The Englishman Looks at His Food: Infographics, Nature, and Global Order at the End of Empire

This article recovers a moment in environmental thinking that connected food, nature, and global order. It traces the rise of pictograms in food policy from the 1940s to the 1960s, a style of design that was popularized by an influential circle of political economists and left-wing politicians. Recovering the visual method through the archive of Otto Neurath and his British interlocutors, the article shows how visual statistics extended welfare reform discourse beyond unemployment and national insurance to encompass agriculture and environmental concerns. These ideas were part of international discussion on development, but they proved particularly impactful in Britain, which was navigating conversations about global natural resources at the end of empire. This thread of British environmental thought connected domestic social issues with global, postimperial development, as policymakers, economists, and illustrators worked through food and its visual representation to reimagine global ecological order.