Background
He was born in Kilmaurs, Ayrshire, on September 23, 1880, to a family of Covenanters. the middle child in a family of seven children. His father, Robert Clark Orr, was a quarry owner, and a man of deep religious convictions, being a member of the Free Church of Scotland. His mother, Annie Boyd, was the daughter of another quarry master, wealthier than Robert Orr, and grandmaster of a Freemason's Lodge.
The family home was well supplied with books, and his father was widely read in political, sociological and metaphysical subjects, as well as religion. As he grew older, John would regularly discuss these subjects with his father, brothers, and visiting friends.
Education
At the age of thirteen, John won a bursary to Kilmarnock Academy, a significant achievement as such bursaries were then rare. The new school was some 20 miles (32 km) from his home in West Kilbride, but his father owned a quarry about two miles (3 km) from the Academy, and John was provided with accommodation nearby.
Later he returned to the village school in West Kilbride where he continued his education until he was seventeen under the inspirational tutelage of Headmaster John G. Lyons.
After four years as a pupil teacher, at the age of 19 he won a Queen's Scholarship to study at a teacher training college in Glasgow, plus a bursary which paid for his lodgings there. At the same time he entered a three-year degree course in theology at the University, for which the fees were also covered.
Career
World War I drew him into service as a frontline doctor with the army and the navy. He earned renown for developing a diet that greatly reduced the incidence of disease in his battalion. After the war he resumed the directorate of the Rowett Institute and extended its researches to agricultural and dietary problems in the colonies and dominions, parts of continental Europe, and the Jewish settlements of Palestine. In 1931 Orr floated the journal Nutrition Abstracts and Views.
His pathbreaking survey Food, Health and Income (1936) defines the physiological ideal as a state of well-being requiring no improvement by a change of diet, finds that a diet completely adequate for health was reached in the United Kingdom in 1933-1934 at an income level above that of 50 percent of the population, and argues for the need of reconciling the interests of agriculture and public health.
Orr's chief objectives during World War II were the prevention of food shortages in the military and civilian sectors of the nation; the development of world food policies capable of banning the specter of a postwar famine; and the planning of a supranational agency in the context of which food would be removed from international politics and trade by being treated differently from other goods. These aims dominated his term of office (1945 - 1948) as director general of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Thus he was instrumental in presenting, for the first time in history, a precise appraisal of the world food situation and in inducing governments to cooperate in the International Emergency Food Council and related common enterprises.
After resigning from the Rowett Institute in 1945, Orr won a Parliament seat, representing the Scottish universities, which he relinquished in 1947, and served at Glasgow University as rector in 1945 and as chancellor in 1946. He died near Edzell, Scotland, on June 25, 1971.
Politics
He stood as an Independent Progressive candidate. He was elected as an independent Member of Parliament (MP) for the Combined Scottish Universities in a by-election in April 1945, and kept his seat at the general election shortly after.
Membership
Orr was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1932.
