The Foreign Policy of the Calorie

Abstract

before recalling that a calorie is a measure of the energy content of food, an amount sufficient to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water one degree. One might try the same experiment with other numerical yardsticks used to gauge individual or social well-being-GNP, T-cell counts, or crime rates-and find a similar cultural lost-wax process: the soft material of objective measurement falls away, leaving a subjective impression on the things measured. The ninth-graders had fully absorbed the governmentality of the calorie; they understood that it patterns food with particular obligations, aesthetic and hygienic norms, and techniques of management. Knowing too much about an indicator's original purpose, or what it actually records, might only diminish its authority.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 relative status of states and empires. As doctrines of development first began to inform the practice of international relations, numerical indicators prepared the way, jumping linguistic boundaries and displacing local knowledge and native informants. The empiricism of states and international institutions, Timothy Mitchell contends, acquired a character of calculability that mediated between material realities and the