Ethnography Food bank Food insecurity Health inequalities Welfare reform UK
Type: Research Study
Abstract / Introduction
An ethnographic study exploring the health and health perceptions of foodbank users in Stockton-on-
Tees, Northeast England during a period of welfare reform and austerity – 2013-2014 field notes and
interviews with foodbank users and volunteers
Emergency foodbanks – a feature of austerity in the West
Definition of Food poverty; the inability to acquire or eat an adequate quality or sufficient quantity of
food in socially acceptable ways, or the uncertainty of being able to do so (Dowler and O’Connor,
2012)
o An epidemic, 4.7mn (<10% of household income on food).
o In 2014, poorest UK households spent near a 1uarter of their household incomes on food
verses 4% for most affluent – 19% hospitalised for malnutrition in 2013 (UK Faculty of Public
Health, 2014) – UK food prices risen 12% GDP since 2007 (Defra, 2013) [social determinant
links]
Findings;
Mental health problems
o Depression, anxiety, stress, isolation, bereavement
Negotiating food insecurity
o Cheapness, cycles of food abundance/scarcity, adverse health effects i.e. constipation,
weight-gain/loss
Financing a healthy diet
o Awareness for how to eat healthy but the inability to do due to affordability
Discussion/conclusion;
“Food choice is a concept no longer relevant to foodbank users.”
o necessity = cheap,
o readily available, filling, no wastage.
,Lasting Questions: Outcome of foreign policy managing food is food banks? Do the findings of this study show
that the food system is a biopolitical tool?
Broader Links in Module:
***
Nally D. The biopolitics of food provisioning. Transactions - Institute of British Geographers (1965).
2011;36(1):37-53. doi:10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00413.x
Key words: biopower colonial agribusiness agro-biotechnology capitalism hunger historical geopolitics
Type: Review
Abstract:
Foucauldian framework
o To explore how a moral economy of hunger gradually replaces a political economy of food
security that promotes market mechanisms as a better protection against scarcity
o Exploring the biopolitics of the modern food economy
Political liberalism and laissez-faire economic shifted how hunger and scarcity were conceptualised
and socially managed otherwise beyond EU it was managed by colonial plantations (transformation of
non-capitalist social formations into market economics as a ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey,
2003)
Introduction
“‘era of bio-power’ heralded a new taxonomy of everyday life: through administrative measures life
itself could be subjugated and managed with a view to the betterment and greater security of
humankind (Foucault 1980)”
Homo æconomicus and the problem of scarcity
Free markets forged through the intimate relationship between state and capital
Old crisis as ‘hunger amidst scarcity, replaced with a modern crisis of ‘hunger amidst abundance’
(Araghi, 2000)
o Famines have functions as well as causes (Nally, 2008)
Colonial agribusiness
‘Imperial agribusiness’ – the use of state and institutional mechanisms to control world agriculture
and the circulation of goods (McMichael, 2000)
Plantations as the ‘laboratories of modern governmentality’ (Duncan, 2007) – the exceptional control
over labour, creation of drastically new ecologies for monocultural purposes, expansion of an
‘international knowledge economy’
“Transformation of non-market economies into market systems (Kearns 2009) might seem a more apt
expression of the death function of sovereign power than the life administering mechanisms of
biopower” i.e. agrarian revolution entrenched with notions of improvement
Global South poverty codified as a symptom of native/cultural incompetence thus new interventions
in the ‘will to improve’ (Li, 2007)
Foucault remains focal to the modern food economy i.e. hunger/malnutrition entrenched by the
notions of welfare and development
Corporate biopower
Biopower achieved through liberalisation, biotechnologies, privatisation
, “end game of this logic is the corporate control of the means of production and the gradual
elimination of non-market access to food”
Accumulation by Molecularization = “tightening relationship between bio-sciences and agribusiness has led to
biological interventions that have, amongst other things, accelerated the commodification of the food system
in ways that were not previously possible”
Definition of the more-than-human in the food system: reluctant commodities biological realities
that inhibit the quick reproduction of capital (Lewontin, 2000)
o Commercialised agriculture as the ‘new metabolism with nature’ (Wood, 2000)
For example, the seed as the ‘first link in the food chain’ (Shiya, 2000) – its
commodification as ‘one of the biggest transfers of wealth in human history’
(Roberts, 2008)
‘Meatification’ of human diets
o Inefficient for acquiring protein to meet world hunger –
17:1kg, grain: beef but for the agroindustry, livestock production is effective for
selling grain to consumers at profitable rates => a global ‘dietary convergence’
(Weis, 2007) i.e. China now consuming more meat that world’s entire population in
1961
Since 2006, 75 million people added to the number of chronically hungry,
bringing global figure to near one billion (meat consumption diverted basic
crop resources from humans to animals)
Central contradiction of corporate agro-industry, making a world that is both ‘stuffed and starved’
(Patel, 2007)
The accumulation by molecularization has devalued life, the human right to food itself despite
promises of everlasting surplus and plentifulness (Cooper, 2008)
Conclusion
‘Poor consumers’ vs hungry
o a matter of economics as calories remain hinged on cash nexus
“Scarcity – as land and resources are diverted to meet the demands of more affluent consumers – and
abundance, as obesogenic diets transform the human body into an accumulation strategy (Guthman
and Du Puis 2006)”
[mutually constituted] Scarcity vs abundance, consumerism vs poor consumerism, underproduction vs
overproduction
o Not a failure of the modern food regime, rather a consequence of its central paradoxes
entrenched by legal, institutional and biotechnical mechanisms i.e. trade tariffs, subsidies,
privatisation which effect subsidence.
Lasting Questions: Outcome of foreign policy managing food is food banks? Do the findings of this study show
that the food system is a biopolitical tool?
Broader Links in Module:
***
Robert G. Wallace author. (2016) Big farms make big flu : dispatches on infectious disease, agribusiness, and
the nature of science / by Rob Wallace. New York : Monthly Review Press, [2016].
Key words:
Type: Book
