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Iraq’s Caloric Calculus: Towards a Social History of Nutrition in the Modern Middle East
What is the history of nutrition, and how can it reshape our understanding of science, governance, and daily life in the modern Middle East? Dr Sara Farhan will explore these questions through the political economy of nourishment in Iraq from the late Ottoman to the early Ba‘thist periods, using Iraq as a microcosm to illuminate broader trends in the modern Middle East. She demonstrates that the study and management of nutrition were not neutral biological curiosities but a historical field in which knowledge, power, and survival were conjoined. Viewed through this lens, the calculation of calories and the classification of micro- and macronutrients reveal the underbelly of the histories of empire, famine, agricultural reform, and political economy. Nutrition transitioned from a holistic understanding of sustenance to a laboratorial enterprise which produced a techno-political tethering that bound the plate to statecraft. She will reconstruct a dispersed archive of nourishment, comprising administrative reports, medical treatises, famine accounts, common recipes, and scientific studies, and use it as a fragmentary trace to spotlight the granular politics of everyday life. In doing so, Farhan aims to reconstruct nutrition as a critical lens for historical inquiry, one that integrates the bio, the necro, and the political within a kaleidoscopic view of the caloric arithmetic behind statecraft.
Date:
5 December 2025, 17:00
Venue:
Radcliffe Observatory
Venue Details:
Room 00.063, Schwarzman Centre
Speaker:
Dr Sara Farhan (University of Northern British Columbia)
Organising department:
The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)
Organiser contact email address:
maria.murad@lincoln.ox.ac.uk
Part of:
TORCH: Critical Food Studies Network
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editor:
Belinda Clark
