CW: eating disorders and diet culture
On Wednesday, March 6, Northeastern University Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship candidate Dr. Athia Choudhury gave a talk titled “The Making of the American Calorie & Metabolic Metrics of Empire.” The event, held at Pomona College’s Gender and Women’s Studies House, examined the historic emergence of modern diet culture through various health and wellness technologies, focusing on the rise of the calorie.
Choudhury is a postdoctoral associate in Duke University’s Asian American and Diaspora Studies program. She is an intersectional feminist thinker, working at the conjuncture of food studies and transnational feminism.
Event organizer Aimee Bahng, an associate professor and coordinator of the Gender and Women’s Studies program, explained that she invited Chodhury to speak because she said she finds the multifaceted nature of her work to be inspiring.
“Professor Choudhury is a fantastic scholar at the intersection of disability studies, fat studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies and comparative ethnic studies,” Bahng said.
At the talk, Choudhury started with a personal anecdote, explaining how her life always revolved around calories. Since the age of 12, she said she attempted numerous strategies to lose weight — fad diets, appetite suppressants, slimming malts and laxatives — noting that she attempted most of these under the supervision of healthcare professionals.
“The idea of health and reaching towards it at whatever cost meant that a world I had only known as punitive, violent and humiliating towards my body would finally let me live,” she said.
Choudhury then delved into the history of the calorie, explaining how it went from a measure of heat energy to a measure of energy content of food when chemist Wilbur Atwater began conducting calorimetry and metabolic experiments on humans for military applications.
Following this, the calorie played a central role in the movement of euthenics, which emphasized human wellness and the creation of universal standards for public welfare worldwide.
Choudhury explained that, as a part of euthenics, ‘living exhibitions’ were used to capture the attention of Americans and encourage them to support health reform abroad. However, she noted that this move caused many Americans to try to shun and eliminate the successful health practices of other cultures.
Citing an example of a living exhibit in 1904 at a World Fair, Choudhury explained that the exhibit showed Igorot Filipinas “barely dressed in scraps of clothes, living in straw huts, using stone tools and butchering and eating dogs to elicit glee and disgust from the audience.”
“Historians have noted that the consumption of dogs for certain tribes in the Northern Highlands was part ritual and part medicinal practice,” Choudhury said. “Yet, the [living exhibits] spectacularized dog-eating daily, galvanizing the American public to support health and hygiene reform in the Philippines.”
After this, the calorie became a mass-market tool, used in training manuals, recipe booklets, food labeling and nutritional media material. As a result, poor communities of color, Native boarding schools and prisons became test sites for nutritional re-education.
“Food as fuel for the body allowed reformers to train the poor labor force into consuming economic and nutrient dense foods to replace cultural and ethnic foods,” Choudhury said. “It’s important to recognize how the calorie fundamentally changed our reasons for eating.”
According to Choudhury, this led Americans to fixate on food and body weight, with body weight being used by the state to determine citizenship and sovereignty over Native communities.
Choudhury cited an example from the Carlisle Indian School collection — one of the largest digital repositories for archival material from Native boarding schools — where there are hundreds of weight charts that were used for transfers, discharges and discharge denials.
“Families were denied reunification based on the child’s weight — either that they were previously overweight or underweight and that under the state’s nutritional watch, the children were healthier and therefore better off remaining at the school,” Choudhury said.
Choudhury added that weight became an index of child welfare and that health data was used to measure the “Native communities capacity for caretaking and sovereignty.”
She continued that later, in the 20th century, the calorie went from being state regulated to self-regulated, when American women began to regulate calories in their homes so that they could feed soldiers.
This created a link between calorie regulation and national responsibility that can still be seen in all kinds of public health initiatives, such as Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move Campaign.
“At first, [the campaign] was about training parents and children in good nutrition, continuing tactics that said that some bodies must be surveilled and eliminated for the good of the nation,” Choudhury said. “[At a press conference], Obama echoed sentiments that litter the USDA and the Bureau of Home Economics archive — that fatness threatens the very vitality of the nation.”
At the conference, Obama characterized childhood obesity as a national threat with far-reaching consequences.
“Childhood obesity isn’t just a public health threat, it’s not just an economic threat, it’s a national security threat as well,” she said in 2010.
Choudhury added that, around the same time, calorie regulation at home led to competing images of American femininity. Women would either restrict calorie intake to get a willowy figure, or use calorie intake to improve health and human output.
But, Choudhury said, this leads to health issues like Orthorexia Nervosa, a hyperfixation on food quality, nutritional value and purity of the foods one consumes.
“It is an eating disorder defined by a desire to know the scientific, quantifiable and material conditions in which a food item has been grown and harvested and how it will interact with the body on the cellular level,” she explained. “Ultimately, it is food literacy that has gone too far.”
Choudhury ended the talk by explaining that it is important to recognize that these racialized systems of eating are embedded in people’s mindsets, but that there is a possibility of cultivating a relationship with food and eating that is honest and indulgent.
Bahng echoed a similar sentiment, explaining how recognizing racialized systems is a part of studying Gender and Women’s Studies.
“The things you take for granted in your everyday life, the food that you eat, the clothes you put on your body, these are all inflicted with important histories, often of racial capitalism,” she said. “A part of our line of study in Gender and Women’s Studies is to inquire after those histories and the significance they play on how we understand our relationships to the world.”
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