Calorie Counting, Difference, and Citizenship in 19th- and 20th-Century United States

Calories are a unit of measurement for the energy content of food. In the early 21st century, calorie counts are ubiquitous in weight-loss advice, but historically they served much more varied functions: they helped regulate wage levels, sharpen racial and gender boundaries, and create normative ideas about proper consumption and body size. In the late 19th century, a transatlantic coalition of researchers and reformers began to understand food as energy for human engines that could help optimize human and social productivity, even on a global scale. Industrialists and government officials were among the first to use it to reduce the cost of working-class diets, countering labor calls for higher wages. By promising to speak truth to food needs, and to scientifically measure the relation of diet and human productivity, calorie counting mobilized different actors and agendas in Progressive Era United States, shaping the American order at a time when it was particularly contested. Home economists used calorie counts to teach working- and middle-class families how to buy nourishing foods while saving money and to outline the contours of modern consumer citizenship. Eugenicists took them up in order to campaign for the “racial fitness” of white Americans, and scientists tried to determine racial and gendered differences in energy metabolism. During World War I food conservation and postwar American food relief efforts, calorie counts served as a way to teach Americans how to substitute foods and to calculate food needs and shipments to starving populations. It was not until the late 1910s that calorie counting was introduced into weight-loss diets. It contributed to the emergence of fat shaming by suggesting that body weight was the direct and causal result of eating more than one’s caloric needs, placing the responsibility for one’s body and health in the hands of the individual. Until the early 21st century, calorie counts thrived in weight-loss advice because they resonate with modern mass consumption, emphasizing both individual restraint and pleasure in consumption and thereby delineating proper consumer citizenship.