Iraq’s Caloric Calculus: Towards a Social History of Nutrition in the Modern Middle East

Week 8: Keynote Lecture

Friday 5 December 2025, 5pm - 6pm

Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre

Iraq’s Caloric Calculus: Towards a Social History of Nutrition in the Modern Middle East

All welcome

What is the history of nutrition, and how can it reshape our understanding of science, governance, and daily life in the modern Middle East? I 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. I demonstrate 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. I 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, I aim 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.

Biography: 

Dr Sara Farhan is an assistant professor of history at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. She is the author of Medical Education and the Making of Iraqi Doctors, 1869-1959 (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) and a former Michael Elias DeBakey History of Medicine Fellow at the National Institute of Health’s Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.

Please follow us on X (@OxCFSNetwork), Bluesky (@oxcfsnetwork.bsky.social), and Instagram (@criticalfoodstudiesox) 

Critical Food Studies Network is part of TORCH Student Networks