In the years immediately following independence, India’s political leadership, assisted by a network of civic organizations, sought to transform what, how, and how much Indians ate. These campaigns, this chapter argues, embodied a broader postcolonial project to reimagine the terms of citizenship and development in a new nation facing enduring scarcity. Drawing upon wartime antecedent and global ideologies of population and land management, the new state urged its citizens to trade rice and wheat, whose imports sapped the nation of the foreign currency needed for industrial development, for "substitute foods." And as Indian planners awaited the possibility of fundamental agricultural advance and agrarian reform, they looked to food technology and the promise of ‘artificial rice’ as a means of making up for India’s perennial food deficit. India’s women, as anchors of the household—and therefore, the nation—were tasked with facilitating these dietary transformations, and were saddled with the blame when these modernist projects failed. Unable to marshal the resources needed to undertake fundamental agricultural reform, India’s planners placed greater faith in their ability to exercise authority over certain aspects of Indian citizenship itself, tying the remaking of practices and sentiments to the reconstruction of a self-reliant national economy.