#i hadn't fully grasped how much capitalists created calories to be an efficiency model

[arysthaeniru]

"This language of work was by no means the private language of a single-minded maniac who had lived too long under the volcano. To the contrary, Hill’s ideas were on the leading edge of the terrain where biological science and social science intersected. In particular, the concept of the calorie, as a measure of both energy consumed and work done, emerged in connection with the steam-engine-based economics of work in mid-nineteenth century Europe. By the turn of the twentieth century, the calorie had developed into a unit of equivalency between what people ate and how much work they could generate, what they needed to consume and what they were capable of producing—effectively recasting the body as a measurable machine.Whether or not Hill had a formal grasp of the field of expert knowledge cohering around the calorie and its implications for labor management and social policy, he did understand it implicitly, for he paid his employees in food. He used the way of seeing the relation of food and work that gained expression in the science of the calorie in his campaign to reduce the people who worked on his plantations to mechanisms of value production—to make them his."

Augustine Sedgewick - Against Flows

(emphasis mine)