Skipping Breakfast to Save the Nation: A Different Kind of Dietary Determinism in Early Twentieth-Century China

ABSTRACT

Dietary advice that advocates of scientific nutrition offered to Chinese people in the early twentieth century often encouraged them to adopt a Western-style regimen prominently featuring meat, wheat, and dairy. Some East Asian intellectuals, however, promoted science based dietary reforms that did not require a change in the composition of their diets. This article examines one example of such an alternative perspective, a book of dietary advice called On Eliminating Breakfast for Health and to Prevent Aging (Jiankang bulao feizhi zhaoshi lun 健 康不老廢止朝食論), based on a Japanese original and published by the Chinese scholar Jiang Weiqiao 蔣維喬 in 1915.

KEYWORDS:

• Republican China
• nutritional science
• physiology
• culinary determinism
• dietary determinism
• Chinese medicine

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Wendy Jia-Chen Fu, Eric Karchmer, and the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for criticism and suggestions that improved this essay.

Notes

1. Using the author’s experience to prove effectiveness has been a characteristic technique of the “credibility engineering” involved in promoting diets to a popular audience, as Steven Shapin pointed out in “Expertise, Common Sense, and the Atkins Diet.” This seems to have been as true in early twentieth-century China as in the late twentieth-century United States.

2. Jiang, Jiankang bulao feizhi zhaoshi lun, 102–3.

3. I have examined both Mishima’s book and Jiang’s, noting places where Jiang’s book diverges from Mishima’s original. In this article, when I cite passages that are direct translations of Mishima’s book, I credit Mishima as the author; where they are Jiang’s modifications or additions, I credit Jiang.

4. The most notable early studies of this sort are Chang, Food in Chinese Culture; Anderson, The Food of China; and Simoons, Food in China. More recently their ranks have been joined by Buell and Anderson, A Soup for the Qan; Sterckx, Of Tripod and Palate; Kohn, Daoist Dietetics; Sterckx, Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood; Arthur, Early Daoist Dietary Practices; and Anderson, Food and Environment.

5. Lee, “The Patriot’s Scientific Diet”; and Fu, “Scientising Relief”.

6. One exception is Swislocki, “Nutritional Governmentality”.

7. Laudan, Cuisine and Empire, 250–2; and Laudan, “Power Cuisines, Dietary Determinism”.

8. On the emergence of the concept of “the Chinese diet,” see chapter 2 in Fu, The Other Milk.

9. For examples of this eclecticism and vitality, see Karl, Staging the World; Liu, Daoist Modern; and Hammerstrom, The Science of Chinese Buddhism.

10. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai.

11. Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 167.

12. Lackner, Amelung, and Kurtz, New Terms for New Ideas.

13. Xu, Minguo renwu da cidian, 1379–80; and Yu, Zhongguo jinxiandai renwu zhi, 414–19.

14. The first edition of Master Yinshi’s Method of Meditation, a run of several tens of thousands of copies, sold out quickly. See Liu, Daoist Modern, 26.

15. Jiang as educational innovator: Smith, “Reading Citizens,” 62, 108; and Weston, The Power of Position, 126. As publishing innovator: Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, 197–8. As both: Culp, “Teaching Baihua”. Master Yinshi’s Method of Meditation continues to attract an audience even today; it was recently translated into English and included with a similar book by Jiang’s contemporary Chen Yingning as Quiet Sitting: The Daoist Approach for a Healthy Mind and Body.

16. By the 1920s, all primary-school textbooks in China were in vernacular Chinese, and students had begun to write almost exclusively in the vernacular (baihua) whereas in the 1910s students had written almost exclusively in classical Chinese (wenyan). Culp, “Teaching Baihua,” 26–9.

17. Though similar in their Romanized forms, ying and yang must not be confused with yin 陰and yang 陽, the pair of complementary opposites common in Chinese philosophy. The latter pair was essential to classical discussions of body, health and illness, but appears nowhere in On Eliminating Breakfast, underlining the book’s departure from classical ideas about how the body functions.

18. Wiseman and Ye translate this “construction qi” in their Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine, 96.

19. For a lucid discussion of the meaning of yangsheng, see Lo, “Influence of Yangsheng Culture”.

20. For a discussion of the etymology and meanings of qi, see Sivin, Traditional Medicine, 46–53.

21. Andrews, “Blood in the History”.

22. Jiang, Jiankang bulao feizhi zhaoshi lun, 13–14.

23. Li, Treatise on the Spleen & Stomach, 3–12.

24. Shapiro, “Chinese and Western Medicine?”

25. Jiang, Jiankang bulao feizhi zhaoshi lun, 13–14.

26. Laudan, Cuisine and Empire, 250–2; and Laudan, “Power Cuisines, Dietary Determinism”.

27. Crumbine and Tobey, The Most Nearly Perfect Food, as quoted in Wiley, Cultures of Milk, 109.

28. Finlay, “Early Marketing,” 48.

29. Smith, Forgotten Disease.

30. Li, “Eating Well in China”.

31. Lee, “The Patriot’s Scientific Diet,” 1814–5, 1817.

32. Apple, Vitamania.

33. Jiang, Jiankang bulao feizhi zhaoshi lun, author’s preface 1–2.

34. Ibid., author’s preface 2.

35. Ibid., author’s preface 5.

36. Among the books in Jiang’s oeuvre is The Origins of Daoism (Daojiao yuanliu 道教源流), published in 1927.

37. Arthur, Early Daoist Dietary Practices; Kohn, Daoist Dietetics; Kohn, The Taoist Experience, 148–53; Kohn and Sakade, Taoist Meditation and Longevity Techniques, 102, 258. For an alternative interpretation of bigu, namely that grains symbolized civilization and that abstaining from them therefore meant rejecting the ordinary social order to more closely approach the way of nature, see Campany, “Eating Better than Gods,” 106–7.

38. Jiang, Jiankang bulao feizhi zhaoshi lun, 88.

39. Ibid., author’s preface 2, 28, 52, 89.

40. Lee, “The Patriot’s Scientific Diet,” 1808–9.

41. Jiang, Jiankang bulao feizhi zhaoshi lun, 44–5.

42. Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body, chapter 5; and Kohn, Chinese Healing Exercises.

43. Sivin, “Emotional Counter-therapy”.

44. Jiang, Jiankang bulao feizhi zhaoshi lun, 33–5.

45. Ibid., 18.

46. Ibid., 71, 87.

47. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table.

48. Jiang, Jiankang bulao feizhi zhaoshi lun, 29.

49. Ibid., 20.

50. Ibid., 31.

51. Ibid., 24.

52. Ibid., 38–43.

53. Ibid., 14.

54. Ibid., author’s preface 1.

55. Yeh, The Alienated Academy, chapter 5; and Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, 223–5.

56. Lei, Neither Donkey Nor Horse, chapter 5.

57. Liu, Daoist Modern; and Hammerstrom, The Science of Chinese Buddhism.