Book Description

"In 1968 Magnus Pyke argued that what "human communities choose to eat is only partly dependent on their physiological requirements, and even less on intellectual reasoning and a knowledge of what these physiological requirements are." Pyke, a nutritional scientist who had worked under the Chief Scientific Advisor to Britain's Ministry of Food during the Second World War, illustrated his point by recounting that in preparing the nation for war, military officials had demanded that land be allocated to grow gherkins. They had insisted, Pyke recalled, that the British soldier "could not fight without a proper supply of pickles to eat with his cold meat." The Ministry of War had apparently been "unmoved to learn from the nutritional experts" that pickles offered little of material value to the diet, as they had almost no calories, vitamins, or minerals. The Ministry of Food, Pyke asserted, nevertheless designated precious agricultural land for gherkin cultivation. For what the human body requires, this former government official conceded, often needs to be subordinate to what "the human being to whom the body belongs" desires.1 This pickle episode exemplifies why a book about government feeding must be more than merely a study of the impact of food science on state policy. The nutritional sciences, which began to emerge in the late eighteenth century and made significant advances from the 1840s,2 established that the nutritive and energy potential of food could be measured, calibrated, and deployed. Food science might have been one of the "engine sciences" that Patrick Carroll positions as central to modern state formation, particularly in the British Isles.3 But if science was integral to modern forms of governance, it must nevertheless be understood not as preceding and dictating state action but rather, as Christopher Hamlin has argued, as "a resource parties appeal to (or make up as they go along) for use wherever authority is needed: to authorize themselves to act, to compete for the public's interest and money, to neutralize real or potential critics."4 That there was "a sharp division" between "theoretical knowledge" of nutrition and "its practical implementation"5 was thus often strategic"--