8. ‘Children Got Slightly Smarter with Fish for Lunch’

This chapter follows the travels of IQ testing to unexpected terrain and describes how a nutrition study in kindergartens used Wechsler tests in the 2010s. Researchers administered the WPPSI test to examine children’s cognitive capacities as part of a randomized intervention trial in Bergen. This chapter zooms in on the material micro-practices in this fish meal intervention to understand the role of IQ testing in the post-welfare state. Policymakers and industry have promoted the aquaculture industries not only as beneficial for health, but also as a resource poised to constitute Norway’s post-fossil bioeconomy. For the multidisciplinary intervention trial, researchers chose Wechsler tests as validated devices, readily available in Norwegian translation, to compare cognitive performance after the fish meal intervention. With increasingly routinized datafication and evidence-based governance, institutions like kindergartens are enrolled into largely unchallenged regimes of evaluation and optimization. Researchers use such plug-in modules as data-generating instruments in scientific studies, which has contributed to the persistence of the Wechsler tests.