Fortified Bodies : Nutrition for National Defense in World War II and the Cold War

Nutrition science, national power, and the politics of feeding the world.

In the twentieth century, nutrition became a matter not only of health, but of national security, economic development, and global governance. In Fortified Bodies, Hannah F. LeBlanc traces how nutrition science moved from laboratories and kitchens into military planning rooms, international agencies, and Cold War development campaigns.

Beginning with the nutrition crisis of World War II, LeBlanc shows how concerns about bodily fitness and food scarcity reshaped understandings of citizenship and national strength. Wartime mobilization cast proper nutrition as essential to defense and linked dietary standards to military preparedness and industrial productivity. In the decades that followed, experts increasingly framed protein intake and dietary adequacy as measures of the "quality" of populations, fusing scientific claims with racialized and developmental hierarchies. The book examines efforts to solve global and domestic hunger through technical interventions, large-scale surveys, and international nutrition programs. These initiatives circulated knowledge across borders while reinforcing new forms of authority grounded in quantification and expertise. LeBlanc interrogates the legacy of this "damage-centered" nutrition research, revealing how efforts to measure deficiency often defined communities through pathology rather than structural inequality.

Drawing on archival research and the records of international nutrition surveys, Fortified Bodies situates modern debates about hunger and food policy within a longer history of scientific ambition, geopolitical competition, and uneven care. The result is a deeply researched account of how bodies became sites of measurement, intervention, and political meaning in the modern world.