Care, Control and Calories: A Genealogy of Measuring International Undernutrition

Abstract This article documents the historical development of the calory and its application in international measurement of undernutrition. It provides an empirical account of the origins of caloric measurement as a scientific instrument, its uptake into international statistics on undernutrition produced by the League of Nations and the United Nations, and eventual use in monitoring global development goals. The historical analysis explores and discusses how a dialectic of care and control is embedded in macrosocial measurement of hunger: Caloric statistics have served as a condition of possibility for states and international agencies to render food systems governable through constituting a novel form of legibility that pushed the frontiers for modern schemes of top-down intervention and control. Such measurements have furthermore served as a vital resource to legitimize and justify the ambitions of the UN and modern development agenda, serving to establish and shape grand narratives of humanity’s progress under different food regimes. Based on this historical analysis, the article provides a normative and epistemic argument for centring the perspectives and knowledges of those affected by hunger in the enumeration of nutrition and food security. Such democratic agency should however not just be an object of measurement but be leveraged through participatory methodologies that draw upon the voices of the food insecure to better capture the multidimensional nature of food security through numbers.