Counting Calories

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. Today on the show, we’re exploring the ways that American’s ideas about healthy eating have changed through time. Now a lot of us have had the experience of standing in middle of a grocery aisle, pouring over the microscopic nutritional data on the side of a package of food. And it turns out that this whole idea of quantifying healthiness, of measuring the molecular composition of our food, became standard in the late 19th century.

By then, scientists in Europe had already identified the calorie as the fundamental measure of the amount of energy in food. But in the 1890s, a researcher named Wilbur Atwater, put a particularly American spin on the issue. It was then that he embarked in what would become famous studies of the chemical composition of 2600 American foods.

CHARLOTTE BILTEKOFF: And by that, he meant the amount of carbohydrates, fat, and protein, and the overall total number of calories provided by a certain amount of that food.

BRIAN: This is Charlotte Biltekoff, who’s written about Atwater. She says Atwater not only wanted to know how many calories were in American foods, he also wanted to find out how many calories Americans were burning on a daily basis. To do this, he stuck participants is something called a calorimeter. That was a sealed chamber lined with copper and zinc. A system of thermometers and electric condensers, measured the heat and air going in out of the room.

Inside, his research subjects would eat different kinds of food and engage in various activities, like lifting weights or taking tests.

CHARLOTTE BILTEKOFF: So he knew exactly what they were taking in, in terms of energy, and exactly what they were expending in terms of both waste and energy.

BRIAN: How did he measure what they were expending?

CHARLOTTE BILTEKOFF: Well, I don’t know exactly how he measured it, but he took out all the waste from the sealed chamber as well.

BRIAN: Atwater compiled his findings into tables that assigned calorie counts to specific foods and tasks. And then, and this is critical, he added data about each of the foods cost, so that he could determine the foods with the greatest caloric bang for the buck.

Biltekoff told me that Atwater believed his data could help cool some of this simmering class tensions in Gilded Age America.

CHARLOTTE BILTEKOFF: One of Atwater’s big concerns was how to feed all these people flooding into the cities to do work in factories, how to keep them well-fed on the wages that they were earning in the factories. And he was concerned about giving people the information that they needed to choose the food that would give them the energy they needed for work.

BRIAN: So was this a way of ameliorating class conflict by simply teaching people how to make better use of food?

CHARLOTTE BILTEKOFF: It was certainly a way of addressing concerns about class conflict and about labor unrest. Atwater and the domestic scientists who popularized his ideas believed that if we give people the nutrition that they need at the least possible cost, then they won’t be agitating for increased wages, they won’t be angry and upset, they won’t be in the brothels and in the saloons. That a good, nutritious, economical meal could keep people out of trouble.

BRIAN: Charlotte who were these domestic scientists?

CHARLOTTE BILTEKOFF: Domestic scientists were turn-of-the-century female reformers. They really believed that bringing science into the domestic realm, and especially into cooking, would solve the social problems of the day. And they did all kinds of things to spread Atwater’s gospel, so to speak, including putting together social reform projects like the New England Kitchen, which was a public kitchen that was meant to be a teacher of good methods and of eating right essentially. And they brought Atwater’s work to the public.

BRIAN: I want to ask you about this New England Kitchen. Who is it directed at and what did they actually serve there?

CHARLOTTE BILTEKOFF: Well, the New England Kitchen began in one of Boston’s poor neighborhoods. And the idea was that the working poor in this neighborhood, immigrants and factory workers, et cetera, would bring their lunch pails into the New England Kitchen and there they would be exposed to the silent teacher of cleanliness and hygienic methods.

[LAUGHTER]

These patrons were illiterate, so rather than teaching by handing out pamphlets, the domestic scientists sought to teach by example. Both by how they conducted their own work in the kitchen, which was through very scientific processes. They considered the kitchen a laboratory. And they also wanted to teach through the food that they gave. So this food was not frivolous. It was an important distinction to them, the food was not there to be enjoyed. It was there to convey two things. One, is a very specific amount and balance of nutrients. And two, was a message about the importance of thinking about food in relationship to the nutrition that it provided and to the cost of that food.

And it might be things like brown bread, and beef stew, pea soup, porridges.

BRIAN: Hmm, porridges. Was taste a consideration here? I mean, did they care about whether the workers actually like this? This is all beginning to sound a little like school lunch programs that aim to be more nutritious, but when they measure what’s being thrown away, you know like 87% of the stuff is being thrown away.

CHARLOTTE BILTEKOFF: Well ironically, or maybe not, the New England Kitchen was actually the source of the first school lunch program. They started sending–

BRIAN: I thought I sniffed out a little school lunch origin there.

CHARLOTTE BILTEKOFF: They began sending lunches out to schools and hospitals in part because the people who they were trying to reach, were not interested.

BRIAN: Let me ask you, if the working class pretty much rejected this not-so-great tasting food, did it put the domestic scientists out of business? Who do they turn their attention toward?

CHARLOTTE BILTEKOFF: Absolutely did not put them out of business. So they discovered that the Irish, and Scandinavian, and German, and Russian, and Italian immigrants who they were trying to teach to eat like them, really preferred the dishes that they were accustomed to. And furthermore, for them eating meat three times a day was exactly what they came to America for and they didn’t want to be told otherwise.

But they turned their attention at that point it to the middle class. And that transition point, I think, is a very important one. This is in the mid 1890s as the New England Kitchen, and all of the public kitchens that had grown up to replicate it, were failing. The domestic scientists turned their attention to what they called the intelligent middle classes.

And they’d started to draw this important distinction between the stubborn, incorrigible, indifferent, uninterested poorer populations and the more intelligent, cosmopolitan, thinking classes, who were more amenable to this kind of education and to this kind of change.

BRIAN: So let me stop you there and ask if one of the reasons the domestic scientists were interested in nutrition was to solve social problems, did they just give up on solving social problems?

CHARLOTTE BILTEKOFF: No, they shifted their focus to the middle class and to a different kind of thinking about what the social problems were. One of the social problems of the time was the sense that the Anglo middle class was deteriorating and this gives rise to eugenics, which I’m sure you’re familiar with.

BRIAN: Yes.

CHARLOTTE BILTEKOFF: But it also gives rise to a way of thinking about changing the environment in order to improve the race and to improve heredity.

BRIAN: And how did that work with food?

CHARLOTTE BILTEKOFF: Well, the approach to diet remained very focused on Atwater’s principles of nutrition. It was about really thinking about the kitchen as a scientific laboratory and ridding American Kitchens of sensuality, intuition, tradition, and all of those reproaches to cooking they could end up in unpredictable messes.

[LAUGHTER]

So science was to take over and to provide replicable, predictable, and reliable results that would promise efficient diets across the land.

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BRIAN: Charlotte Biltekoff is the author of Eating Right in America: Cultural Politics of Food and Health. She’s a professor at the University of California, Davis.