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Moral Foods Series Editors: Christine R. Yano and Robert Ji-Song Ku Moral Foods THE CONSTRUCTION OF NUTRITION AND HEALTH IN MODERN ASIA Edited by Angela Ki Che Leung and Melissa L. Caldwell University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu © 2019 University of Hawai‘i Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Leung, Angela Ki Che, editor. | Caldwell, Melissa L., editor. Title: Moral foods: the construction of nutrition and health in Modern Asia/edited by Angela Ki Che Leung and Melissa L. Caldwell. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2019] | Series: Food in Asia and the Pacific | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018041490 | ISBN 9780824876708 (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Diet—Asia. | Food habits—Asia. | Food consumption—Moral and ethical aspects—Asia. Classification: LCC GT2853.A78 M67 2019 | DDC 394.1/2095—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018041490 Cover art: (right) Rice with sesame seeds in black bowl. Photo by Vitchakorn Koonyosying on Unsplash. (left) Macro photography of rice with bokeh light background. Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access ISBNs for this book are 9780824887629 (PDF) and 9780824887636 (EPUB). More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. The open access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Contents Acknowl edgments ix Introduction: Food and Health: Fortification and Modern Asian State Making 1 Melissa L. Caldwell and Angela Ki Che Leung PART I GOOD FOODS 1 Health, Wealth, and Solidarity: Rice as Self in Japan and Malaysia 23 Francesca Bray 2 Confronting the Cow: Soybean Milk and the Fashioning of a Chinese Dairy Alternative 47 Jia-Chen Fu 3 Moral Responsibility for Nutritional Milk: Motherhood and Breastfeeding in Modern Japan 66 Izumi Nakayama v vi Contents 4 Eating Well for Survival: Chinese Nutrition Experiments during World War II 89 Michael Shiyung Liu PART II BAD FOODS 5 The Good, the Bad, and the Toxic: Moral Foods in British India 111 David Arnold 6 The Good, the Bad, and the Foreign: Trajectories of Three Grains in Modern South Korea 130 Tae-Ho Kim 7 Snacking, Health, Modernity: Moralizing Confections in Japan, 1890–1930 150 Tatsuya Mitsuda 8 Bad Meat: Food and the Medicine of Modern Hygiene in Colonial Hong Kong 173 Robert Peckham PART III MORAL FOODS 9 Becoming Healthy: Changing Perception of Tea’s Effects on the Body 201 Lawrence Zhang 10 To Build or to Transform Vegetarian China: Two Republican Projects 221 Angela Ki Che Leung 11 From Civilizing Foods for Nourishing Life to a Global Traditional Chinese Medicine Dietetics: Changing Perceptions of Foods in Chinese Medicine 241 Volker Scheid Contents vii 12 Good Food, Bad Bodies: Lactose Intolerance and the Rise of Milk Culture in China 262 Hilary A. Smith Glossary 285 Bibliography 293 Contributors 331 Index 335 Acknowledgments The idea for this volume emerged from an international conference held in December 2014 at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKIHSS, University of Hong Kong), “Food and Health,” coorganized with the Asian Society for the History of Medicine (ASHM). A follow-up workshop, “Moral Foods,” took place in January 2016 at HKIHSS for the preparation of this volume. We would like to thank par- ticipants of the two meetings for their valuable comments and suggestions on the chapters in this volume, especially Shang-Jen Li and Jen-der Lee, current and former secretary of ASHM who made the international con- ference possible. We would also like to express our thanks to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, the D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia, and the “China-West” Strategic Research Theme project of the Faculty of Arts, University of Hong Kong, for their generous support of the two meetings and the publication of this volume. We are grateful to the staff of HKIHSS, led by Joan Cheng, for their impeccable logistical support. We are much indebted to the two anony- mous reviewers for their helpful comments and criticisms on an earlier version of the manuscript, and to the professional help of our copy editor of the first submitted version, Gershom Tse. Special thanks to Masako Ikeda of the University of Hawai‘i Press for her kind help and encourage- ment, and to Kerrie Maynes for her meticulous and thorough copyediting of the final versions. ix x Acknowledgments Six contributors of this book (Bray, Kim, Leung, Nakayama, Peckham, Zhang) are participants of a collaborative project supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region China (Project No. HKU C7011-16G, “Making Modernity in East Asia: Technologies of Everyday Life, 19th–21st Centuries”). The work in this book is partially supported by the project. Angela Ki Che Leung and Melissa L. Caldwell Moral Foods Introduction Food and Health: Fortification and Modern Asian State Making Melissa L. Caldwell and Angela Ki Che Leung n today’s world, the centrality of food to health is often taken for granted, as health care practitioners, dieticians, pharmaceutical and industrial Ifood manufacturers, activists, and ordinary consumers alike use foods and food-based products both to treat ailments and to cultivate desirable physical and mental traits. Yet the connections that are presumed to exist between health and food are not, in and of themselves, absolute, natural, or even logical. Nor are these connections necessarily universal or even con- stant through history. Rather, the mutual intertwining of food and health has always been deeply embedded within cultural ideals about what those qualities and associations should be.1 In turn, those ideals are situated at particular nexuses of political ideologies, economic realities, cultural prac- tices, and historical moments. Consequently, to focus solely on the per- ceived curative aspects of food is to overlook the fact that, at their core, food-related health systems are intrinsically moral regimes that shape and define social worlds and the subjects who inhabit them. Modern nations and nation-states have long recognized and mobilized the moral capacity of food-related health systems, such as when they set nutritional policies that influence or dictate what their citizens consume. These approaches are perhaps most evident in institutionalized feeding programs for children, soldiers, athletes, and prisoners, but they also appear in more mundane practices such as labeling and advertising, placement of products in shops or markets, and even pricing. At the same time, federal policies and inefficiencies may even prevent—either deliberately 1 2 Introduction or accidentally—what people can consume, as has happened with wartime deprivations, manmade famines, and embargoes against imports through- out the world.2 Individual citizens, for their part, can display personal ide- ologies and patriotic allegiances by consuming domestic products and other foods that are associated with national or regional values.3 In other instances, nation-states have sought to produce and reproduce themselves through closed recirculations across the food cycle: from agricultural prod- uct to consumer goods to biological byproduct (waste) that is then turned back into the soil that will generate new food. For instance, in China, trad- itional methods of recycling excrement through the agricultural production and consumption process continued into the modern period as citizens’ “night soil” was collected and used as fertilizer on state farms.4 More recently, Shinto-based Japanese agricultural development programs in Myanmar use farmworkers’ waste as fertilizer for crops, thereby promoting not only ideas of sustainable production and consumption but also particu- lar social relations among producer-consumers who are producing and consuming one another’s bodily byproducts.5 When empires, nations, citizens, and subjects connect in very tangible ways the health of individual persons with the health of the community, the nation, the state, and the empire, the roles and relationalities that shape and constitute governments and citizens are transformed. As such, the connec- tions that cohere between food and health reveal a complicated nexus of identity, personhood, social interaction, and critical historical transitions. Ultimately, what it means to be a good, virtuous, and even productive per- son, family member, community member, or citizen is deeply enmeshed in how food and health are imagined, constituted, provisioned, and managed. This volume takes seriously the ways in which food-related health practices are, at their core, moral regimes that shape ideal subjects and states. By focusing on the place of food in changing health regimes in modern Asia, the contributors to this volume examine not just the moral systems in which food and health are embedded but also the