In 1933, Georges Hardy and Charles Richet, two veterans of the French Empire, published a monumental study of the dietary habits of the indigenous populations under French imperial control. L’Alimentation indigène dans les colonies françaises emerged not out of personal interest in foodways and cuisine—Hardy was an educator and Richet a doctor—but out of a growing concern with standards of living throughout the empire. Economic depression, environmental crises, and failed colonial policies wrought severe food shortages in much of French North Africa in the late 1920s and early 1930s. A wave of protests in the early 1930s put the basic promise of French associationism—the modernization of the economy, material improvements in the quality of life of the indigenous population—to the test. In response to these early contestations over colonial rule, colonial officials sought to address the basic needs of North Africans first. In the words of Hardy and Richet, the most effective governments need not have a “grand political vision” but instead must be able to provide the fabled “‘chicken-in-every-pot’.” An adequate food supply, therefore, was key to political and social stability throughout the empire. Thus, in the first half of the twentieth century, France joined other imperial powers in employing food as what Nick Cullather has called a “material instrument of statecraft.” Hardy and Richet’s study, therefore, subjected the entirety of French North Africa to the scientific logic of “the foreign policy of the calorie.” The initiative to tabulate how many calories indigenous populations consumed, how they consumed them, and how much they needed to consume to maintain their labor and prevent illness was part of the intertwined colonial policy goals of security and profit. In this paper, I analyze Hardy and Richet’s findings on the diet and foodways of North Africans under French colonial control. How did their codification of “traditional” indigenous foodways create new categories and means of consumption? How did Hardy and Richet account for geography and environmental change in a region marked by unpredictable weather patterns? How did their analysis reflect a newfound concern with food security in the empire? Finally, although new alimentation policies in the 1930s brought larger quantities of affordable foodstuffs to French colonies, they ultimately diminished North Africans’ capacity to produce their own sustenance.