Below is a picture of a bottle of Walden Farms Sesame Ginger Salad Dressing. But as I read the label I ask myself, “is this really a bottle of salad dressing?” Walden Farms seems intent on convincing me that this bottle of what is purportedly food is, in fact, a bottle of nothing: the murky reddish liquid is merely a gastronomic simulacrum. Within the bottle, there are neither carbohydrates, nor protein, nor fat, and the legally mandated Nutrition Facts panel assures me that a 2-tablespoon serving size contributes zero calories to my 2,000 calorie-per-day diet. On the Utopian Walden Farms, they have managed to make a salad dressing with no calories. The calorie, the unit with which we measure the energy in our food and the unit that fuels our every move—the scientific essence of nutritional or energetic value—has somehow been eliminated from this condiment. Walden Farms takes every opportunity to remind the consumer of its nothingness, about which we are expected to be happy. We are expected to want to pay $4.99 for the pleasure of pouring nothing on our lettuce. I find this salad dressing both amusing and disquieting. It is amusing because Walden Farms seems thrilled to be selling a bottle of nothing, and we are supposed to be thrilled to be buying it. It is disquieting, however, because it points out just how much the language of “how much” has come to impact the way people think about food. As this example demonstrates, foods like salad dressing are often portrayed and understood in terms of this language of numbers, and consumers, at least in the developed world, are expected to celebrate nothingness in food form. The naughtness of Walden Farms’ salad dressing points to a larger trend of talking about food in terms of quantities broadly, and calories specifically. Food has become, among other things, something we count. Empirical measurement, moreover, has become one of the bases upon which we judge food. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, scientific research about food and eaters helped developed an extensive discourse of quantification to describe and judge foods. That language includes facts about the quantity of carbohydrates, fats, protein, fibre, vitamins, and other nutrients that foods contain. More importantly, such a discourse includes a determination of the number of calories that make up any particular food. The calorie lies at the centre of nutrition science and discourses of quantification, just as it lies at the centre of how we are to understand Walden Farms’ salad dressing. The calorie, however, has a history—it is not a natural or eternal mode of understanding what we eat. Even the word itself was adopted from chemistry, where it was initially used to measure the heat of combustion in a chemical reaction. The word “calorie” now describes food as well. Public health agencies, government regulatory bodies, and the food and diet industries use the calorie as their trope. Calories fuel humans. Calories are edible energy. The calorie can stand in for the idea of food. Politics, law, economics and public health have all taken up the calorie to delimit and regulate national diet, poverty levels, and food costs. Most major public policy regarding food rests on the use of the calorie, and, indeed, the word “food” is often replaced by “calorie” in official documents. The United States Food and Drug Administration talks about “calorie needs.” The United States Department of Agriculture speaks of “balancing calories,” while the World Health Organization ranks nations on their “per capita supply of calories,.” The International Food Policy Research Institute in conjunction with the Global …