The Calorie and the Making and Unmaking of Racial Bodies

The talk explores how nutritional science and the calorie contributed to, but also challenged racial classification and national belonging. In the late 19^th century, the calorie was invented by a transatlantic scientific community, promising to be a reliable means for the scientific comparison of food values, and thus for bodies, their shapes, abilities, and needs. According to chemist Wilbur O. Atwater, who introduced the calorie to the nutritional discourse in the U.S., experiments in a single country and with a single group of people did not suffice, because peoples‘ diets and bodies differed greatly. Into the 1920s, nutritionists conducted numerous dietary studies and used the calorie to determine and compare the energy value of nationally and regionally distinct foods and the energy requirements of different bodies and peoples in the U.S. as well as globally.

With the invention of the calorie as a means of comparison it was possible to relate different eating bodies to each other, such as white and black Americans and workers in Great Britain and the Congo. Endowed with the discursive power of science and the reliability granted to scientific knowledge, caloric studies created nationalized and racialized “dietary standards” and shaped the contours of different races and national bodies. On the one hand, these studies fit well into a time when racial status was increasingly connected to body shape; on the other hand they complicated fixed understandings of race and national belonging. For instance, the researchers found that—broken down into calories—the needs of different bodies and peoples’ dietary customs were much more similar than expected. The talk takes up this ambivalence and shows how the calorie simultaneously created and transgressed race and nation at the beginning of the 20^th century.