government money for nutrition research was new, but money for agricultural research dated back to land grant institutions and the Morrill Acts of 1862, making the transition possible. In the early 1870s, he helped found the first federally funded Agricultural Experiment Station in the country in Middletown, Connecticut.10 Then, in 1877, an opportunity from the United States Commission of Fisheries pushed the professor’s study from the food composition of animal feed to the food composition of animals themselves. For the next three years, Atwater and his students analyzed fish that might be part of a typical American diet. These “human feed” studies made his name. The study shifted Atwater’s interest in the composition of animal feed toward work on the composition of food eaten by humans. After determining the amount of crude protein, ash, and carbohydrates in each of these fish, Atwater began to direct experiments on a diversity of human-consumed foods. By 1879 he had analyzed the composition of 1,300 foods.11 Following the influence of human nutrition studies across the Atlantic, Atwater also became absorbed in research on calories. European calorie studies emerged from projects that attempted to understand the human body, especially to understand how it compared to other machines. As American and European physiologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century began to analogize the human body to a machine, a system of interlocking parts, they also came to understand the body as something improvable. Like other technologies of the moment, a human-machine could be assessed and managed piece by piece.12 As German and French chemists tried to rationalize the human body in the late nineteenth century, they conceived of it as a study of labor input and output. The laboring body was a machine, and food calories provided an authoritative, quantitative, way of evaluating human physiology. Research in the late 1850s and through the 1860s tried to understand calorie-use in terms of the heat produced by the laboring body, just as well as its energy output, evaluating how the human body stood up to the laws of thermodynamics. American research only caught up to European nutrition research through Atwater, who built the first domestic respiration calorimeter in 1896.13 The device measured research subjects’ intake of food and output of heat. At the core of this research was the project of evaluating the body through laboratory means, assessing input and output, and imagining an ideal management of the human body under carefully calculated rules.14
For Atwater, understanding consumption through a unit like the calorie offered a way of making sense of how food composition related to energy and physique. It offered a simplifying language.15 Atwater contributed the concept of Atwater Units—now usually called macronutrient ratios—to the study of calories. The general idea of Atwater Units was that one gram of fat contained nine calories, one gram of protein contained four calories, and one gram of carbohydrates contained four calories. This idea, still central to contemporary nutrition, allowed Atwater to use the research subjects and studies available not only to understand laboring men’s basic caloric needs, but also how the composition of foods affected laborers’ energy and strength. It allowed scientists to “rationalize quality.”16 It was one substantial step beyond simply counting calories to decide what foods one should consume for optimal energy.
Atwater’s ideas were developed in a moment when the quantification of wellness was the gold standard. He also contributed to that moment. Atwater believed that the working-class “good wife and mother” needed a translated and simplified version of this emerging gospel of scientific nutrition. In the years leading up to the development of the calorimeter, he was primarily concerned about the poorest American families, with a special interest in the families of factory workers and laborers. It was working men who needed the most calories and protein to get through the workday, according to Atwater’s research on how the body-as-machine used its fuel. Yet it was, Atwater explained, “the poor man’s food that is the worst cooked and served at home.”17 Atwater argued that women’s faulty understanding of nutrition was part of the reason American laborers had tight food budgets, and that their reeducation was necessary for progress.
The chemist explained that the poorest women often insisted on purchasing the most expensive groceries, presumably because they believed that a high cost indicated high value. Atwater recounted the complaints of a butcher who observed that working-class women chose expensive tenderloin over cheaper round or sirloin cuts of beef. While the tenderloin was pricier, the butcher insisted that the sirloin would do just as good a job of feeding a family. The butcher complained specifically about one seamstress who indignantly asked, “Do you suppose because I don’t come here in my carriage I don’t want just as good meat as rich folks have?”18
Choosing food based on taste, pride, or misinformation, Atwater thought, was an epidemic in America.19 He dismissed the complexity and labor involved in navigating the marketplace.20 Women, especially immigrant women, were widely understood as poor consumers by the new consumer sciences. Progressives often characterized the female consumer as emotional and easy to persuade or trick.21 Supposedly, the dawn of a new nutrition would replace the irrational behavior of women with rational consumer behavior. Atwater’s pecuniary economy of food never considered female labor, and he implicitly calculated working-class women’s time and effort as zero cost. Any unwillingness to put in the labor was evidence that these women were poor consumers and homemakers.
Meanwhile, Atwater’s food plans mostly ignored women’s own nutritional needs. Atwater used “a man at moderate muscular work” as a physiological norm, the basis of his nutrition math.22 Then Atwater determined the nutritional needs of that laboring man’s family through rough estimates. A thirteen-year-old boy counted as 80 percent of “a man at moderate muscular work.” A twelve-year-old girl was considered 60 percent of “a man at moderate muscular work.”23 This data on caloric needs and macronutrient needs (how much protein, fat, and carbohydrate each man needed) became the basis of new food plans designed for the poor and working class. Atwater and the emerging field of home economics calculated the entire family’s nutritional needs based on their fractional relationship to an employed and able-bodied patriarch.
Ellen Swallow Richards, the “mother of American home economics,” and Democratic politician Edward Atkinson had no qualms about these calculations. Instead, they extensively promoted the practical application of Atwater’s research, especially the development of family food plans.24 Atwater himself lost interest in research applications over time, but Progressive reformers continued to make use of his work.25 Scientific nutrition offered the pleasing promise of rational actors and utopian results: if precise amounts of calories and nutrients might be cheaply and efficiently parceled out, everyone could be well-fed, everyone could work hard, and there would be no waste in the process. It was a Progressive Era reformer’s dream. Atkinson imagined that this approach to nutrition would teach working-class Americans to embrace cheaper meats, soups, stews, and flours, which they supposedly avoided out of “false pride of show.”26 Scientific nutrition seemed an essential tool for social management. Richards wrote that “it is … not too much to say that women are the stumbling blocks in the way of higher industrial, social, and ethical progress.”27 She believed guidance on calories and macronutrients would help them toward that progress. Atwater’s nutrition science had the potential to help women take the so-called rational costs of food to heart, to transform the supposedly superstitious immigrant into the imagined rational American consumer. It also had the potential to hold workers and their families responsible for their own poverty at an intimate, even biological level.
Atwater’s first major Department of Agriculture publication, the 1894 booklet called Foods: Nutritive Value and Cost, was critical in developing a quantification of nutrition useful to practitioners and laboratory researchers. The body was like a steam engine, Atwater wrote, except the body’s fuel was food.28 There were many ways to adequately fuel the human body, then, and with careful management that body could be fueled on the cheap. In the 1902 revision, Atwater explicitly took women to task for not managing food budgets appropriately. Too often women obtain food by overpaying at the market, he wrote, “rather than by skillful cooking and tasteful serving at home.”29 Around this time, Atwater also released tables on the chemical composition of foods, which remained the primary government publication on
