It might be said that in politics, progress is what can be measured, and much public policy is certainly a matter of meeting numerical benchmarks – growth targets, casualty figures, test scores, prescription drug prices, inflation rates, and the like. In “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” Nick Cullather argues that scientists who invented the calorie in the late nineteenth century intended to bring food into this international discourse of measurable units. The calorie was indeed a unit for comparing national diets and measuring social efficiency. It was a standardizing measurement tool, allowing scientists and policy makers to look at all food as the same, reducing the variety of foodstuffs across the world to their energy producing capacity. In these terms, the most efficient food was cheap and dense in calories. And the food that best fit that definition was wheat. The calorie proponents, particularly Herbert Hoover, believed that states had an obligation to ensure an internal balance of calories; if they failed, international wheat transfers could not only fill the gap but also shore up political stability. In this article, which is truly transnational in scope, Cullather offers an analysis of the central role of food policy in international affairs throughout the first part of the twentieth century.
