Responding to calls to instate the visual in accounting history research, this study utilizes photographic images to reveal the role of accounting in the attempt to preserve an ideal (ruralism) and an institution (the family farm) in the United States . These elemental features of the American way of life were threatened during the interwar depression, resulting in governmental programs to secure their restoration. The analysis of official imagery reveals how the accounting prescriptions attending state intervention in agriculture were deemed conducive to the fortification of the economic, social and political foundations of agrarian living. Documentary photographs propagated the notion that accounting facilitated companionate marriage and the inclusive family. They also suggested that accounting was a focus for encouraging the communitarian endeavor, democratic participation and receptivity to state interventionism considered necessary to preserve the rural mode of living.

This article explores how accounting ideas travel to unfamiliar environments and instigate new modes of calculation therein. The empirical focus is on the food balance sheet, a key calculative technology in the realm of food security. Drawing on Said's four‐stage schema for analyzing the movement of theories and ideas, this investigation traces the journeying of the balance sheet to the field of food security from the First World War, culminating in the institutionalization of the food balance sheet as a standardized and universal practice from the late 1940s. The study reveals the conditions that facilitated acceptance of the balance sheet idea in a new field—specifically, its alignment to the problem of managing the national and global supply of food, as well as the presence of individual actants who recognized its utility for communicating and addressing the problem of food insecurity during periods of global conflict and humanitarian crisis. These key individuals emanated from the United States, the dominant power in an age of internationalism. It is shown that conceptual traveling involved the jettisoning of core elements of the accounting construction of the balance sheet, but also their selective reimportation once the balance sheet became domesticated in its new location. The article offers original insights to the forces that generate calculative innovations in epistemic communities beyond accounting.