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Over the past two decades, food historians have been particularly interested in the question of the quantification of food intake and requirements, and in the political uses of this new scientific discipline. Most of this work, however, has focused on the twentieth century and the emergence of the calorie. This article reviews earlier developments of food chemistry to show that it was in the second half of the nineteenth century that a science of dietary needs emerged. It focuses on the case of Great Britain, and more specifically on the investigations carried out in the early 1860s by an English physician, Edward Smith, whose surveys and analyses contributed to a shift in the ways in which food and hunger were conceptualized. The article also shows some of the uses and debates that accompanied this new approach, which intersected with a wide range of technical, moralizing and political readings of hunger.