THE PROJECT

In the late 1960s, the growing international expertise (World Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, International Labor Office, etc.) on nutrition, calorie standards, and dietary regulations became a key area of intellectual interest for the Romanian regime. This attention strategically mediated the goal of the bureaucratic socialist state to develop (Bruckweh 2015; Porter&Ross 2008) by anchoring organizational modernization initiatives in the new realm of the “government of life” (Foucault 2009). At the time, authorities seemed more determined than ever to rethink population welfare policies while advancing industrialization. Food categories would have helped policymakers understand the daily universe of the labor force in more nuanced terms of needs, opportunities, and consumption desires and formulate effective social intervention programs. However, as the global food and oil crisis of 1974 unfolded, and grain prices reached historic highs shortly after that, it became clear that the food issue could not be problematized independently of global macroeconomic changes. In the following years, Romania turned to the World Bank, the world’s largest financier of nutrition and health projects in developing countries, for expertise on agricultural modernization, irrigation systems, and chemical fertilizers. Despite such efforts, against a backdrop of increasing economic difficulties caused by socialist states’ inability to adapt to the new global financial situation, the authorities in Bucharest rationalized staple foods in the 1980s. Such harsh austerity measures dramatically altered the well-being of the labor force and worsened the nutritional state of the many.

While knowledge transfers and professional interactions in various political and institutional settings have recently become essential dimensions of a renewed interest in late socialist attempts to “go global” (Bockman 2011), little is known about how the East Central European (ECE) states used this emerging (and sometimes contradictory) international expertise to address domestic social and economic changes, and even less in the intertwined areas of nutrition, development, and well-being in this (semi)peripheral region. The project “Medical Knowledge, Nutrition, and Social Change: An Inquiry into the Politics of Life in Socialist Romania” (NUTRIPOL), for a TE grant, aims to fill this gap by analyzing food regulations between the late 1960s and the 1980s in Romania, with an additional focus on the reciprocal relationships between the production and dissemination of food knowledge, state development strategies, and social change. To this end, it interrogates the strategy that led “food” to become “nutrition” and “nutrition” to become a domain of political interest, regulation, and maximization during the late socialist period. It analyzes the participation of state and non-state actors in transnational knowledge exchange and the subsequent “naturalization” of this knowledge in the 1960s and 1970s when Romania was actively involved in international conversations about the most appropriate development paths in (post)industrial societies. It also shows how ideas about the potential long-term benefits of nutrition in optimizing social practices and increasing economic profitability motivated restrictive food rationing policies in the 1980s, when the so-called “Scientific Nutrition Program for the Population” [Programul de alimentație științifică a populației] was implemented. By documenting state rationalities that specifically addressed “life itself” (Rose 2007), NUTRIPOL contributes to an emerging scholarly work on biopolitics, life sciences, and governance in socialist ECE.

OBJECTIVES

The main goal of this project is to offer a historical account of the (re)making of nutritional standards in socialist Romania, focusing on the part played by medical knowledge in developmental projects of the state between the 1960s and 1980s. Specifically, NUTRIPOL aims:

(1) to map the trans-national epistemic contexts where nutritional issues were debated, appropriated, and contested since the mid-1960s and then to evaluate the degree of international visibility and relevance of Romanian experts and medical specialists in such matters;

(2) to tackle how actors, practices, and local processes have contributed to the creation, dissemination, and transformation of a body of transnational scientific knowledge in Romania and subsequently to assess temporal variations of similarities and differences in nutrition approaches in the relatively prosperous 1960s and 1970s versus the austere 1980s;

(3) to analytically relate these findings with domestic governing processes by considering various shifts in labor legislative regulations, policymaking dynamics, and workforce welfare approaches between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s.