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There is no subject of more interest to the physiologist, of morepractical importance to the physician, or that more urgentlydemands the grave consideration of the statesman,” wrote theEnglish physician George Budd in 1842, “than the disorders resultingfrom defective nutriment.”1 This assertion proved no merehyperbole. Over the following century, concern about thepernicious effects of malnourishment only became morewidespread, and the study of human nutrition expanded from aminor branch of physiological chemistry to a major domain ofbiomedical science. Yet as Budd’s claim implies, it is overly simplisticto understand human nutrition (or malnutrition) as merely aphysiological process, however complex. Nutrition was less arigorously defined scientific concept than a flexible semiotic devicethat provided intelligible and actionable explanations for manycomplex, elusive, or otherwise intractable problems of clinicalmedicine, public health, and political economy. “Medicine hasrecently and rapidly developed a keen nutrition consciousness,”wrote the American chemist Henry Sherman a century later. “Itis finding in nutrition the solutions of many of its most bafflingproblems.”2